So I wound up Booking again this year. I chose to walk. I’ve probably made better choices, but I still had a great time, and I beat skiers, so what the hell, eh?
It was really beautiful out on the bay. The luminaries on the snow seemed like reflections of the stars above. The moon didn’t rise until the race was over, so it was nice and dark. And conditions were pretty nice with some two-day-old snow. And a -20 wind chill.
Oh, and Chad, yes, that’s pretty much exactly what we’re doing: burning green wood.
We get our firewood from a logger up the road. He brings us a truckload of fresh-cut oak sometime in mid-summer. I try to get it cut and split and drying, but I never do. I mean, it totally sucks working on the wood pile in summer!
We’ve never had enough money to pay for an extra stack of firewood so that we can get a year ahead, but I think that’s gonna change. I’ve had a couple biggish jobs for the BAT come through in the past month, so I think I’m going to turn that money into a pile of wood before the spring thaw.
I’m also hoping to build a wood shed in early summer. That oughtta go a long way toward helping season the wood, too.
A couple days after my last post celebrating the cleaning and re-firing of our wood furnace, the system went to hell again. The smoke generated from the fire seemed to seperate into two equal volumes: the volume that sputtered out our chimney; the volume that seeped through our house.
At one point, it got so bad that the carbon monoxide detector upstairs sounded its alarm. Needless to say, we stopped using the stove, again.
After talking to a bunch of empirical experts, searching the Web, and looking at our stove pipes, Meg and I still couldn’t find any obvious reason for the smoke leaking. I tried sealing the pipe joints with stove pipe cement (which will now make the pipes a real pain in the ass to take apart, I’m sure). I tried opening a variety of combinations of windows and doors. I tried swearing in a variety of combinations of colorful adjectives and verbs. None of it seemed to work.
We finally called the chimney sweep and he came the same day. The diagnosis: A plugged rain cap. Apparently the rain-cap-and-critter-guard on the top of the chimney was plugged with ice and creosote, limiting the draft to just a couple holes. The sweep forgot to tell us we’re supposed to remove the cap during the heating season.
So now, the cap’s in the basement, the furnace is drafting like a champ, and I’m not wishing for a February tornado anymore.
Today only, get a free trial of our new Multiple Personalities Support Group. The anonymous meeting starts at 7 p.m. in the basement of Our Lady of Imaginary Voices. Anyone who’s everyone will be there.
We are officially at the end of our week without wood heat. Our chimney was once again mostly obstructed by creosote, thanks to our sweep’s lack of coming over when scheduled last May and our lack of following up with him.
But after promising to come yesterday and never showing up, then finally making it over late this morning, and cleaning out a couple bucketfulls of crap, the sweep gave us the go ahead to light ‘er up.
Well, he didn’t actually say that. Apparently, he didn’t actually say anything. Meg said his wife did all the talking for him. Figures.
At least now we can turn off the four space heaters that have been running since Monday morning.