After a fairly wet summer, I’m beginning to see the end of this year’s firewood gathering. Obviously, wood gathering, and perhaps more important, wood drying has been on my mind a lot lately.
Apparently, there’s a group of people at the Cold Climate Housing Research Center in Fairbanks, Alaska who spend a lot of time watching firewood dry. Even for a firewood lover like me, that seems like a bit of a bore. They learn a lot from it, though, providing information that we can use. Continue reading
I am a great believer in Abraham Kaplan’s The Law of the Instrument: “When you’re carrying a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Currently, my hammer is a wine bottle, and everything looks like it should be bottled!
Here’s how it happened: after a particularly large batch of homemade wine aged to bottling point, I discovered that our large collection of wine bottles (see Reuse Glass Before Recycling It) had dwindled over the past year. Suddenly, I found myself short of 750 ml bottles.
Luckily, friends on the bay had recently married in an event that gathered more than 400 celebrants. I checked, and discovered that they hadn’t hauled out the recycling yet. They were very happy to let me take away all I could. On an extremely rainy afternoon I collected a large pack full, plus an extra case box of corkable empties. Continue reading
