Summer projects

We've been spending our summer learning a lot of new things. For instance, I strung up some hummingbird feeders. The thing that attracts hummers is the red cap. The bottles are filled with sugar water (1 part sugar to 4 parts water). And no, the sugar will not make their beeks rot off! Turns out this mixture is not too different from their natural energy drink: nectar.

I helped put the roofing on this pole-frame building. Some friends are doing a lot of building out here in the country and sometimes hire me to help out. I'm fascinated by all forms of building so I'm happy to help and learn.





I also recently helped a friend put in a cob bread oven. This is the third oven I've worked on. She lives in a very rural setting and patiently--over months--dug away the hillside to make space for her oven. We used the excavated clay to build the oven itself, but there was almost no sand. This means the clay will crack, so she'll have to seal the combustion chamber initially, and it's possible the whole thing will collapse. The good news is all the material can be re-used if need be.

Connor spent a week near Mt. Shasta at a wilderness camp. This was a hard one for us, to let our Connor go away for a week. But, now that he's back it's all good. He was one of the younger boys in the group, but as the instructor said, "he was the heart of the group". He learned a lot about camping, outdoor craft, and people, and refers to the course frequently.

More on gardening soon...

Solar Water Heater

I built a solar water heater. It is perhaps the simplest style of solar water heater in that the heating part and the water containing part are together in one unit.

I stripped a water heater down to just the tank, painted it black, put it in an insulated box also painted black inside, and covered the box with glass.

The first picture shows the box during construction where I packed insulation in between the box framing. This insulation came from the original water heater and so did the sheet metal I sealed it in with. The wood was mostly scrap laying around the place, so everything was free!

The second picture shows the box with insulation in place, and the
third picture shows the inside of the box painted black.

The picture missing here (because it's still in my camera which I forgot because we left for town in a hurry and so much for casual, stress-free life in the country, but anyway...) shows the completed heater sitting out in the open under the sun warming up our shower water for free.

Just painting a tank black would provide hot water. Placing it in an insulated box will keep the water hot overnight, and will extend the season well into the autumn.

Capitalism American Style

This Bear Stearns thing has me upset because once again the people got screwed and the perps made colossal fortunes.

On March 12th, Bear Stearns' CEO scoffed at rumors of liquidity problems at the bank:

"Schwartz also denied rumors that the company's liquidity is under threat. Bear Stearns still has a $17 billion cushion against losses, he said.

"Our balance sheet has not weakened at all," he said. "We don't see any pressure on our liquidity."

The day before Mr. Schwarz's appearance on CNBC, somebody made an enormous purchase of put contracts on Bear Stearns stock. A put contract is a bet the stock price will fall. These put contracts were an extremely risky purchase as they would make money only if Bear Stearns stock lost HALF its value within TEN days. The size of this purchase was over 55,000 contracts at an average price of 15 cents a contract at $30 strike.

Of course, if the purchaser was an insider they knew what was going to happen and that there was no risk at all, and they won the lottery, because...

The following weekend on March 16th Sunday, a day when the stock market is closed and shareholders could do nothing but watch, JP Morgan announces they are buying Bear Stearns at pennies on the dollar. Not only that, there is very little risk to them as the deal is "guaranteed" by the Fed.

In just days Bear Stearns stock had fallen from $60 to $2.

Jim Rogers had this to say about the bailout:

You know the reason they did it this way was because, if Bear Stearns had to declare bankruptcy, you'd realize that Bear Stearns paid out billions of dollars in bonuses in January - six weeks ago. If he let them go into bankruptcy, they all would have had to send back their bonuses.

This is what they're doing, they're doing it so they don't have to give back their bonuses. That's why they didn't put them into bankruptcy. Jamie Dimon has gotten a great deal because the Federal Reserve is paying for it. The Federal Reserve is using taxpayer money to buy a bunch of Bear Stearns traders' Mazeratis.

As if this weren't bad enough here's what one of the Bear Stearns executives demanded of his new boss, JP Morgan's Jamie Dimon:

"How will you make me whole?"

How about them apples? If this were the exception to an otherwise honest system that would be one thing, but it isn't. This is capitalism American style.

