First job this morning ...

... after making up the fire for this evening of course, was to shovel a foot of snow off the solar panels on the roof. Yes, we've had another pasting again through the night and isn't this becoming monotonous?

And after breakfast it was more wood-cutting for the fire and I can see me needing tons of this as the cold weather and snow continues. I now have 5 buckets lined up in the queue and I'll be cutting some more. I've also built a kind-of lean-to out of two old pallets and some offcuts of plastic roofing from when I made the verandah, and I've been slowly collecting the wood that's been lying around outside and heaving it under there out of the weather.

Next task was to sweep the floor and clear a big space in the bedroom to lay down the plasterboarding for cutting. That seemed to take ages and I ended up with a huge pile of rubbish in the middle of the floor. Going through it a few times with a magnet pulled out tons of screws and nails and the like and I need to sift that properly as I was finding all kinds of things that I had lost.

During this time the heavens opened again and we were treated to a thorough downpour of the white stuff - an incredible snowstorm. And I felt sorry for this guy who turned up - his company is a bigger liar than he is and he was not in the area at all - he had driven 260 kms from Lyon in the worst snowstorm of the year and his face was a picture when he saw my panels. 14:00 he arrived and despite this 90-minute presentation I was to have, he had gone by 14:15. And in all that snow as well.

But tonight the temperature plummeted all in a space of about an hour. From -2°C to -7.5°C and we have a brilliant clear sky with so much moonlight that you don't need a torch down the garden. If this keeps up tomorrow I could have a recor solar energy day and by heavens I need it, but I'm not holding my breath. We'll have one quick promise, a change of wind back to the westerlies and then another shed-load of snow, all by 10:00.

I'm getting fed up of this.