The only relevance to the forum is the fact that I was delivering a load of firewood to my wife's grandparents, but thought I would share anyway.
After running out of seasoned wood for sale for this season, my buddy who owns a tree service made a deal with me I couldn't refuse--take my TW-5 and split all the wood I want, just split it with him 50/50. To throw out a number, I would guess he has about 200 cords of wood cut into rounds varying from 14"-20" depending on the diameter. Last Sunday I split roughly five cords.
To make a short story long, I find out my wifes grandparents have no wood. Her grandfather is a scrappy 78 year old with a defibrillator and a pacemaker, who has no business cutting and/or splitting wood, but would do it anyway. So I throw about a 1.5 cords on the dump trailer and we head down toward the farm. On the way, we saw a heavy plume of smoke along the road and came upon a house with fire blazing out of the second story windows and through part of the roof. A teenager and older couple were from the front door. I stopped while my wife called 911 I ran to the house and saw a dog in the front window. I went in to get the dog only to get a pretty good bite on my right hand, but was able to get him out.
Fortunately, everyone in the house was fine although with the 18 minute FD response all appeared to be lost. When we got home this evening we had a long discussion with our kids about fire safety. Also, I discovered that two of our four smoke detectors have dead batteries.
The point: This was an eye opening experience for me. Since the vast majority of us have wood burners of some sort here, please check and make sure you have the basics working properly, like smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, etc. We went as far as to review our escape routes and our meeting place in front of the house. I want everyone to be here after the woodburning season!