Stumps

Ever since we got an acre of trees cleared there has always been the stumps. We didn’t remove the stumps because the county didn’t allow us to do that many, so instead we just ground them down. But finally we decided to rent a stump grinder because the stumps prohibited us from planting grass and also make for a very bumpy bike ride. So on the 28th of September Dad took the day off so he could operate the machine. Mom let me (Philip) off of school so I could mark the stumps with flags that came with our invisible electric fence for Lily. Without it she would run off chasing some squirrel or something. Dad let me grind a couple of stumps down. When Dad was done with one side of the clearing he let me smooth it out with our little box blade on the end of our tractor. Because when you grind a stump down it makes a hole where the stumps was but leaves a big mound of wood chips next to it. So there were tons of holes and mounds of chips all over the clearing.Some of the mounds
Also notice all of the wood chips covering the ground.

A ground down stump

After thirty minutes or so, the machine would run out of gas, so we would have to go through the whole process of driving to the gas stations and refueling our tanks two or three times. But luckily we discovered a gas station that carried diesel that was much closer to us. But eventually the machine shut down and not because it was out of gas. So we called the rental place and they sent a guy over to see if he could fix it, but it turned out that something had gotten clogged. So they swapped out our machine for one that was slightly smaller.An armie of flags.
(This is the second machine at the top)







Here's a video of the actual grinding part.
When grinding you had to lower the arm a little bit, swing it to the side and lower again and continue "sweeping" the stump until it was to your desired height. But if you lowered it too much it would stall when you would try to sweep it to the side.

We were hoping we could grind all the stumps in one day but it ended up taking two. So the next day we finished the other half of the clearing in the afternoon. We got most of them except for two or three that we missed.

As always I hope that I did not bore you with this post.
--Philip

The cube

This has been my recent occupation. I had seen several people do it, and determined to learn how to solve the cube. So after a couple weeks of looking at online guides I finally committed the sequences to memory. Once I had done that I started working on speed, with a goal of solving the cube under a minute. Now I need a new goal. :D I will never need a gameboy again (not that I used them much anyway), and take it with me everywhere I go.



Here I solved it in 57 seconds, today on the way home from church I was able to set a personal record of 52 seconds. I have also gotten several people from church into rubik's cubes. Here is the site I used to learn how to solve the rubik's cube.