Monday is my usual day for going to town, to check on things in the office, see what’s happening with the town folk.  Not today.  My ankle is still quite swollen and hurts.  I think it’s best to just stay off my feet and keep that foot packed in snow.  20 minutes on, 20 minutes off.  During the 20 minutes off, I try to get something done: fill the wood stove to stay warm, mainly.  Wood supply is good for another day or two, before I need to do something about it.  My biggest problem at this point is clearing the driveway to get out.  A foot of snow is a bit much to drive thru.  If I rest and ice today, maybe I’ll be able to run the snow-blower tomorrow.  I have to get the car out, five miles is a bit much to walk into town.  So far the plow trucks haven’t been by to clear the road though, so it might be moot.  I might be stuck here.

I noticed a few days ago that the smoke diverter on my stove was hard to move, then wouldn’t move at all.  Since it was stuck in the ‘out the chimney’ position, I wasn’t real concerned, but in the ‘around the over box’ position, it was easier to maintain the temperature for baking.  I pulled the wheeled table closer to the stove and spread it with newspapers.  The stove had cooled off enough during the night so I could handle the top plates, but it was really chilly in here so I wanted to assess what needed to be done quickly.  Fortunately it’s a simple mechanism, and the grooves it slides in were just crudded up.  After 18 years I guess that’s to be expected.   I wire brushed and swept, wire brushed and swept again, manually moving the diverter plate back and forth to loosen up even more.   Finally it moved smoothly, and I put the stove back together.  I used the papers the sooty top plates had just been sitting on and started up a fire.  It took less than 15 minutes to fix it; there’s really not much that can go wrong that a good cleaning won’t fix.   Had this situation been different, I would have called Jason over to check it out; but it’s not different, and in many ways I’m on my own, just like the town is.  Maybe I should insist he and Jacob move in.  But then, I did fix it myself.