One More Lesson Learned.

Are you wondering why my vacuum is sitting on the porch? No, I wasn't cleaning off the sawdust that I track in from the barn everyday. And I wasn't showing off my spiffy apple green machine to all the neighbors driving by. The one problem with having a woodstove in the family room is the amount of wood bits and bark that winds up spread around the room. Add to that, the collection of sawdust that always seems to get caught in the bottom edges of my jeans until I sit down on the couch. At that point it lets go and after a while it begins looking like I have the whole sawdust pile on the carpet.

I've been very busy lately, trying to juggle the improvements on our house and the house on Stanley Street. As a result, the family room was beginning to look a bit neglected, a little untidy. Finally a moment when I could drag my spiffy green machine out and suck up all that mess. It was looking so nice, and then suddenly Don, who's been sitting on the couch behind me, quietly staring at his computer, is leaping up and shouting, well, I don't know what he was shouting, but he was making a lot of noise.
And as I turned around to see what all the fuss was about, I saw the yellow smoke billowing out of my vacuum. Oh yeah, I remember now what Don was shouting...."stop it,stop it!!!" He's always the one making a fuss and standing there as if frozen in his tracks. I just grabbed the whole vacuum and hauled it out to the porch still flooding the yard now with the horrible stinking smoke.

In my enthusiasm for cleaning, I must have picked up a small ember from the area around the stove and the wind inside the vacuum fanned it and set the debris in the bag alight! Exciting, eh? What I have learned from this? Well, let me see, I think I've learned that keeping the vacuum away from the little front shelf of the stove is a good idea. I think from now on I'll sweep it off into the ash bucket instead.

We've had 1/2 a year of interesting learning experiences and I think that next winter will be a little easier. We'll have all our winter wood in the basement before the first snow falls, the horse shelter "floor" will have been lifted with the addition of some gravel mix and swales dug around to to prevent the formation of a skating rink in there, and we'll have curtains (heavy, thick ones) on all the windows to retain the heat in our house. But it's all good, we're having a good time in the school of life!