I don’t think that winter is really ever totally out of my head.
It’s now mid June and the central air conditioning has kicked on in the house. That’s about as far away from winter as we get around here. But when you live in a region where the winter is brutal and lasts a minimum of five months, it tends to stick with you. For me, I’m already in prep mode for the coming winter and the air conditioning hasn’t even been on for a few weeks. But I live out in the country and I have a nice bit of land. That’s where I spend a lot of my time during the summer gathering firewood for the winter. We have great residential HVAC. The gas furnace does a great job of keeping us warm. But I also have a wood stove for supplemental heating and as an emergency heating source if the power goes out. Having a wood stove is great. I love the sort of heating it puts out. There’s nothing really quite like it. It has the cozy feeling of radiant heating but without the moisture. However, there is plenty of prep that goes into using a woodstove for heating in the winter. Not only is there all that wood to cut, split and stack but I act as my own chimney sweep as well. The gas furnace gets the HVAC maintenance it needs each fall but that’s not from me. The HVAC professionals trek out here to do the heating maintenance. That’s the last bit of winter prep I do. But I’ve got a long way to go before then.