Cold November, perfect for knitting!

If you have ever paged through the Mother Earth News and seen the ads for Woodstock Soapstone stoves, and wondered if they were really as good as they say, they are!

We've had one for, hm, four years, I think, and learned the lost art of starting a fire in a stone-cold stove. We put it in the end of our long, narrow house, thinking we'd use it once in a while to warm up our front room, which used to be so cold we would close it off in the winter. Ha! Instead we open up the front room and literally heat the whole small house, including the geodesic-dome-room we added. We still use our furnace in the spring and fall, when it's not quite cold enough to use the stove without the heat blasting us out of the house, but is too chilly for no heat at all.

I love this stove. In the winter, I used to hate washing my long hair and shivering as the overhead blower blasted me with "warm" air. Now I just go and sit out in the front room by the soapstone stove. In the morning I go out there and stand on the warm concrete in my bare feet. Luxury is a warm floor in the winter! And heat that doesn't go off when the power goes out.

These days Woodstock even sells these tiny gas soapstone stoves about the size of a CRT monitor. If I lived in the city and not in SouthWest Outer Nowhere, I'd want one. Because let's face it, love it though I do, a woodstove is messy. Wood sheds bits of bark or sand, and we have to deal with wood ashes. Soapstone plus gas, what an idea.

And here is my naughty Ajax, who opened the closed trash can and pulled out everything while I was taking John to school.


PS: My husband says I cannot put up a picture of the dog after talking about the woodstove! I tried to take a picture of the stove, and the camera insists it is rusty-looking. After all my hard work with the wire brush -- it is not! But I am not playing with the camera any more right now.