All kinds of miscellaney

What a wonderfully productive holiday break this has been! I have:

* Skied every day.
* Feasted and skied with friends I hadn't seen in months.
* Repaired my hearth.
* Replaced the gasket on my wood stove.
* Shoveled a path to my woodpile, cleared my wood pallets, and gotten back into splitting wood.
* Reorganized my car emergency stuff.
* Done my laundry.
* Tackled another round of feedback to my thesis.
* Drafted a syllabus and organized notes to teach ME344 next semester.

So here are deets on the more interesting stuff.

In a book I was reading, an old Wyoming man freezes to death on a cold, blizzardy night because he's lost his way, his car has gotten stuck in snow, and he had forgotten his duffel bag of emergency supplies in his other car.

I thought to myself, duffel bag? That's brilliant! I had had my emergency supplies tucked into every nook and cranny of my car--very tidy, but difficult to remember which was where when I needed it. So this evening, I pulled all of that stuff out and into my living room:


All that's missing are the tire jack and the bottles of fluids (oil, IsoHeet, and coolant), because those sit too nicely in the Subaru's nooks and crannies to remove.

My sister has expressed contempt at my desire to be able to save myself should the need ever arise, comparing me to the Unabomber. Be that as it may, I'd prefer to minimize my chances of ending up like this guy or this guy, or even this couple or this family, who both survived after a long, cold wait. The Unabomber, I'd like to point out, is still alive, and wouldn't be in jail if he didn't kill people. So I figure, if I can refrain from killing people (which is certainly a challenge at times, for example, on weekday afternoons when I am still at work and all out of Triscuits), I can afford the great mental risk that comes with keeping survival skills sharp. Also, I have prettier hair and probably prettier shoes than he does.

Not to mention--a vintage Sun Microsystems duffel bag! Look how nicely it holds my stuff!


So in addition to the brilliant (to me, anyway. Smarter people have long figured out the uses of duffel bags) idea to shove everything all together in a duffel bag, I have recently learned two other things. Firstly, that my emergency blanket really ought to be wool. Worst case scenario, if I am ever spending a night out exposed, keeping warm by a fire, a wool blanket is far safer than a synthetic one. So I pulled out my fuzzy fleecy synthetic blanket and replaced it with a felted wool one. The second is that matches don't work so well when they are cold and possibly damp from frost accumulation. Yes, I know, those Coleman camping matches supposedly work when damp, but have they ever worked easily for you in the rain? Me neither. So I picked up a cheap BIC lighter the next time I was at AIH. The clerk who was checking me out attempted to pass it to me after he had rung it up, saying, "You wanna just hang on to this?" I realized that he took me for a smoker, and figured I'd want it in my pocket. I was mildly taken aback, but shook my head no and informed him to put it into my bag.

Okay, now onto my hearth. I have two women friends who are quite warm-blooded and chill easily, so they like to sit on my hearth, toasting their backs against the stove. The other evening, as one of them got up to leave, the front row of false bricks crumbled off behind her. She was appalled, exclaiming, "I'll go to the gym more often!" I laughed. She's about the size of my right thigh. Anyway, the next day, I pulled off all of the loose false bricks, chipped them clean:


and took one of them to The Woodway. My mom, in the days before GPS and google maps and mapquest, always told me, "A map is in your mouth." So, too, are repair instructions for almost any project, especially in rural towns, where there are so many do-it-yourselfers. A kind man at he Woodway informed me that grouting false bricks onto a slab of plywood was a crap way to build a hearth; no wonder it was falling apart! I needed to build myself a proper hearth, by blahblahblah-ing and then blahblah-ing and then, finally, by blahblahblah-ing. I sighed and looked as pathetic as possible. "But if you just want to do a quick fix..." I perked up. "You can just stick these back on with Liquid Nails and then grout around 'em." I liked that! Special heat-proof grout? Nah, ordinary grout'll do. Liquid Nails holds up in the heat? Yes, he'd seen it used around stoves before. Score!

But when I was at AIH, I found this:


Intriguing. It said it would seal gaps in chimneys. I also liked that it was grey in color, so the flubs I was certain to make would be less visible.

Well, step 1 went okay:


I weighted it to let it cure overnight:


then realized that putting my water jugs in front of the stove was probably sub-optimal (algae in the water supply, anyone?), so I replaced them:


The next day, I found that my experimental filler-stuff was a mess. It didn't apply very cleanly, and it was thick as tar. I was barely strong enough to push it out with the caulking gun. I ended up squeezing a whole mess of it onto a piece of cardboard, and applying it with a painter's spatula. It was messy, messy, messy. In the end, I gave up on aesthetics and just smeared it every-freaking-where:


But voila! I finished!

When it had cured, I found that it felt plasticky and rubbery, like kitchen and bathroom caulk, but that it paradoxically had pokey edges. I filed and sanded them down. When I shovel my ashes and sweep my stove clean, I feel like Hestia. This job... was less meditative.


The stove gasket was a tad more problematic since the adhesive requires two hours of curing time before I can light a fire. So, when is the stove cool in winter? Weekday mornings, before I go to work, and weekday evenings, when I first get home from work. The former is out of the question since I'm rushing off to work and have no desire to fuss around with my stove. The latter is also out of the question because when I get home, the first thing can think to do is light a fire, and to spend even the twenty or so minutes in the cold to replace the gasket, and then run to a neighbor's house for the following two hours, was unthinkable to me.

Finally, temperatures came up:


So I was able to replace the gasket as well! No major mishaps there, except that the adhesive instructed me to "knead with fingers before applying." Sooooo... I imagined that it needed to be warmed and softened before applying, and figured that I'd squeeze a bit into my hand, knead it, roll it long, then stick the section on, then repeat until I had rimmed the stove door. The adhesive... it came sploodging out into my hand. Knead? How in heck was I supposed to knead this stuff? Finally, it occurred to me--they mean knead it in the tube, as in, to make sure that the contents are mixed, before applying it. Duuuuuhhhh. So I washed my hands, kneaded the tube, and applied a nice little ring around the stove door before shoving in the gasket. Then I rounded up the doggies and went skiing for two hours! Yay!

Happy New Year, Everyone!