Nothing Says I Love You Like. . .

. . . Spending several hours on Valentine's Day working in the woods together.

At least, at this little place here it says "I Love You."  Spending a warm sunny winter afternoon cutting up blow downs for future firewood is about as frugal and loving as you can get.  LOL.

A nice maple tree, lying on the ground

That nice maple tree, cut into 8' lengths and stacked on the tractor forks.

After taking the logs from that maple tree up to the wood boiler area, we returned to the woods and cut up several more 'small' (ie. skinny-ish) trees to make a second load of logs.  Some I loaded, others DH had to carry from where they were cut to the tractor to put on the forks.

He's not just good looking, he's strong!

(No picture of me, but I can carry logs about 2/3 that diameter--note the ones all ready on the forks.  I'm strong too!)

Another tree we tackled together was a huge beech that came down in the big storm we had at the end of March last year.  (You can read about house/outbuilding damage here.)  The busted off stump is about as tall as I am.  Unlike me, it was quite rotten inside. 

It is also quite big around; neither DH nor I could get our arms around it.  Maybe if we'd tried joining our hands together we could have spanned it with our arms.  Maybe.

The stump end of that big old beech tree.

If you look close to the left side you'll see a bit of burgundy. That's DH in a t-shirt about 3/4 of the way to the top of that beech tree.  It was huge in life.  In death it will be several weeks' worth of firewood.

That one was too big to cut into logs and put on the forks.  Instead, DH cut each chunk into firewood lengths and we stacked them into a couple of piles right there in the woods.  They'll age out there for about a year before being hauled in and split to use in the 2027/28 heating season.

We didn't just work all of Valentine's Day.  Well, actually, we did, because cooking counts as work in my book (it's a daily chore so that's work, right?  Not like going out to eat and being served. . . )  For dinner I made a big salad and baked potatoes while DH grilled a big ribeye steak (from the 1/4 beef we bought last fall).  We had ice cream for dessert.