log

because of decisions made by some folks who are not me, the price of fuel oil has gone, shall we say, excessively high. right when we bought ourselves a house with a fat fuel oil tank and furnace sitting in the basement. after a winter of handing over piles of cash to the fuel oil folks, we've broken the shackles of oil. sort of. we got ourselves a sassy wood stove and now that everything is in place, we're ready to fire things up.

on to the wood. the sweetie ordered a cord. for those of you who don't know, a cord will be more than plenty for weekend burning. but the sweetie got a bee in his bonnet and the day of delivery called and asked for a full load. a full load is 2 1/4 cords. this is a lot of wood. the sweetie worried that we'd somehow run through the whole cord of wood in a season and then would suffer the consequences of being unprepared- wood at five bucks a log or something. the sweetie is very mellow, but he can become very apocalyptic about what will happen if we don't prepare for the terrors of home ownership. the truth is, he had no idea how much 2 1/4 cords of would might be.

i did. i grew up in a house with a fireplace. i stacked quite a bit of firewood as a child. it's very soothing. very therapeutic. when you're twelve. even fifteen. i was not looking forward to taking my 40 year old self out to stack all those logs. but then the sweetie got a bee in his bonnet about having a firewood rack for the porch before the logs got here, and he ran off to the hardware store 30 miles away to get said rack.

and firewood delivery guy arrived right on time. as the pouring out of logs was happening, i saw the sweetie drive by and park at the abandoned factory next door so the firewood delivery guy would be able to leave. i could see him grinning from across the yard and i was worried he'd be so excited about the logs he'd forget to breathe. after firewood delivery guy left the sweetie pulled into the driveway. "that's a lot of firewood!" was all he said. right. i know. and we filled the four foot porch firewood rack in about five minutes without making a dent in the pile. the forecast was promising rain and the sky stayed black most of the day with rumbles of thunder, but we managed to get everything stacked up before supper.

and the sweetie came in to build a fire. turns out the stove works nicely for our house. the stairwell makes itself into a little chimney for the heat and i suspect we'll be toasty all winter. this morning the sweetie woke up unable to move, but then he is a few years younger than me, being only 37. me, i feel great. like i'm twelve again. or fifteen.