Coffee 1-26-2013

Welcome! Come in out of the cold & join us while the coffee is hot. Blueberry muffins & scrambles eggs are just about ready. Brrrr, this whole week has been nasty cold. This is the time of year that the hand fed stove people earn their stripes. It's always some labor to burn coal, but in weather like this it can become a real chore. We girlie-men (and women) with he stokers don't notice it so much. To us it's just an extra ash pan or a bit heavier one. This week will surely separate the one match club wanna be's from the experts. It's a work in progress and an art to stay in that club. Congrats to all of you!

Our system works! Some time back I added alarms on the doors in case Uncle Billy got confused & tried to go for a midnight walk at zero degrees. Marty & I over slept this morning and got woken to the alarm going off. Bill woke up before us, got dressed, then without us awake he kind of forgot just exactly where he was. He didn't see his car out front (even though it was there) and had to go check. Opening the door brought us out of bed & once we turned on a light or two he saw us and all was OK. He said "You guys think of the most amazing things.... turning on a light!" We have night lights here & there, but that man can see in the dark better than most owls.

Keep up the good work! Hug your loved ones and enjoy the weekend.

Little chilly getting here this AM, but I couldn't pass on Marty's blueberry muffins 4* on the hill--kinda balmy actually. The old Hitzer loves this stuff. Nice call on the door alarms Freddy. I'm planning on staying pretty home bound this week-end, but, who knows what might come up.Whoops, so much for that---gotta go help a neighbor hand water (hose from milk house) his dairy herd if 40--water in the barn's been froze up since Wed. Have a good week-end all & stay warm. Again, I think the puppy (6 mos) has this cold figured out. The lil *censored* just keeps growing--MAYBE if I stop feeding her????

Good morning Freddy,those Blueberry muffins sound so good I wish I had one right now!Well I almost had a new stove this week but things didn't work out for me but I hope they work out for him so I will just wait and keep looking(good things come to those who wait,I think ) Good thinking on the alarms to keep Uncle Billy safe, I remember growing up an old neighbor with alzheimer's who worked at Warner & Swasey he would get on the bus to go to work(the plant closed 10 years prior)but his family had a hard time keeping tabs on him until he got beat up and robbed(the plant was in a bad part of town)I guess some or our stellar citizens thought it would be a good idea to rob a 5'4'' 85 year old man .I have to do the rear brakes on my ford(second time in 292,000 Mi )but I think this will be the last time for me with this truck,The stove is humming along at temps like this you just have to scoop more and the ash pans are a bit heavier . Take care and have a great Weekend. Keepaeyeonit

Smart dog!

Good morning all,

Mmm, blue berry muffins… I can’t think of anything better as I sit next to the coal fire on this cold January morning. Here in N. Virginia we hadn’t been above 25*s in a week with overnight lows in the low teens. The Harman has been humming along at 500*, that’s way hotter then I normally need to run it. Because of that high rate of burn, I’m seeing a lot more klinkers and there is a little more hands on involved; still it’s easy keeping the house at an toasty average of 77. Thanks again Forum for teaching me to burn coal! Hopefully, this will be the last day of this particular cold spell; “they” have said we will be returning to the high 40s or low 50s by Monday. If history is any indication we won’t see this type of cold again this year but we could see a lot more snow or ice. That usually smacks us when temperatures are around 30*.

Freddy, good move on those door alarms. It was the first thing the county Office for Aging recommended my mom do when my dad was diagnosed with dementia. They stopped Dad from wandering off numerous times.

This weekend (I have Monday/Tuesday off) I’m prepping and painting the trim in the living room. It’s going to be a multi stage operation due to my and DK’s backs but we will get it done the same way you eat an elephant – one bite at a time.

I hope everyone is warm and able to knock something off their to do list. Take care, Lisa

Good morning....another morning below zero. Like Freddy said, this week has been NASTY cold. Two nights ago it was about zero degrees and the wind was shaking the house...the ash can was pretty heavy the next morning! This has been the coldest weather we have experience since I first lit the fire in my EFM...January 23, 2011 it was -22 degrees, and the house has been warm ever since.

Big news this week...I accepted a job offer from a company in VT and start on the 11th of February. It was not easy to tell the folks I work with that I will be leaving, but they understand and have been very supportive.

Stay warm.

Congrats on the job front Rob

mmm....good muffins,thanks Marty, tell Freddy to be careful with that ash pan. Thanks for thinking of us hand feeders we are Definitely earning our stripes this week, but it's still worth it. Kinda' makes you think one of them "girly stoves" for the future but it's cold right now 0* as of 8:00 and the stove is chugging along glad I made the heat exchanger basement cooler than upstairs, before that I was thinking of moving to the basement

Thanks for the coffee...

Today was our first morning of coffee inside the new Great Room as Freetown Fred named for us, and it works. For those of you that do not remember I have been busy destroying my home, only to take out walls and make the interior bigger. We basically have turned a 12x24 kitchen, and a 12X16 living room, a 12 x 16 bedroom and a 12 x 16 dining room into one complete room. We left a half bath off the Foyer for guests, but other then that it is a big 24 x 40 room.

