If there's a recipe to gain a true appreciation of what incredible source of energy fossil fuels are this could be it....
Spend a frosty winter day chopping up a couple of dead willow trees (blown over by the wind) using only hand tools (two different sized pruning saws, an axe and a hatchet) while listening to a chorus of chainsaws as neighbours clean up their own dead wood. I spent most of the day doing what I could have achieved in an hour or so with the help of a cup or two of petrol and the appropriate technology to put it in. And for all my effort I only managed to get the trees stripped of their smaller branches (anything smaller than my wrist) and lined up ready for tomorrow when a friend is coming to visit with a chainsaw. It will take all of 20 minutes to chop and stack the trunks of the trees. I shudder at the thought of how long that would take me with hand tools.
There is something about this kind of physical labour that makes a beer taste better...
3:05:01 PM 
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