Oh Winter, There you Are

Winter! It’s finally arrived. I’ve been looking for it since about mid-November, and it’s finally decided to show up. Suffice to say, I’m a bit excited about it. As it is about negative thirty-five degrees with the wind chill today, Kevin and I have decided to take the day off of attempting to hack our home site out of the woods. It’s a great day to huddle around the woodstove and watch movies and drink hot cocoa. Maybe we’ll get really unruly and put a shot of whiskey in it. We’re rebels now.

The sad part about this whole scenario, is that just a few miles away, lives the ‘air-stagnation zone’. I like to think of it like The Nothing from The Never Ending Story. Like myself, I hope you are thinking, air-stagnation zone? Missoula, Montana? These things just don’t mix. Well, my friends, apparently they do. The rules are also fairly fierce, just like the winter. When it finally gets here.

Any sort of wood burning stove is illegal in Missoula. Now, I think to myself, humans have been burning wood since they discovered fire. I’m not really sure that burning wood is the reason for any sort of air stagnation. I mean, sure, it can be unruly if everyone is burning wood twenty-four hours a day, but with the cost of conventional electric, not to mention propane heating, people can’t even afford to heat their homes. Much less get some whiskey to booze up their hot chocolate.

Burning coal produces most of the country’s electricity. Really, I’m sure that doesn’t have anything to do with air pollution. When you refine crude oil and natural gas, mix them together… what’s the result? Ding, ding, . Sounds expensive huh. Guess, what, it is.

So, I guess the end result is, we can’t burn wood that surrounds us and is heavily replanted every year, but we can burn huge amounts of coal, and refine crude oil (that we happen to be in a war over by the way) and import it all here, where we naturally have none. Sounds logical to me.

Unfortunately, that is for the people that live a few miles down the road. I’m glad that we live on our side of the mountain, where we can enjoy burning wood, and reap the nice warm benefits. That happen to be boozy hot chocolate.