Felling and Bucking

Thanks for looking that up for me. I didn't really expect you to do it, I was just giving you an example of passing the buck, but thanks anyway. I got to thinking later of other uses for the word "buck". To buck a tree is to cut off all the limbs after the tree itself has been felled. The guys who cut the tree down are called "fellers" or "fallers", the guy who bucks off the branches is the "bucker", and the saw he uses is called a "buck saw", not to be confused with a "saw buck", which is a frame that is used to hold a log while you cut it up into firewood lengths. The saw buck was handy when people used hand saws because it held the log up off the ground at a comfortable working height. With a  modern chain saw, the saw buck is usually more trouble than it's worth, but some people still use them for small logs and branches because it keeps you from cutting into the ground, which quickly dulls the cutting teeth of your chain. I don't know how the ten dollar bill came to be called a "saw buck" or, for that matter, why a dollar is called a "buck". Somebody should look that up one of these days.

Clothes made from deer hides are usually called "buck skins", but I have, on occasion, heard reference to doe skins. I suppose that doe skins are softer than buck skins, although the age of the deer would also have something to do with it. I have never heard of something being made from fawn skins, which would have to be the softest of all.

I don't know why the Canadians haven't blocked that Siberian air mass for us. Maybe they don't have the technology, or maybe they haven't noticed it since it's pretty cold up there to begin with.

I believe that idea of turning the Rockies around has some merit. Interstate 75 runs north and south down the middle of the Northern Lower Peninsula, and it blocks a lot of cold and snow for us, since most weather systems move west to east. The TV weather people frequently mention that a coming storm will be worse to the west of I-75 than to its east. On the rare occasion that we get a storm out of the east, off of Lake Huron, we get hammered worse than the people on the west side of I-75. If an interstate highway has that much effect on the weather, I suppose that a whole mountain range would have even more of an effect. We should think this through, however, before we implement it. As it is, the Rockies already block a lot of the moisture that blows in from the Pacific, which is why Washington and Oregon are so wet, and the Northern Plains are so dry. We might need a pipeline under the mountains so Canada doesn't end up with all our water. Then again, with nothing to block the moisture from the Pacific, we might not need any more from Canada. Somebody should do a study about this.

Come to think of it, California isn't particularly wet, and they pipe a lot of their water down from the mountains to their east, the Sierra Nevadas, I believe. Nevada itself is a big desert, so why isn't California wet like Washington and Oregon?