What's in Your Portfolio

[Undertoad]

Bullshit factory.

[IamSam]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Bullshit factory.

Leaping turquoise lizards! Give it a rest already. You know all sort of interesting things and you’re one bad ass bass player and no pawn shop customer in Philly or anywhere else would ever even dream of looking at you cross eyed.

I neither know nor care to know the places you’ve traveled, the things you saw there or the amazing local customs you got to observe first hand in these places – where ever they were.
However, if you’ve managed to make it to anywhere within a 500 mile radius of the Colorado Plateau and stayed for more than 24 hours; I’ll eat my cowgirl hat, my corgi, and my truck. And that’s just for starters.

Plenty of people – especially in rural areas - burn wood to stay warm and even to cook. Even people in rural PA apparently do this – believe it or not. When I was still married to my ex-husband, the boy who grew up in urban Arlington, VA only to run off to the American West to become a Colorado Mountain Man, he was a fanatic about heating anyplace we happened to be live in with wood – preferably using a good wood stove, but making do with a fire place when there was nothing else.

When we were in Idaho, it was mostly larch that was the fuel of choice. I hated that stuff - mainly because it was almost impossible for me to split, since, being a girl, I didn’t have old Jeremiah Johnson’s upper body strength. Plus the larch we had wasn’t really dry and took forever to get the house warm. I left for work in the morning still shivering, and I returned home at night to shiver some more.

I had grown up in suburbia myself, and the only thing I hadn’t liked about forced air gas heat was my Mom’s insistence on never letting the thermostat go up into a more balmy range of heat.

I didn’t know how good I’d had it as a child until I got married and “Deep River Ed” was off somewhere playing lumberjack with the Forest Service yet again. But I found out real fast. Those were the times when I had to go grab some wood from the dilapidated pile of larch on the front porch, try to split the stuff with a mallet and amass enough sticks of kindling and carefully crumpled sheets of newspaper arranged just so to encourage a small flame to finally lick up and turn into a fire.

I would sit on the couch and cry with homesickness for the Southwest and its wonderful stands of juniper and pinion that even a girl could split by just hitting a dead branch of juniper over her knee. Plus, juniper burns so hot, it wouldn’t surprise me if the devil uses it when he runs out of brimstone.

For anyone who actually gives a shit, here's a couple of random links from Google giving reviews on wood burning stoves and the fuels used and so forth. The first link is to an essay written by someone out of Cortez - quite the surprise since I hadn't even been aware this person existed. The Internet never ceases to amaze, I guess.

http://www.hcn.org/wotr/the-woodpile-and-me/print_view

http://www.trailspace.com/gear/vargo.../review/23573/

http://reviews.northerntool.com/0394...ws/reviews.htm

Now, are we clear?