Cold Run With Ducks

According to the tracking device GPS smartphone I’ve been strapping to my arm, I ran 12.4 miles today. Almost a half-marathon. It was cold, but not as cold and windy as it could have been, and I managed to follow the open track along the canal without freezing any parts off.

This little smartphone’s pretty handy. Music, GPS, photography and video, plus a keyboard for word processing and note synchronizing? I kind of regret being such a curmudgeon about them for so long. The things are made for jogging.

Here’s another photograph to convey a bit of the joy I feel when running.

Most of those footprints are mine. I only encountered three other people along the whole route.

There were a bunch of ducks clucking away in one of the bends of the canal.

I’m not sure what the story was with these guys. The males were very dark in color and the females very light—or maybe it’s the other way round? Anyone know what they are?

ITAM Staycation Typecast

 

Overnight Coal Fire Success

 

And if I had one of these, I could stay warm forever!

Burning Coal in a Franklin Stove

It turns out this little Franklin stove burns coal pretty well.

That’s actually a coal grate that it came with, so I was expecting good results. It’s taken a good deal of experimentation and practice to heat with it, though. It’s kind of a hybrid stove, and not terribly efficient. We’d probably get more heat from a stove that sat out in the middle of the room with a pipe coming in at the back. But then we’d have to have a big stone slab in the middle of our floor, lose a bunch of our living space, and risk burning ourselves on the thing when we walked across the room.

Ain’t nobody got time for that.

The grate is made to sit up a few inches higher than shown in this picture. That would leave more space for the accumulation of ash underneath and make shoveling out a lot more convenient. We tried it that way a few times. I quickly got the hang of burning wood down to a hot bed of cinders before adding the coal, and then layering it up gradually until we got a slow, sustained burn. It burned most effectively with the doors closed and the dampers open on the bottom, so that the draw of the chimney drew a steady stream of air across the fire.

Problem was, the stove never threw any heat that way. It all went up the chimney. The body of the stove remained cool enough to touch. I’d heard stories of people’s coal fires getting out of control and turning their stoves cherry red. Close the dampers, cut off the air supply, said the experts. Be careful or you could burn your house down.

No concern about that here.

What seems to work for us is leaving the grate in the lower position. Then we can pile the coal a bit higher. If I close the doors for half an hour to get it nicely stoked up, I can open them and fill the house with heat for a couple hours after that. The only thing about leaving the grate down is we have to let it burn out at the end of the night, then pull the grate out the next day to shovel out the ash. Messy, perhaps. But it fits just fine with our heating habits.

I’ve read that combining wood and coal at the same time is a bad idea. It releases sulfuric acid and eats away the steel chimney liners like ours. The Irishman who delivered our firewood said they mixed coal and wood in the old country all the time, though, so I couldn’t resist trying it today. Just a bit. It gave us a nice blast of heat. The temperature at the sofa got up to 65 degrees!

It’ll be something I’ll do in moderation. Like smoking.

This coal is a handy way to go. It’s available at the local hardware store, a 40 lb. bag for $8.50. I can pick up a few bags in my Honda and be set for the week. It’s not like committing to a cord of firewood, a propane fill-up of $400, or, heaven forbid, one of those 275 gallon oil tanks that costs over $1000 to fill completely. And I can dump half a bag in there and let it burn for hours, instead of fiddling with logs every half hour or so. Wood fires are fun when you’re in the mood for them, but let’s face it—that’s not always.

Those big trophy houses with cathedral ceilings that were put up in the 90s (I sheet-rocked a couple of them in my ill-starred role as a drywall man’s assistant) cost $1500 a month to keep warm these days. So I’ve got yet another reason to be grateful for my modest little half-cape. Keeping this place warm with electric heat, when it was our only option, ran about $650 a month. When we rented it out to a woman from South Carolina, who didn’t know any better (even though we told her) and she kept the thermostat at 75, (even though we told her) and didn’t put plastic over the windows to stop the drafts (even though we told her) she paid in excess of $850. Using this stove and a couple cheap space heaters for select rooms has brought our electric bill down to $240. Of course, we have no heat on at night, or when we’re both out of the house. It’s cold in here when we come home. But that’s okay.

