2010

I know I said I would be making more entries but it just didn't work out that way.
Since September I have first been getting ready for winter by installing a new wood stove, blowing in another 10 inches of insulation in the attic, some miscellaneous weather stripping and other stuff associated with winter up here.

Then it was time to start getting ready for Christmas and New Years. And then things started falling apart so I've been kept busy putting them back together. Actually the getting ready for the holidays was not all that big of a deal.
For Thanksgiving it was just Scott and Mary and me but we did cook a real turkey and made our own cranberry sauce from wild cranberries picked out back. This may not have been a first but it was not how we usually spend Thanksgiving so it was special. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas Mary and I both did quite a bit of baking making cookies and pies and even a cake kind of thing.
For Christmas all the kids, Maija, Scott and Brad, came up here for Christmas Eve dinner and gift exchanging. Then Maija and Brad went on up to the cabin near Talkeetna for the night. Scott hung around until Christmas afternoon and that was it. New Years eve was a perfect day/night. The sky was clear the moon was full and it wasn't too cold. Lots of fireworks were shot off around Nancy Lake so we had a pretty good show until the wee hours of January 1. It's been a rather slow year so far. There hasn't been a lot of snow so far so snowmobiling isn't all that great. This would have been a good year for me to turn the pond into a skating rink since there has only been about a foot of snow, but I'm lazy.

Recently I found that my network router and webserver had been hacked and we were loosing band width. I replaced the router with another one I had laying around and it forced me to take the web site off line. Then I found out that even though it recognized attacks from outside it didn't block them it only logged them so I had to upgrade again. I was able to put the web site back online but I noticed an awful lot of activity on the computer when nothing should have been going on so after some searching I found that a rootkit virus had been installed on the computer and someone other then me could actually take control of it at anytime and do what ever they wanted to do with it. I'm in the process of making a permanent fix for this problem but until then I only have the webserver online when I'm around.

Monday we had a bit of a scare when I built a fire in the new wood stove. It was just getting going when a bit of a north wind came up which increased the draft in the stove. I was in the back room working on fixing the webserver when the smoke detector started going off. I knew immediately when I walked into the living room that I had a chimney fire going. With the old stove a chimney fire was no big deal. I would let it burn for a bit to clean the creosote out of the chimney then close down the air to the stove and it would go out after a bit.

This stove doesn't work the same way, I found. It is not an air tight stove design so even when it is all closed down air still gets in. Not knowing this at the time I closed the stove down and waited. The fire in the chimney kept getting hotter and stronger. The roar from the stove pipe was really scary and when I went out and looked at the chimney top it was cherry red and sparks were flying all over. I decided I had to do something before it burned through the chimney and started the house on fire. The information that came with the stove said to never throw water in the stove to put out a chimney fire but that is how I had learned to put them out when I was in the fire department so that's what I did. I really doesn't take much because the object is to make just enough steam to travel up the pipe and put the fire out. The stove is made of soap stone so care must be taken not to get water on the stone or they will crack. So I threw about a cup of water on the burning wood and closed the stove and waited. The fire went down for a while but then started roaring again so I threw another cup. I could see moisture dripping from the chimney rain cap so I knew the steam was getting to the fire. Once the chimney fire was out I got the embers out of the stove and let the whole thing cool for the night.

Next day I took the stovepipe down to inspect for damage and to see if there was anything more to clean out. The chimney and stovepipe were clean but the stove above the baffle was full of creosote. I went down the the guy I bought the stove from to ask him if he had any suggestions on how to put a chimney fire out in that stove and he said to just let it burn out as long as the chimney was installed correctly, it should take it. Then he said I need to clean the chimney at least once a month during heating season so there wont be fires in the first place. I was just so surprised because my routine with the old stove really kept the chimney pretty clean and I never had an unintentional chimney fire. But with that stove and the stove at the cabin I was able to burn the chemical cleaning logs once a month and when I did get the chimney going I could put it out by just sealing the stove because they were air tight.

Well this has taken over 6 hours to get this far so I'd better move on to the next project.