Remember the dead birch I was going to take down for the kids’ tree house? I dropped all four trunks on Friday evening. I blocked up one trunk, hauled the wood down to the wood shed in a sled, and tossed it in. Turns out that the wood is partially rotten and mostly wet, even though that trunk was better than 30′ high. I’ve split up what I can for it to start drying out, but it looks like for now I’ll be burning the wood I got from the branch president.

The other three trunks are still lying there in the snow. I’ll move them when I don’t sink down to my hip every fourth step. The sawn-off stumps aren’t exactly even, but that can be remedied. I’m glad I got that done while the snow was high because the sun is shining now, and the snow is melting nicely.

Between sessions of General Conference yesterday, the kids and I took a walk down to the main road to get the newspaper. It’s about 9/10 mile down there, but the sun was shining, the birds were singing, and it was nice just to be outside. Down on the level part of the road there’s a 6′ culvert that carries the creek under the road. Since we still have an average of 30″ of snow on the level, the creekbed is silent and full of snow, and the kids and dogs had a great time running back and forth in the culvert under the road. We had a high of maybe 55° yesterday, and it’s supposed to be as warm today and tomorrow, so the days of empty culvert days may be numbered. That would be fine with me. I love the snow, but I love the spring.