Doesn’t look like we’ll be needing the ol’ kiva fireplace in the master bedroom for a while, if the long-range forecast is any guide.

Actually, we’ve never needed it, nor the bigger one in the living room neither. We both got our fill of wood-burning Back in the Day®, when we lived at 8,800 feet in frosty CrustyTucky and tossed big chunks of aspen, cedar, piñon, and oak into the Lopi fireplace insert faster than ICE Barbie’s masked goons throw brown people out of the country, only with less horseshit and gunfire.

Here in scenic cosmopolitan Duck!Burg, a couple-three thousand feet lower and more than a few Fahrenheit degrees higher, we manage to skate by with fossil fuels. This keeps Your Humble Narrator away from chainsaws, always a good idea, especially in these dark days. Will he do an injury to himself or someone else? Stay tuned!

The chainsaw always made me nervous, actually. What I liked was splitting rounds with the ax, another implement that should probably be under lock and key for the duration. The chainsaw is long gone, but I still have an ax, a couple smallish camping hatchets, and a few handsaws in case I need to dispose of a body … uh, of some downed limbs! Tree limbs!

Goddamnit, this is what comes of reading the news of a morning. Some days there just isn’t enough coffee in the world.

But it does look like we will have oddly springlike conditions for the near future, and so instead of burning wood or anything else, I can expend a few calories on the old bikey-bike. And without all the heavy-weather gear, too.

At this rate, an old white guy could find himself browning up enough to get deported. I hear South Sudan is lovely this time of year.

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