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Published: March 27th 2015
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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 to do was to chop up the trunk of the tree, which Ted had chainsawed into smaller lengths, with the axes. This took a fair amount of practise, especially as one of the axes we were using had a 5kg head alone. As Matt and I chopped, Rosie and Kate used a sled and a wheelbarrow to move the logs up to the wood-hut next
to the house.
After a couple hours of this work, we were called in for a lunch of soup and grilled cheese sandwiches - which we made short work of. The usual practise after lunch is then to have an hour or two of quiet time, where the four of us returned to our room and amused ourselves for a little while.
By 3 o clock everyone was well rested, and we were out again to cut up more wood and stack it up by the house. The work is physically pretty tough, so by the time we'd finished we were all pretty wiped. Before food was started we headed out into Portneuf to run a few errands - shopping etc. - then got on with cooking dinner. We ate chicken, rice and stuffing, followed by a fantastic slice of Sugar Pie bought from the local cake factory.
The evening was spent reading, playing scrabble, drinking tea and writing. Before long however, we were ready to bed - and lights were out by 11.
This morning started the same as yesterday. We didn't head straight out however, instead we helped Judie plant tomato, cucumber and squash seeds for the vegetable
garden - as well as propagating a germanium plant. For lunch we had a very Canadian French toast with bacon and maple syrup. Although it sounds a little odd, it is actually very nice.
We passed our quiet time in the usual way then headed out to break up the bigger parts of the trunk. There was about 20 of these, and I managed to break up 10 in the two hours we worked. Rosie, Kate and Matt helped out - as well as using the hand saws and moving the cut logs back to the house.
For dinner Judie had cooked us a gammon and potato hash, and we finished up the amazing pie for dessert. These two days, I believe, follow the general pattern of life here at the House.
Reading back through the post I feel like I've just listed the activities of the past few days (we did this, then this, then this etc.) but hopefully it gives an idea of what we are getting up to here. In my next post I'll be sure to give more of a sense of my impression of Quebec, rather than what we have done.
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Dr John HW
John Hyder-Wilson
Sugar Pie
'Sugar Pie from a local factory' doesn't sound particularly healthy! Don't worry about the descriptive pieces - gives those of us who are thousands of miles away a window into your world. Remember that such 'thick description' is a great phenomenological technique to convey the essentials of an experience, and reading your blog I can almost hear the snow crunching, the axe biting into wood and the four of you fading out before 11pm dog-tired. Great stuff. D