Happy Thanksgiving

Truly, we do have many things to be thankful for.  A few of the things for which I am thankful include my husband, children, extended family, and great friends as well as a nice warm home in which to live during this cold time.

It seems that winter snuck up on me.  I was not ready for the snow and the cold temperatures.  Each year I understand better why my mother liked to get away from it.  She and Dad went to Arizona for a few winters until he died.  Then she went down there by herself for many years.  I'm so glad that our family was able to visit her there.  It is one of my best memories as we went to Disneyland and we went camping on the beach in Mexico.

This morning I woke early.  It seems I always do.  The house didn't feel as cold as it was yesterday.  After checking the wood stove and finding the insides burned down to mostly ash I cleaned out the ashes as I do each time before I load it.  We have a little brick on the bottom of the stove that lifts out with a special metal bar created for this purpose.  Then I scrap all the ash into the pan below the stove which eliminates the dust getting around my house.  I have a big metal tub setting by the outside steps that I dump the ashes into and hope that Tim dumps later when he goes outside.  While doing that I found it didn't feel that cold even though I was in slippers and a sweatshirt.

Daniel is awake, too, and just checked the temperature.  Dish Network says it is 19 degrees with a ENE wind of 6mph.  When that feels warm you know that it was really cold yesterday!

My wood caught on fire already and I can hear it crackling.  I leave the door open so it can get air and start quicker.  There are usually only a few little coals left in it so sometimes it takes a few minutes for the wood to catch on fire.  Once it is going good I shut the door.  I have to leave the damper open until the gauge shows "active."  Then I can shut the damper and turn the control switch down a bit if I don't want the fire to burn too hot.  We rarely have it burning full blast as it gets too hot in here.  Yesterday we did use the electric fan to blow the warm air out though we still didn't have the stove burning at its hottest.

It is nice to heat our home this way.  We do have a good furnace that we can use but prefer the heat from wood.  I had been loading it once a day.  Since it got colder I needed to do it twice a day.  That's better than the old stove we had that we had to load every 3 hours or so.  It's not that this stove has a bigger fire box, it just burns more efficiently.  It was very worth the money!  It is called a Blaze King in case anyone is interested.

We had a nice Thanksgiving.  Our married daughter, Whitney, made a lovely meal.  Her turkey was scrumptious and the gravy...mmmmm!!  She had so much food but we ate almost all of it.  It was nice to have no mess to clean up!

My blogger friend, Tina, wrote on her blog about celebrating Thanksgiving and the first Thanksgiving, an encouraging read.  If you have time take a trip over there.

May we all continue being thankful and enjoy our time this weekend with our families.