Author Archives: Steve Mays

Is the chainsaw perfect?

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I spent a few hours with the chainsaw today. A perfect day to be in the woods. As I slowly brought order to chaos I wondered how people got along without chainsaws. And is it one of those rare tools that can’t really be improved on, like the fly swatter. I headed over to Wikipedia for some history:

“The first portable chainsaw was invented in 1925 by what became the German company Festo in 1933. The company now operates as Festool producing portable power tools. Other important contributors to the modern chainsaw are Joseph Buford Cox and Andreas Stihl; the latter patented and developed an electrical chainsaw for use on bucking sites in 1926 and a gasoline-powered chainsaw in 1929, and founded a company to mass-produce them. In 1927, Emil Lerp, the founder of Dolmar, developed the world’s first gasoline-powered chainsaw and mass-produced them.”

While they’ve made lots of improvements to the tool, the basic design seems unchanged for what, 85 years? I daydreamed (not while sawing) of ways to improve this wonderful tool. Quieter? The noise keeps me on my toes, always aware of the potential danger in my hands. Lighter? Maybe, but the weight of the saw seems to make cutting easier. I guess if someone could come up with a tiny (safe) fusion reactor to eliminate running out of gas. But I look forward to the rest breaks those provide.

If the chainsaw never gets better than it is, it will be good enough for me.

“Forcing my life into slow-motion”

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Jonathan Safran Foer had an idea for Chipotle so it shared it with their CEO.

They had nothing on their bags. So I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to just put some interesting stuff on it? Get really high-quality writers of different kinds, creating texts of different kinds that you just give to your customers as a service.’

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In the Vanity Fair piece below they give a few samples. One by Michael Lewis (The Two-Minute Minute) resonated for me.

“Recording the quotidian details of my day seems to add hours a day to my life: I’m not sure why. Another trick is to focus on some ordinary thing—the faintly geological strata of the insides of a burrito, for instance—and try to describe what I see. Another: pick a task I’d normally do quickly and thoughtlessly–writing words for the side of a cup, say–and do it as slowly as possible. Forcing my life into slow-motion, I notice a lot that I miss at game speed. The one thing I don’t notice is the passage of time.”

The slowing of my life over the past two years has been one of the best and most interesting parts of not having a job. I still notice the passage of time but it’s moving more slowly.

Stacking Logs

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“When stripped of formality and returned to its natural shape, Zen is earthy and ordinary. Nothing special.”
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“It is so uncontrived and subtle that it goes nearly unnoticed. And no one can deliberately do it.”

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“Taoism and Zen cannot properly be understood, but they can be experienced.”

Logs - 4

Sawing Logs

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In the low 30’s today here in mid-Missouri but I spent a couple of hours with the chainsaw making little one from big ones. These will have to be stacked unless the lumberjack elves do it while I sleep. By the time this project is complete, I think I might have enough logs to fill 50 pickup trucks. Maybe more.

The clean up begins

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Short of hiring someone else to do it, there doesn’t seem to be any easy way to tackle a job like this. The trunks have to be cut into logs; the logs have to be moved and stacked; the limbs have to be dragged and piled. Lots of lifting and walking, up and down the hill.