Oh, Yeah! Double-Knitted Mitten Weather!
Not much snow here, but it's cold as bejabbers. The temperature has been sitting at 12 degrees F (about -11 C) since 5 am, with a windchill of around -4 F (-20 C).
Definitely weather where I can wear my double-knitted snowflake mittens and not feel like they're overkill.
We're heating the house with osage orange wood, Maclura pomifera, today. Shortly after we put in the soapstone woodstove, I went online and Googled for the BTU values of various woods. Osage orange is right up at the top.
Shortly after that, my husband ended up on a crew clearing out osage orange tres on post at Fort Custer, and he brought a couple of trailer loads home.
It's supposed to be the densest wood in North America, and I can tell you that a dry piece of osage orange is a lot heavier than any other piece of firewood the same size I lift on a given day, including oak or black locust.
It burns hot! Usually we burn one smallish piece of osage orange in the stove with other woods. Mmmmm, radiant heat.
This is what we're getting today, tiny little flakes in bands of lake-effect snow. The radar picture is from up in Grand Rapids. (The snow doesn't really end in a neat circle: that's just the limit of the radar's range.)
When I go outside today, it'll be double-knitted mittens all the way! Yeah!
Labels: Michigan weather, soapstone stove, winter
posted by Alwen | 11:39 AM
4 Comments:
I really wish for 'proper' winter weather here - I love to have snow and ice and stuff - we get frosts! and sometimes we get rain! We do get those blue sunny clear still winter days which follow a frost and they're nice and all... Gosh that fruitcake looks great - all fruit and nuts and no cake, from what I could see!
Ooh, it really does look chilly there -- no problem justifying double-knitted anything! There are times when I wish for some real winter weather, but then I remind myself of what that would actually mean, and I just wish for more fog and the mid-thirties instead :)
I hope someday i get to experience that winter. Just once. For a whole season. Just to say I did it. It looks so wonderfully bleak!
It's really cold here too for the first time this winter. I may actually have to wear a hat to work tomorrow and I hate hats. But, I hate being cold even more.
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