Just call me Ma Ingalls

It is COLD here. Clear, cold, icy dry and dropping into the mid-20’s at night, and it’s supposed to be like this until Friday or so.

Here at the Corner, we have baseboard heating (our house was built in 1965). But we also have a fireplace insert, which, when we get it going, provides a lot of radiant heat – enough to keep our baseboard fan from clicking on in the living room, thus reducing our power bill.

When we bought our house, we inherited a gigantic wood pile. Thanks to a couple of trees coming down over the years at the CW House and next door (you know, when the tree fell on their garage), we’ve had more wood given to us. As a result, we can keep a fire going for a looong time.

However, when it was 35 degrees this afternoon and there was no wood on the porch, I had to trudge myself out to the woodpile and haul it back to the house. Some of these pieces are just too heavy to carry and too large to burn, so I have to carefully pick over what I can take with me. The Webmaster gets out the ax and can split these pieces for me, usually, but this time (as has happened many times before) I was on my own.

I had a roaring fire with good coals going by 1 pm.

We have the kids trained to not mess with the fireplace when hot, or even touch the fireplace tools. They know better.

I’ve even discovered how to boil water on the fireplace, which has come in handy when there have been blackouts in winter, let me tell you.

I was feeling quite frontier-like and everything… right up until the time I put on Curious George (using the DVR) for the kids because I swear they were either going to kill each other or whine me to death.

I have a feeling Ma Ingalls never did that.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 1:56 am and is filed under Mommyhood.
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