We’re New Englanders.

Running In Winter

I went for a run in the 14 degree weather the other day. This is the coldest exercise I’ve ever subjected myself to. The first ten minutes were tough but after that I was quite comfortable. Mostly.

We’ve had an inch of snow on the ground for several days, so it was interesting to see how many of the trails around here had not been trod by man or beast in that time. Most had coyote tracks running along them. Deer tracks would cross the hiking trails but not follow them. I didn’t see any signs of raccoon anywhere, or the wild turkey flocks that have been holding up traffic crossing Cape Cod roads of late.

Most of the hiking trails were free of any sign of human passage at all. I may have run them many times before, but this time I felt like an explorer.

One of these days, when it’s warmer, I’m going to chronicle some of the wonderful vistas I get to take in during my runs around here. Pausing to mess with a camera is a bit of a pain, but with this new budget android phone strapped to my arm for music and GPS, it’s hard to come up with an excuse for not taking some pictures.  On a day like this, though, it means I have to take the gloves off.

Still, I had to stop here and take some pictures. The power lines were breathtaking in the snow, and those cirrus clouds gave the sky an elegant texture below the moon.

Things got a little dicey when I made it down to the canal. This may be over-sharing, but I’ll do it in the name of safe fitness practice. The advice:

When one runs at freezing temperatures in wide open spaces with the wind in one’s face, one must take care to not freeze their bloody c**k off. Put on an extra pair of briefs or two before you leave. (Let’s just say I never thought I’d have an occasion to google “jogging penis frostbite,” but here we are.)

No worries, though. It was nothing a few minutes in front of the fire couldn’t cure.

Embracing Boredom

I like to be bored. I enjoy having the time to savor ordinary tasks. Building a fire. Washing the dishes. Splitting wood or mowing the lawn.

The embrace of boredom has been the great delight of my adulthood. It has also led to my being not as motivated as perhaps I should be, to lead a more interesting life. I probably should have gone back to school. I probably should have pursued a Capital-C Career. But once I managed to secure a house that kept me warm and a job that met the expenses, it became hard for me to want to stretch beyond that. 

Getting up in the morning and being all right with what you have to do. It's a kind of American dream. Not everybody gets to live it and it rarely lasts forever. But what the heck--why run from it?

David Foster Wallace, who wrote one of the world's most aggressively boring novels, said in his unfinished manuscript The Pale King that boredom made anything possible in this day and age. Wallace wrote a lot, because he didn't live long enough to get a smartphone.

This is probably true.

Here's his quote:

The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable.

It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.

On second thought he doesn’t quite have me pegged. I’m not so much immune to boredom as desirous of it.

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I love classical music, because there's a lot in there, but you have to be bored to take the time notice it all. And it doesn't impose itself on you. You want to think about something other than the music? Go right ahead. You want to play it while you read a book? It'll be there in the background. Glenn Gould once said something along the lines of he’d spent his career making the best elevator music he could. 

I like minimalist electronic trance type stuff as well. It, too, stays out of your way. There's not as much to listen for in it, so if you do want to focus on it, you have to sort of make up a story in your head to keep it interesting. You think, this has to be the soundtrack to something. And then you script your own little movie. You can project it on the back of your eyelids. I've had wonderful naps this way.

Smoking a pipe probably sounds boring to most folks too. Bent or straight shape? Birdseye or straight grain? English or Aromatic tobacco? And you mean you have to clean that thing, pack and light it, and then puff on it for half an hour?

Yawn. I love it.

This article at Smithsonian.com is fascinating. In defense of boredom. It refers to the blog of James Ward, I Like Boring Things, which is here. It’s nice to know that I’m not alone.

Sometimes I feel that the internet is robbing me of my own thoughts, whisking me through life before my time. I slow down with typewriters, which only display the letters I press. They are lousy for research but they are great for this other thing which I just made up, called pre-search. If you sit down at a typewriter and start moving your fingers, you bump up against your own limits and discover the things you really want to know. 

You keep those things in mind when you go out into the world looking for answers, you might be all right.

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