Wednesday, October 19, 9:00 PM. Brewer.

The days are getting shorter. It’s been nice and cool lately, high of 67° today. It’s cold at night. This evening we lit the wood-burning stove in the living room for the first time. I showed everybody how to do it and we’re going to start taking turns so we all get good at it.

This house has a gas fireplace in the master bedroom and another on the same chimney upstairs in the game room. I don’t want to use electric heat this winter if we can help it, so we will probably keep the gas fires burning most of the time. It’s not cold enough for that yet though. It’s already too hot in here with the stove going.

Garrett has been our main lumberjack for the last month or so. We haven’t needed to fell any trees because there is firewood everywhere, in lumber yards and peoples’ back yards, but a lot of it has to be split and stacked. He’s been doing that every evening for half an hour before supper and has built up a cord or so beside the house. He seems to enjoy it.

We took Trevor’s cast off today. I was able to find a special saw at the doctor’s office. I was really nervous about cutting the cast off, but once I figured out how the saw worked it was a piece of cake. It’s not really a saw, more like clippers. You can hold it up to your skin and it won’t cut you. It just wiggles back and forth. But it cuts right through the plaster.

Trevor can be a strange kid. He was delighted that his arm looked so skinny and white. Amy and I were not so delighted that it still has a bump. I’m afraid his arm may never be normal. But he was able to move it fine and had no pain. The bones have healed.

I had a troubling experience today that has me a little unnerved. It’s probably nothing, and after I talked it through with Amy I felt better. But I’d better mark it down for future reference.

Our primary SUV didn’t want to start this morning. I had to crank it several times. I thought, Could it be the cold? But it wasn’t all that cold, and it had been colder a few weeks ago. The engine did catch after a minute, but then it wanted to sputter and didn’t have much power.

I parked it out of the way and jumped in the truck. But the truck had the same problem: kept cranking with no luck and then died as soon as it started.

After that I tried the Lexus and it ran just fine.

I must’ve got some moisture in the gas. I’m always transferring gas back and forth between vehicles, using pipes to siphon it here and there. There must’ve been some water in one of the pipes and it tainted the gas as I refilled the SUV and truck.

For a minute I was really worried. We’d be in bad shape if all our machines started to die already.