Wood splitting

All you folks who split your own wood every year should get a chuckle out of this:

It's been a few years since I used anything but a fakelog (Duraflame, etc.) in my fireplace. This year I decided to get one of those bundles of actual wood and have a real wood fire again.

I used to do this in the past, and I had a gas starter in the fireplace then, or I'd just use a bunch of newspaper to get the fire going.

But this fireplace doesn't have the gas connection, and I haven't subscribed to a newspaper in years. The first attempt was a total disaster. I [i]know[/i] you need kindling to get the large wood burning, and you need some kind of tinder to get the kindling going, but I tried it anyway.

Needless to say, that didn't work too well. But I did learn a few things about what [i]doesn't[/i] work.

"No problem," I said to myself, "I'll just split a couple of the pieces down into kindling, and split the large pieces into two or more to make it a more manageable fire."

Man, I forgot how much [i]work[/i] splitting wood is! Even just little quarter- and eighth-log pieces!

But I now have a stack of nice, wrist-thick pieces, another stack of finger- and thumb-thick pieces, and a whole bunch of chips and splits for kindling. Since my fires are more decorative than functional, that will do me just fine.