Morning Cup Of Coffee And Weather

I fly out of Alaska later today and arrive back home early tomorrow. I hate to leave. We had Sand Hill Crane for dinner last night. Rib-eye in the sky!

Yesterday I got to shoot eight different Class 3’s - UZI, FAL, 1927 Thompson, M11/5, M11/9, M45 Karl and a 1919A4 and M2 Browning.

 

Now you've got my interested...

On the meal -- Sand Hill Crane looks beefy --- I'm surprised it doesn't have the same light/dark meat of most birds. I was a little surprised! I want to try it now

 

Sand Hill Crane is not water fowl so it doesn’t have the oils and it doesn’t spend time in water. It nests in maybe six inches of water and the meat is not in contact with water so it doesn’t taste like fowl. It looks and tastes like beef. It can’t be hunted in certain feeding or nesting areas which is good. They can only be hunted during migration in certain areas.

 

Color me surprised The birds I am limited to have been chicken, turkey, duck, and some bird a friend of mine hunted years ago. Other than spitting out the birdshot, they all are similar in texture and taste except for the greasier duck. Not a fan -- and I'm (theoretically) a keto subscriber. The last few months have been bad though ... very very bad.

No apology on preservation -- I'm all for responsible use

 

I’m in the book. Contact me anytime.

 

UGH!!! Another rainy weekend!

I just canceled my reservation. The last few trips we've taken --- 4 in a row now --- have all been rainy. I'm tired of drying tents and cleaning up mud.

I searched for about 2 hours in every direction and its high rain probability across the midwest. I'm turning into a wuss!!!

Hopefully, by CICO the curse will be broken...

 

Going to be rainy this weekend in SC too.

 

This one caught my eye:
Watch NASA Crash a Spacecraft Into an Asteroid (Sept. 26)
In an effort to better understand the methods that could one day help us deflect a celestial body on a collision course with Earth, NASA on September 26 will fly its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft directly into the path of an asteroid named Dimorphos...

That will be live on the web!

 

Warm and sunny skies this morning as I sip my first cup of coffee and rub the cats ears.

 

Finally cooling off at night here. This hot-spell has been brutal.

 

The asteroid crash caught my eye as well. This reminds me of a "special event" that would have necessitated rolling the TV to the front of the classroom in grade school.

I'm glad to see the cooler weather as well -- I enjoy having my windows open rather than the AC cranking. However, I think our Indiana summer has been slightly cooler than usual. Perhaps, I am just getting used to it as I have disciplined myself to leave the windows open longer. The next 8-10 weeks should be magnificent

I don't enjoy what is around the corner -- I despise winter and snow. The past few winters have been relatively mild, a trend I hope continues. While we have a wood-burning stove, it doesn't quite work in our house. The layout allows the living room to be as hot as an oven, but the rest of the living area is cold. To make matters worse is the issue of wood storage and transportation. Not to mention the endless leaves, dirt, and pieces of bark that wind up on the floor.

So, I'm excited, after years of research I just order a Harmon pellet stove. I'm convinced it is the best design I've seen The problems we had with our previous Quadrafire seem to be addressed. The pellet feed mechanism is 'bottom fed' fire so you don't have the constant plinking of pellets falling down a chute. As a result of the bottom feed, the ash and clinkers are pushed out the top into a LARGE bin, so daily maintenance is minimized. Of course, it is self igniting and will extinguish itself when there is no demand.

A 40-pound bag of fuel will burn for about a day, and those are stored in the corner of the garage. No more logs, leaves, bark, and ash!

 

What? Birds?!

 

Sounds like a nice solution to a dirty problem!

I remember my dad getting loads of blocked wood delivered to the house as a kid. We'd pick out one of the larger pieces to use a a chopping block, and then get to splitting. Of course in the earlier years, he did most of the splitting, and my brother and I would haul the split pieces into the house, through the kitchen, down the basement stairs, and start stacking it in the back of the basement for the warm winter fires, leaving a trail of dirt, leaves and bark through the house as we hauled, much to my mothers chagrin ;-)

When my wife and I built our home, I wanted to continue experiencing the ambience of a cold winters night fire in the fireplace, but wanted to eliminate some of the mess and work involved. So we built a firewood box outside incorporated along the chimney, that is filled through an outside door that has a walkway leading to it so you can wheelbarrow loads of wood right up to the door, with another door inside on the hearth to pull the wood inside and put into the fireplace.

