So most of our laurels are destroyed by the ice.  And they are on a slope and under lots of strain.  Very bad conditions for use of a chain saw.  You get much better control using a hand saw, or an axe.  And if you miss, or get it stuck, you are less likely to loose a limb.

Of course, all that being said, I did end up buying a chainsaw because I simply have too many trees to cut up.  Though I still do most of the felling with hand saw and axe, and almost all of the limbing with either an axe or bypass pruners.

Tree fell on the house.

One of our trees.

This is the view this morning from my front door.

This morning I found my 17 year-old amelanistic cornsnake dead. I’ve had her since she was a hatchling in 1993. Her name was Mel.

She lived a very comfortable life in what many would consider a palace of a habitat for a little ol’ cornsnake.  It is five feet by two feet, and two feet in height. It sits on a cabinet purchased specially for it. It is very lonely now with no inhabitant.

My daughter Carys took the news pretty hard. Lilia ran into the room and said that I was wrong, Mel was still here. She isn’t quite old enough yet to understand death.

I’ve been very sad and melancholy all day. I’ll try and add some pictures to this post later.

Came home today and found this icicle hanging off the eaves of my house. The icicle is over a foot long.

Some links I want to follow up on and read more.

http://www.capdsupport.org/

http://www.webring.org/hub/capd

http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/voice/auditory.html#aud_07

http://www.ncapd.org/

http://qw88nb88.wordpress.com/living-with-auditory-processing-disorder/

http://www.judithpaton.com/

We have quite a few laurels that were once bushes, but are now trees. I’ve been working on getting them back under control. Last weekend I pruned them all by quite a bit.

I still have quite a bit of work to do, but it was a good start.

I am testing out the wordpress app for android. So far so good.

It seems to work quite well.

Some time ago I purchased a refurbished Porter-Cable 6 Gallon air compressor and tool combo (PC3PAK).  I actually only paid about $20 for it, because I got it on sale, refurbished, and used my health plan’s gift certificates (for having a healthy lifestyle).

Then it ended up sitting around for a while because other priorities intervened.  By the time I got around to using it (well past the return period) I discovered it would not hold any pressure.  This greatly disappointed me.  I read through the manual and went online, and even tore most of the compressor apart (shh… don’t tell anyone).  It still wouldn’t work.

Then while reading the manual again – carefully this time – I noticed the information on the check valve, and that the most common reason the compressor would not build pressure was due to a stuck check valve.  So today I finally took the check valve off of the tank.  It was stuck.  About 10 seconds later I had it unstuck.  I put it back on the tank and reattached the hose from the motor.

The tank held pressure.  Everything works now.

I had spent a month and a half agonizing over what to do with this compressor and whether it could be repaired or not.  And if I had just spent a little more time reading the manual the first time, I probably would have checked the check valve on the first day, and have had the use of the compressor since.  Trust me, using a foot pump to inflate tires or the kids toys is no fun.

Now I just need to figure out the correct nails to buy, and I can finally finish installing the trim in the house.  The trim that has been sitting in the garage for over a year.  My wife would really like the trim finished.