Click me!

It’s been one of those days where I’m not sure if it actually rained or if there was a localized suspension of natural laws causing large droplets of water to just kind of…hover mid-air.  You’d look at the ground and realized that it had rained earlier.  You’d look at the sky and think, “By golly, it’s going to rain any minute now”.  You’d feel water on your skin and think that it might just be raining now.  But there was no rain to see.  Nothing fell.  Nothing moved.

Including my pellets.   8600 pounds of pellets are taunting me from my garage.  None of bags joined their compatriots in my basement.

You might be wondering what that is.  If there’s one thing that Midwesterners seem to be quite stoic about, it’s the weather.  We talk about it all the time, but you’re as likely to find a Midwesterner strolling through the neighborhood on a rainy day as a sunny one.   (Snow seems to be the only change up that bothers the natives out here, but that only because they need to remember to use the emergency exits on the second floor of the houses.)  And I live here now.  I should be trying to be like them.  Indifferent to weather.  Incredible work-ethic. Salt of the earth.

The reason that no pellets moved today is not because I have an Southern inclination to stay dry (I do but I like to say that I’m smart enough to come in out of the rain).  The fault lies with the pellets themselves.

Wood pellets, in case you are curious, are small cylinders of incredibly compressed sawdust.  And that’s it.  They basically take all the leftover sawdust from the sawmills, etc, and basically press them through a play dough factory toy…but for grown ups.  There are no glues or joining products involved.  Just sawdust.

That means that any exposure to water basically causes the pellet to collapse into its component dust, rendering it useless for the stove.

Now, pellets come in sealed 40 lb bags.  So more than likely it’d be fine to move the bags.  But you never can be too careful.  A small rip or gash in the bag can let water in, ruing a portion of the bag.  And I paid good money for these things.  I’m going to get every minute out of them that I can.

So nothing moved today.

Secretly my back is grateful.