This weekend was a beautiful one, if you like hot and humid weather. Of course, I have never cared much for hot and humid weather.

If it's going to be humid, I at least want it to rain. It did rain Friday as I was preparing to go to the Alleghany Fiddler's Convention, a veritable deluge that began right as I was preparing to leave at 7 p.m. or so.

I was so happy to see the rain, I didn't even mind going back in the house to watch it fall as if God was tossing out his mop bucket.

I decided that Saturday might be a better day to attend after all. So, instead of going, I opted to do a few things around the house and go to bed early.

Saturday morning, some friends from the lower part of the state, who also own land in the county, opted to come by and help me cut some brush and move some lumber. It isn't every day that someone comes around to help move lumber and cut brush, so I took them up on it immediately.

We loaded up the back of my school bus with a big stack of oak boards, cleaning up one of my many piles of lumber that need to be moved. My uncle recently sold my old homeplace, which he owned, for a pretty good chunk of change. It includes numerous acres, many of which overlooked the New River.

So, I have to move all of my stuff from the land or watch it be bulldozed over into a hole somewhere. Needless to say, I'm not one to let things go to waste. There are probably enough boards there to keep me stocked for at least two years of building projects. I do hope that I have a forklift if I have to move them again.

It is hard to realize how much work goes into making a stack of lumber eight feet wide by waist high, until you have tried it. It helps to realize that the lumber is useful and valuable, or one might not bother moving it at all. It is heavy, hot, dirty, hard work. Of course, in my regular course of making a living, moving boards isn't something I have to do very often. Thank goodness.

Once all of the oak was on the bus, we headed back to my place to unload, but got a bit side-tracked when my friend got out his chainsaw to cut ‘one or two laurels.'

We ended up starting another project that I haven't even thought of for a while — carving a road down into the woods to connect to an existing road I already have.

That made four big piles of brush, which I subsequently dragged with the pickup, and some help from my brother-in-law, to a burning place near the edge of my land. As hot as it was, I felt like I was about to combust myself.

As for the cut area, I would like to be able to use more of my land, especially to build a nice little woodshed on and possibly a place to hide some of my junk. It isn't good to have that stuff stacked up in front of the house, you know. Not so much because it looks bad, since my place isn't visible from the road, but because it makes for more headaches in having to move all that stuff again later.

I just got my grass seed replanted last weekend, so I hope to actually have a yard again instead of the mudhole that had developed since the lines from the well were buried this past spring. It was a long time in the making, but I have had a lot of other things that I was much more interested in, so it just took a back burner. But, what with real grass seed spread here and yon, I might decide to start cleaning things up a bit.

I also discovered a painful truth. My ‘new' building is almost full on the bottom floor and the top floor is about one-fourth full. What's inside? Upstairs I have old doors, bus seats and insulation. Downstairs I have stored such a motley group of items that I can't begin to explain. Everything from kegs of nails to old farm equipment is stuck in there, sometimes stuffed in there, along with my tools for carpentry and such.

The treasures of a junk collector abound. I also have an old corn sheller that I need to get home, along with a few other odds and ends. I guess the little shed in the woods would be a nice place to store old car parts, the new/old lumber I just started hauling in and a few other items that have been ‘homeless' up until now. If all goes well, it won't cost me more than a few nails and a lot of hours of hard work. What else would I be doing with my time, anyhow? I need a project going all the time or I lose my focus. Doesn't everyone have a hundred jobs and none finished?

Get more tongue in cheek commentary this week's issue of the Alleghany News!

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