David Farmer might be the last person in the GTA without power after last month’s ice storm.

Swinging a splitting axe in his Mississauga backyard, the white-bearded, 66-year-old former banker is staying warm.

“You acclimatize,” he says, bundled up in five layers of clothing. “In a bad luck situation, I’m lucky.”

Farmer’s large property has many trees that have provided lots of deadfall over the years. For the past month, he’s been burning wood to keep warm, and it’s been the perfect excuse to clean up the yard.

The power to Farmer’s Clarkson bungalow went out on Dec. 22 when a fallen branch took out the wire over his driveway. It was the start of a massive ice storm that left an estimated 750,000 people without power in the city of Toronto alone and the GTA facing public cleanup costs likely to top $100 million.

That doesn’t include private repairs, like the one that has fallen to Farmer.

Enersource crews came by several days later and informed him that because the line runs along poles on his property, he’ll have to repair them before he can be reconnected.

Since then, Farmer’s been on the phone with his insurance company and waiting for the contractors to arrive. The insurer has said it will pay for a hotel room — an offer his adult son, who lives with him, accepted — but Farmer doesn’t want to abandon the homestead.

“I’ve gotta keep the pipes from freezing,” he says, especially during the cold snaps when temperatures have dropped below -20.

Each day starts with a newspaper and a Sudoku puzzle in the house — which was a balmy 5C on Friday. In the afternoon, Farmer splits enough wood to get him through the night, and in the evening he sits beside the wood stove in the basement with a battery-powered lantern and a book.

He bought the stove in the early ’80s when oil prices were soaring and the government started offering subsidies for people to install wood-burning furnaces in their homes.

For five or six years, Farmer heated his home solely with wood. It was during this time that he got handy with an axe.

“When the machine stops, it’s nice to know you can carry on,” he says.

Farmer isn’t totally on his own. His 34-year-old son, a ramp worker at Pearson airport, comes by every other day on his way to work to charge up the lantern and his daughter has dropped off a generator, but he doesn’t like to use it because leaving the door open for a power cord lets the heat out. He also admits to going out for fast-food dinners and doing his laundry at a friend’s house.

His saving grace has been the gas-powered water heater, which has functioned throughout the ordeal, though he doesn’t take any showers because towelling off in a cold room is unbearable.

“I’m back to the Sunday morning bath routine,” he says. “But the most annoying part is trying to squeeze toothpaste out in the cold.”

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Enersource spokesperson Karen Ras isn’t aware of any other occupied homes still powerless in Mississauga.

Crews came by Thursday to put in two fresh wooden poles beside Farmer’s driveway. If all goes well, he could have power flowing early next week. When that happens, he says, the first thing he’ll do is give the house a good vacuum.

But at this point, he’s hardly in a hurry. Farmer has taken the same Zen-like attitude to his predicament as he does to chopping wood.

“I developed a tai chi technique,” he says, letting the weight of the axe head do the work. “You just have to get a little speed on it.”

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