8/11/2013 Lughnasa Honey Moon
BTW: I don’t change moon names mid-month but when I realized this was the honey extraction moon I decided to go ahead. Honey Moon is too good to pass up.
Finished moving limbs in the prairie grass area this morning. In matters related to trees I have experience. I learned long ago that if you line up the limbs in the same direction and pull them all together so that their branching parts follow the cut ends, moving them is easy. If you don’t do it that way, you’re in for a frustrating time. Of course, chipping them is the usual practice, but I like building up brush piles for critters and I’ve done that as the default option for years. Not to say I haven’t chipped. I have, but only when the amount was considerable. Wasn’t the case this morning.
This project involved cutting down several ash trees and saplings that I had let grow up in the prairie grass area. They had begun to shade the orchard and it was time for them to 
come down. Past time, really. I cut the trees down with the felling axe and limbed them with the limbing axe, but I used the chain saw to cut the trunks into logs. The big pruners, 2 foot plus handles, allowed me to take out the amur maple saplings, too. That area is now back to its original purpose, prairie grass and wild flowers.
Still plan to loaf today. Sort of. In my loafing I’m reading Madame Bovary and I finished the Communist Manifesto yesterday. They’re both for my Modern/Post-Modern MOOC. The guy who’s teaching it, Michael Roth, is the president of Wesleyan University and a scholar of French thought. That makes the bias French thought, the touchstone he keeps coming back to in his examples and the source of several of the readings. Though I took French in high school, I’ve not kept up with it and matters French have not figured significantly in my education, having a more English/German bias myself. Gives this course a different feel for me and I like it. But. It’s not convincing me so far.
