Baby it's Cold Outside

It's been a cold month in Boulder Creek. There has been hardly any rain, and the cloudless nights have meant that the overnight lows have been below freezing for the past couple of weeks. We put two heat lamps inside the chicken house and the chickens have taken to basking under them. Until now the collected warmth of the flock has kept the interior of the chicken house about four degrees warmer than the exterior; the heat lamps have brought that up to about six degrees. Aoibheall bought a heater base for the outside waterer and that has kept the water in the chicken yard from freezing up. "The best $70 I've spent in years," she calls it and I fully agree. The hens seem to be benefiting from the longer days (so long, solstice!) and the warmth: before all the improvements we'd been getting maybe 4 eggs per day but now we've been getting 10 or more for the past week. Want some eggs? We've got 'em!

We're still working on last year's firewood, but the cold weather and our determination that heating with wood is a bit cheaper than heating with propane means that we're using it faster than we did last year. Now, we already bought a cord for this season, back when it was still summer and nobody was buying firewood. The wood was still wet, fresh cut, but that just meant we got a full cord for cheap. The other night Aoibheall was down at the market and a woman approached her in the furtive way of a drug dealer. Instead of offering weed she asked, "Need dry firewood?" Apparently many people did not plan ahead and so the guys with chainsaws are doing great business.

I am perfecting my recipe for fire with all this practice. The key is to keep a big pile of little sticks in by the fireplace. When it comes time to start a fire, I've got plenty of kiln-dried kindling and the whole thing gets going with only the mildest of encouragement. Today I undertook a more difficult challenge: use one of the big, odd-shaped logs that barely fits in the firebox. If the fire had been going, it wouldn't have been possible to get the log in there without seriously injuring myself, so I had to start the fire around it. It took a lot more attention and time and the fire has been a lot smokier than our normal ones, but it did start and has made our house a toasty 67 degrees inside (compared to the brisk 33 outside). If our normal fires are the regular slopes and the ones with fire starters are the bunny runs, then this one is a black diamond. Aoibheall first suggested a double but I pointed out that the wood was dry and it wasn't raining.