My great-grandmother had a wood stove in the kitchen, and she still cooked on it.

My great-aunt did too. That was a 1900s frame house that held three generations of one family, plus a boarder. The room you entered from the front door was the largest room in the house, and aside from the enormous oil furnace vented into the fireplace chimney, there was no furniture, and it was used only as a passthrough. Living room isolated on one side accessed through a door into the entry room. Bathroom and stairs, accessed through the entry, downstairs room which had been intended as the dining room but which my cousin and his wife used as their bedroom, and through which you had to pass to get from kitchen to the rest of the house. Upstairs, another bathroom, three bedrooms, one of which was rented to the boarder, and a linen closet. Never really a comfortable house.

My boss had a pre-1900s house in the country which the previous owners had been dragging into the 20th Century. Insulation had been added to the downstairs walls on the inside, and the interior walls resurfaced with naked plywood sheets, over which ran metal electrical conduit carrying wires for wall outlets. I suggested the wash the walls in colors they liked and pretend they were paneled with moire' silk. They had a newly-installed bathroom off the kitchen, but it never worked at high volume. So for parties, they spruced up the outhouse. I've used outhouses at the campgrounds where we tented, and my mom's mountainfolk kin still had outhouses. But my boss' outhouse was amazing. A two-holer, so it was spacious. They installed a stained glass window, so it was light and pretty inside, walls and ceiling whitewashed, floor swept. There was a little shelf with a vase of flowers and a solid air freshener, and brackets for the TP--the good, soft, multi-ply kind, because there was no plumbing to clog. There may have been a moment, or two, when I sought refuge from the chattering horde of the lawn party in the outhouse.

Having stayed in a youth hostel that was a converted carriage house, not so much.

The one a cousin in Saratoga had was awesome. And the girls used to roller skate on the ground floor.

I do cook on our woodstove. It's a heat stove, but I bought the kind that has a graduated top, so there are two different surfaces, basically, boiling and simmering, when I've got it going right.

Mostly I just boil water, though. I keep it boiling all the time, and it serves as humidifier, and then when I want a hot drink or need to defrost the birdbath, it's already hot.

Aunt Effie would just use the iron handle-thingy to pull the flat cover off so there'd be a hole in the top of the stove, and set a kettle full of soup or stew right down into the fire and let it simmer all afternoon.

Friends heated their suburban house with a woodstove. Of course he also converted their diesel Land Cruiser to run on post-consumer crude he collected from some first-use source. They're in West Virginia now, raising sheep, shipping meat, fleece, wool, yarn, and woven yardage and goods nationally and internationally, over the internet. It is what you make it, I guess.

We had a whole house vacuum like Theo's talking about in BR, it was excellent at sucking up cockroaches. No basement, of course, so the compressor was out in the boat garage (we didn't have a boat, but that's what the realtor called it and we kept calling it that, I guess, it was a shed on the other side of the carport, basically). I still didn't like vacuuming, having to wrangle the tubes all over, but never having to empty bags or replace burnt out belts was nice.

You aren't sick are you? I am on day two of the cold from hell.

No, although I'm sorry that you are! My plans for sleeping forever and watching DVDs this weekend are now totally preventative care.

ita, my digits are crossed for this to work out. Getting a response from the nurse within 30 minutes is a very good sign, I think.

...my life really isn't like your lives, is it?

I love reading about the little details of your life, Liese.

Australian shepherds

My stepdad got one of these once. He couldn't train her properly, so he sold her. He liked his beagles better, anyway. She was a beautiful dog.

I miss living on a farm. Mind you, I don't miss WORKING on a farm. I'd like to live on a farm that someone else took care of. I need to be a rich farmer's pampered neurotic artsy wife.

When I was real little, we heated our old farmhouse with gas from a pocket of natural gas that had been discovered under our farm. It ran out after a while and they put in propane, which is just as well, because if I think about that too much, it gives me the wiggins. We still had an outhouse. They'd converted a porch to a bathroom in the 50s, but the older folks in the household continued to use the outhouse during the daytime. It was falling apart and full of spiders by the time I was 12, though. We had a hand pump outside, and I remember getting water from our well in the summertime. The water was heavily sulfured. You couldn't cook with it; we caught rainwater in a huge cistern for that. But I loved the taste of it on a hot summer day.

The moose would sleep underneath our satellite dish when it got that snowy, so we wouldn't be able to watch TV, anyway.

That is way more awesome than watching television.

My sister's house has that whole-house vacuum thing. She doesn't like it, of course.

My dream house would have everything you all have already mentioned, with the exception of a spiral staircase. I like the giant entryway with stairs going up both sides thing.

The promised heavy winds are starting. I think there's a flap missing from the air vent to the lower bathroom; I can hear the wind in that room like it's blowing straight in.

My plan for getting a lot of work done today is not going well, mostly because I can't concentrate on work. Don'wanna.

Many wood burning stoves in our neighborhood. In cold weather, air quality is rated poor because of them. When there are inversion layers their use is banned, other than for people for whom it is the only heat source.

In addition wood heat can worse than gas or propane for global warming. Leaving aside the question of whether the wood is source sustainably, there is the question of black carbon and soot. So even if the wood is from a well managed wood lot, where all wood harvested is replaced within five years or so by new growth, the problem is that soot has many times the global warming potential of CO2. Most wood stoves produce a fair amount of smoke - so even if the source is carbon neutral, the conversion of ordinary carbon in the wood into black carbon has a net global warming effect greater than natural gas or propane. New wood stoves with catalytic coverters or reburners don't have this problem to as extreme an extent, though they still produce some black carbon and I'm not sure how they compare to natural gas or propane. But older ones are definitely worse from a climate change perspective than natural gas or propane.

Yeah, I read the wind advisory yesterday, which didn't start until 11 today, and was all, oh, okay, as long as I move the wood before noon. Two flaws in that premise. 1: Noon not before eleven. 2: Wind does not actually just start at 35mph at time of advisory, just only then gets over the threshold of warning.

But it's okay, 'cause, done. The winds are craxy, though.

The new ones even without catalytic converters are much better than the old ones. It does give off a certain amount of pollution, of course, but when I'm burning well, there's no smoke visible from the chimney. Now, when I'm not paying attention or am being stubborn about starting from last night's coals, and let it smoulder, then it is both visible and clearly polluting.

Our wood all comes from snags or fallen wood. I don't know how that rates in sustainability, because the forests aren't being manually cultivated to replace the falls, but the natural regrowth is considerable. Most of our wood comes from fire prevention land-clearing. Out here all the small diameter trees go to the local pellet stove plant and paper mill. Both when we do it and when our primary vendor does, it comes from either state forest land permits or clearing private land.