Cutting Firewood! Can it be considered a hobby.

As many people, who know us or drive by our house, know we cut firewood and lots of it. Before we moved to Riley I don't really remember my dad using a chainsaw much he always owned one but because of where we lived they hadn't really ever been a need to cut firewood. The first time I remember working with firewood was on a mission trip in Canada. We helped many people stack their firewood and there was a lot of it because they get it delivered in dump trucks. The firewood they burn is the scraps that the saw mills throw out. It was also the first time I'd ever used an ax. I hit on the same long for a very long time and only managed to criss-cross the top of it with ax marks. I never got it split. However when we moved to Riley our house only had two forms of heat, a small propane stove in the living room and a fireplace in the dining room to heat the rest of the house. We had to cut wood or we were going to be really cold. For the first couple years of us living in Riley, I didn't enjoy any part of cutting firewood. I wasn't big enough to run a chainsaw, and although I tried to split, the only thing I managed to do was turn logs into toothpicks because of how many times I hit the same log. Dad says he would give me a log and I would work on it the whole time he split the the rest of the truck load. Oh, and let me stop here and say that we don't own a log splitter, at that time everything we cut was split by hand. Even though I didn't find much enjoyment in cutting firewood I did enjoy playing with my ax and cut down many trees with it. I believe the biggest I ever cut down like that was roughly eighteen inches in diameter. For a nine or ten year, that big of tree takes a long time to cut down.
I think cutting firewood became an enjoyment for me around the age of twelve or thirteen. My uncle Justin was selling wood but he didn't have a place to keep it because he lived in town, so he stored it at our house. He would come out to our place in the evenings after work to split wood and I would go out to help. He started showing me how to "read" a log so it is easier to split. For those who don't know how to "read" a log there are things to look for. The rings of tree not only tell the age of a tree they also let a person know how that the grain of that piece of wood is. If they are nearly perfectly round the grain is smooth and the log will split easily. If the rings are round on one side but they bubble out on the other it means there is probably a not or old branch that has been grown around and the log will not split well on that side. Or sometimes a log will have two sets of rings that have their own center starting point. This means that the tree had a crouch or another branch there. When you have these logs they are very hard to split unless you know just what you are doing. After Justin had started pointing these things out to me it became easier for me to see them on my own and I was able to actually split wood. This made firewood cutting more fun because I didn't just have carry and stack, I could do something else. When I turned fourteen, once again cutting firewood became even more fun, I got my farm permit and was able to take my truck when we cut. This meant I got to help haul as well as split. I was also running a chainsaw by this point but not very much yet. I remember when I began running a chainsaw a lot. It started at our house, dad would bring 15-20 foot long logs and then I would cut them up. This gave me practice running a saw, was in a fairly obstacle free area, and was close to the house if something happened. Thankfully nothing did. Once I had cut like that for a while dad let me cut some when we were in the woods and it just grew from there until I was running a saw just like everybody else. Then last year dad just let me go cut as long as a friend was there just in case. The stories from those cutting trips were the subjects of several blog posts last year and you can see the amounts of wood we cut.
Firewood cutting is dangerous and I have been a part of and witnessed some close calls over the years. I think the first I can remember was when I was in seventh grade. Justin had just gotten married that fall and Lenay his wife had come when we went to cut wood, because my dad and uncle often cut together. Dad was getting ready to cut a tree down and had looked around for my little siblings to make sure they were clear, but he hadn't remember Lenay was there. He made the last cut and the tree started falling when everyone noticed Lenay was in the path of its fall. Justin yelled and Lenay crouched over and covered her head. CRASH! The tree hit the ground and Lenay stood up, not hurt. The tree was dead and didn't have any small branches and had two main branches that forked out several feet above the ground. Lenay was standing in the middle, between the two big branches.
The next close call I can remember actually the next two both happened to me in the last couple of years. The first one happened when I was cutting. I had just made a cut and picked up the saw, the saw I was using had this problem where it wouldn't stop the chain from spinning, and I had the saw hanging at my side when I felt something tugging at my coveralls. I looked down and the chain had cut through my coveralls and started on my jeans. It was a little close for comfort. The second was similar however I was actually cutting on a log and my hand slipped jerking the saw up into my boot and taking a notch out of the sole. That again was a little too close.
Even with how dangerous it is and how much work it is. I enjoy cutting firewood and hopefully always will live in house where I can burn wood. Can cutting firewood be considered a hobby or is it a little strange?