Excess Deaths

[Kellemora]

You must be only getting the blue side news.

[yogi]

The tunnel vision that is allowing and encouraging the destruction of our democratic institutions is the result of psychological warfare and something known as cognitive dissonance. It's really difficult for me to understand the numbers of people swayed by all this. I'm not a conservative in a political sense, but I do miss the traditional Republicans that offered reasonable alternatives. That party was destroyed about the time Mr Trump entered the White House and has been going downhill ever since. He certainly is not the cause, but he is a vivid representation of everything that has gone wrong with what was once a Grand Old Party.

[Kellemora]

Enough on Poly-TICKS, we know they are ALL corrupt!

[yogi]

Speaking of pine trees ... I''m beginning think the place I live in is hostile to anything in the conifer family. A couple years after we settled into this house we had a professional landscaper come out and do some plantings on our plain vanilla estate. Some bushes were put in up front and some trees were planted out back. Rose bushes were interspersed to add some color and interest. Our neighbor to the east did the same thing but more elaborate and with a different landscaping company. Both of us had some sort of pine trees on the ridge line in our back yards. The first year one of my neighbor's conifers died completely. Things happen, and I didn't think much of it. He had it replaced and it took only one more year for that replacement pine tree to turn into a mere skeleton of it's initial being. My pine trees had a few dead needles but nothing that looked threatening. I attributed my neighbor's bad luck to the landscaper he chose and the nursery from which they provided stock.

About the time his second tree died, one of mine show signs of imminent death in that the bottom branches were becoming bare. Somebody suggested it needed fertilizer so I got some of those Jobe's sticks and pounded them into the ground. While that seemed reasonable to me, the tree ignored the food and proceeded to die off completely last fall. At that time a second conifer in my back yard started to go barren in its lower half as well. I could trim all the dead branches off that tree and if the top stays healthy and grows it won't look too bad. Unusual, but not bad. We'll see what happens.

Yesterday I used my (electric) chain saw to dismember and mulch the dead pine tree. The main trunk was cut into pieces I could toss in with the regular garbage and dispose of it that way. While I was in the house resting after all that exposure to Missouri sun, I read up on why pine trees loose their needles. Could be a few reasons, but the most likely is drought and water deficiency. When a pine tree needs water the old needles stop working and the new growth takes over. This isn't too bad if you catch it early and remedy the water situation. Unfortunately I had no idea trees needed to be watered because the ones I had up north took care of themselves. It looks like my two small pine trees are history, and I only have one fairly healthy one left. There are some scattered branches on that tree which are dying off, but it won't look too bad if it doesn't get worse. I'll do what I can but I have a gut feeling that tree is doomed as well. So, I'm fairly convinced planing pine trees in my subdivision, perhaps in the entire state of Missouri, is a bad idea.

[Kellemora]

We had a whole row of Pine Trees in our back yard, and only lost one in like 35 years, and ironically, it was the one near the top of the hill, not that I had much of a hill to speak of. The one at the bottom grew the fastest, and it was close to where the rain and runoff from the roof settled.
My dad had trouble with pines, so went with blue spruce and they grew like weeds.
In my front yard, I had planted a wagon wheel pine for Debi's dad. It didn't last long.
So now we have a cypress tree with the feathery leaves, and it took a lot of water at the beginning to get it to grow.
It looked so poorly at first, we named it Grock, after a character in a game Debi played.
But now it is gorgeous, and full.

Our electric has been flickering today, and for no reason we can see. Bright and sunshiny day, no rain, no wind.

[yogi]

From what I can tell the lack of water is lethal for pine trees. Drought is a killer. We have not had it as bad as the folks farther west, but the summers have been pretty dry and hot recently. Even the sod suffered from it. We planted a Colorado Blue Spruce up north shortly after we moved in. That tree grew tall and lush and I hated to leave it behind. Then, too, it was only about 15 feet away from a drainage ditch that nearly always had water in it. I"m sure the spruce loved that situation. My pine trees here are on top of a small rise in the land, but there is a 45 degree slope to the south of the tree line. Any water that does not get sucked in immediately goes down that slope. Thus I can see how the pine trees might not be getting their needed supply of H2O.

