It's All About the Oil

I sit at my computer in the imaginary lookout tower that rises from the roof of our house, the gray November morning rolling on around and below me, a small ceramic electric heater purring at my feet, and conclude that it's all about the oil.

Number two stove oil, that is.

Our antiquated oil stove has heated the house for many years. It handles the living room, downstairs sleeping area and kitchen where we spend most of our time. The upstairs bedrooms and the massage studio require ruinously expensive electric heaters. We hope to be able to replace all of this with proper central heating eventually, but for now we depend very much on the oil stove.

A few years ago, our oil supplier stopped carrying #2 oil. The closest substitute was diesel fuel (close enough that stove oil is dyed red to discourage people from using it as fuel to evade the road tax), but we soon found that in our stove diesel produced a lot of soot and clinker in our stove. Finally, we found a gas station in Albany which dispensed stove oil from a gas pump, but alas, they don't delivery to Corvallis.

So, every time I'm in Albany now (usually three times a week), I stop by that station and fill up our two five-gallon cans, and dump them in the oil tank when I get home. It's a hassle, and messy, and let's not forget tedious (I begin to understand why hauling water is the bane of a peasant's existence), but it keeps the stove lit.

And the bright red oil does look rather pretty as it pours into the tank in the dim light of an overcast winter afternoon.