Why I can't park in the garage this weekend

Inki and I can never manage to agree on what is a comfortable temperature. She always wants it warmer, and I try to oblige. We have a wood-burning stove in the living room, and one of my manly tasks is to keep it well-supplied with firewood.

Wood is a common heating source here and is sold in bags almost everywhere from the grocery store to the home-improvement warehouse. It's fairly cheap, too; a ten-kilo bag costs around fifty kroner (eight dollars). Still, to my mind, free is better than cheap, even if it costs me a few sore muscles.

When I was renovating apartments when we first arrived, I salvaged the wood from the walls I ripped out, cut them up into stove-sized bits with the circular saw, and had wood enough to last us, well, we're not done with it yet, though our stores are getting fairly low.

The past week or two they removed a lot of trees from out in front of where Andor works, so we got a call asking if we wanted any of it before they hauled it away. Sure, I said, so we loaded up Andor's truck with a couple of cords of wood in twelve-foot long bits which took the place of our car in the garage. I spent today chopping these into stove-sized bits with a chainsaw, and tomorrow I'll split it.

Fortunately for me and my back, the splitting will be much more "Robocop" than "Little House on the Prairie." Andor was going to buy a hydraulic log-splitter for the family homestead in Vigra anyway, so we picked one up this morning, wrestled all 115 pounds of it into the truck, and brought it to our place. Tomorrow I just load the bits I cut today into it and let it do the work for me.

Then, I hope, I'll be able to fit the car in the garage again, though I don't know for sure. It's a LOT of wood.