Saturday Shopping

I hate shopping at the best of times. Today we tried yet again to purchase a pellet stove. This time, we were successful. I am alternately glad and unhappy about this! Glad because our living room doesn't get over 55 degrees without a pellet stove on a really cold winter cold snap. It isn't really uncommon in our area to have cold snaps where it is in the zero or below zero area for a week or so several times in a year. 55 degrees inside is really cold. Particularly when 2 family members are children under 6 and one family member has Reynauds. (me) I tend to look like someone out of Les Mis most of the winter anyway. Even with a pellet stove, our home's temp is about 65 or so. I am comfy a good many degrees above that. So I wear thermals, wool sox, fingerless gloves and usually walk around wrapped up in a polar fleece cloak that I used to snug around me in this weird way that helped also carry the kids when they were smaller. Sort of like an Artic version of a rebozo. They are past rebozos now. I am not sure I am ever going to be warm enough in winter to be past the cloak. Unless of course, we move to AZ.

Last Sunday we went to the pellet stove store. They were supposed to be open but weren't. We called this Saturday before we went over. Seems the owners wife was very ill last week and he took her to the ER. Poor soul. I have taken people I love to ER. I feel for him. But we went today and because we can only use a Thelin stove in our living room. (we have 6 windows in the room and there are all kinds of regs about how near or far from a window your piping can be) and because we have a very weird small footprint to put the stove on, the only model which works is made the by the Thelin company. This is actually a pellet stove that looks like an old fashioned parlour stove. That also sort of works for our house which is a quasi victorian. We used to have the model called the "gnome" and it did us well for 7 years. But last year it backburned and fried out the insides (thankfully not us, though) and needed to be replaced. We were able to buy last years Thelin but a model that is larger than the gnome (basically taller, so it can hold a whole bag of pellets). And for less than if we ordered this years "gnome" version. Plus this floor model even had the pretty trim which our old one didn't as that costs extra and I am cheap.

Except that the need for so many folks to use alternative energies made this still an expensive purchase. Significantly more than we shelled out before when we bought the first stove. So that is the "unhappy" part of alternately happy and unhappy over this. But we will be as warm as it is possible to be in this house this winter and that is good. Now I have to order 2 ton of pellets. Sigh.