Don’t tell the insurance man, but last week I started a chimney fire, my first ever. I know enough not to walk away from the fire in the process of building it, but for some reason I did anyway. When I ambled back to the wood stove, I saw that the stove door was cracked, and the stovepipe was hemorrhaging smoke. Then I heard roaring coming from the chimney. The stovepipe thermometer read zero. How could that be? In the middle of a fire cycle, the thermometer might read 500 degrees. It only goes to 1,000. That’s when I realized the needle was buried.