As a rule, I am not a sunshine-seeking guy. I prefer the shade and I have no problem with light rain – makes the air smell clean.

I am generally uncomfortable on hot, bright August days. Hurts my eyes. Burns my skin. Makes me sweaty. I associate hot sunny days with mosquitoes and the constant seeking of ‘cool and wet’. That is a drag. I actually enjoy the cold, brisk, windy days and, for me, that is the best kind of weather. Makes me feel alive, alive-o.

Spring and Fall are my favourite seasons.

I mention this because the last two days have been glorious. And they were sunny and warm. And I liked it. I think this unusual-for-me feeling is because of what seemed like an extra long winter. You’d think I’d be used to that, living in Canada but it’s different now.

When I lived in the city, I went from one climate controlled building to another by way of a climate controlled car. It could be snowing, sleeting or freezing. It could be pouring. It could be windy. Whatever. My exposure to it was minimal. I really didn’t care about the weather. Not a bit.

Not so out here. Out here, you are either deeply involved with the weather or hunkered down and staying put and watching it. Weather here is, of course, like the weather the city dwellers experience but it just feels like it is more so.

And so yesterdays and today’s Spring-like days were much more appreciated than ever before. Out here, I can tell you the day Spring arrived. It was yesterday. It was intense.

Yesterday we started to pull up logs from the lagoon. The logs come up by way of the ‘highline’ I installed a few years ago. We run a block and taykle down the line on a winch cable and haul the logs up the 35 degree incline for about 125 feet. Sal ‘sets the choke’ on the log at the bottom of the hill, pulls one end of it in the air and then I run the winch and unhook it when it arrives at the top.

Each ten-to twelve foot log takes about five minutes to ‘choke and lift’, five minutes to winch and another five minutes or so to unhook and roll out of the way. If we work hard, we can do four an hour.

We need between 45 and 60 such logs every year. Somewhere around 750 cubic feet or three cords. With ‘finding and salvaging’, wrangling and herding and tying up, the above-described highline work and then the cutting, splitting and stacking, it takes about 100 man/woman-hours. At $10 an hour, it therefor costs us (in theory)$1000.00 in labour to get our wood in. Mind you, we work slow, we stop a lot and we spread it out over months. If we lived in town and bought from a local wood-guy, 3 cords would not likely cost $600.00.

Interesting.

We are, at the same time as ‘getting the wood in’, putting in the garden and I am also doing some needed boat maintenance. None of that is much of a workload but, of course, there are the inevitable stripped threads that have to be replaced or re-cut with a die. There is the reluctant winch engine, the broken cable, the sealant that won’t set up (or which set up in the tube) and that sort of thing. Every two hour job takes us 6 hours. Two hours to prepare for it, two hours to do it and two hours to clean up but that includes two, maybe three tea-breaks and looking for stuff.

It is like we are unionized and working to rule except when we take extra breaks.

Tomorrow is supposed to be another nice day. Sunny and warm. I am looking forward to it.