You reared the cute little girls. You put them out in their new chicken house and tried to keep them warm and dry every winter. You gave them treats from the dinner table and watched them scramble for it joyously. It is not easy to contemplate killing them ourselves. We want someone else to do it for us.

One thing to understand is that even laying hens have meat value, depending on local markets. When I found a craigslist ad for someone to buy my girls, the man said that both hens and roosters are valued in certain ethnic cultures about an hour's drive from here. He was willing to pay me a few bucks for my girls, and he said they would be treated humanely and enjoyed for dinner by some happy family.

I watched as he tossed each of my five girls into cages on the back of his truck. They were terrified! This was a complete and utter shock to them, after a life of constant comfort and care. And I felt terrible. The man seemed nice enough, but I could only pray that the girls did not suffer long.

There are people who specialize in humane slaughtering, in which a chicken experiences no terror prior to death and is actually given comfort as it quickly bleeds out. Here's an example. If you can find such a practitioner, you will be fortunate.

I chose not to install a pellet hopper, which is supposed to provide a steady burn for 10-12 hours. I didn't want to have to buy, and rely on, pellets. That configuration is for people who need this as a primary heat source and who can't tend to the stove often.

I mainly burn wood on freezing mornings, to help the heat pump bring the temperature up. Much of the hot air around the stove gets sucked down the hall, into the return vent, and back through the HVAC system. That is good; I don't need a room fan, and the heat pump appreciates the warm return air.

The stove needs dry, healthy wood to burn hot and smokeless. Most mornings, after the stove warms up, it runs at about 350-400F. I have gotten it as high as 650F. This depends on the wood, how it is arranged relative to airflow, and how much you're willing to fiddle with it. Gravity takes care of much of the wood feeding, but you can adjust it with your poker to keep the pieces ventilated and burning hot. I step outside to confirm efficiency by looking at what's [not] coming out of the chimney.

I don't mind having to fiddle with the stove. I used to fiddle with the fire when I had a fireplace.

Further, my purpose for this stove is not to provide the main source of heat. It is to provide comfort and energy savings. Someday it might also serve as an emergency heater; it is certainly capable of keeping us alive in a power-down situation.

Infrastructure

The house was built with an external chimney having two flues fitted for wood stoves, one in the living room and one in the basement. Previous owners had used a conventional wood stove in the basement, but that scenario is not for me. I'm not comfortable leaving anything burning unattended for too long, and this stove needs frequent tending to maintain a hot burn.

The stove needs a good draft and chimney stack to operate correctly (that is, with a hot, clean, almost smokeless burn). I reckon my stove has about 12-14 feet of flue, counting the inside stovepipe, and this is about the minimum required.

Several members of a wood-burning social site said that I should install an all-metal flue in the chimney for best results (this would be inside of the clay liner). But I tend to err on the cheap side; and the existing flue seems to be providing a decent draft, especially since I sealed up the cleanout door at the bottom of the chimney. On a cold day, with the house at 65F (thanks to the heat pump), there is already a slight draft that can be detected.

Topside, the chimney is not in great shape. But I am running mostly warm air through it, and not much smoke. I don't expect creosote buildup for several years, if at all.

Because the flue is flush with the crown, I will have to buy an adapter if I want to install a chimney cap.

Safety

If you don't do stupid stuff, this device is safer than a fireplace or a conventional wood stove. What would be stupid? It would be stupid to burn something really inappropriate such plastic or other petroleum products.

Never turn on your attic fan or window exhaust while the fire in the stove is blazing! The fire will come roaring back up the feed tube like a blowtorch.

As long as you start the stove properly and keep the lower lid in place (on the cleanout/starter opening), there is virtually no risk of flames or sparks escaping the stove. As long as the draft is going, virtually no smoke will escape into the house. Indeed, with good firewood it is normal to achieve a smokeless burn as soon as the fire gets hot enough.

Use the recommended method to safely start the fire. You must read the instructions and watch the video to get this down pat. As soon as the twigs are burning, you can add progressively larger pieces of wood.

During burning, you must always leave the hopper completely uncovered; put the lid on the floor and forget it. Don't try to control the burn rate by damping; always let the fire burn hot and clean. If you want less heat, use less fuel.

To stop the fire, you simply put the lid on the hopper. That snuffs out the draft and thus the fire. Otherwise, let the last embers burn themselves to ash and then close the hopper. When there is no fire, the lid should stay on the hopper to prevent a draft sucking your warm room air up the chimney.

Harvesting firewood

The best stuff is store-bought, kiln-dried, oak kindling, but that costs over four bucks a bag.

On my property, I've been cutting down saplings and small, uninvited trees. I recently bought a Kindling Cracker to split this stuff properly and safely:

This thing won't work for logs that are too thick, say more than 6 inches. So my harvest needs to be focused on unwanted trees that are nearing that size.

After being split, the wood will now need to sit and season, preferably for at least a year.

It helps to use a moisture meter to test wood. Healthy green wood is moist, and so is rotten wood. The former is good to split and stack; the latter should be discarded.

Installation notes

The user manual provides details for different installation situations.

You need to do a long burn (at least four hours) outdoors before installing the heater. This is to heat-cure the paint job. Doing it outdoors prevents the resulting off-gassing from polluting your indoor air. This requires buying more stovepipe than you actually need so you get a long enough flue to create a good draft. I tied my makeshift chimney to a basketball goal to stabilize it.

