I've seen pictures of your Black Panther; the other mice probably leave the `last-picked-for-mouseball' ones tied out for her convenience. Cat has been going out regularly up until now. She seems to consider -25 her cutoff point. Can't say I disagree.
Dix, I agree, small price. Odd, I've read about people who have a hard time convincing their cat to use a litterbox, cats that are fussy about location, etc.. This is just the opposite: cat has been trying to persuade me all week that installation of modern indoor facilities would be a nice upgrade. Leaves brochures sitting around, bookmarks websites, says it will make the place more marketable, etc. Come to think of it, I believe there was a no-cats-upstairs-rule around here, which morphed into a no-cats-on-the-bed rule, and then a foot-of-the-bed-only rule, and so it went. Insidious little beast. Still holding fast on the `leave-the-mouse-outside' rule, though.
Kenny, you have a fair point. Why do I live here and then whine about it getting cold? Answer: kids in school, work, house, friends, etc. It has its charms, but -30 isn't one of them (unless it was down to -50 for a week or three, then -30 looks pretty good.) Also, this winter is a little tougher than most because I am heating 24/7 exclusively with wood. It was a lot easier with a boiler and a warm garage. With the responsibility for keeping my fleet of ancient vehicles running (unheated garage is still warmer than the driveway) and keeping the house warm enough not to worry about the plumbing, and throw in a teenage son who is pretty sure that he's already forgotten a great deal more than I know, and holding down a job, I'm stretched kind of thin some days. Getting on here and blowing off a little steam about it seems to give me the resolve to go stick my feet in a pair of bunny boots and pull down a few more sled-loads of wood from the garage. Don't take me too seriously--it's just how I keep the ball rolling.
Randy, I don't know of anyone going through the kind of wood you're describing--17 or 18 cords!--I'd have to install a revolving door on my sunroom and on the stove!
Gassifier, thanks for giving me an opportunity to bore people with my details (again).
I'm in the Fairbanks area (where we refer to BDave's neighborhood as the banana belt), and we're getting into a bit of a cold snap here. I am heating a 2000sf house, two stories, 40x26 (internal measurements) oriented on the long axis to the sun. Lots of glass to the south, a few windows on each side to the E & W, and one tiny window to the north in my door. The house is built into a hillside so I have an upstairs door at ground level and a downstairs door to the east at ground level. The house is double-wall construction, with R60 in the attic (two layers of batting). All the plumbing is indoors, and the water tank is buried and the connections indoors are earth-sheltered.
I also have a detached garage where my boiler lived before it died. At that point, I was heating the garage with the residual heat from the boiler plus the house via glycol through a utilidor on about 830 gallons of fuel oil a year.
Now that I am heating just with wood, I think I'll use about 5 cords of wood this winter: 1-1/2 cords of birch, 2 cords of beetle-killed spruce, and about a cord-and-a-half of assorted spruce, poplar, etc. Sorry not to have more accurate numbers, but my goal of having all my wood lined up and stacked and seasoned before the winter arrived just went perfloof this year. I'm just grateful to have wood.
We also have one oil-filled electric radiator that kids and I shuffle from one bedroom to another. And blankets--lots of blankets. Try to keep the house around 68-70. but there are cold corners here. My goal for next winter is to have the boiler replaced so that I can enjoy the fire without being completely dependent upon it. Balanced heating.
My daughter flew out with her swim teammates for a week before they return to their campus for spring semester. She called from Florida. It was around -40 when she flew out last night, and she called this afternoon (our time) to report that she was walking on a beach in shorts and a t-shirt ("and the moon is right overhead and Orion is sideways!"). I had to cut the conversation short to help my son get his battery warmed up and charged (I held the door for him--that was my contribution--hey, I told him to put it in the garage!) That kid was feeling the pain of mechanic work in the sub-zeroes. It hurts!
We have a few members here out in the North Pole area--haven't seen them posting lately--they have probably frozen to death. They are 30-40 miles away, and run 10-30 degrees colder in the winter than up here in the hills.
