Not Out of the Woods Yet

I turned up for work yesterday hoping that I would get the chance to catch up on a few of these jobs that I've been harping on about. I think I'm going to have to change my harp for a bugle.

No, instead I was told we were all going to cut firewood for the bothies. Fair enough, it's another job that has to be done, and we're fast running out of time in which to do them. We start with guests in the lodge next week and will be busy with them from then on until the end of October.

So we put on our clumsy great steel-toecapped safety wellies, don our extra-thick chainsaw-resistant safety overtrousers, pop on our chainsaw helmets with integral visor and earmuffs and clump off into the rainforest. At least, it feels like a rainforest on this airless, muggy day.

Unfortunately, so distracted was I with getting my extra-thick, chainsaw-resistant safety overtrousers on, that I drew the short straw and landed the long saw. And that's the heaviest one. Within minutes of starting, wielding this brute has me soaking in sweat. And the midges are biting.

We saw and saw and by the time we have our 'piece', my back is nagging like I forgot our anniversary. (I guess thats why they call it lumbar pain.) Then we saw for another 4 hours.

We decide enough is enough and pull up stumps (har!) at 5 o'clock. And that's when our boss springs a little surprise on us. It turns out there's a delivery of hay bales due imminently- and they'll all need to be unloaded and stacked into our hayloft.

We arrive at the stables as the bales arrive. All 365 of them. That's somewhere just shy of 8 tonnes.

An hour later, they're all safely squirreled away and my back now thinks I slept with its sister.

I'd planned to write this blog yesterday evening, but after all that, I couldn't summon the strength to lift the lid of my laptop. And guess what we were doing again today.