Winter ready

For the first time in years, we used up all our firewood this winter; in fact we ran out a couple of weeks earlier than we would have liked given the weather. It's always difficult to get the lumberjack to commit to a delivery date, and this time he phoned yesterday afternoon to tell us he would be showing up this morning. At least we are both here. We always order in the spring because his wood, while relatively cheap, is never seasoned, and this gives it time to dry out. At least it wasn't sopping wet this time.

The pile is what five stères looks like. People will tell you a stère is one cubic metre of wood, but it's more complicated than that. It's one cubic metre of logs cut to a length of one metre. When the logs are cut smaller (33 cm in this case) they counterintuitively take up less space. So our stères are about 0.7 cubic metres. 

It's still a lot of wood. It looks slightly daunting, but we pace ourselves to stack it steadily. Plus given our location, someone almost always passes and asks if we want some help -- in this case Sophie, when we were about halfway through. It really speeds it up having an extra person. Total time an hour and a half including a short coffee break. It would probably have been two hours without her, and we caught up on gossip while doing it.

In other news, S dragged me outside to show me the fountain first thing -- after months of silence it was gushing water and happy pigeons were splashing about. Lovely to hear it gurgling again. Sadly, it was a false dawn -- the mayor later posted on Facebook to say that municipal employee J had poured water into the pipe from the manhole near the water tower and then opened the closed stopcock, to see if the pipe conducting the water to the fountain was broken. Answer, no. "So," said Serge (in a slightly exasperated tone), "you can stop complaining that the sewerage works are to blame for the lack of water when it's the drought!" (S later pointed out to me that they should have measured the volume of water at both ends, since there could be a crack leaking water). As of now, 10 hours later, there's still a small trickle, so it's better than it was. And I don't think Serge wants to hear any more complaints!