"No man, they got the metric system. They wouldn't know what a Quarter Pounder is." - Vincent Vega on the Royale with Cheese Pulp Fiction

It took us about an hour to clear all the branches from this cut of trees near the house. I only hit the house with one tree. But it was small, so I don't think that counts.

June turns into July up here in the North. I’m guessing that happened to you, too, unless you live in some sort of Stephen Hawking-inspired wormhole that keeps it June forever for you, or unless you live in some country that uses holiday wrapping paper for money and just calls June something other than June.

It’s still June. But now it’s July.

July is a traditional month of sweating for people most places across the United States. Here, on July 1, it was something like 50ºF (723ºC).

Here I must take an aside. Since I’ve been a child, the coming takeover of the metric system in the US has been touted. By 1985, by gum, we’d all be talking in meters, kilograms, and hectagons. It hasn’t happened. Metric is the measurement system of choice for scientists, since we can’t ask Stephen Hawking to remember to divide by anything other than 10. But for the average rank and file consumer in the United States (and for every business outside of physics, medicine, and chemical research) the good old system that uses gallons and feet seems to stick. I don’t want to go buy litres or liters or kilograms of milk. I want a gallon. I want to buy my carpet by the square foot, and I want to eat steak by the pound. Beer, they come in cases. A metric case would contain only ten beers, hence, the English system of 24 beers to the case is better (though, if those ten beers each contained 3550 ml, I could be converted, so to speak).

If you don’t use the old English system, I’m not making fun of you. If you like buying liters of gasoline, good, and I can appreciate that. I don't even mind your money. The reason I bash the metric system is that there’s no real reason to change here, unless you give me big honking beers for less money, and I don’t think that’s an attribute of the SI system.

/digression

Anyhow, it’s been a nice, cool summer, the kind of summer that make Al Gore fume, heating up his local climate. Evidence of global, or even local, warming is sorely lacking. It’s been gorgeous.

The Mrs., The Boy, and I have been busy. Vacation for the Wilder clan? Not until after my first triple-bypass surgery. Time off from work? We work.

The Boy and I started the other night. The Mrs. was off hunting moose with a dull spoon (she only got three, slacker) and I decided that it was time for some of our trees to go. I did not make this calculation lightly. Some lady came on the radio the other day and said that we needed at least 30’ of clear space around our house so that the firemen would have room to take pictures of our house after a forest fire leveled the place. The Mrs. and I (in fairly vague details) discussed my plans to do this. She left.

I hadn’t told her I was going to cut down 14 trees. I got bored, there was gas for the chainsaw, so I fired it up and started knocking the trees down.

To her credit, when she got home and saw the 14 trees down, she then looked at the others that I’d marked for doom. She wiped away the moose blood and nodded. She gestured at the remaining 31 trees.

“There must be dozens of liters of wood in the rest of those trees. How many kilominutes will it take you to cut them down?”