At the bottom of that slope is my neighbor's fence. About 8 feed from that fence is one of those trees we see everywhere but I don't know the name of it. It has white flowers that look beautiful in spring, but the locals seem to think these trees are nothing but big weeds. They are well formed too, and do not grow wildly or ill shaped. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. Anyway, this one tree is tall and mature and I think it's beautiful. But the low branches get in the face of anyone cutting the grass. I had to trim a few lower branches when I was doing the cutting because dodging them on a 45 degree slope while pushing a lawn mower was tricky at best. One branch got to be fairly long and I am certain the guys cutting the lawn now and days get whacked in the face by it. So, while I was out there taking care of the pine tree, I decided to cut this branch off that unnamed tree. It was easy pease. I have one of those curved hand saws for pruning. It only cuts when pulling back and does not cut when pushing it forward. I was cutting and nearly finished when I decided I wanted to undercut the branch so that the bark would not peal off. Well yeah, I should have done that first, but better late than never. What could go wrong?

Well, I was holding the branch with my left hand and cutting with my right hand. Suddenly the cut was complete and the saw was free to travel through the air, which it did. It didn't stop until the blade landed on my forehead. It wasn't much, but it was bleeding, and as I mentioned elsewhere I am taking blood thinners and do not want to bleed unnecessarily. So I rushed into the house with a bloody forehead and shook up my wife a bit. But the first aide kit was handy and I wiped the blood off quickly to reveal a series of tiny cuts about the same distance as teeth on a saw. Thereby I now look like Frankenstein's monster with those stitches on his head. Fortunately I did not need stitches and very little real damage was done. It just hurt a lot and bled more than usual for a few minutes. It's healing just fine and there is no more pain, but I do feel pretty stupid and look the part too.

[Kellemora]

We have two volunteer white blooming trees here, but both are considered weeds. One is a Honeysuckle, and I don't remember the name of the other one either. It has smaller leaves on it than hedge and does look pretty when it blooms.

You can laugh if you want, but I carry a large size Styptic Pencil in my pocket at all times. It was the only thing that would stop my arm from bleeding when it started up. Thankfully, that has not happened since he cut back my dosage, but I still carry it with me.

I've also got hit in the face with pruning saws myself. Those little teeth give you like 30 shots all at the same time, and they burn like heck, not to mention the blood. Heads seem to bleed much more, much faster, and much longer, than anyplace else on the old bod, hi hi. So don't feel alone on being attacked by saws, hi hi.

[yogi]

Back in Illinois I became a fairly good woodsman. I had all sorts of tools to be used in that forest in back of my house. It was wild and overgrown when we first got there and I had intentions of clearing some spots and pruning back some of the wildness. After nearly 25 years the project was not completed yet, but I did gain a wealth of experience handling potentially dangerous cutting tools. I also had to learn how to avoid being crushed by the tree I was cutting. #1 rule is to always have an escape path planned should the tree fall in the wrong direction. Sometimes I had to spend time making an escape route just in case, but only miscalculated a time or two in all those years. Obviously I managed to escape major injury by good planning and being conservative. But, alas, I've not done any foresting in eight years. Also, my brain and reflexes aged in the process. So some of the instinctive precautions that were SOP didn't get implemented here for that one simple branch cutting task. I did have safety glasses on, but the saw got around those very easily. Thus with all that experience from the past with saws didn't do me any good. I was simply careless and over confident that nothing could go wrong.

I have to agree that the face and neck seem to have more than their fair share of blood vessels. Most of the time I was hacking at the forest was done prior to taking blood thinners. I probably should have carried a Styptic Pencil especially when I was working with sharp instruments. But I did not. I managed to get cut a few times, but nothing serious enough to need special attention. One time the chain saw bounced off my knee cap and scared the bejeezus out of me. That cut did bleed a bit after cutting my jeans but I was very very very lucky. It just scraped a lot of skin off and no damage to bones or muscles. The pants choked the saw and it shut down quickly before doing a lot of damage. Eventually I got a pair of chaps and they seemed to work well in spite of the warnings that a chain saw can cut through them. Never tested them out that way, fortunately.

[Kellemora]

When I first moved down here, only the front 1/2 acre, perhaps a tad more were cleared, the rest was all woods.
I didn't want to take out all the woods, because I liked that buffer zone at the top of the hill, so left about 30 feet untouched.
But like you said, it was one heck of a lot of work clearing it down so I could plant grass seed and keep mowed.

I had the wedge jack I used when felling large tree. And although I had it in there securely, a strong gust of wind shot that wedge out of there like a slingshot and it hit my upper eye socket, just under the eyebrow and blood was everywhere.
Hammer in wedges are one thing, but these hydraulic wedges you pump up can be lethal, hi hi.

