Quiet

This place, by far, is the quietest place I've lived for at least 30 years.

When I awake in the small hours -- an event that happens all too often these days -- I listen in the quiet dark.

I hear: 

Angel sleeping softly

A boat out somewhere across Puget Sound, perhaps bound for the Pacific

If the weather calls for it, fog horns blast their locations into the night

If the weather calls for it, rain on the metal roof

If the weather calls for it, wind through the trees and around our home

That is about it.

In the day time, the crows call to each other, laughing the way they do. There are not so many song birds here. I do not know why that is. Sometimes, but not that often, we will hear a car or a truck moving on a nearby road.  Today was recycling day, so we could hear bottles clink. If neighbors are out and about, you might hear some voices. Dogs bark as dogs are so fond of doing.

That is about it.

Where else can you count the sounds of a place on your fingers and have fingers left over?

Weather Holding

The Old Amigo is feeling like he needs to get some blogging done.  I've been working on a longer piece -- an animal story.  It's taking some serious hours to pull together though, so I thought I'd give you an update on the garden.

We're feeling pretty good about the weather today. Fox, the Blind Man, recommended the Namesake of the Other Folksinger (Notof). Notof is 27 and Fox's son's best buddy. He's spent the summer fishing up north and now he needs some work before winter sets in.  

Notof can work hard.  He spent a day-and-a-half clearing brush and then breaking up soil in the garden.  Job well done. I spent several hours yesterday sifting and moving soil. Angel mixed in compost. 

Notof and I also did quite a bit of clearing on the south side of the property. That's about the last bit that needed attention. It's starting to look darn near manicured (hardly). But at least it's starting to look cleaned up.

The Farm Girl called today too. She couldn't work last week because she had a fire in her yurt. Yep. It started where the pipe from the wood stove went through the wall. It was a close call, but she got it put out and got her place cleaned up. She got her garlic crop in and can work this Thursday AM. If we can get Notof over tomorrow or Tuesday and FG over on Thursday, we'll have the garden dialed in.  No extra time left, but that's okay.

I mowed some more on the south side today. There's long grass there. I pull it up and then run over it with the rotary mower. That chops it, but it clogs the chute into the bag so every few minutes I stop the mower, turn it over, and push the heavy trimmings into the bag. Then I mow a few more feet and do it again. It's a lot of work, but it's having a great effect. 

I call the south & east sides of the property "The Meadow". As I clear it and mow it, I also pull out surface rocks and wood debris. The weedstack continues to grow. The Meadow looks better and better. 

Angel laid in Halloween candy. This'll be our first Halloween here at the Edge of the Continent, and we don't know the trick or treater traffic levels yet. Not many kids in the immediate neighborhood. Of course Halloween, like everything else, can depend an awful lot on the weather.

One more thing: the "Monster Maul". A neighbor loaned me his Monster Maul. It's a heavy (VERY) splitting maul with a metal handle. This thing is amazing. This afternoon I split a couple of 16" long, 18" diameter rounds. No wedges. It's a real... monster.

Okay, I'm going to try to talk Angel into giving me a haircut now.

Stay warm.

Stay dry.

Almost

We are almost to the election. This will be a long 2 1/2 weeks. I worry about some last minute news story, claim, or projection -- real or fabricated -- that might alter the trajectory of events. This is the first time I have felt truly optimistic about our political prospects since the year 2000. Little did we know that we would be misruled by brigands for 8, long years. This terrible national mistake is almost over. The healing process is almost ready to start. America may once again take her well-earned place at the forefront of civilized nations. Almost. Almost.

We have almost got the yard in shape for winter. If the weather holds, until Halloween, we'll manage nicely.

Today I completed breaking up the soil and removing the largest rocks in 3/4 of the first section of the main garden. Angel worked a good mulch / compost mixture into the sifted soil. This is heavy work. If I could do this much each day for the next four days, we would have the first section of the garden prepped. This is probably not a reasonable goal, but it is almost a reasonable goal.

One of our neighbors, Nancy, gave Angel some root stock for five, shade-loving plants. We got these in the ground today too. This is not nearly enough to constitute a landscape -- or even a landscape plan, but it is almost a good start for some of the places snuggled against the north side of the house.

The rocky soil -- glacial till, I have heard it called -- is beginning to yield to our efforts. We are beginning to see the incredible number of rocks as a resource. We have almost enough piled up from the main vegetable garden preparation to make a beautiful private garden space. I am beginning to visualize this private space on the east side of my office. It may well be fenced off from the rest of the property. This will keep deer out and will allow for privacy... a special, spiritual sanctuary. We may use the small rocks in a gravel path. We may use the larger rocks in a wall. There are almost too many options from which to decide, and this project will of course have to wait for a time when we have basic, remedial and preparatory work done.

