I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals. I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants.

Title quote attributed to A. Whitney Brown

So it is cold here. Florida cold, for those of you who want to scoff that I don't know what real cold is. And to those of you thinking that, let me just quote Calvin, the Ed-like half of Calvin and Hobbes, when he said, "I don't know, and I refuse to find out."

All my plants are brown and hopefully not completely dead. Even trees, who you would think that due to their relative immobility would have evolved some kind of defensees to the elements, are brown and pitiful. I added cow manure ('cause what gets you through the winter better than bovine crap?), mulched the base of each tree about 3" deep for about 9" around, and wrapped them in towels and sheets. Still, mango, tamarind, banana, and especially papaya trees look like toast. Spring will tell if they are dead or just stunned. Why do I tell you this? Because I can, I suppose.

So let me tell you a true story from King George County, VA. Ninde, VA to be exact, although it is one of the few things you can google and get nothing back on. It was very rural. All the business, employment, and realty links google displays are not really valid. Google results page 4 had the first valid link, and it was MapQuest (http://www.mapquest.com/maps?city=Ninde&state=VA). App Intel, you may want to hit this link as it shows just how close I was to Camp A.P. Hill. (I swear, it was a camp) It was about a 30 min drive to get there, but you pretty much had the place to yourself once you got there. Especially the lakes and ponds.

So, in my triple wide trail...er, manufactured home I had a wood stove in the den. I loved that sucker. I heated exclusively with it. Well, it and a couple of box fans to move the warm air around the trai...er, house. It sat right next to my easy chair, so I could watch TV in warm toastiness. Even better, I had an old aluminum camp pot that I kept handy. I would drip brew a pot of coffee, put it in the camp pot, and put the camp pot on the wood stove. Now I did have to balance it in such a way that only about 30% of the pot was on the stove and the other 70% (killer math skills) hung off into space. Otherwise the coffee boiled pretty quickly and tasted bitter. Still, this allowed me to keep refilling my cup with hot coffee without ever having to get up. Well, I would need to get up once the coffee had fulfilled it's purpose and was ready to be returned to the earth in a modified liquid form. Yes, I am saying that I would just go out the backdoor and pee in the woods. What's the point of living in the country if you can't pee outside, right?

So I have been enjoying it all for the entire Virginia winter; TV, toastiness, and convienent coffee. And let me tell you, a setup like that is hard to let go of. And that is where Cindy, a no-nonsense Jonesville, NC girl comes into the picture.

It is starting to be Spring. Cool enough to justify a fire in the morning but warm in the afternoons. You know the weather I'm talking about. Cindy had come over to do something. She walked in off the back deck, took a look at me and shook her head semi-disapprovingly. I'm thinking, "What? I have pants on and I wasn't even expecting anybody." "You are pitiful," she clucked and walked off to find Rene (my ex). Well, of course I had to laugh. I mean, she was absolutely right.

See, it would warm up faster than I could finish a pot of coffee. And when Cindy arrived a little before lunchtime, there I was, with a fire in the stove, pot perched precariously upon it, sweating like hooker in church, with the sliding glass door wide open and the box fan on high blowing sideways across my face. Why? Well, I did all that just to save myself from having to rise and walk into the next room for a cup o' joe. And that, friends, is indeed pretty pitiful.

Another thing I learned about a woodstove. Or perhaps I learned it about snow. Anyhow, I learned something abpout something, which is not an everyday occurance. We had just had an ice storm, and as you all know, that is God's way of telling the power company that they need to replace power lines.

Power was out all over the place and of course our neck of the woods ended up as one of the last to be reconnected because of our sparse population. We ended up without power for 4 days, but going into it we did not know how long it would be out. We had hurricane lamps, we heated with wood, and we had a one burner kerosene camp stove. Yes, kerosene. I bought it in Korea or Hong Kong. We also had 3 toilets, so we figured we'd be OK. We just had to go outside to pee (she was a Louisiana country girl) and saved the toilets for more solid works of art. We had well water on an electric pump, so there was one flush per throne and then we were done til the pump came back on. Or were we?....

As the days wore on, eventually, each one of them had to be flushed. I pondered on it because I am the ponderizer, and then, had a brilliant idea to save the day. Since we have plenty of snow, I noted, we just need to put a big pot of it on the woodstove and melt it down to water. We will then pour that water into the tank and then wallah (c'mon, Voilà !, spells vo-ill-ah) we will be flush-o-matic once again. BRILLIANT! Thank you.

Only, for some reason, the snow would not melt. Maybe the big pot was sinking the heat away, I don't know. All I know is that while I could boil coffee on that stove, I could not manage to melt snow. I did get curious on just how long melting this snow was going to take, and it took a couple of hours. Worse yet, after waiting a couple of hours for it to melt, I didn't get enough actual water to brush my teeth. Apparently, snow is the white bread of elements. No volume, just mostly air.

So......

If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error, out

Ramblin' Ed