I Am A Thief!!

Yes, indeed I am a THIEF.

I am a very very picky thief though: I only steal pinecones, and only from business parking lots.

You see, pinecones are excellent tinder for starting fires in my woodstove and my two big pine trees are being greedy.

They have given me five whole pinecones in the last week (I have needed a minimum of 84!) and kept the rest for themselves.

Over the last couple of weeks I've stolen all the pinecones I can find from the street and my neighbors yards on my cul-de-sac too and it still hasn't been enough.  All the pine trees in the neighborhood are holding on to their cones, greedy things!

I use 12-15 pinecones for each fire I build and lately its been cold enough here that it has snowed off and on all day every day for most of the last week.

Newspaper and pine needles are poor replacements for pinecones, they both go up like gasoline but don't burn long enough to catch even small pieces of firewood on fire. They barely burn long enough to catch loose pieces of bark on fire.

The day before yesterday I also ran out of fire starter squares. A quick trip to Ace Hardware solved that problem, but I still had NO pinecones

Yesterday morning it took half an hour to get the fire started because I had no pinecones and no fire starter squares.

This morning I was on the way to my bank. I noticed several businesses along my route that had lots and lots of pinecones in their parking lots.  Fortunately for me (perhaps unfortunately for the Juniper Aquatic Center and Pool)  I had a medium size tote box in my truck.  I filled that sucker to the brim with pinecones, and when I got home my trees had donated the five pinecones mentioned above.

Yes, I do intend to continue stealing pinecones -- but only from business parking lots.  As a friend says, either the business will leave them there to rot or they will put them through a chipper (and my thievery is saving them work in the latter case).

To my mind, its a win-win.  They don't have to deal with the pinecones in their parking lots and I can stay warm without having to spend 30 minutes or more getting the fire lit!