I have almost resigned myself to my lack of employment prospects. I continue to pursue opportunities, real and chimeric, but I am slightly less frantic. I am slightly less distraught with our circumstances. It is possible that Angel's work could turn into something that could almost support us. Then the pathetic contributions through my work at PTAC might almost be enough. All we need is something like steady state expenses covered. We continue to reduce our expenses. I hope to learn to do more and more for us so that our expenses continue to drop. It is not a plan, but almost an idea for a plan.

Almost.

Almost.

The Yardman Cometh

This AM I sat looking out the window and thought that it looked too cold, damp, and windy to go outside.  But then I thought that I'd better suck it up and go do something.  After all, winter is nearly upon us and if I don't get the yard ready for it, we're likely to be overwhelmed when things start growing.

So I bundled up and went outside.  It quickly became obvious that I was overbundled.  My tasks were strenuous and the temperature in the mid-50's.  It's important for me to realize that here in the Pacific Northwest, an overcast day does not mean one must stay inside.  The weather stayed mild.  I just came back in the house after about 4 hours of heavy work.

At this point, the north and east sides of the property are just about under control. The south side probably needs about two more hours.  The west side is fine for this year. It is good that I'm nearly done with it.  I now have a "weed stack" that's taller than I am and probably 6' wide and twice that in length.  Next year I will be able to compost my mowings from the meadow area, but this year there are too many weed seeds.  Even next year I'll probably only use that compost in certain parts of the property.

My strategy is that if I can get the heavy brush cleared and the grasses thatched, I will be able to maintain things using my electric lawn mower. Of course I'd like to follow in the footsteps of John Wayland and build some kind of electrically powered riding lawnmower, but that will have to wait for fatter times. My electric lawn mower is heavy, but it's also pretty quiet and it's really easy to start!

The garden area still needs several days of work.  We still hope that Angel's farmer friend will help us with that once she has her garlic crop in.  She has already given us some good garden tips.  

So far the compost bins aren't producing anything but gnats.  I think we need more wet, green-type stuff.  We've got too much straw in the mix.  From what I've read, that's the opposite of most compost situations.  Angel suggested some anti-raccoon measures.  The bins have nice lids.  We've added bungee cords and so far the compost bins have remained unmolested.

The last few days have been overcast with brief periods of sun.  The nights have been rainy, cold, and windy.  The wood stove keeps the house comfortable and the slightest amount of sunshine warms the main living areas.  The passive solar design features really work!

So far the local climate suits us perfectly.  It feels so nice to be near the water. When I go downtown and smell the salt air it immediately lifts my mood.  The local views of mountains, seashore, and water are no less stunning today than they were when we first found this place years ago.

Some Political Considerations

Well, the Old Amigo generally steers clear of overtly political observations, but there are a couple of things I've read and heard lately that bear passing along.  So if politics bothers you or makes you upset, maybe you might want to skip this post.

Maybe next time I'll write about the flock of birds that enjoyed searching for tasty morsels in the area I cleared at the north end of the property.  Or gardening.

But today, I've got two things that I want to mention.  They're political things.

First of all, yesterday I read a New York Times article about the economy.  Buried well down in the article was something that everybody ought to know.  Everybody ought to realize that in the last 8 years -- even though there was an "Economic Expansion" -- the median family income in the United States actually fell.  The numbers?  $50,600 in 2000 to $50,200 in 2008.  Just in case you missed it, let me repeat that this 8 year period was marked by economic expansion.  What does that mean?  Well, I am pretty sure that it means that the top 5% of the monied interests in our country got a whole lot richer while the rest of us just hung on as best as we could.  Sobering isn't it?

Now often when someone has the audacity to bring this up, someone else flings the "Class Warfare" epithet at him, sniffs derisively, and changes the subject.  I ask why it is not class warfare for the richest 5% to accumulate ever greater wealth on the backs of everyone else's labor when working people are seeing their real earnings erode?

Next, I want to flog a horse that ought to be dead but seems somehow to be on taxpayer-funded life support: nuclear power.  In last evening's debate, Senator McCain once again flung his nuclear sound-byte onto the air-waves: We should build 45 nuclear power plants right away.  Now I guess the Senator is counting on us to be unable to do 6th grade math -- or perhaps he is counting on a certain intellectual laziness.  Let's examine this campaign rhetoric masquerading as a proposal to help our country.

