Chopping firewood till the axe handle breaks...

It's been one hell of a winter.

Cold records set all across the land, month after month.

They call it "global warming."

I'm not so sure.

We enjoyed a warm spell in these parts today. Temperature went up to -7 Celsius I'm told. Apparently that's not enough to mitigate the Owen Sound frozen water-pipe crisis.

Personally, the only water-pipe crisis I ever experienced was when Junior stole my water pipe, but that's a matter for another blog-post.

As for this one, my legal team, who vet every blog-post before it hits the world-wide-web, have strongly recommended that I delete certain relevant details due to matters that are, or are about to be, "before the courts."

I spent this balmy day in shorts and flip-flops digging firewood out of the snow-drift behind the woodshed. The reason I am digging firewood out of the snow is because the nice lady at XXXXX Fuel Supply suddenly took a bitch pill one day last October, and advised me that since my furnace inspection certificate had expired the previous day, they would not be able to provide me with furnace oil until said inspection was duly expedited and archived in their files.

Well!

I have a problem with ultimatums.

No matter how reasonable the ultimatum, I just want to say fuck you.

So I've spent the entire winter, the coldest winter in history, proving to the XXXXX Fuel Supply bitch that I don't need her fuel supply.

This has not been as simple a project as it seemed that day when I first told her to go fuck herself.

As the regular reader knows very well, the prime fuel supply here at Falling Downs is that firewood I harvest every summer. The regular reader will also be acquainted with the 1,001 sound reasons why summer is never long enough to get enough wood in for the winter.

Luckily, I had a great surplus of tree trunk rounds that were waiting for the wood-splitter that I never got around to fixing, because summer was just too short. They're sitting under four feet of snow right behind the empty wood-shed.

So I've been out there with the snow-shovel, and it's a bit like an archaeological expedition; you just randomly dig in and hope for a lucky strike!

Sure enough, I've discovered a motherlode of those two hundred pound rounds under four feet of snow. They were too big to bother with last summer, but suddenly they're golden... I've been dragging them into the wood-shed and carving them up with the ten-pound maul.

It's an exercise that's been keeping the house warm and the Farm Manager quiet...

But just an hour ago, chopping those frozen rounds, the axe handle broke...

Could be trouble ahead...