Our 6 acres of heavily wooded land seems to provide a constant supply of various hardwoods that have fallen to lightning, or wind, etc. to keep the outdoor woodpile replenished, and a splitter to help keep it stacked up to dry, and the fireplace fed. Hopefully I'll be able to do that, as long as I could lug 40lb bags of pellets around and still not have much of a inside mess between the wood box and fireplace. I usually clean out the firebox once a season. It's remarkable how much the ash will compress beneath the grate as the season goes on when you just keeping stacking the firewood on top of it.

 

Yeah, I almost forgot about the chopping part. The guy we buy our wood from (at about the same annual cost as the pellets) already has the logs broken down into manageable sizes. He uses an automated splitter --- pretty cool to watch. He just lays the trunk or limb on a bed. the machine then cuts to length, then a ram drives the round through a splitter. n a few minutes the work is done. Use a bucket loader to stack fo drying...delivered to me split and seasoned. We collect the 'scrap' from that operation and use it as kindling.

The wood stove turns that all into a nice coal bed in short order, and I usually have enough 'scrap' to keep everything burning all winter nicely without using a splitting maul. I've got a small hand-operated hydraulic one if I need it, but its almost more work than its worth.

Here's a great hack from youtube. I'm not as much of a fan as I used to be of this content provider. Sadly I think he's become a shill. But this hack works great, even on campfires:



I'm only on an acre, so I have to buy my wood. If my supply were 'free' it might make more sense to keep what I have.

We started burning for ambiance, but the savings in my gas bill every month made me rethink that pretty quick

 

Yes, if built with heating in mind in addition to ambiance, a fireplace can be a heating plus. Many with open fireboxes that were put in homes for ambiance only, actually sucked more combustion air along with the homes heat out of the house and up the chimney.
We put our sealed door fireplace within an insulated cement block enclosure with an air plenum around the firebox, with vents in the plenum above/ below the firebox and an adjustable outside air supply piped into the firebox for combustion air. It ended up being our only source of heat when our geothermal heat pump gave up the ghost about 15 years ago in mid December, and the replacement heat pump couldn't be built and installed before mid March. I think we actually slept a little better that winter because while the great room was nice and toasty, the air circulation to the bedrooms wasn't that great, so they tended to be about 10 degrees cooler. Had to snuggle up a little to keep warm.

 

We’ve been using dryer lint firestarters for the first time this camping season - they work great! No newspaper needed.

And, the “log cabin” style of laying a fire on top of bedlogs really does work in an open campfire as well as a woodstove. I never thought of making it totally upside down with kindling on top, will have to try that.

 

That method of fire building was something new to me as well, and seemed to work well. One thing I liked about it was that with the heavier pieces on the bottom, there would be less tendency for the pile to collapse, and cause larger pieces on top to roll off to the side, or worse out the front or in our case against the glass doors.
I ended up replacing the glass in our fireplace doors several times when I couldn't get to the firebox before the heat from a log that rolled against it caused the glass to shatter.

About 15 years ago I found a company in Seattle that makes clear ceramic glass fireplace windows.
Neoceram Glass
They cost twice as much, but a burning log can lay against the glass until it's burnt up, and the window won't shatter. I've heard you could even spray the window with cold water and it wouldn't break, but I'm not willing to quite take it that far to check their durability. It's also nice to know that if you leave the room, or even the house for awhile and a log rolls up against the glass, it won't shatter letting the smoke from the dampered firebox fill the house.

The thing I didn't care for with the youTube method above was that he probably used 3-4 times as much kindling as I normally would. In fact I normally use 3 4" pieces of fatwood https://www.menards.com/main/heatin...594-c-6855.htm?tid=4851079947226969854&ipos=1 to start our fires, which is sufficient 90% of the time without any newspaper, or lint balls, but I have supplemented with both of those at times too. The pieces in the bag are about 8 inches long, and cut them in half, so use about 1.5 pieces per fire. Lasts most of a season.

 

it really works well….I started doing upside down 2 years ago…lots easier. Fire is more gentle at first…but that isn’t a bad thing. You don’t burn a nights wood just to get coals. After a couple hours, you can’t really tell the difference between normal nsf upside down.

 

Walk away from a wood fire starting up? That’s the best part to feel it slowly get warmer and warmer and then hotter and hotter. Of course I said that before I moved to Wisconsin. This will be my first full winter here

I currently have floor radiant heat and a propane boiler. Even with today’s prices it’s not too expensive. My home is small and really insulated.

So why is air dryer lint grey?