Firewood

I used to buy my firewood from an ex-serviceman who did it on the side to supplement his pension. He was only allowed to work so many hours a week as he was on a pension. He used to sell me a pile of wood (trailerload) for $70, no delivery. He was great. Split the wood to fit my needs when I used to have to put a piece on the fire in the AM which would smoulder for 12 hours or more before I got home in the afternoon again.

Last year I had to find someone else to supply my firewood because the good bloke had become too ill to do the work any more. He was great! I hope he's feeling better now. My good neighbours across the street know a bloke from the pigeon club who does firewood. I bought a trailer load from him, but as the weather had been mild over last winter I still had a bit left. And I'm not burning the big lumps of wood because I'm only away from home during the day for up to nine hours, and as I'm at home longer I have time to relight the fire from coals after work. I shut the thing down completely some days (making sure that there are some coals to relight!).

Lately I've been thinking I'd need some more wood soon. I've stretched it out about three weeks from when I was thinking I'd need to do something about getting the wood. Pretty good I thought.

Today I phoned the neighbour to find out the number for the firewood mate. When I explained my dilemma to the firewood mate he said that if I could hold out until Friday that'd be better as he's been working and would need to deliver after work. I didn't want to put him out, but said that I've got about three to four days/nights worth of wood left if I'm really miserly with it, and I told him that I could stretch to late in the week if I had to, so whatever suited him would be OK.

He was waiting for his pigeons to come home and I organised to leave the moolah with my pigeony neighbour.

After I got off the phone I popped over to the pigeony neighbour and left the money and had a chat about what they'd been doing lately (I've been quite reclusive since I've started working locally... no, probably for the past two years, very slack!).

I arrived home from across the street and started to make a cuppa, I thought I heard a vehicle out the front... it was the wood mate! Woohoo! That's service! His pigeons won't be home for hours because they left late due to fog, so he did a run over here with his wife. I had to go across the street and get the money back to pay for the firewood.

(PS: I used to split my own wood up until all I had left was the forky-bits of the trees. They're a bit tougher to split... I can't do it any more because of my shoulders. I used to be able to do a lot of stuff before my shoulders got wrecked.)