Illegal maneuverings of this type come to light all the time. For another example, remember the California power crises in early 2001, which it was later revealed were caused by Enron restricting power supplies to make colossal profits? Here is a transcript where an Enron employee asks a utility employee to do something "interesting" and cause a power outage.

POWER PLANT WORKER: Las Vegas Co-Gen, this is Rich.

ENRON EMPLOYEE: Hey, Rich, this is Bill up at Enron.
POWER PLANT WORKER: Bill.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: How you doin’, man?
POWER PLANT WORKER: Junior or Senior?
ENRON EMPLOYEE: Heh, heh, the Third.
POWER PLANT WORKER: The Third! What’s happening, Bill the Third?
ENRON EMPLOYEE: Not much, man. I’m giving you a call. We’ve got some issues for tomorrow.
POWER PLANT WORKER: Okay.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: Are you ready for some issues? You’re just about out of there, aren’t you?
POWER PLANT WORKER: I got a couple more hours, I ain’t going anywhere. All right, shoot. I’ve got pen and paper.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: All right man. I’m not—this is going to be a word-of-mouth kind of thing.
POWER PLANT WORKER: Okay.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: Tonight, when you finish your normal QF, so for hour ending 1, which will actually be tomorrow—
POWER PLANT WORKER: Right.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: We want you guys to get a little creative—
POWER PLANT WORKER: Okay.
ENRON EMPLOYEE:—and come up with a reason to go down.
POWER PLANT WORKER: Okay.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: Anything you want to do over there? Any cleaning, anything like that?
POWER PLANT WORKER: Yeah. Yeah. There’s some stuff that we could be doing tonight.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: That’s good.
POWER PLANT WORKER: Yeah, we need to do some—we need to come down and inspect this switch on the steam turbine, this one switch on this induction steam valve that’s been failing us, and we need to be down in order to pull the switch and adjust it.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: No sh-–?
POWER PLANT WORKER: Yeah.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: I like that. And, I don’t know, I guess around 11:00 for hour ending 11—
POWER PLANT WORKER: Right.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: You got to go back—we need you to go back down.
POWER PLANT WORKER: Okay, shut back down for hour ending 11?
ENRON EMPLOYEE: Yeah.
POWER PLANT WORKER: So, we’ll do our normal afternoon shutdown tomorrow.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: Yep.
POWER PLANT WORKER: Okay.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: But we’re not wanting to have it prescheduled.
POWER PLANT WORKER: Right.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: It’s supposed to be, you know, kinda one of those things.
POWER PLANT WORKER: Okay, so we’re just coming down for some maintenance, like a forced outage type thing.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: Right.
POWER PLANT WORKER: And that’s cool?
ENRON EMPLOYEE: Hopefully.
POWER PLANT WORKER: Because the schedule I just got over here, well, you know what it says.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: Yep, I’m looking right at it.
POWER PLANT WORKER: Okay, it’s the new schedule.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: You just got a new one?
POWER PLANT WORKER: It says “new schedule” on the bottom. It’s showing 52 all day.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: Oh, right, and so that’s the one you’re going to want to ignore.
POWER PLANT WORKER: Exactly.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: I knew I could count on you.
POWER PLANT WORKER: No problem. I’m sure I’ll have a good time.

Again, that’s an Enron employee asking a worker at a power plant in Las Vegas to take the plant offline. That same day energy supplies were so tight, Northern California experienced a stage three power emergency, and rolling blackouts hit as many as two million consumers.

It's too bad you can't listen to the conversation. Hearing these smirking chimps is something else. I have a recording, but this bloggin software won't let me upload it for you. Don't use Blogger. Google bad.

Endemic corruption like this might just cause a person to abandon the system and head for the hills, you know?

Early spring activities!

We've been busy this early spring. Here are some of the highlights:

We planted pine trees. Drier conditions are thinning out the Douglas Firs, so these little pine trees should do okay.







We have been building a cob oven. The foundation is shown first. This was one day's work filling bags with sand, filling the donut hole with rock and rubble. I'll post a detailed story on this oven later...so it will be a little hard to piece together what we did from just this.