The first time you burn indoors, leave a window open to provide a bit of ventilation until you assess whether there are still paint fumes. Do not run a window exhaust fan or attic fan.

But there is enough info to familiarize yourself with the basic facts about the plant (toxicodendron radicans).

After several years of dealing with the plant and contemplation of it, there are a couple of tips I can offer. For lasting removal, most experts recommend digging and pulling up the roots/runners. This is easier said than done, especially if your back tires from bending over a lot. The story is that if you leave even small root fragments, they will regrow. However, I have found that hacking up the roots using a grub hoe seems to retard, if not eliminate, regrowth. You just need to be sure to destroy any leaves that are still poking through.

One important step will, in my opinion, give the biggest return on effort: Locate the trees (or other structures) where the poison ivy has climbed and is producing berries. I call these the Queen Mothers. Some are very old, perhaps 30 years, and the vines are several inches thick. Birds eat the berries and shit the seeds out under trees throughout your property. You can cut the vine using loppers or a pruning saw and thus immediately kill all growth beyond the cut (up the tree). You have then put the Queen Mother out of business.

If you do not uproot the vine below, it will eventually sprout new growth. Here's one I cut, perhaps two years ago, where the fat, hairy vine ends. It is still not producing berries, though.

It would be irresponsible of me not to mention one important caveat: Never burn poison ivy! The smoke is harmful (as in blindness) and potentially deadly.

If not, what makes a human different from a dog? Does a dog have the feeling of Me?

What is the destiny of the human self? Why would a dog self not have a similar destiny?

Animals clearly have conscious experience and show evidence of thought.

But how does this assertion prove that the pattern of habits and causal relationships that persists in the physical realm—the apparent self or personality—does not also persist in a nonphysical realm, functioning through another “body” of a different kind? Such body has traditionally been described as the subtle, nonphysical body.

Does a subtle body need to be a duplicate of the physical? Does it even need to have arms and legs, or is it just a luminous sphere of spirit? If some portion of my life's training (which I think of as part of “me”) is stored as “muscle memory,” then what happens to that program when there are no muscles?

Whether the subtle body exists or not, or whether it is best thought of as a “body” or as a program, the possibility exists that “someone” will someday be born into this world with my core program running as a baseline, or default system. Perhaps that new person will not inherit my basketball skills but will instead be blessed or cursed with my deeper qualities, such as generosity or selfishness.

Meanwhile,it is possible that whatever information has been generated or acquired in this life of mine will continue to be stored in Mind at large when I have died. This is the testimony of those who claim to have accessed the subtle database traditionally known as the akashic records.

...

Does the subtle body have a self living inside it? If it is animated and conscious, such an apparent personality would still believe, in whatever dimension it now finds itself in, that it is a self. And it would make choices, as it does in this life, based on the consensus of its mental/emotional processes, which are ever changing. In this sense, it could be said that the individual survives death, even though there is no one there.

Memory

The perception, thought, or feeling of being a self depends, at least to a high degree, on the continuity of memory; that is, one's conscious knowledge of the significant life experiences that occurred in the past and were local to this organism.

Some people report that, after all their memory for a given period in time is erased from conscious recall—as during a traumatic event—there is the impression or feeling that they did not exist at all during that time.

Birth as the death of the apparent self

The dependence of self on memory poses a problem for the idea that “someone” reincarnates. Our inability to remember any experiences prior to birth effectively collapses the prior “self” and initializes a new one, a blank slate as far as conscious memory is concerned. Thus, whoever or whatever it is that gets reincarnated, its biographical self (memories of both physical and nonphysical life experience) effectively dies at birth. Birth is the death of whoever you were, or thought you were, before that.

Having inherited the attributes of your overall pattern that have survived physical death and are appropriate (even if maladaptive) for the new incarnation, the new self, or personality, is much like “you” were and feels much the same. It is likely to suffer in similar ways, acting on its inherited unconscious beliefs and strategies. To what extent the new personality inherits its attributes from past-life experience vs. inherited traits from the physical parents, is an open question.

The question of data storage

There is the idea that our memory of past lives and nonphysical interludes is actually preserved somewhere in the greater mind, in the akashic record, or in our own “greater self.” Tom Campbell refers to this as a database in consciousness, silently recording every detail of everyone's experiences, (whether they were conscious of it at the time or not). In normal waking consciousness, access to the data is normally unavailable, as awareness is completely occupied with sensory and thought input. If you are skilled in the process, you can access the data and plug it into your awareness as an input stream.

Given the existence of the database, there is the idea that after you die, all this biographical experience, in vivid detail, is accessible to you, and you can experience a period of full recollection of your history and its many lessons. This is often referred to as the life-review process. Perhaps it is how memories are finally digested before they are allowed to fade to insignificance.

The data storage, as reported by consciousness explorers, is almost always considered to operate outside of the physical universe, independent and beyond space and time. But how are they sure about this? How can we be sure that the information storage does not depend on the existence of living brains?

Just as conscious, nonphysical experience might depend on the existence of the physical brain, so too the database might exist only in the brains of countless human beings, with detailed information, feeling records, thoughts, and so on distributed over any number of brains, and perhaps randomly. If you accept the idea that ESP actually happens because our minds are invisibly connected in a vast and intricate web, this does not rule out the possibility that physical brains are required to support that web. The Collective Unconscious could be a networking program that has run continuously since our mammalian ancestors first developed it. It has never lost its database because humans have never gone extinct.

I mention this “wetware” hypothesis just because it is possible and not implausible. The testimony of Tom Campbell et al does not support it.