Stocking up for the Winter.

The bell rang today while I was tidying up after dinner. I wondered who it could be at eight o'clock at night. As I approached the door, the bell started ringing very fast, which made me guess that it was one of my children. When I opened the door, I found three boxes on the doorstep. One was a box lid full of dry cut grass, one was a similar box full of tree bark, and the third was the baseball box emptied out and filled with pine cones and pine needles. My son Robert was standing there with a big grin on his face, "D'you see what I did, mum?" His hands and torso were filthy. He had gathered all of these things from the front garden, and had got a lot of the stuff on himself rather than in the boxes. I have been saying for a long time that we should gather up the debris from a tree that we cut down, because it would make great burning material for the Winter. Pine cones catch fire quickly, and keep burning nicely, helping to set the wood on fire. We have two large pines that give a lot of cones each year, so I would like to make the most of this resource that is in our own garden. I am a hunter-gatherer at heart. I have been putting off this task for months, procrastinating, and doing other things instead. So, Robert took the initiative, and did the hard work for me. If we are smart, we will gather the pine cones from the many little pine trees that we have. Though they are small, they have already produced a lot. All together, we will have at least three huge garden bags full of fuel for the Winter. It's funny to think of stocking up for the Winter now that the season is getting warmer and warmer. Grammar notes. Use of '(even) though...,...' plus related vocabulary: pine cones, torso, to procrastinate. 1. Even though I had collected lots of pine cones, they were too wet to burn. 2. Even though her torso is very toned, her legs have cellulite. 3. Even though I reminded the students every day about the vocabulary test, they procrastinated and didn't study until the night before. // //