Learning to love a wood splitter

And how did we spend Palm Sunday? I would like to tell you we rode donkeys and waved palms, or even that we braided palms and walked beside donkeys, or even that we fed palms to the donkeys and took a walk. Or,given that we are fast approaching the end of Seagrass Awareness Month I would like to say we planted seagrass. But that would not be true. (It is also almost the end of Vulval Health Awareness Month and you probably don't need to know what we think about that.)
What is true: I saw a large loping coyote on the driveway in the morning. Coyotes and donkeys share a common class (Mammalia) but the grass eating donkeys belong to the order of Perissodactyla (odd-toed ungulates) while the carnivorous coyotes belong to Carnivora. It has been several millennia since donkeys and coyotes had much in common.

We chipped wood.

I learned to love a Wood Chipper. I am already a fan of hydraulic wood splitters, and at the end of the day I think the wood splitter is still a more entertaining tool. But chippers have their merits.They are voracious and mesmerizing.
We fed a couple of tons (no exaggeration - consider we've had two major storms alight and do their damage) of brush and branches and trees into the wood chipper and then watched it spit out tons of wood chips. Into the maw of the wood chipper (CSB referred to it fondly as The Eager Beaver) we fed an entire blue spruce that snapped off about a foot off the ground, more hemlock limbs than I can count, a pile of white pine branches twice the height of CSB. And that was just before lunch.

One of the cool things about a wood splitter is that you can aim the chute and therefore get the wood chips wherever you want them, and spread them around.

In other news, today would be the 181st birthday of Ritta and Christina, the Sardinian Siamese twins. (Think fusion cuisine.) And 162 years ago Niagara Falls stopped flowing for 30 hours because of an ice jam. We can't be sure if this was the first time that ever happened, but we know it was the last time.