“Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.”

I don’t know if Albert Einstein actually said that, but the internet tells me that he did. You be the judge…

I hate Winter… HATE it… I always have and I always will. I’ve said many times that I would much rather die of heatstroke then hypothermia. My friends who are fans of winter typically say that you can always just put on another layer, but I’m happiest lounging around in shorts.

My other biggest gripe with Winter is the sheer expense of heating my 224 year-old house. As you might imagine, it’s not exactly Energy Star rated, and every year has been one financial beating after another.

Although, in the interest of full disclosure and to be fair, I would probably be singing a different tune if we had snowmobiles or we were skiers.

But why is it that Summer passes by in a blink of an eye, but Winter lingers on seemingly forever like a running injury?

Here’s one big difference between Summer and Winter; Summer is filled with big plans with family and friends. Camping, cookouts, golf outings, road trips, vacations, races, etc, and the kids have no rigid school schedule to get in the way. You can roll out of bed at 5:30 and crank out some miles in the cool morning air before things get real and you have to deal with your day. We march through the warmer months passing milestone after milestone and by the time we get to Labor Day, we wonder where the time went.

In the Winter, it’s a nonstop grind with short days, and we gaze upon St. Patrick’s Day or Patriots Day far off in the distance. You want to go running? Sure. just stack on the layers and then clad yourself with reflective and blinky thingies, and grippy things on the soles of you shoes. Awesome.

So we need to find ways to make Winter go by faster and/or make it suck less. For starters, maybe this year Winter will have its own milestones to pass the time. Wine and beer tastings… Poker night… Cornhole tournaments in the barn… The possibilities are endless. If I can make it to Tax day and wonder where the time went, I’ll be a pretty happy guy.

One other thing I did around Christmas time last year was replace my 25-year old oil boiler with a Kedel/Blackstar wood pellet boiler, which cut my heating bill just about in half. Waiting until the week before Christmas to replace a boiler probably wasn’t the brightest decision, but we got it done. It is also worth noting that the New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission offered a 30% rebate for new pellet boilers.

We were actually able to turn up our thermostats without getting financially violated so we ended up with about 2/3 of our Biobricks left over for the year. (Biobricks are the wood pellet industry’s answer to cordwood).

These are AWESOME. There was no cost savings with these, but I had 2 pallets (the equivalent of 2 cords) stacked in 45 minutes. Also, the’re easy to handle, and they burn really clean with very little ash. They’re so dry that there’s almost no creosote. SWEET!

The other thing I was just recently able to do was replace our treadmill. In my case, the treadmill was a crappy Nordictrack EXP2000 that involved a lot of maintenance and workarounds to keep going. The thing was basically like a Fisher Price treadmill.

The one we got was an 8-year old Sole F80 on Craigslist. If the odometer is to be believed, there’s only 171 hours of use on it, which is nothing. I’ve already washed and aligned the walking belt and lubed the deck, and it’s purring like a kitten. All I need to do on crappy mornings is charge the iPad and connect to Netflix, and I’m good as gold!

So if you don’t see me around town after Thanksgiving, you know where to find me.