The woodstove fire of the vanities

The other day I noted that geezers in England are buying up heavy unwanted old books and putting them to their best use in fireplaces because they're cheaper than coal by the pound.

That got me to thinking about the heavy unwanted old books out in the garage. . .

Suffice it to say that Shakespeare can be very warming indeed, as can the Art of the Western World. Dickens is positively a font of warmth, and Carl Sagan can generate thousands of BTUs if not billions and billions.

All told I figure there's about a quarter cord of books out there that will never be wanted for reading again. Books are about half as dense as hardwood, so my guess is those books will save me the tractor fuel to haul in about an eighth of a cord of wood. They will also save me from burning uncured wood at the end of the winter if this unusual cold keeps up. I've been burning up the cured wood much faster than in former years.

Rag paper, I've learned, makes excellent kindling; much better than newsprint. One finds it in what were once good quality books, like the fine print one volume edition of Shakespeare's works. Glossy paper, such as one finds in color illustrated books is not so good as kindling. It leaves too much ash because of the clay they put in it.

On one level burning books feels like sacrilege; but I remind myself that Amazon now sells a substantial percentage of new books as electronic files for reading on Kindles and that Google and others are busy digitizing books by the tens and hundreds of thousands so they will be available on line.

If you find yourself wanting to read anything by Shakespeare or Dickens or a host of other authors in certified accurate form for free you can always go to The Gutenberg Project to do so.

http://www.archive.org/details/gutenberg

If you're not too concerned about accuracy and you simply want to find a Shakespeare sonnet or something that contains a particular quote you can always google the words you know of the quote. Doing that will take you directly to a dozen websites that have used that quote. Many of them will have the whole sonnet there for you to read free.

You do have to be a bit careful and alert when you simply google part of a famous quote. There are lots of folks like me out there who use famous quotes with a little twist. When I do that there is always at least a clue that all may not be totally normal on the page; but there are others who give no warning that Shakespeare or Dickens or Coleridge's meaning has been a bit modified.

Books cost less than coal by the pound in England

England is suffering from the coldest winter in years. And some smart geezers have learned that thrift shops sell heavy old books for less than the price of coal.

The interesting thing about this is that just today I was looking at a box of old hardbound books in the garage and thinking that I really should just burn them in the woodstove or start putting them in the trash a couple at a time so as not to make the trash bags too heavy.

http://www.metro.co.uk/news/807821-pensioners-burn-books-for-warmth

hat tip to Greg Pollowitz of National Review who posted about the book burners on NROs Planet Gore blog.

Sheepherders

Linda reported that the sheepherders who live cross the creek in Mom and Pop's old house had a couple of their goats out on the ice on our pond this morning. The goats are usually in a pen next to the shed I built for our horses twenty-nine or thirty years ago. Meanwhile the noble shed has been reduced to being a shelter for two exceedingly dirty off-white sheep and one less obviously dirty brown sheep. Bah!

The horse shed has held up amazingly well over the years, and I'm pretty proud of its post and beam design. I suspect that the trunks of the cedar trees I used for its supports have rotted off underground by now; but the thing still stands proud. If only I had built it on our side of the property line rather than on Mom and Pop's side. It would make a great drying and storage place for wood although it wouldn't be very well sited for that.

It's been about as cold as it gets around here for the past couple of days and we've been burning wood at a prodigious rate. Jas was talking yesterday morning about those electric space heaters they've been selling all over the place; but those surely can't hold a candle to a nice hot woodstove. It's not only physically luxurious to sit near; it's also morally luxurious to contemplate. The trees take the carbon out of the air and we put it back into the air.

Walking in the rain

Linda and I returned from our nightly walk a little while ago. I wrote "nightly walk" but truthfully we very rarely walk in the rain as we did this evening. And we almost never walk when there's too much danger of icy sidewalks and streets. But tonight we broke all the usual rules.

On the way back we ran into one of our neighbors and learned that we're not quite so virtuous as we thought we were. We've been keeping the thermostat set at 66 degrees, although sometimes it creeps up to 68 or even 70. It turns out this neighbor keeps their house at 61 degrees, and she said her sister keeps her house at 55 degrees. That's impressive. On a twenty degree night like tonight our woodstove comes very close to keeping the house in the 60s all by itself when I feed it every few hours. And that's without running it seriously hot the way I used to do occasionally back in the day on truly bitter cold nights.

55 degrees! That's serious hair shirt style self denial. You can let Al Gore know from me that the polar bears will all be treading water and the rising ocean will be lapping at the twentieth floors of the buildings down in Philly before we turn the thermostat down to 55 degrees.

We're all done with the poplar from the big tree near the house, which is just as well. Poplar is okay for moderate weather; but it burns up too fast if I run the stove the way I need to for freezing nights. Way back when before we knew better Pop had me cut up and split a big willow that had fallen over behind the springhouse. Talk about a waste of effort. That willow was about as light as balsa wood once it was dry. Pop burned it up; but it almost wasn't worth the effort of putting it into the woodstove. Of course, him and Mom really used their woodstove only to make it toasty warm in the living room since the air couldn't really circulate out of that room at any great rate.

Recently we've been burning the ash from the big limb that fell down and made a six foot high bridge across the driveway a couple of years ago. After that we'll get into the walnut from the tree Alex cut down to get a big enough piece of heartwood to carve his last year's Christmas gift for Christina. And then I have a bunch of apple, maple, cherry and walnut from the smaller trees I thinned out of the woods last year over on the other side of the property.

All in all I still have about two cords of good well dried hardwood stacked out there near the house. And I have another half cord of cured small stuff over on the other side of the property that I'll be bringing over a bit at a time with the tractor on weekends when the ground is frozen.

I already have a couple of cords worth of maple and cherry rounds to split for next winter from the leaning trees that were near the driveway. And I have my eye on the oak grove back of the house. There are a couple of smaller trees in that grove that should be thinned out.