It’s back.

OK, it doesn’t do this often…. it’s hard to pin down. Some balance between inside temperature, outside temperature and quality of snow on the roof makes for pockets of water that somehow get in, freeze, and then melt, and come out around the door frame in the kitchen.

What’s especially pleasing about this is that [...]

Home heating oil at $4.65/gallon? Uh, yeah. No.

4 cords of firewood instead. Look like a lot? This is about half of it.

Yes, that was a lot of work… but I had nowhere else to put it. Stacking it carefully this way actually produced a pretty sturdy pile. I’m not [...]

…would a… never mind.

2 cords of wet wood today, at $175/cord, which is high for unseasoned wood, but that’s all that’s available in the Amherst, MA area. With home heating oil at $4.65/gallon (compared with $2.65/ gallon last year), there’s going to be a shortage of trees.

ahhh… CHOO

I’ve also been [...]

Clearing the woodpile, getting ready for the winter’s wood being delivered tomorrow, I had to move this guy’s house inside. He was not very happy.

Don’t believe me? Check out that mug.




At LAST. I win.

The metal squirrel baffle is the only thing I have used in a year of endless warfare that has finally sent these little bastards back into the woods, hungry and pissed off. It works.

(Until they figure out how to get a screwdriver up inside it and [...]

If your wood-burning furnace hasn’t been generating much heat over the last season or two, and your garage is full of smoke all the time and the house smells like wood smoke but it’s gotten past that pleasant point of a faint fragrance and started to become an odiously [...]

…is that when people tell me things, I believe them, and I often believe what I read as well.

So one day I burn myself at the kitchen faucet and measure the water temperature and find that it’s coming out of the tap at over 150°F, where 120°F is the [...]