First I Make My Own Bread, Now This

On my Friends list, today seems to be Home Renovation day. Myself, I spent my afternoon discussing my wood-burning stove options at the 3rd wood-burning stove emporium I've gone to in a week. (In the Land Without Central Heating, there are myriad competitors trying to solve the No Central Heating problem. Heat pumps? Whole-house dehumidifiers? Gas furnaces? Underfloor heating? Roll the dice and take your pick...it's the stoves that actually seem to work.) Today's discussion was fruitful enough that I arranged for an installation estimate after Venus Retrograde finishes, the week of September 10th. Am I on the slippery slope, from the occasional loaf of home-made bread to heating my house with a wood stove to raising my own yaks for butter?

A pleasant puttering day otherwise; lunch downtown with a friend I haven't seen in ages, gift shopping for helpful co-workers in America, and a visit to a musuem exhibit I just wanted to move into. At Te Papa, they have an exhibit on called "The Poisoners." Apparently the museum wanted to do SOMETHING with a lot of their accumulated taxidermy and miscellaneous items, so they set up a four-room murder mystery for kids with sassy adult overtones. One room is an evil widowmaker botanist's bedroom with a taxidermy wolf in one closet and a bear skeleton in another; another is a very steampunk-like submarine; a third is a mad scientist's lab; and the fourth is the abode of a naughty safari-leading lady. I could live in the bedroom easily, and cook in the lab, and the exhibit even had a bathroom right off it.