Poison in the Spring

the poison oak is looking so fresh and lovely as it reaches out to try and brush you.

Things in various levels of completion

It's not been too exciting around here lately, but some of the projects have moved a bit to a point where a photo might be interesting.  A new batch of flagstones - and a new move to flagstone rather than urbanite(concrete) has got this 2-pick-up-truck-load pile sitting and waiting to be put down:

We're back in the chicken game, with me having caught the one 'wild' chicken who was living in the woods and another generous gift from our neighbors of 2 more chickens had me building a new, stronger coop.  The plastic is to help keep off the rain, and not a permanent feature. It's built, by the way, entirely from one pallet that our extra solar panel came on: 

Other excitement has been around the fact that it finally started raining, and I am now close to having 15,000 gallons of rain water stored.  Here's the inside of the top 2 5k ones... they're hooked together (see below) and almost to the top.

I just created a siphon from one to the other, and it has kept up the balance between the one that gets fed from the roof and the separate one. I will plumb them together later.  

Then I discovered mice are trying to move in to the solar circuit box. Great. 

Worse than mice in the electronics, I discovered a leak in the roof.  We had water coming in *next* to a skylight.  Luckily, the roof warranty still had 6 weeks left of it's 5 year contract (!) and I got the roofers back up here. This is his knife, as he was checking the seal you can see below the knife. They just took 10 minutes to make a change.  It better hold. 

Taking Shape, fermenting

The first car port bent is coming together! finally, we're starting to see some progress on this project.  I started checking the notches and fitting together the pieces in place. 

This is the north side - the shorter side - which is closest to the tank so the gutter will run into the water tank.  Now to start lifting it up! 

In the meantime, I'm continuing my sourdough adventure.  I accidentally bought white flour the last time, so we're transitioning the goop/starter from whole wheat.  Seems to work fine, but I'm going to have a whole bunch of extra this weekend.  

Putting things in Place

Gave myself a holiday present this week - I sewed my shoes back together.  They have leather uppers and the seams had come undone (not the first time for one of them) and so I finally got to sit down and sew them up. Once again, love the dental floss solution!

And, the tank got moved!  It's hard to show the proper perspective of where a 10 foot wide 8 foot tall thing is sitting on a hillside... 

 But here it is moments before the last move, where it will sit on that "pad" I dug out a while back.   The whole last 2 days of moving actually went very well.  Of course, going downhill is the way to go. 

Another product improvement thought

So, we have a Dirt Devil upright 'cyclonic breeze' I think it's called.  The link to it is here.   It's actually a really nice little machine. It's powerful, light, and has a lot of little features.  The best is how it comes apart so easily to clean, with the canister thing and easy access to the filter -a  key part to keep clean in any vacuum device.  What I find is I need to take off the rotating brushes regularly (which could be easier,btw) and cut off the long hairs that have wrapped around it.  What the builders of this thing should have done is make a shallow, thin groove along the length of the drum, so that one could easily slip a knife under the wrapped hair and cut them all with one quick swipe. 

cool winter days

I love it when the cold box in the kitchen wall becomes another refrigerator for us, filled with autumn goodies

Still to do

So, yeah, that still needs to get moved.  They're 900lb empty, you know.

Crack update

So, faithful readers will remember I posted about being sad we had some cracks in the walls from the house settling.

Well, I made some attempts to fix them up, and it seems like it worked!  I made up a putty of fine sand and lime putty and actually painted it on with a brush:

Then I wiped it off after it dried a bit, which left the stuff in the crack.  Then I went back with typical whitewash and painted over it 3 or 4 times, doing the standard wetting it down and wiping it down between coats.  It turned out GREAT!

You can't even see the cracks in person, let alone these photos!

Check out the front of the living room bench, even from the photo above! 

Electronics and Attack!

So here's a couple of photos that were in my phone for reference, but I find them interesting.  I used them for reference by snapping the picture and then coming back to my laptop to look things up online.  This pumpsaver thing is part of the well electronics, and it's not liking the new, smaller generator we want to use up there. I need to figure out how to recalibrate it.

This is the 2 fuses in my 'combiner box' that's up on the roof, where the solar panel feed comes in and combines into one power cord.  I took this because I just ordered another set of panels so that we can have more power.  Luckily for me, the combiner box will take more power, and I managed to find panels that have the same 'open circuit voltage'.  I almost couldn't, as the kind we have have gone out of style.

These are showing the destruction of the chicken tractor by forces unknown.  We came down to check on it one day and found that something(s) had trashed it.  Wood is splintered, chicken wire pulled apart, the thing is trashed. 

Amazingly, the 2 remaining chickens (did I mention one got sick and died?) survived!  They must have run off in to the woods. They now won't go near the tractor or the hen house.

termite season

In these last warm evenings before the rains, the flying termites come out of their nests and start covering everything.  I hate them.  I actually stand outside with a racquetball racquet and a shoe and swing at them.

They also come in under the doors, shed their wings and start crawling around looking for somewhere to set up shot.  Here's the tiles by the back door.  Luckily a vast majority of our house is termite proof, but still. 

Re-using old wood for new stuff

Taking some old deck boards and working them up.  First, take off the old brackets:

Then, use a hatchet to split off the rotten bits of the 4x6s:

And build a new raised bed box for a garden: 

I'm going to try this idea of putting old (rotten) wood at the bottom, under the dirt, to act as a sponge for the winter water.  Luckily, I have plenty of rotten wood around.