For the past couple of days I've been reading Susan Strasser's Never Done: A History of American Housework. So far most of the history of "never done" involves fuel: chopping firewood, hauling firewood or coal into the house, managing open fireplaces, cookstoves, heating stoves. Now it's branching into light: making candles, the history of kerosene and household gas. Surely plumbing and the lack thereof will be next.

I tell you right now: I am glad to have evaded the generation of fireplace cookery. It's the fuel chore I haven't gotten past. All winter day long: fire the stove, stoke the stove, clean the ashes, adjust the dampers, sweep up the mess of dropped bark and ash, fill the woodbox. Strasser writes this book as if no one does this kind of thing anymore, which is vaguely insulting but then again I suppose she's more or less right, though I happen to know several people who still use kitchen cookstoves, gas lights, spring-fed gravity water systems . . .

. . .  but they don't own a cat who just leaped onto the counter like a demon from hell and SPILLED AN ENTIRE POT OF COFFEE DOWN THE STOVE BURNERS.  

Talk to you later. It seems I have some housework to do.