It costs about $9B (Billion: with a "B") to build a nuclear power plant.  45 of them would cost in the neighborhood of $405B USD.  That doesn't count the cost of the enriched uranium fuel, either the extraction or the processing costs.  That doesn't count the cost of infrastructure upgrades: nuclear power plants are, after all, centralized facilities that produce lots of power that must be fed into the grid.  That $405B certainly doesn't count any disposal, reprocessing, or security costs associated with spent fuel.  But let's leave ALL THAT OUT of the calculations for the moment.

Now in sunny parts of the country, you can build a pretty decent little rooftop PV system for about $20K (Thousand).  This will be a "grid-tied" system, meaning that it'll automatically feed any excess electricity into the local power grid and automatically pull power from the grid when you need more than the PV panels can supply.  

Properly installed, these systems are safe, reliable, and last for, oh, twenty or thirty years with no more maintenance than occasionally washing them down to keep them free of dust and bird droppings.  When the sun shines, they produce about 3.5kW of electricity.  In a reasonably efficient home, this will be a significant fraction of the electrical needs of the household.  In a mild climate, such as we have across much of our "sun belt" this could easily contribute a third of household electrical needs.  You could probably do better if people were willing to conserve (see my blog posting about sacrifice).

So how many such systems could we buy for $405B?  Oh, we could build a little more than 20 Million of these.  That's right.  20 Million households could cut their electrical use by about a third. And if we funded 20 Million grid-tied PV systems, their cost would probably come down due to economies of scale.

I am pretty confident about these numbers.  I live north of the 48th parallel and am producing about this amount with a 4kW system.  Yes.  Up here in the gray, cloudy Pacific Northwest, such a system produces well over 40% of our *total* power needs in an all-electric home during the months between April and September.  Imagine how the system would perform in Fresno.

Funding this would produce lots of jobs.  It would not require mining, refining, and processing uranium.  It would not require big investments in grid infrastructure.  It certainly wouldn't require storage or reprocessing some of the most dangerous stuff humanity has ever produced.

"But," say the red-herring bringers, the detractors of solar energy.

"But, PV systems don't generate any power at night or when the sky is dark and cloudy!"

Yes, we know that.  That's why we favor grid-tied systems.  When the system is not producing electricity from the shining sun, the house automatically draws power from the electrical utility in the conventional way.  And since we use most of our power in the day time -- especially on hot, summer days -- this works out beautifully.  So grid-tied PV systems produce power when we need it the most.

So why is the nuclear power horse not well-and-truly DEAD?  Why?

It is still on taxpayer funded life support because of the nuclear power industry and the pathetic cretins in Congress who work for it.  It continues to be proposed because the the people who build nukes want that money, and they're powerful and well connected.

Nuclear power has nothing to do with energy security and everything to do with funneling money into the same old network that's been running things for a long, long time. It is all about funneling my money and your money into the well lined pockets of that top 1% of the population who are ever-thirsty, ever desirous of even more wealth to prop up their empty lives.

Feels a Little Like Wednesday's Child

First the good.

I got into the garden again today.  Put in maybe 2 hours of dirt shifting, rock shifting before I got tired and the weather turned nasty-ish.  It wasn't terribly bad (the weather) but the wind kicked up and it looked like it would start raining any second. And I got a bit tired of operating my shovel.  If I can get about the same amount of time in again tomorrow, I ought to have things rearranged well enough to restart the dirt prep.  OTOH, the young farmer we're hiring to help us called Angel and said she can't come this week -- she needs to get her garlic in.  I wish we were planting garlic.  Perhaps next year...

Which brings us to the less good.

My career consultant sent me some documents that were intended to be of help in my search for employment.  I'm talking gainful employment now.  While I mostly enjoy teaching my 5 yoga classes each week, the employment is more loss-full than gainful.  But I digress.  I read some of these documents.  They basically say that I'm hosed.  

See, most legitimate companies will only let existing, well-regarded employees telecommute. So if one loses his job for any reason, it's not likely a real company will hire him as a telecommuter right off.  First he must prove himself.

Since I can walk from one end of this town to the other in two hours, I wouldn't really need to telecommute if I could find a job here (which so far I haven't).  That pretty much means that if I want to obtain gainful employment, I will have to move back to a big city.  Hosed, see?

Now I haven't (quite) given up hope yet.  It is just possible that one of my contacts, someone who really knows me and my work ethic will be willing to get me hired at something like 25% of my previous income to do something.  Like technical writing.  Or editing.  Or web content development.  Or news stories.  

