Neighbors and chain saws

Now, that's a gripping title, don't ya think.

That others may learn from my mistakes . . .

It all started as an effort to deal with complaints from John, our backfence neighbor, who thought our trees needed a little trimming. After a major facelift to the NE corner of our yard, we had a whole driveway filled with tree branches, blackberry vines, and greenwaste. I decided to use the chainsaw to make short work of the pile, get a little firewood for campouts and backyard firepit cookouts, etc.

Now, I'm recovering from yet another dumb injury. I'm feeling a lot like Tim Taylor lately. I trimmed the fingernail (and a bit of the finger), using my chainsaw. Turns out chainsaws slice through pine like a hot knife through butter, but bite into and pull birch like a vaacum beater brush too close to a powercord. Picture holding the homelite chainsaw in the right hand, holding the tree branch to be cut into firewood in the left. The branch was pulled under the chainsaw (with my hand attached, pulled in from more that a couple of feet to the left) within a split second.

The doctor I visited (at Misti's insistence) the following Monday said I was dang lucky to only have lost as much flesh and nail as I had, and that this would be painful for a while. They took x-rays to make sure I hadn't knicked the bone (yeah, the cuts were that deep). They did a cleansing soak and gave me a fancy bandaid and homecare instructions, oh, and a tentanus booster. Its a little painful even now, two weeks later, typing this blog entry. It's still bandaided, but mostly just to keep the nail fragments from snagging on things until they grow out.

I have a whole new respect for chainsaw safety now, and will no longer "hold" anything I am cutting with such a saw; probably common sense for most of you, but for a big macho dude, who sometimes gets a Superman complex, thinking the ordinary laws of physics don't really apply to me, well . . ., you get the point.