Our heater in the house is on the fritz so I checked with a heating and air conditioning firm we’ve done business with in the past and was informed that I could get a new heater for – are you ready for this – ONLY $5,000!

“Does that include a lifetime supply of gas or something?” I asked the salesman.

So, I started on my quest to find an alternate heating solution. The first option was that we could just go without a heater and freeze to death. Or we could buy more blankets and firewood. Then I was struck by a fantastic idea. What could we use for fuel that we have plenty of and would be free? COW CHIPS, of course, that we could burn in our fireplace for free like the pioneers did.

My wife likes saving money as much as I do and I’d almost convinced her about the cow chip idea until I told her that because of my tender health she’d have to be the one to collect the chips.

In my neck of the woods, we only have to deal with nearly freezing weather for about one week of the year. Having written that, I’m thinking the folks in North Dakota, Maine and Montana right now are saying, “What a wimp Pittsy is!” And I suppose I am. What can I say, I’m a fifth generation Californian who has lived on, or near, the coast my entire life where our weather is almost idyllic. All we have to put up with is fog and earthquakes. We don’t need, or have, air conditioning and hardly ever use the heater except at night when it might get all the way down to 45 degrees inside our comfy home. So, you can see why spending $5,000 for something we’ll rarely use seems like an unnecessary allocation of our resources.

We were almost ready to pull the trigger on the heater when I remembered something I’d read about years ago. As I explained to my wife, “I don’t remember in what country it was, but the people’s houses were two story with the bottom story being reserved for cows. Yes, cows. By cutting a few holes in the floor the heat the cows produced naturally drifted upward and that is how they heated their houses.

“Well, that gives new meaning to the words ‘natural gas’, doesn’t it?” asked my wife.

“It’s the perfect solution for us. We have all that open space underneath our house and we could kill two birds with one stone. A few cows could get out of the weather and they’d heat our house for free.”

“To make room for the cows what are you gonna do with all that worthless junk you’ve stored under the house?”

“We’ll sell all my valuable junk, but because of my tender health you’ll have to remove it to make room for the cows which will produce more cow chips that you’ll have to muck out in the spring. But just think, it’s an ingenious enclosed system that I’m sure any greeny would love. If we want to turn down the thermostat in the middle of the night all YOU have to do is go kick a couple cows out from under our house.”

“Would we have to get a permit from the county?” asked my wife.

“Of course we would. After all, this is California where you gotta get a permit to flush the toilet.”

“But wouldn’t it smell something awful?” asked the wife.

“Not any worse than the natural gas that comes out of a pipe that they make smell like rotten eggs so you can smell a gas leak. Only instead of coming out of the orifice of a pipe our natural gas will come out of the orifice of a cow!”

“But when company comes to stay won’t we be embarrassed about heating with cows?”

“That’s the beautiful part about it. You know how we hate having company, right? If we install our cow heater, I guarantee it will cut down on the number of house guests we have in the future. And even if relatives do come and try to use our home as a hotel where we cook and clean for them, I guarantee they’ll be getting an early checkout after only one night!”