Update: Where exactly does the time go?

All right, I know where some time goes: into taking the dogs out to run in the arboretum and then cleaning up their feet, legs, and bellies because, oops, muddier than I thought.

I took three of them on leash first to walk around the whole perimeter — this is roughly an acre and a half in area, so not huge — and just take a look at the fence all the way around. Lo, a cedar tree was leaning at about … oh … thirty degrees from the horizontal, let’s say. It hadn’t fallen entirely, but plainly that was a temporary situation, not a new and stable status quo for that tree. I mean, this was leaning right down over the fence, not inside the arboretum where I don’t really care if a tree s down in general. Three big branches and one tree were down inside, away from the fences, one practically blocking the gate, but those weren’t the problem. This tree leaning over the fence, ready to crush the fence, was the problem.

So I took the dogs out to run, brought them in, cleaned them up, and called a neighbor with a chainsaw. The tree is now in pieces on the ground, and no doubt it will eventually go into the neighbor’s wood stove.

This tree needs to come off this other tree next:

This is a big piece of an oak that has smashed into a small osage orange. I suppose I should admit that the situation is not as dramatic as it seems; that osage orange was leaning way, way over to begin with. Nevertheless, it can’t be good for it to have this oak branch completely on top of it this way, so the oak branch does need to go.

As a side note, osage oranges are hands-down the slowest-growing trees I know of. “Known for their rapid growth,” says Google’s AI overview, and I am here to tell you that the five osage orange trees here have not grown a millimeter in width in thirty years, as far as I can tell. They all look exactly the same now as when I first saw them. Perhaps they have added height. It’s hard to judge. They aren’t necessarily tall trees as far as that goes. However, I have two small ones, the size of the one shown here, and they have just been sitting there all this time as well. They are wild trees, incidentally. I don’t water them. They may not like our summer droughts. But I’m very underwhelmed by their growth rate.

Fine trees in general, of course. They are thought to have largely depended on mammoths for seed dispersal, and of course given the size of the fruits and the little interest current fauna shows in those fruits, this is highly plausible. The wood is particularly good for bows, in case you ever accidentally step through a portal and find yourself way back in the Stone Age and would like to make a bow.

Meanwhile:

Sure, of course I got a fair bit of writing done. Not much was going on this past weekend, which is just what I prefer: boring life, thank you, zero events of note. I’m maintaining a rough 3000-words-per-day average, meaning a little more on weekends to make up for shortfalls during the week. It’s not a particularly obsessive book to work on, but I’m enjoying it.

AND

We are about to enter the pass, and very (very) soon thereafter, we will descend on the northern side of the mountains and enter the startlit lands. AT LAST.

I’ve also almost finished a book that I have been reading very slowly for some time. I started it last year. I know why it’s been so slow, but now that I’m much closer to the end, I’m glad I went on with it rather than just deleting it from my Kindle app. I expect I’ll finish it fairly soon and then I’ll post about it, because it’s interesting. Most of you (well, a lot of you, anyway) will be familiar with the author, and you’ve very likely read it, so we can see what you all thought of it too!

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