“Really the topic of breakfast cereal is generally a very boring one.”
Josh Homme
I poured a little gas down Gracies’ throat, got the garage doors open as wide as they could and coaxed the old girl to fire. It even sounded like she was firing on all cylinders, sort of. Soon me and my girl were travelling down the highway. No I don’t got a girlfriend, I ain’t that lucky or cute. Yup I are a writer alright.
We got to the village I put on my mask and picked up my parcels, I went across to the auto parts store and picked some muffler cement and some muffler tape. I needed to try to seal the smoke leaks long enough for the fire to burn through the creosote blocks in my chimney.
I got home got Gracie back inside sort of. She was crooked I would have to Jack her up and pull her over another day. I unloaded my stuff. I went straight to the fire. I smeared the muffler goop all around the lower leak and slowly opened the wood stove, a few little leaks, which I patched right away. The top part was patched with gorilla tape, that wouldn’t do when the fire got hot again.
Then I saw it, I had solved the smoke leaks mostly, but now creosote liquid was pouring down the side of the pipe. I knew what meant, the blockage was too great to overcome with fire alone. I found the longest skinny board I could. I climbed up on the roof slid down to the chimney. I lowered the board down found nothing. The block was lower than the length of the board.
Back up the sloped roof, across the flat roof, down the ladder through the deep snow, across the rickety deck and inside the woodwork shop to find a longer board.
I ended up joining two boards to make one long one. Back up the ladder, across the flat roof. The snow had been melting on the sloped roof and down I went, landed spine first on a rib of sheetmetal. Ya that wasn’t enjoyable but I needed to keep working, a ton of snow was coming over the next week, the roof would be worse later.
I made it to the chimney and lowered my home made chimney cleaner, down about ten feet I hit a blockage, awesome. I thought for fun I would lower the board deeper and sure as hell another one . I cleaned them the best I could with my board and realized very quickly that I had left the fire intake wide open. I could also hear crackling coming up through the chimney. Through extreme heat I pulled the board straight up.
I had to hurry to get back inside I had a chimney fire going on. In small bursts a chimney fire was a great way to keep the chimney clean, an uncontrolled fire like that will take your house.
I went to the fire and opened the front door of the stove, no smoke that was a welcome sight. I might survive the cold snap and snow coming. Of course I would have to cut and split more a lot more wood. As always and now that the chimney was better I would use more wood but stay warmer.
With some luck this would be the end of winter, just needed to survive one more week.
all gooped up
the deck had seen better days but winter wasn’t the time to rebuild.
Spine breaker
So what happened to my spine in the fall, well that is still not pleasant. I also realized all I had to eat was my morning coffee. One of the parcels at the post office was a package of organic maple cereal, sounded good right now.
I was sure that Amazon had short shipped me on my last order, so I called them up, and even in the middle of the Covid epidemic and long shipping times they sent me a new bag of cereal. Two days before it arrived I found the bag I thought they didn’t ship. I called them and told them I had made a mistake and wanted to be charged for the extra bag. Which was so tasty after the chimney ordeal.
It immediately reminded me of a cereal commercial I grew up with.
Just made it, had a little snooze and woke to three inches of fresh and a raging blizzard. I decided to retrieve the wood I cut yesterday and at least bring it to the shop. As I headed out to the snowstorm I noticed a cat box needed to be taken out, and while I did that a songbird told me they needed more food. Got that done too and then I went out to the logpile and retrieved the wood and brought it in. I would deal with tomorrow. Right now I was toasty warm and had enough wood for the night, I think.
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