I have got a lot more to do for sure, but the floor will have to wait as I need to cut the trees, saw it into lumber and then plane and form the edges. I have some White Pine that I have been saving for years, and I think that will make for some nice wide pine flooring. As you can see in the photo, we also need to add curtains to the small window and build a new kitchen table in anticipation of our growing family; as witnessed by the high chair also in the photo. I also have the hearth area to build, but that must wait until my rock walls are unfrozen this Spring. So other then some trim details, it is livable.

To that end me and the wife swapped furniture around and like the extra room. I did stack some firewood near the hearth are to tidy that are up until we can install the rock, and to let it dry some. In a perfect world I would have dry firewood, but my life is hardly ideal. I was late getting in my wood this year, and while I cut only White Ash since it burns good green, I bring it inside for a week and the dry air inside really dried the wood out. That helps, but in this cold...oh yes I am burning clean, comfortable, convenient coal!

(And yes, that is Shaun the Sheep, the funniest claymation ever on the TV)

Good morning. I'll have a muffin and a cup of coffee. Thanks. The coffee is good and the muffin is delicious.

So, I am scheduled to do a horn test at a bank about two hours from my house. I wake up, splitting headache. Down some Advil. Shower, get dressed get in the van. Get onsite at 0809. No one is here. It was scheduled for 0800. So, I figure the maintenance guy rolled through the parking lot at right around 0800 saw I wasn't here yet and left. Sure, 0809 isn't 0800 but it's friggin' close enough and I can't control weekend driver speeds. Got stuck behind some idiot going through the center of town that the job is located in doing 15 miles an hour in a 35 for four miles right to the job's parking lot. That chewed into the 0800 time frame. Couldn't pass the guy as it was double yellow through a business district then residential and there were two cops running radar that we passed. I don't have a number to call the guy I was supposed to meet and even if I did, he barely speaks English. Here it is, 0835 now and I'm sitting in a cold parking lot with my truck off. If I run the truck I get a flag at corporate because of the stupid GPS. The thing that pisses me off is I could've stayed home and slept this headache off. But no, I'm sitting in a cold truck, in a cold parking lot getting more and more irritated that this guy couldn't hang out for a few minutes. It's not like this horn test is going to take all that long to begin with. Unfriggin' believable.

Freddy wrote:It's always some labor to burn coal, but in weather like this it can become a real chore

Funny, I'm sitting here now watching the neighbor through logs into his out door forest fire. And he will spend the rest or the day getting fire wood.

Paisan wrote:

Freddy wrote:It's always some labor to burn coal, but in weather like this it can become a real chore

Funny, I'm sitting here now watching the neighbor through logs into his out door forest fire. And he will spend the rest or the day getting fire wood.

I've noticed that since I'm been running my stove a bit harder this week it's taken me 10 minutes longer to put coal in the stove than normal. I do a bit of extra shaking to make sure I've cleared enough ash.

But then again, I don't have to go outside and cart wood in and only need to go 2' to get fresh coal.

My father had an outdoor woodstove, but before it burned his house down, he used to be a slave to that thing. If he was not putting wood in it, he was cutting it up, and if he was not cutting it up, he was trying to find some to cut up. My Mother said she was a Firewood Widow with that thing, and seeing how he liked to get me to help share the slavery of that thing, I can say burning his house down was the best thing that ever did.

Now that he just retired (On Tuesday of this week), he is so bored that I think he hates his new pellet boiler. Being one of those Underfed Stoker Units, he has nothing to do all day and it is killing him. People call me a workaholic but he has got me beat. This retirement thing is NOT for him, and it is only 4 days old!

Paisan wrote:

Freddy wrote:It's always some labor to burn coal, but in weather like this it can become a real chore

Funny, I'm sitting here now watching the neighbor through logs into his out door forest fire. And he will spend the rest or the day getting fire wood.

Blueberry muffins sound good. Been a cold week for sure, been coming home midday to tend boiler and add more coal, and shake. Its been a struggle maintainng a temp of 70* in house. First brutual night only was able to keep 66*, but slower tending of new coal, at more frequent intervals seemed to do the trick.Usage has been about 120# a day, looking foward to the balmy 30s this coming week. Also coal bins showing bottom... been using more coal than anticipated for winter, plus I fired up a month earlier than last season. Guess next weekend will be a few runs to local coal dealer for another ton coal. Good thing, no power outages with extreme cold.

Hey congrats Rob on the new job! VT is a nice place to be.

Yep - it's that time of year that tries man's soul - at least for me. I am officially extending my middle finger to mother nature in a epic F -YOU!!!

So far since the 22nd, we've had lows of 8°, -1°, -4°, 4°, & 5° with the highest temp all week was yesterday at 19° during the day.

Jammed the grates open on the Mark III Thursday night with more f'ing rocks. Was going below zero that night, so I left the grates jammed open and just piled coal on top of it. Woke up to 57°, as 2/3rds of the fire was ash by morning due to not getting it shook down properly. Managed to break the rocks with an anger-fueled kick to the shaker handle. Thought I had finally broken the grates, but lucky for me it was just the rocks. Took a day of temps in the teens to get the house back up in the mid 60's. Been having to tend to the fire in 15 hour intervals instead of the normal 24. Did some work outside for a few hours too. My lungs are burning, hacking up phlegm, scortching headache .... I'm sick of this *censored*! On the bright side I finally got a couple dollars in my wallet for the first time in months.

See what happens when I don't drink?? I get REALLY CHEERFUL!