Basically, if I could make any decent salary & medical benefits doing something useful and good, I'd be more than satisfied.  We'll see.  One of my former colleagues in The Valley asked me to send him a copy of my DVD.  He has many contacts.  Perhaps... perhaps.

I really did land on the wrong rock, didn't I?

"Bring me a rock, please."

"Here.  This is a pretty rock."

"Sorry.  Wrong rock."

It was raining when I got to PTAC to teach my yoga class this evening.  Luckily I got a pretty good parking spot.  

When I came out it was no longer raining, but the wind was starting to blow.  Now, nearly 9:00PM, the wind is clutching at the edges of the house.  Our home is sturdy, solid and well-planted in the hillside, so the wind cannot get so much as a fingernail lodged in the cedar siding or the standing seam roof.  But the wind tries. And howls its frustration when it can do nothing but go around things.

The fire pops.  The wind alternately whispers and howls.  Angel says she's sleepy and goes to brush her teeth.  As she always does, Isabelle follows to see if Primary Human is doing anything interesting.

I ate an early dinner and would like a snack before bed.

Busy Sunday

It is great to have an almost functioning shop again.    About all that remains is to go through all my supplies (fasteners and scavenged parts, mostly) and get them organized so that I know what I've got.  I expect to save quite a bit of shelf space by consolidating & organizing the supplies, and this should allow me to use that shelf space to hold still more supplies. 

I already put the shop to use.  We picked up a pretty good wheelbarrow for $12 at a garage sale.  It only had one problem: the wheel was wobbly on the axle.  I had some thin-walled plastic pipe and I cut a sleeve/bushing to make the wheel fit right. Wobble gone!  

Angel & I did some good garden work today.  We basically need to move all the amended soil for the garden to the north edge and pile it in sort of a temporary "berm."  This will give us room to work south through the garden area. Here's what we do:

• Break the soil apart with a pick.
• Pull out the big rocks.  Some of them are bigger than two fists and are real tool-breakers.
• Pick out some of the medium sized rocks.  This leaves a sandy soil that compacts too easily.
• Add a large amount of compost & mulch.

This is time-consuming, heavy work.  And we're racing with the seasons to get the main garden ready for winter.  If we get this all done, we'll spread the bermed soil evenly through the garden area, cover it with some mulch -- perhaps straw if we can find something that hasn't been treated with fungicides, etc. -- and add a bunch of night crawlers.  Come spring, we should have a garden ready to plant!

The north & east sections of the property continue to get better.  I've almost finished with that work.

Completely different topic: The Presidential Election.

Even though the debate was fairly lame, I think that Senator Obama was asked a good question, namely, what sacrifice would he ask of Americans at this time.  

I am not surprised that in his answer he only alluded to a need to conserve energy. Remember, after all, what happened to the last president who actually asked Americans to put in some heavy lifting for the country.  Jimmy Carter tried hard to get us to conserve and we rewarded him for his efforts by voting him out of office ASAP.

There are many things that we as Americans can do for the country.  And I don't mean "go shopping" either.  Since I'm not running for office, I have the freedom to say what's on my mind.  Here are some things that we should be doing:

1. Figure out how to use less energy.  Find one person with whom you can carpool.  That will cut your fuel costs in HALF.  Yes, you'll relinquish some of your precious independence. You'll also have to cooperate with a neighbor to make it work.  Quite a sacrifice.
2. If you are able, grow a little bit of your own food.  Even if all you can do is put a couple of tomato plants in pots on your condo balcony, those tomatoes will be fresher and won't be transported who-knows-how-far from their place of origin to your local supermarket.  They won't be sprayed with anything that you didn't spray 'em with either.  Sacrifice?  Well, you'll need to pry yourself away from the TV and remember to water your vegetables.
3. Bake some cookies for the neighbors.  Do not expect anything in return.  Just show a little kindness to people whom you may not know all that well.  If you've got a Grumpy Gus (no offense if you're named "Gus" and are reading this and aren't grumpy, okay?) next door who is just too surly to deal with, well take some cookies to someone else on the block.  Smile.  Introduce yourself. Make nice for 5 or 10 minutes.  No agenda.  Now there's a sacrifice for you.

Now I could go on, but three things are enough for now.  If you're interested in more things you could do, file a comment on the blog and I'll think about making longer list.

Take a deep breath. Hold it gently for a couple of seconds, and let it out.

Is that the right rock?