Do you watch SpongeBob SquarePants? No, me either. Although, if you did you’d know that SpongeBob, at times, talks about being ready for things.

For me, I’m getting close to that state of mind.

I’ve done a bit of outdoor work over the last few weeks (oh, my aching back) and the picture you see above shows the fruits of my labours (or at least some of it).

This is getting close to the amount of wood I’ll need to heat our house this winter. We don’t have really cold temperatures like I grew up with in Canada (not everywhere in Canada is really cold in winter), but with no central heating in the house, the wood stove is our main source of heat.

The amount of wood we have not might look like much to some of you, but it occupies a huge amount of our total yard space. Land is expensive in Japan and so we make do with the amount of land we were able to buy.

Because of space limitations, I’m not able to collect enough wood for more than one year, which is a bummer.

Maybe in the future, I’ll be able to shrink the size of the wood until I need it thereby creating more space in my yard. Until that time however, I’ll have to keep working year by year collecting wood.

I’m ready...almost.