Here at the cabin, the pilot light is broken, the northwest wind is screaming, I don’t have a car to drive, and one’s on the way. Apologies to the late Loretta Lynn for my HORRIBLE paraphrasing of her song lyrics One’s On The Way. This is a really good song and even if you are not a country music fan, you should listen to it.

And no, of course one’s not on the way here. I birthed two beautiful baby girls but that train left the station a loooong time ago.

We heat the moomincabin via a propane stove and a couple of space heaters if and when we need them. Before I went to bed last night, I made sure the propane stove was set at “pilot”. Waking up throughout the night as I often do, I kept hearing an irregular ticky noise which I attributed to the stove but it didn’t alarm me and I always went back to sleep. At 4:00 AM, I woke up and was sentient enough to actually get OUT of bed to go to the water closet and check the stove. It was set just a tad above “Pilot”. I turned it to *exactly* pilot. When I got up in the actual morning, I turned the gas up to low but nothing happened. No pilot light. I’m enough of a wimp that I don’t know how to light the pilot light.

It was okay. It’s midsummer and I was not cold at all, even with a strong northwest wind.

When I was a little kid and my parents first built this teensy tinesy wee little cabin in the woods on the shores of Gitchee Gumme, we had a wood stove here. We had to order wood and collect kindling and that was a pain in the butt. The biggest pain was that when it was cold in the morning, my parents would faaaar up the stove and then later in the day, when the beach temperature warmed up to 80 or whatever, our wood stove would still be kicking out heat. This one heats up and cools down quickly. When it’s working…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 28th, 2026 at 7:15 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.