This is a cookstove. I’ve been calling it alternately a STOVE and a CAMPSTOVE, but apparently it more accurately self-identifies as a COOKSTOVE. In other words, it’s a stove on which one cooks.

It’s really quite nice — it’s full of big heavy iron compartments in which one makes fires, and who doesn’t love starting fires?

We like fires around these parts, and so we’re a big fan of anything that enables that. Cookstoves are particularly and rustically nice, especially given our current chances at coming anywhere near a “conventional” oven.

Of course, it should also be mentioned that this stove — er, this COOKSTOVE — looks quaint and modest, but pictures do lie because the bitch weighs about eleventy billion pounds. Remember wen I noted that this beast is full of big heavy iron compartments? Do you know how I know this? Because we had to move it last week, along with Stacey’s few and meager material possessions and Scott’s reliquary, comprised of a hundred thousand old quarter-inch audio tapes, a hundred crates of wires and cabling and a half ton of India BS546-to-Switzerland SEV1011 power adapters. Because you NEVER KNOW when we might inherit an Indian television station and decide to move it to Bern.

But do you know what this means? This means we’ve moved it all, and the quest for Crapshack-worthy materials begins in earnest. And it also means we need a beer, probably. As always, you’re more than welcome to give us one or both.