A layer of bottles forms an insulation layer below the heating chamber. (burp!)







Next we built a sand dome and covered it with a "thermal layer" of clay and sand--no straw.










Once this thermal layer dries a little we cut the door opening and scoop out the sand.















Herb spiral

Just outside our kitchen I built an herb spiral so we can fetch a few fresh herbs for breakfast without getting our slippers wet!

Happy Birthday, Alexis!

Alexis turns 10 today. I can't believe how quickly my children are growing up, I say in cliche.

We had some very nice folks over to celebrate. One of Alexis' presents I was most impressed with was made by her friend Ariana. It is a shepherd made by her hand of natural materials. Pretty fantastic, eh?

Alexis had a great time and we all had fun too. Bless you all.

Weather Breaks
My last post spoke about the rather depressing blanket of winter that had fallen about this place. Well it broke this week, so we had the pleasure of resuming our gardening in full sun!

Snow!

One feature of the Oregon winter is its unpredictable nature. Sometimes it may snow once and melt right away. Other times it's like this one: intense!
For going on three weeks we have had snow and rain. We are warm and cozy, but are getting cabin fever.

Recall we are living entirely off our solar panels, and are nursing our batteries through this. Sometimes, like now, we escape to town and get on the wi-fi at a coffee shop.

Of course, all this snow is a winter paradise for the child within us (I'm pretty good with a snowball, and my young friend Julian is a good aim too). Here a snow ball fight is on-going.

Gardening in winter
One afternoon it was pleasant enough to mulch a bed in the garden. The garden has a lot of slope and we want water to flow evenly across the plants so we built the bed on contour, which we find using an A-frame. (It's surprising how deceptive the eyeball can be in these matters).

Once the contour line is found on the hillside, we carve a level bed, dump on a couple of inches of compost, and cover it with cardboard and then straw. From here we let mother nature do her thing with earth worms and microbes. We will plant directly through this mixture, and could even plant seeds in little soil pockets in the straw. Ideally, this would have been done last fall, but it's not too late to do it here in January.
We debated whether we should test the soil and add amendments, and in foregoing the expense of this step we join company with every other organic farmer we've met!



Circus Class
Connor and Alexis are taking "circus classes" where they learn silks, juggling, unicycle riding, and so on. Here Connor gets instruction on the trapeze.


Stay well everyone!

New home in Oregon!

Recall that we arrived in Oregon at autumn just as it was getting cold and this left us with a tough choice. Should we go south where it's warmer and risk not returning to the Pacific northwest? Or should we stay through the winter and experience Oregon in the springtime? Chant and Susanna at Trillium Farm made it easier to decide by letting us power our trailer off their electricity in exchange for work around their place, and so we stayed there from October to January. In fact, we spent Christmas day in their warm farm house while they went to Hawaii.

We were able to learn some interesting things while we were at Trillium. We helped them build a bath house out of cordwood, where logs are "mudded" into a wall with a cement mixture (with an insulating layer in the middle). I helped Chant cut the hardibacker flooring before tiles went in and rough in his wood stove. Over the winter there was applesauce to be made, firewood to be cut, runs to the dump, and pottery to be spun. (Susanna is a talented artist and teaches art at the highschool). And of course, there was the special place called Trillum to experience and explore. Over the course of four months we had many dinners and good times together with Chant and Susanna and consider them to be of the highest calibre of awesome good people.

Since we were in one place for a while, mingling with locals, new opportunities came up. We were invited to move onto the land of a young family and work around their place in exchange for rent, "work trade" it's called. And so, that's where we are now. We have moved into their hobbit hut cob cabins and plan to stay here at least until October of this year.

Our main activity will be cultivating their vegetable gardens, and there will be many opportunities to learn how to build with cob, a mixture of clay, sand, and straw. We are off the electrical grid and so through the winter months with short days we have to watch our power use. We have a dial up internet connection which we're still getting used to, and we see our children less often now that they spend many hours playing in the woods with the other family's two children who are just about the same age.

So, here's where we'll be for a while. Stay tuned!