Today’s project was to take advantage of the cold snap of the last few days to bring up some logs for firewood.  I had dropped some trees over the last couple of weeks, but the recent thaw made the ground too soft to use the tractor to get the wood, and given my hand-to-mouth situation with firewood this winter, I needed to take advantage of the conditions.  I was feeling a little proud of my planning and strategic thinking until stupidity intervened.

I spent the early part of the afternoon bucking up the trees into manageable log lengths.  The next step was to mount the grapple on the front of the tractor and bring the logs up to a dry area near the barn where I could process them over the next few days.  The grapple, along with my other implements, lives at the edge of the driveway across from the barn.  As I was pulling the tractor up to it, I had a fleeting thought that it would be a drag if I accidentally pushed it over the edge of the hill; stupidity moves faster than fleeting thoughts, though. Here’s where the grapple had been propped up

and here’s where it ended up when I tapped it a little too hard with the tractor.

I considered for a moment leaving it to stay with all the other debris on that hillside, but I mustered up the motivation to try to salvage my work day.  I drove the tractor to the bottom of the hill, hoping to reach the grapple from there, but it was still a good ways up the hill.

Ironically, its fall was broken by some strands of barbed wire.

Still on the verge of giving up, I discovered that I could sort of roll the thing far enough down the hill to get within range of the tractor.

Moderate success.  I reset the chain to get the awkward package ready to go out on to the road and back to the barn.

Half an hour behind schedule, I got back to my starting point,

and got the silly thing mounted on the tractor.

I pulled out one of the big red oak logs that I was so anxious to burn

but realized that my initial premise was faulty:  The ground was not nearly frozen enough to support the tractor, and I ended up making some awful ruts.

Sometimes it seems that planning is nothing more than hubris; we’ll see if I’m still making the same mistakes in three years.