[yogi]

I had three hammer-in wedges and a maul, none of which I found very useful to fall a tree. The trick is to cut out a wedge low in the trunk trunk and facing the direction you want the tree to go. The problem, as you point out, is winds and changing centers of gravity. They can make a tree go in the wrong way. The best approach there is to have a few guys with ropes pulling the tree where you want it to end up. I didn't have the luxury of strong burly men to help me out, nor did I have a strong enough rope. So, the notch and some good fortune was all I had to work with. Once the tree was down, then the wedges could be used to split the trunk. There are many ways to maim or kill yourself in the forest. I never thought about being taken out by a flying wedge.

[Kellemora]

The drive in wedges are usually used on the side you are cutting from, to hold the tree from compressing on your saw.
The side you want the tree to fall on, you cut a big wedge shaped triangle out of first.
We use wedges so the tree has a larger HINGE when it falls, this keeps it from twisting or going in a direction not intended.
And those pneumatic wedges are made to force the tree to fall on a wide hinge. Normally, this is the safest way.
They also make a flat hydraulic wedge, but to use it you have to make two cuts into the tree about 6 inches apart, then cut a horizontal V slot into the tree. This gives a place for the flat wedge to rest, so it has a sold top and bottom to rest on so it can't shoot out, that is until the tree starts to fall, then it can as the tree tilts.
Which is basically what happened with the pneumatic wedge I was using. A gust of wind pushed against the tree and caused that sucker to snap out of there, even though it has prongs that are supposed to prevent that from happening.

The most dangerous trees to cut are those old ones in a nearly urban area. You hit all kinds of steel items inside those trees, everything from horse shoes to fence wire and nails. I learned to cut above and well below a side branch when cutting the trunk, and taking that piece home to burn in my own fireplace to find out what was inside it.
The biggest thing inside a tree joint, totally covered of course, was the little spades from a plow. It was stack of eight of them stuck in the fork of a tree and forgotten. I've found things like wagon pins, small metal pieces that look like they came from a tractor or combine, looked sorta like the governor from and old one lung motor. Oh, and big iron hooks about 4 inches long with a 2 inch throat. Have no idea what they were used for, but I've hit a few of those also.

[yogi]

I recall only one time finding a nail in a tree trunk I was cutting with a chain saw. The sparks flew and that was the end of that chain. How that nail got put into the tree was a mystery to me, but I do know my little forest was part of a nursery many years before I got there. I must have cut a few dozen trees down and never had a problem elsewhere.

I'll agree with you that old deadwood trees are the most dangerous, but for different reasons than you mentioned. I only had a few and was warned ahead of time about the possibility of some old dead branches from the top breaking loose while I was cutting the bottom. Dry wood is very brittle so it seems and actually a little harder to cut than a live tree. I had a few mulberry trees with gigantic trunks. That wood is very hard and yellow. I wrecked a blade or two just trying to cut through the trunk of the largest one. I also had some wild cherry trees. Those trees were mostly under six inches in diameter, but they might as well have been that 30 inch mulberry. Cherry tree wood is really beautiful but most of what I had could not be used for anything but kindling. Actually it was too hard for kindling, but it did burn a long time such as oak would do.

Some twisted willow trees also were back in the forest and as I recall they were soft wood. Like slicing through butter. They grew funny in that the rings were kind of braided and twisted. I never saw trees like that before and to be honest they are not very pretty. But they do grow in interesting ways.

I understand what you are saying about steel wedges preventing the saw blade from being pinched by the weight of the tree. I don't see how that could be done easily given that the wedge would be in line with the saw blade. My trees were too small for wedges and a 16" chain sow all in line. Typically I would cut the back side at a shallow angle and was lucky enough not to trap any blades that way. However I was trimming a felled tree one time as it laid horizontal on the ground. I thought it was propped up on both ends well enough for me to cut through the middle, but I thought wrong. I didn't get too far into the trunk and the saw was locked in place. Couldn't get wedges in to pry it apart and didn't have a second saw to cut from the bottom to try and loosen it. So, I had to go rent another chain sow to break loose the first one. To my surprise I didn't bend the bar and the saw was perfectly usable after I got it loose. If that happened to a standing tree, I don't know what I would have done.

[Kellemora]

I had a bandsaw with an 18 inch throat, and a neighbor asked me to cut his cherry logs into planks for him.
I told him, if I hit anything in them, he has to buy me a new blade for the bandsaw.
About the 8th cut, I hit a nailed in fence insulator and it was deep into the tree too.
But that blade cut right through it, with only minimal damage.
That is until I hit the next metal item, don't know what it was, but it sheared all the teeth right off the blade.
It ended that project, and he did pay for me to replace the blade.

I had some Elm trees I had to saw because they wouldn't split for firewood.

