2 cords of firewood + 10" of snow = classic Maine workout

Sorry for the posting delay, folks. We've been too busy relaxing in front of our toasty-warm new-old woodstove to do any new house projects. Also, Gabe also went back to school and I started a second job, but that's another story.

Of course, the problem with being toasty warm all the time is that eventually you run out of wood. We had a supply of really old wood in the basement, and we guessed it would last until the first of March. Well guess what? It's almost the first of March, and we're almost out of wood. So we called a guy advertising seasoned dry firewood in our local weekly rag, and asked for two cords at $220 a cord - not bad at all for dry wood in the dead of winter as oil prices head towards the stratosphere. He says, I'll be there at 10 a.m. tomorrow. 8 a.m. the next day, he shows up while we're still in our jammies - hey, I work from home and no one could accuse me of being a morning person! He showed up early for a pretty legitimate reason: a beastly snowstorm was heading right for us. And just like that, we had two cords of firewood occupying substantial space in our driveway, becoming increasingly buried by the minute.

It's times like this when you eat a hearty breakfast, summon the latent courage infused in you by five generations of Maine ancestors, get outside and get to work.

We carved out some of the iceberg that has been forming at the end of our driveway to make room for a nice neat stack. We extracted some old pallets from the basement to pile everything on. We soon realized that it would be easier if we threw a tarp over the pile to keep the snow off it as we worked. We stacked, it snowed. We stacked some more, it snowed some more. Before too long, we had this (taken this morning, after the sun came out):

That ought to get us through the rest of the winter. I hope. It'll probably burn a lot slower than the 15-year-old bug-infested sticks, rotten, mushroom-covered limbs of trees cut from our yard, and broken furniture we've been burning so far. Once the snow melts (or, at least before it falls again next November), we'll get this stack a proper shed. For now, I'm just glad it's not in our occasionally wet basement!

Gabe ended up stacking a bunch of the wood by himself while I went inside to work on that second job I mentioned earlier. To finish off our Maine day, we made some fish chowder and I rewarded Gabe with an apple blueberry pie.

And then we shoveled. Ayuh.