Forestry with nice music.

Chipper Knife Tricks

Probably obvious to most people, but recorded here for posteriority.

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Also – beware that the height of the blade is as important as how sharp the blade is. The tip of the blade needs to be a certain height above the notch in the flywheel – you can have a very sharp blade and still waste your time and gas turning branches into sawdust if the blade is too low.

Conundrums.

Just some thoughts that have tickled my fancy lately:

The work your employees are most proud of is frequently the work that pisses you off the most. I had an employee at the end of the summer last year. The guy diligently cleaned up some storage areas, and was beaming. A few months later, with two feet of fresh snow on the ground and more falling, it took me an hour to find the chains for the snow plow.

It might just be my peculiar kind of neurosis: I’ve found more and more that when I’m about to lose my cheese doodles with an employee, I need to take a breath. They may have done work that really matters to them.

People are most critical of those on whom they depend and those they care about. If you are fortunate [?] enough to have some people in your life who are intensely critical of you, take a step back. You may notice that part of what makes their criticism sting is your efforts to do right by them.

Scared people lash out. Just another time to step back and observe. It’s easier to suffer the slings and arrows of park life when I remind myself that the person I’m coping with is probably scared. The worse their behavior, the more scared they usually are.

There is no right side in an argument. There are different points of view.

The Year So Far.

Friday the 13th. A good day to take stock. I’ll find a black cat and walk under a ladder while I’m breaking a mirror.

So far this year:

• Fixed the electrical system on the dump truck again. This time: the 7-round adapter on the bumper got plugged up with Dihydrogen Monoxide and sand/salt mix. Dihydrogen oxide with salt makes a great conductor. My clever solution: instead of trying to find a perfect plug or buy a waterproof 7-round connector, I stuffed it with a small trash bag. Conforms to the contours of the outlet, waterproof, compact, and cheap.
• Repaired the fence at the garage yard.
• Totally rebuilt my volunteer/project/weeds/forestry database in Filemaker. Very easy, and I can build iPhone interfaces.
• Went for a big, gnarly hike with my favorite volunteer:
  

  One gnarly five year-old

Weekly – December 13-17, 2011

• Lotsa scraping, sanding for grand re-opening event
• Water samples to CDPHE for testing
• Returned chipper knives for refund
• Finished prepping steps for redgarden project
• Finally cleared out my inbox. Wow.
• Pre-work finished on redgarden steps. Hauled new treads up redgarden wall trail.
• Found/priced replacement sunflower seed board for VC counters. I’m not kidding – it’s a 3/4″x4x8 conglomerate building product that costs $250 per sheet. To make it hold up, it has to be slathered in polyurethane. Sometimes “green” building materials aren’t really that green in practice.

Learning Opportunity

Between work and restoring a 100 year-old house, I mostly just work these days. Which means that I spend a lot of time around dangerous things, and am burning the candle at both ends.

Not surprising that I did this the other day:

be careful out there

Like any accident, there were several factors that contributed. More than anything, my home table saw isn’t in a good position for doing work. I’m glad I got such a gentle reminder.

Weekly. December. 6-10.

Highlights of da week:

• Lots of prep work for my step project. Templates. Cutting. Drilling.
• COV hours: 9×6
• Plowing. Snow-blowing. Sanding. And more of that.
• Meditating on project structure.
• Getting a new Windows install to do what I want it to do.
• A lovely, snowbound hike over shirt tail peak. Knee deep snow over glaze ice in spots. Epic fun.
  

Work Process, Quality, and such…

It’s been an interesting few months. In a nutshell, I’ve had to seriously rethink my approach to projects. I’ve had to retool how I budget, how I communicate with coworkers, and most importantly, improve the quality of my work.

For some reason, thinking about “meta” work is challenging. Bear with me.

Down the “process” rabbit hole! (in randomly ordered bullet points)

• Quality is not secret sauce that gets added to a project when it’s done.
• Quality should be defined with specific outcomes before the project begins.
• A project should be atomized into its components – materials, process, outcomes, purpose, budget, …
• Without an understanding of the phases/components of a project, there’s too much mystery. In my case, there wasn’t ever a quality control part of projects – just kind of a “looks good to me, I guess I can stop.”
• When projects have been teased apart into their components, a big picture can emerge. For example: when a timeline is part of every project, then it’s easier to see if projects are consistently running over or under time.
• With a project template, there is the opportunity for modification. Things change: If there isn’t an overlying structure for projects, adding components to projects becomes more haphazard. Because of where I work, I should consider things like regulations, grants, whether volunteers can or should work on the project, et cetera. I am not capable of remembering to check all of those components when I’m flying by the seat of my pants – but I can add new components to a template.

Without further ado, my template:
Project Template

December 8, 2011

• Unloaded supplies for garage overhaul
• Got correct chipper blades on order (phew)
• Migrated equipment, volunteer databases to new desktop
• Spent entirely too much time cutting, drilling steel for step replacement

I’m pretty happy with the real simple template I made. Felt like out of the box thinking for me – used the vice-grip dealies to secure the template (a 1×2 with marks for centers) and not the work.

December 7, 2011

• Got in touch with my counterpart in Wildlife
• Got steel for steps
• New computer set up in office, including CARS, printer
• Got verbal permission to install leveling kit on Dumptruck
• Some salting/snowblowing to clean up park road