Another bright, dry day yesterday so with more rain forecast, I took the opportunity to clear away the pine that I’ve had stacked and drying out for the last year or so. I started by sorting out the lengths that would fit into my wood saw and then cut, split and stacked them inside at the back of my wood store where they can stay until next winter when they should be ready to use. I was quite surprised by how much lighter they’d already become compared to when they were originally stacked, obviously a sign of their drying out.<\/p>\n
That only accounted for half of the wood, though. The rest comprised large chunks of trunk of too large a diameter to fit into my wood saw, so I had various choices. I tried attacking it with my old chain saw, but that’s pretty useless now and ‘wouldn’t cut butter’ as my Dad used to say. I thought about going off to buy a new one to do the job, but changed my mind as the expenditure can’t be justified just now as I don’t need the wood at this moment, which I got for free anyway.<\/p>\n
Another possibility will be to sell the wood saw that I currently have and buy another with a larger diameter blade. That will be my preferred option, I think, as I doubt that I’ll have much, if any, use for 3\/400\u20ac worth of new Stihl chainsaw once my unwanted trees have been cut down, of which more in a moment, but I’ll always have a need to cut burning wood all the while that I have a poele a bois.<\/p>\n
In the end I just ended up moving the large diameter logs to a spot next to my new tool store and re-covered it with the heavy plastic sheet that’s been over it for the last few months. Then I called it a day and went off for an ‘apero’ with Wim and Sophie, always one of the highlights of my week \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n
I’ve now heard from the firm who are going to take down my big old ’tilleuil’ that stands in front of my house and the other scrappy smaller trees that are around the side in front of my wood store. They have said that they’ll be along at the end of the month to do the initial felling and clearing, returning in March to clear up and do the ‘terrassement’ for my proposed extension. Having finalised my design, I’m still working on my plans which I should have completed ‘in draft’ later today, so things are moving slowly but still ticking over. I can’t wait for them to start speeding up, though.<\/p>\n
There are still absolutely no prospects of my picking up the Savannah for several more weeks. This spate of weather, rain day after day after day, is almost unprecedented, even for this time of year, and usually you get a short series of a few calm, clear days before it reverts back to rainy conditions. But this year it just isn’t happening.<\/p>\n
As usual, it seems to be the Jetstream that’s responsible and the charts that I’ve been monitoring show it as being way, way further south over France, Spain and even North Africa than it ever usually is.<\/p>\n
It’s the northern end of my route, where I’ll be starting from, that’s the main problem. The current forecast is for Coulommiers, which is adjacent to la Fert\u00e9 Gaucher, to get rain and occasional high winds EVERY DAY from now until the beginning of March, which is very depressing for me and probably even more so for the people living there \ud83d\ude41<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Another bright, dry day yesterday so with more rain forecast, I took the opportunity to clear away the pine that I’ve had stacked and drying out for the last year or so. I started by sorting out the lengths that would fit into my wood saw and then cut, split and stacked them inside at … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10125"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10125\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10127,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10125\/revisions\/10127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}