Careful burning a lot of pine in a fireplace or wood stove as it has lots of tar that can contribute to a chimney fire. Season it well and mix it in with good hardwoods and you'll be fine.

We have 3 fireplaces that came in handy one winter when we were without power for 14 days. We set one up for cooking and my wife and I had fun making creative meals. Actually, we did a lot of tent camping for years and were familiar with wood fire cooking and had the equipment to do it with already on hand. No big deal if the SHTF - at least for a while.

Me dino would have plenty of firewood if I had a fireplace. Here in Pleasant Grove, a satellite city of Birmingham, during 2011 a lot of people were killed as a F5 tornado that also hit Tuscaloosa an hour's drive south of here and abnormally pretty much stayed on the ground like a huge bulldozer all the way here where it slammed into Concord, Hueytown, Pleasant Grove and north Birmingham. My home a quarter of a mile from what looked like a war zone, a huge pecan tree nevertheless tore down power lines as it crossed my front yard, the top of the tree landing a yard short of my front steps. Last week a smaller tornado wrecked Fultondale, another Birmingham satellite, and the only fatal casualty was a teenaged boy hit by a falling tree.