Miscellaneous

Along with 'sundry' one of my most favourite words. Anticipatory word. My wood-stove shop tells me today that they are all sold out of the woodstove I want, the factory can't keep up with the orders. People who never wanted to burn a matchstick in their lives now want to burn wood due to, yeah, oil - both price (now) and shortage (coming). So I'm feeling it. I do have an old old woodstove, Enterprise made it but the oven has no rack and it seeps ash in from its rusty corner. Plus no one seems able to cut wood to fit it and I may have to resort to what Doreen up village did and buy my own chain saw. What a sight that would be. Meanwhile, I'll make do and maybe shop further for one. I just want a little one.
I hear great things of something called a Russian oven which entails building an oven of ceramic blocks, thing is it heats your whole house on one log of wood. Expensive though. $5000 or $6000 and only one or two professionals who can build it on the entire east coast.
Reading Alan Bennett - 'Untold Stories', he has such a gift for writing, even though he struggles like the rest of us writers and writes everything long hand. Unlike me, ten years younger than him, he missed out on the whole technological transformation of the globe. Am I ever grateful that I got in under the wire. I absolutely adore the web, the internet, file exchange, digital cameras, ditto phones, palm pilots, printing my own photos and cards, email every day to friends, research and on and on. This has to remain in the public domain, like water, like education, like health care, like heritage sites, like old buildings and old forests, like child care and some of these are pipe dreams I know but we have to have all of it for us, the common folks. And I'd put same sex marriage in there too. What is up people's noses on that issue anyway?? I can never understand it. Ever. I get along better with my own sex and with gay men than I ever do with those mysterious beings of the opposite sex, apart from my brothers whom I sometimes don't understand either. Are men so simple really? Sex and food? That's it? It can't be.....tell me it ain't so....