Christmas Break so far.

It has been fun. For Christams, we did the usual, ate too much and got to talk with family and friends, can't get much better. From 10 minutes after I got home till Christmas day, and since the day after Christams, I have been running around with and for my dad. Mainly, I helped his A/C buisness by running service calls and dad has some lumber cut, so I had to do some of the stuff related to that. For those that have never had lumber cut, here is what you do, cut down about a dozen straight trees, cut them to the longest lenght possible in increments of 23', 19', 17', 15', and so on till about 9'. Basically you are cutting these trees 1' longer than what you actually need out of them. Then you drag the loggs to an open, level are that is easily accessible by a 24' trailer and pickup. the 24' trailer is a saw mill on wheels. The guy that we use cuts the logs up for lumber for about 22 cents per board foot (a board foot is a board that is 1" thick X 12' wide X 12' long). You tell the guy what you need or want. In dad's case, dad wanted the best cut for the log, in other words, what the lumber guy thought was best. After the guy leaves, you stack up the lumber with "stickers" inbetween the boards (Stickers are scrap pieces of boards that are roughly 1" wide X 5/8" thick X the width of your stack of lumber). The Stacking is the most important because with out the stickers and being almost perfectly straight, the boards warp and become hard to work with. My brother and I stacked these boards about 6 feet tall and about 24" wide. Then after the stacking, you have to cover the boards otherwise they will grow mold. We have had problems in the past of people stealing cedar and other boards, so we put 20' freezer panels on top of the lumber. These pannels are what large grocery stores and warehouses use, they only weigh about 100 pounds or so (they were water logged, but dry on the lumber side, fun stuff). Today, I actually had a day off with some friends. We played a little with Half-Life 2. As I dorve my truck around Tyler, my friend had fun scaring people at stop lights while wearing a gas mask (all sorts of fun, DON'T DO TO OLDER LADIES, might run across a few complications). Well, I must go, I have to restart my computer, I finished dowloading a few updates that will "help" my Windows partition, later.