Two-stroke Tuesday

After breakfast today, we all parted company - the cats were outside playing, Helen and Reggie headed into the office and I headed down to the lower terraces to pick out a couple of dead trees to fell so that I could restock our wood pile.

After finding a couple of likely candidates I went back to the house for the chainsaw, hard hat and walkie-talkie and went back to cut the first. It wasn't long before it was down, and I was staring on the job of cutting it into logs ready for splitting before moving it closer to the house. With that trunk all cut up into logs, it was time for a refuel of the chainsaw and then to turn my attentions to the neighbouring tree. This one turned out to be hollow - an ant colony had long since turned the inside of the trunk into fresh air, which meant that I didn't get much firewood from this one at all.

That meant that a third tree had to come down. This was the largest of the three I felled today, and I managed to fell this one exactly where I'd planned to (as much through luck as by judgement I'm sure, but I'll chalk it up as a victory).

By the time Helen called me on the walkie-talkie for lunch I'd been through another couple of tanks of fuel and still hadn't finished cutting the third tree up.

After lunch, I decided to make a start on moving the wood up one terrace before doing any more cutting. This took an age! Slices of trunk two feet across take quite some effort to move and I had piles of them. I toiled away, moving all but the last few pieces then switched back to cutting until the fuel ran out again. In case you were wondering, this is what a day's felling and logging looks like:

At around 3pm, just as I had taken a seat on a piece of cut wood to empty my boots of wood shavings and catch my breath, Helen called through to me on the walkie-talkie asking if I'd like any help... WOULD I!? I was running on empty now, my t-shirt wet through with sweat and my legs felt like I'd been taking part in the Olympic dead lift competition.

So, for the next hour, as I split the wood where it lay (making it easier to later throw up the terraces rather than walk it all the way up in back-breaking chunks), Helen moved the split wood to a spot further along the terrace ready for throwing.

When Helen called time in order to go and get ready for her Italian lesson in town, I followed suit, knowing that I still needed to walk the dog before I could relax for the evening.

Once Helen left, I took Reggie up the donkey track to the top of our hill as the sun dropped behind the hill opposite, then we zig-zagged our way back down and onto the lower path, going through the wood past one of the small quarries and eventually back onto the lower terraces before circling back to the house.

While I collected some wood for the fire, I left Reggie running around the geese enclosure. This is a ritual he enjoys whenever he is allowed off the lead (which is whenever the cats are safely indoors) -he runs around the perimeter of their enclosures, barking at them, and they watch him going back and forth (as if they're watching a game of tennis) while hissing back at him. After collecting up several crates of wood, I loaded them into the house before sitting on the patio with a glass of red to start the blog. Reggie was STILL running around after the geese - although by this time his tongue was hanging out of the side of his mouth and his speed had halved.

Once it got too cool to sit outdoors, I put the geese to bed and coaxed Reggie up off the ground where he'd collapsed, exhausted, then we both went inside so that I could light the fire and Reggie could stretch out on the sofa next to me and we could both wait for Helen to get back from her lesson.