Day: December 8, 2014

I phoned M. Dumas this morning as planned and told him that I’d like to order 3 more stères of dry oak, as before, and that if possible I’d like it delivered tomorrow. He asked ‘why tomorrow’ and I told him ‘because tomorrow it won’t be raining’. Evidently M. Dumas isn’t someone who is put off by such trivialities and he said that he’d be along with it this afternoon. He’s the sort of chap who, when someone says they’d like to place an order, he wants to deliver it before they get the chance to change their mind, and who can blame him 🙂

So he turned up this afternoon in a large new tractor (from Savimat) pulling a large tip-up trailer. Last time he came he was in a beaten up old tractor towing an old flat-bed trailer that we had to unload manually, so I guess the wood business can’t be all bad 😉

So unloading the wood was a quick job compared to last time and after I’d paid him and he’d departed, it was then just up to me to get it under cover. While he was here delivering, there was just a very slight drizzle, so to start off with, I began to move it two lengths at a time into my wood store. I was fortunate to get a reasonable amount inside before the drizzle began to turn into more heavy rainfall.

So far, so good because what I managed to get inside hadn’t got too wet and will soon dry out before I get around to cutting it down and splitting it. But I then had to call a halt to moving it and just think about getting some covers over what was left outside before it became too wet. I was able to do so and now I’ve got two stacks of wood on my grass, today’s delivery temporarily under the blue covers until the rain stops and I can get it into my store, and the pine I acquired the other day that will have to stay under the black cover for a couple of years until it’ll be ready to burn.

Although the wood that came today is stacked in a higgledy-piggledy way as it came off the back of the trailer and is therefore not stacked down neatly, I think M. Dumas has come up trumps and delivered what you might call a ‘good’ 3 stères of wood.

Now all I have to do is cut it, split it and stack it and that’ll take me a few days I think. A good way to keep warm, maybe, without having to light a fire 😉