The home we rent has a large, unfinished basement that runs the whole length of the house. It was quite empty for weeks when we first moved here--our regular readers may recall that our household goods took approximately one-and-a-half geologic epochs to get here. Now it is chock full of said household goods--the stuff that we don't need immediately (ever?), that can wait until we move into a more permanent home.
In one corner of this basement is a big ol' woodstove (a Wood Chief). Our landlords, when they were still in residence here, would burn it on weekends--Mr. Landlord is very handy and would work on furniture projects on his workbench while the stove was ablaze. When we moved in, they told us to feel free to use it as a backup heat source, and to use up all their wood (and there were probably a good 3 to 3.5 cords of excellent dry firewood down here, very generous of them).
Mr. Landlord had also cut two vents into the living room floor, so some of the heat would go up there. Now, not long after we got here, I was looking around in the basement, stroking the old beard (always a catalyst for musing), and I thought, "Hey...if I hung a couple tarps from the rafters, I could make a little 12' x 12' room around the stove. It's a small house, so an extra Room of Leisure would be a plus, and the contained space would warm up nicely. In fact, it would push much more heat up through the vents, too--sweet!" [Cognitive note: I did not actually think those words, but rather some imaginative-conceptual-image thingies. But those don't make for good narrative. If I do ever start thinking in deliberate sentences, and I begin my sentences with, "In fact," then I will slap myself. Carry on...]
So, I did just that, wayyy back in January. The tarps I got were perfect: just the right size, blue on one side and silver on the other. I made silver the interior, so as to reflect the light. Oh, yeah, furnishings: one floor-lamp, one table lamp on this square table the landlords left down here, two camp chairs, and a leftover rectangle of beige carpet that covers most of the concrete floor in one half of the room. Behold The Drones (as seen from without):
And look at all those boxes--not looking forward to another move, oy. I'm down in The Drones right now with Stella, who is sulking over the arrival of That New [insert stream of feline invective] Kitty (see Kate's previous blog entry, and surely more entries to come). Oh well, we knew she was going to have a cow, whaddaya do? Stella and Lily will never be fast friends, but I hope we can get to "forced peace" before long.
The Drones, by the bye, takes its name from Bertie Worcester's gentlemen's club in the P. G. Wodehouse books about Jeeves and Worcester. It is a Place of Repose from the World, where all one needs is a warm fire, a cat, the Globe & Mail, and maybe a pint of suds. (Or a glass of wine and a cozy mystery, if you happen to be the blogger's wife. That's a real sub-genre, by the way--"cozy" mysteries. I keep thinking Kimm has read them all, but she keeps finding more.)
Erik relaxing, "where time comes dropping slow":
We tend to fire up The Drones mainly on snowy nights. And funny thing, those seemed to be declining, and then...well, we've had something of a chilly resurgence in April so far, with snowfall both weekends. I wrote in an earlier entry about Sheila's Brush being a snowstorm around St. Patrick's Day, so I don't know what these post-Easter snowfalls are...Sheila's Carpet-beating??
None of this snow is lasting, though, as the days are all above freezing, now. Friends and family in the South are having all kinds of fun teasing us--"It's in the low 80s today, the azaleas are out," yadda yadda. 'Sokay, come August there will be days when I say, "It's in the upper 70s today, how y'all making out with 98?"
Here's a small album with some more Drones pics, plus other photos I nev
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| The Drones; Erik's b-day in March |
And Now for Something Completely Different: a Bird-Feeder the Size of a Tree:
(It sometimes goes on rampages around the metropolis.)
