Tuesday 29 January 2013

What a good start to the week.

This week has started off beautifully - the temperature is rising - it was almost 20° today and reached 19 indoors,   and the sky is clear and blue.  It starts me thinking about spring cleaning,  the cotton Alpujarran rugs we have down are very good at collecting the dust so a sunny day  is ideal for shaking them outside and leaving them in the sunshine on the balcony.  Wash all the winter bedding,  sweep and mop the floors,  dust those places that very rarely get done because no-one can see them, like tops of cupboards, they get done at Christmas and days like this. 

So that was yesterday morning's work.  John made a start on the olive tree again,  we didn't finish pruning out the largest trunk last time we pruned - early December I think it was.  When I went outside to tell  him it was lunchtime, there was a huge pile of greenery waiting for cutting up.  It all gets burnt,  makes lots of smoke outside but no worse than the village houses do  when they all light their wood burners  in the late afternoon.  We can see a blue haze over Yátor as the sun sets and the fires get lit.

Today was the cutting of the last section of the big trunk.  So far so good.  Each section has fallen where he was expecting it to, none have rolled down into the brambles and they've all missed the tubo which takes water down to our bottom land.  The tubo is part buried, and we'd covered it with soft branches just in case.....but this last section hit the tubo with a thud.  There was a bit of muttering under his breath and we clambered down  from under the tree to the land where the wood had landed,  took the branches off the tubo to find a hole, cracks and well, basically the tubo was shattered.

Luckily it was only buried in soft soil so John cleared all around it,  went off to Paco's to buy a new 3 metre length  of 110 diameter tubo  then we took out the complete length including the broken section and replaced it with the new piece.  Now it needs reburying to protect it from the sun.  I suppose 9 euros - plus a tube of glue - is a small price to pay for all the firewood we've got from that one branch.

He's logged it all, split the huge bits and now it needs stacking to dry out.  But that's for tomorrow.  Another sunny day forecast,  in fact it's looking good all week.  :)

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