[yogi]

Much of my tree cutting experience is with elm trees. I think they are doomed to extinction. When I first started to clear the forest there were maybe ten full grown elm trees. My neighbors had a few on their lots as well. One by one all the elms in my back forest died from some kind of common blight, Dutch Elm Disease most likely. It took more than ten years for all of them to die off, but they all did eventually disappear. My neighbor had one elm that was special to his family for some reason I don't recall. He called out an arborist to try and save the tree. The attempt at saving it was to use something like a Ditch Witch to dig a trench all around the perimeter. The idea was to cut the roots and prevent them from contacting other surrounding trees. Apparently whatever was killing off the elm trees was transmitted through the roots. That tree did outlast all my elms, but I think the inevitable happened just before we moved out.

I guess there are metal cutting band saws, but no doubt even those have a limitation. Some of those six inch diameter cherry trees I had could have been sawed into 2 x 4's, but few were straight enough to be very useful. I have a kitchen cutting board made of cherry wood and it is nearly twenty years old. I coat it with a "mystery oil" from Boos which is basically mineral oil mixed with bees wax and you can hardly see any wear and tear. The wood has not splintered but, of course, there are various cuts on the surface. I have little doubt this board can go another twenty years and still look good.

[Kellemora]

I've heard that digging down around an Elm is supposed to help, if you can dig deep enough.
But then the tree can become unstable and blow over in the wind too.

It would take a decade to cut through a log using a metal cutting blade, hi hi.

All of my cutting boards were made of Rock Maple. Loved those things, and we did keep them oiled also.
Even so, they get all the little cuts in them, which lets more water and juices in, so they start to darken down deep.

[yogi]

I understand rock maple is sugar maple, the tree from which syrup is gathered. Little did I realize how hard the wood is, but I've not heard of nor seen cutting boards made of the stuff. I have seen cypress and bamboo which are supposed to be excellent, and of course the cherry wood. The oil is supposed to preserve the wood, I gather, but it will degrade over a long period of time. Meat oils and fats decompose relatively quickly and really mess up wood if allowed to penetrate. That is why Boos uses the bees wax in their formula. It keeps the organic fats out of the wood.

I recall the time when there were butcher shops in corner grocery stores. Those guys had butcher blocks, which were end grain cutting blocks. The block had to be two or three feet tall. The butcher would rub the fat off with a steel brush at the end of the day and then wax over that with a block of what probably was bees wax. The cutting block wore out and had a deep gully in its center which mostly was due to the steel wire brush and not his cutting. I never thought about that until it came time for me to get my own cutting board.

There are articles written about how trees "communicate" with each other via their root system. One author described how they actually help each other when one is distressed. They send out healing chemicals of some sort through their roots. Unfortunately, it it also the roots that carry diseases, Dutch Elm in particular. It's a good thing I didn't read those articles until I came down here to Missouri. I probably would have felt very sorry for the talking trees and never cut any down.

[Kellemora]

Hard Maple and Birch are the two main woods used for those big butcher blocks.
Hard Maple is often called Rock Maple.

You are right about them being worn down more from cleaning than from cutting on them.

I do know our butcher used food safe mineral oil on his, because he gave my mom a nearly empty can and she had it for years.

I've heard about that about trees communicating through their root systems, including helping each other out as well.

[yogi]

It's interesting that you say Birch is one of the woods used in butcher blocks. I had a couple birch trees in my former homes and their wood is very easy to cut and soft. I can't see how that would hold up to butchering. I suppose that like maple, birch also comes in various degrees of harness. Be that all as it may, I don't scrape down my cutting board. That could be the reason why it's still in good shape. When the oils and wax wear thin I simply go over the board with dish soap and water. When that dries I reapply the mystery oil I bought from Boos. That routine has been working for many years now.

Veering off into a slightly different direction, I want to mention the problem I had with my clever phone, Pixel XL. The only keyboards I hate worse than those on a desktop computer are those touchscreens on mobile devices. The keyboard on my Pixel isn't too bad for short texts, but the "touch" of the touch screen is maddening. I frequently call up things that were not intended to be called and sometimes settings get changed inadvertently. That's what happened yesterday. I lost control of the touchscreen because it went into some version of assisted access that I could not get out of. I was not able to get to the settings and became very frustrated very quickly. Rebooting did nothing but bring me back to the chaos. Eventually, I figured out how to call up the system settings and against my better judgment reset the phone to factory defaults. It's not like Windows which gives you the option to save your data and programs. Android (or LINUX, if you will) just blows everything away and does a clean install. Well, in some ways that was good in that certain features showed up that I disabled long long ago and could be helpful now that I now how to use the phone. But, I had to reinstall all the apps which was a pain because like the Linux repositories, you need to know the names in order to find them and install them. I know what I had and what they did, but I did not recall many of the app names. ugh

