starting fires

We live in an official “little” house (900 to 1200 square feet) and heat our little house with a very small wood burning stove.

So I build a lot of fires One a day on average.

Matches come 250 in a box and it takes about a box to do a season. This week the old box was empty, so I went to buy matches.

I have nothing (much) against the Chinese (“Eat your food Davy, remember those starving Chinese children”) but they don't know how to make really good matches.

Our usual grocery store only has chinese matches, as does the big chain store. From before I learned that one of our small Idaho only food store indeed carries real Diamond Matches.

So we went shopping, and since they are hard to find I asked (Imagine that) and talked to the assistant manager and told him how much I appreciate him having real matches. He agreed that the chinese did not work as well.

So I bought 3 boxes. By the time I go back again, who knows what will be the state of the match industry.

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With all of that I am pretty experienced at making a good warming fire that does not smoke.

There are barometric issues here, I guess, but today nothing would work right I filled our little house with smoke. I had to open the front door (lucky Leo was not here), and turn on the upstairs bathroom fan.

So there went ten years off my life, more or less.

In the summer I put a screen on top of the chimney. Starlings are the dumbest birds there are, and one will inevitably go down the chimney. It is stainless steel and slippery and there is no place to go but down.

In our old stove the chimney opened right into the firebox, so in time the bird is in the firebox and you can let the beast out.

Our new stove has baffles, so if the bird gets in the chimney, the only way out is to take the chimney apart. That is a dirty nasty job. So as soon as heating season is over, I put that screen in place.

But if I forget to take it off in the fall, it works fine -- for a while, then it gets hard to start a fire, it smokes and will not “draw”. I am reminded to go get the ladder and take that screen off.

I could pay Idaho Power for electric heat, but that would be way too simple.