count down, to the holidays, winter cold and keeping warm

are you all ready for the thanksgiving holiday?

we mostly are, since there were the turkey breasts on sale for .99 a pound.
i have to make cranberry sauce.. which i most likely will some time between now and thursday...or maybe not..if i find a home canned jar on the shelf then we're good to go with that.

i've taken to roasting poultry breast down for the majority of the time- i can recommend it.
i flip it for the last maybe 1/3 of the time, really just to brown the skin
i have found that the meat doesn't dry out.
i like doing breasts instead of whole birds because legs take longer and when they are done it seems that the breast can be dry... but really try a breast down bird ...( try it in an off month, see if you like it)

today was an insanely busy day for me, i had a lot of stuff to do for bernie, then a lot of stuff to do for 'the family' financial stuff, getting the elements that didn't fit returned, tracking down where the other elements are ...all sorts of stuff like that
i managed to print the polar bears, (the wider one) and it looked good but is a bit crooked on the paper...so i have to make sure that the paper is loading right for the next print.

the weather warmed up a bit (yeah all things are relative...it's not above freezing), i was up with the woodstove several times last night.... today i shoveled a coal bed out of it and let it burn down too.
now for those of you contemplating a woodstove or pellet stove, i can tell you some of my reasoning behind what we got (prompted by a conversation i had with someone recently about non oil heating)
i had a list of things i needed/wanted/expected

1) warm/cook food in an emergency
2) radiate heat for a while after it burnt down
3) be safer at around 400 degrees instead of 800 or more
4) non catalytic (the catalytic converters cost a LOT of money to replace )
5) burn something easy to get a hold of
6) easy to maintain

the few years before we got our woodstove, while i was ruling out things like pellet stoves, coal burners, heat pumps, solar.......

Pellet stoves---there was a pellet shortage...no one could get the pellets as at that time i believe, there was only one place making pellets and something happened- (now a lot of 'pellet' stoves also burn 'biomass' so you can burn cherry pits, corn, barley etc... not just pellets- you can't cook on them, and you need a battery back up to run the hopper incase of electrical outages- plus you need to shovel out the ash daily)

Coal or duel fuel coal/wood---i looked at coal or duel fuel coal/wood.... coal burns HOT, too hot to be in the studio. and i wasn't at that time interested in a whole house duel fuel furnace.
i didn't want to shake the grate down and remove chinkers either.... the technology is very good however, they don't pollute like they used to and you can cook on them- but they aren't soapstone so they are HOT

Catalytic wood stoves--- the only thing against them was the need to periodically replace the catalytic converter

Outdoor wood furnaces --- not very fuel efficient, have to go outside every 12-ish hours to stoke them- can't cook on them but they will heat a few buildings, and heat water all outside!

so our choice was a soapstone woodstove.....the hearthstone phoenix-- and really it was the right choice for us.
when we move i swear i am going to carry this stove on my BACK if i have to and take it to the next house!
however if i get a crack at a soapstone masonry heater..... i may reconsider
we burn about 4-5 cords (@ about 500 per 3 full cords of seasoned hardwood) in a bad winter, but we also have very poor windows and insulation in the studio where the stove is...
it does keep the whole house pretty warm, with the exception of those couple of weeks in dead of winter. but still so far (since 05) we've never had any thing actual freeze except the front door a few times ....but then we don't have a storm door