January Jump: Make Preparedness Notebook; Build Fire; Create a Home-Escape Plan (hopefully not needed directly upon building fire)
Completed: Build Fire
For months, I’ve been happy to load the wood into our stove, but I refused to learn how to light it myself. Until this weekend, that is. On Saturday, I built a fire in our chiminea and wood stove.
* Crumpled the comics up real small (they’ll burn longer that way)
* Piled on a good amount of small, dry twigs in the classic tee pee formation.
* Lit the bottom of the newspaper balls with a lighter, and whoosh: fire!
* Ryan taught me how to build up some nice hot coals by adding wood that is successively bigger in size.
* Left the flu open until the stove was burning nice and hot.
* My chiminea fire even crisped the edges of some delicious marshmallows. If that’s not success, I don’t know what is.
* (And due to Ryan’s thorough lesson plans, I even learned how to rake the ashes through the grate in the morning and start a fire with last night’s coals. Bonus material.)
Here’s an article with more details about building a fire in all kinds of circumstances. This information is going straight into my Preparedness Notebook (that post is coming soon!).
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