The moral of this story is to backup the device to the cloud, which is one of those things I disabled when I first set up the phone. Google doesn't need to have all my stuff on their cloud, but, unfortunately, that's the only way to recover stuff. So, I've spent the last 24 hours rebuilding my clever phone and it's nearly back to normal again. A few settings will never go back because I don't know what I did to change some things. Often I read an article, make the change, and toss the webpage with the article. It's kind of like having a new phone, and overall in spite of losing all my photographs (which I did back up to my NAS by the way), the phone seems to work better. It's still 4G and can't be converted to 5G, but I've not decided yet if or when I'll replace this Pixel.

[Kellemora]

There is a type of Birch that is as hard as Maple. Why they call both the softwood and hardwood varieties Birch I have no idea.

Almost all of the cutting boards I've seen recently, they have a food safe polyurethane coating on them. Some even come with a small can of the polyurethane to recoat them with.

And you just supplied me with reason #1001 why I don't want a Schmartz-Fone, hi hi.

I'm sitting in the doctors office waiting for my turn to see the doc.
All around me, everyone except the very much older folks (like me), are sitting staring at their palms flipping their thumbs all around the place. I assume they are typing with their thumbs, hi hi. But they never look up to see the world around them. Their eyes are embedded into their device. A naked lady could walk through the room and they would never notice, hi hi.

[yogi]

I have witnessed the evolution of seniors' communications first hand. In fact I am part of it. The past 25 years or so demanded me to sit in hospital and doctor's waiting rooms for various reasons associated with various people. Way back about the turn of the century the older folks, older than me at that time, did pretty much what they do today, i.e., show pictures of their grandchildren to the poor souls sitting next to them. All those pictures were paper prints in a folded album inside their wallet. It was amazing and pretty funny to see how long some of those picture ribbons were. Gradually over the last twenty years those seniors still show pictures of their family to the people sitting next to them, but now it's on their smartphone. LOL At first I was impressed that those old geezers could figure out how them there "phones" work. As it turns out, they don't do much with the phones but take pictures and occasionally receive phone calls. It truly doesn't take much to learn how to do those things and now, as you point out, it's rare to see those old timers without a smartphone in their hands. I am 78 and might be considered old by some folks, but I don't have pictures of my family on my phone. It's a security thing in my case. Thus I can't show anybody my grandchildren, but I do have mind numbing games for those times when all I can do is wait for something to happen. So, those smartphones actually can serve a useful purpose.

My own sad story was not due to the fault of the phone. The damned clever phone did exactly what I told it to do. And, not having backups is stupid. While I consider the smartphone to be a small computer, it does not serve the same purpose. I keep nothing of value in there other than my list of contacts and most of those have nicknames instead of real names. The phone is not a productivity tool and typing on it is a burden for us dudes who learned how to type with all ten digits. But, like you said, it can be done very efficiently with your thumbs only if you practice how to do it.

I reset the phone because I was too lazy to figure my way out of the mess I created. But that reset function is one of the great features embedded into most smartphones. Blowing away everything can be mitigated by using the cloud as it was intended to be used, but that clean install has another genius benefit to it. I have a small program installed in the phone that will use Google services to locate it should I ever lose it, or have it stolen. That location feature is what parents use to keep track of their kids. But, there is also an option to reset the phone remotely from a web page setup for that purpose. I can log into the Google Find My Phone website and whether I discover where it is or not, I can do that factory reset remotely. Thus anything of value would be removed. More than that, the new owner would be required to set the phone up using my Google credentials, which, of course, involves multi factor authentication.

And, I am aware of how you feel about smartphones. I think you would have problems with the mechanics of typing, but that can be overcome with a little patience and practice. One thing of real value would be the ability of the phone to sense an emergency situation. If you fall, for example, the phone can detect that event and ask if you want to call 911, or your ICE contact. If you don't say no, it will call for you and give your location to the 911 people. Since you don't do a lot of traveling outside the house, that particular aspect of the phone might not be a compelling feature. But, that same thing can be used to page Deb on her phone, or anybody else for that matter. So, there are some useful benefits associated with clever phones. And since you are not totally adverse to playing mind numbing games (on Facebook, for example) a smartphone would be the perfect solution when you are away from your computer.

Which brings to mind a question I have. You said you were in the doctor's waiting room watching all the seniors play with their thumbs. How did you compose your message here from the doctors' waiting room?