Love that wood heat…most of the time

we go from this:                                                                    to this:

with this: 

That pile on the porch is about what we use in two weeks keeping the house warm.  This time we only made it to Monday, though, which means we burned half a cord of wood in about 10 days.  Whew!  Today it was about 10 when we got up and by the time we started to move wood it was all the way up to 18.  I don’t believe it, though, because with that little soft breeze blowing, it felt like it was 10 again. 

I love wood heat.  It keeps me warmer than any other kind of heat, bar none.  I am warmer in my house here than I ever am in California with the gas turned up as high as I can stand it.  It cost me 400 bucks a month to heat my house in Jamestown during the winter and 500 a month to cool it in summer.  Yeah it was older and not very well insulated, but still.  When I am tromping up the stairs here, however, hauling the wood from the trailer up the steps to the back porch, huffing and puffing away, I wonder just how long we will manage to do this.  Once back inside the warm house I have no doubts at all.  Love it. 

It’s been a quiet week since New Years.  We have been staying home, feeding the fire, doing small house chores.  I have been working on soils “stuff”, knitting, and finally getting around to reading “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”.  The Kindle I ordered should be here sometime this week, and my first purchase will be the next book in the series.

I actually managed to get out my cross country skis, (the first time since I left Klamath to work in California in 2006) and shusshed around on the local roads a bit.  Cross country skis on my feet aren’t made to go down hills.  At least not any more.  Guess I am going to have to practice a bit and get my balance back, but it was still fun.

Yesterday my daughter Melody brought her family out to Rocky Point to enjoy the deep snows and get in some great sledding.  The skies were sunny, with temperatures that weren’t so cold you couldn’t have fun and we certainly did.  Mo has an old sled that is everyone’s favorite, but the big green thingy I bought from Costco wasn’t a bad ride either.  Kwankae, Melody’s exchange student from Thailand, had a great time as well, laughing in the snow.  This is her first year for snow, since that is something you certainly don’t find in Thailand.  I loved the chance to make a couple batches of peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies,  knowing that I could send most of them home with the kids. We all drank hot chocolate and ate cookies and laughed about all the “air time” the kids got jumping over the moguls on the old roads around our house.  Speaking of wood heat, after we all got back in the house, everyone really loved backing up to the wood stove to warm their buns!

In less than two weeks I’ll be flying to Florida with my eldest daughter to board a cruise ship to the Eastern Caribbean.  Yippee!  Wood heat is wonderful, but white beach sand heat is a whole lot better!