It's 12.42 on the 8th of April. We've got a couple changes to our plans that I will go through in this blog, but first I'll briefly go through the last couple of days. We've been sticking to the usual routine since my last blog. Ted has been cutting down some big trees so we've had our work cut out (no pun intended) to keep up with shifting the logs to the path, splitting an sawing them, then stacking them up. This is good though - we felt a little bit that last week we got off a little too lightly in terms of workload and especially since Judy and Ted have been excellent hosts we want to do our bit. The 4 of us work like a well oiled machine now, and since my last ... read more

It's 12.49 on 4th April. I think I left off halfway into Thursday, so I'll begin by briefly going through what we did the latter half of that day. As I think I said, it had been snowing all morning and in the afternoon, when we set out to Donnacona to visit the shops and cheese factory, it showed no signs of stopping. We drove there via the more rural, country roads that passed dozens of milk farms, each with a triplet of massive silos and several barns usually in varied states of dilapidation. The view was actually pretty bleak, a flat, white country with such low cloud the horizon couldn't really be made out. We did a quick food shop, then headed to the local Portneuf cheese shop, which sold a whole variety of different ... read more

It's 20.08 on the 30th March. We've had a very relaxed couple of days here at The Old Stone House. Sunday is our day off so, after breakfast, we headed back up to our room to read and chill out until our lunch of fried eggs, toast and sausages. In the afternoon we took the sledges down to the oil pipeline in the forest, and spent a good hour and a half sliding down the steep hill and, usually tumbling, into the snow banks at the bottom. Once we were drenched and frozen we headed back to the House to dry off before dinner. We ate meat pie and potatoes, then afterwards Rosie, Matt and I played scrabble and drank tea round the kitchen table. It was a very pleasant way to end our day off. ... read more

It's 20.39 on 26th of March. I will give a quick account of the last couple of days in this post, just to give an impression of what life is like at The Old Stone House. On Wednesday we woke at the usual time, around 8.30, and got ready for breakfast of tea, coffee, toast and honey. After breakfast we layered up and got ready to go out. The first job of the day was to hand-saw up the smaller branches of the tree that Ted cut down the day before, then move these us to the wood rack outside the house. While Matt and I did this, Rosie and Kate used the snow shoes to tread down a path to two trees on the plot that are also ready to come down. The next thing ... read more

It's 23.46 on Saturday 21st March. Today has been a relatively low key day - so there is not all that much to report. We woke latish, around 9.30, at breakfasted in the usual manner. We were all ready pretty swiftly today, so were able to leave the hostel by around 10.45. From the hostel we headed down past the park to the closest subway stop, and out West of the city to the university district for a little exploration. The area we ended up in, around Boston University, was nice enough a but there wasn't a huge amount going on, so we found a little coffee shop and grabbed some lunch From there, the time being around 2pm, we boarded the tram to take us back into Boston. The tram got about 2 stops before ... read more