Carl Rice makes me want to blog

I'm sure he hears that all the time. Sike. The man has neither a cell phone, nor an answering machine, nor a listed phone number. If you need to talk to him, you either need to catch him first thing in the morning or last thing in the evening, or you need to go find him, which is the best option. He tells a hilarious story about a lady who came to find him once when he was running his sawmill, as he frequently does, up on Spring Creek. The lady needed some logs milled, and she asked Carl for a business card. "Ain't got business cards," he told the her. She decided that was OK- she would just look up his number in the phone book. "I ain't listed in the phone book," he replied. The lady got all aggrevated and bothered by this. "How am I supposed to get in touch with you?" she demanded, to which Carl informed her that she had already managed to find him and was indeed standing there talking to him right there. The lady didn't like something about that and stormed off in a huff, never to return again. The man is, respectfully, old fashioned and probably not worrying himself with the lastest communication technologies, like blogging. And he tells the story about the lady with a special twinkle in his eye.

Lady luck smiled upon me yesterday evening when I arrived from Asheville hauling a trailer load of large black locust logs. Let me mention that I have never hauled a trailer load of anything before, let alone in a trailer loaned to me by a man I only met twice. But, thanks to the generosity of "BL" (one of our favorite landscaping clients) and Lee's Trees, I was hooked up with some awesome logs and a trailer to haul them on after Lee and his crew took down "BL's" tree. Lee's guys cut it and loaded it all up for me with their machine and Lee himself helped me hitch the trailer onto the rusty ball of Dad's truck*, and I was off (crossing my fingers and driving very slowly). (*There was some question for a few minutes as to whether the size of the ball matched the size of the hitch. A climber named Rick said to Lee at one point, "Her ball's too big!". Lee paused a moment, looking through his reflective sunglasses, and replied, "Sounds like a personal problem.")

Lady Luck escorted me to Sapling Mountain, where I was fortunate to find Carl and JD, who were standing by the barn like angels in the evening sun. I exhaled my tension from the drive, and settled into feeling comfortable and lucky and relieved. Carl and JD gave me an appropriate amount of teasing, whilst aptly unloading the logs and staging them for Carl to mill next week. I am thinking of 6x6s for deck posts, or something along those lines.





The afternoon sun graced the golden brown cows, which Carl said were "Limosines," as well as the hay barn and the church.






Later I went up to my place to unload the rest of the smaller locust poles, and I discovered a spider on the forehead of the blessed virgin. Wowzers!