The quest for fire

It looks like the warm and sunny autumn days we've been having since moving to Vermont are coming to a rapid close. Today it's cold, about 47 degrees, and pouring with rain. Snow is forecast for Friday night so we'll probably be lighting the fire for the first time. Can two muppets who are used to October being sunny and warm survive?

The house we're renting does have forced air heating which works really well, but it could do with a boost from the fire. We'd really put no thought into where to get firewood, nor how much we'd need. I realise that makes us sound a bit stupid, but when you're used to "cold" meaning "it's 58 degrees" the words "hey, does Vons sell firewood?" never cross your mind.

But we're in Vermont, where almost everyone has a fireplace or a wood stove, and the state is 76% covered by forest. Finding firewood should be easy, right?

Haha.

Today we tried at a supermarket, which sold kindling by the ton but no wood. Alicia asked the kid at the checkout, who told us his family got it from a guy who owns 50 acres of forest. "I think his name's Tom." Awesome. We picked up some of the packaged, pre-treated logs (above photo) in a sort of "I guess this will work?" moment.

Onwards to Home Depot, where first off we couldn't find the firewood because we were looking in the wood section when we should have been looking in the garden section. We made our way there and discovered what we'd been looking for. After all, wood is wood, right?

Well... according to the packaging on the five different types of firewood, some is good for indoors, some for outdoors, some for cooking, some is treated to burn faster, and for all I know some is made for ritually sacrificing goats so the sun will come back out in March. 

Alicia had the best idea: run away. No, she asked the guy sweeping the floor. He looked suitably taken aback at two seemingly fully-functioning intelligent adults asking which wood is best for a fire, and answered as best as he could by basically telling us that it comes from different types of tree. We picked up two packs of different wood and made our way to the checkout desperately trying not to look like clueless flatlanders.

Back home it was down to me to make the fire because despite living my entire life with central heating (and the past 16 years living somewhere with 350 days a year of sunshine) I have an innate ability to set a pile of wood in a small brick alcove ablaze without burning down the house and everything else within a 10-mile radius. After reading the instructions on the prepackaged logs, I put it in the grate, put a couple of logs on top, set it alight and we had fire. 

This made us and the dogs happy. Seeing as Cadbury would try to get under the blankets when it was 70 degrees, I knew he'd have issues with the cold. So we bought him a sweater that makes him look like a test signal on an old black-and-white telly:

Erebus is apparently weatherproof given her sheer joy at running around in the pouring rain. Mo is more like Cadbury but has developed a cunning plan to use Alicia's coat as a blanket, and Watson keeps warm by surrounding himself with a cloud of farts.