What a pragmatic, busy day. Generator installed! Yes. High fives all round. Vega groomed. She did not like having her nails cut. No big news there. Seeing the truck made her very happy. Groceries bought. Two more trees cut down. Still using the axe. Gonna get the chainsaw fueled and oiled tomorrow. I may use it. I may not.
Out late last night so we’re both knackered, to use the technical term. Oh, I forgot. The roof guys came out, too. Found a gap in the flashing around the loft’s first skylight and will repair it early next week. No more buckets under its corners.
We’re moving toward having as much work as possible done before winter, our first full winter here. That list includes a remodeled kitchen, a completed loft with walnut shelf tops installed, wire shelving up for bankers boxes, garage organized.
I will not complete the fire mitigation before winter, rather I plan on cutting down trees right through the season until I’m done.
Fire mitigation means removing some trees. Putting solar panels on the roof means removing some trees. Turns out removing trees is something I know how to do. So, every day or so until I’m finished, I’m cutting down one tree, limbing it, cutting the trunk into firewood, stacking the firewood and putting the branches out for chipping.
A complication here that I never faced in Andover is that slash is bad. That means I can’t make brush/slash piles for the critters like I did in Minnesota. Each limb removed from the tree has to be moved into a location accessible by a chipper. That’s a lot of extra work. But it’s good work and I’m looking forward to it.
Got started yesterday. The first lodgepole I cut down stood directly in the way of backing out of the garage. It doesn’t now. I know, this may seem callous, cutting trees down, but in actuality I’m thinning a garden bed, leaving more room and therefore more nourishment for the trees that remain.
Removing shadows from our solar panels is important, too. Shade has an outsized impact on electrical solar generation due to an unusual characteristic of silicon panels. Just a bit of shade shuts down the entire panel.
Most significant of all is fire mitigation. Lodgepoles are a pioneer species, that is, they come in after a fire, grow up, shade other species, then die back. They tend to grow close together and many get spindly, unhealthy. 30 feet from the house all trees have to have branches cut off to ten feet above the ground. This helps prevent fire from reaching the tree through ladder fuels like shrubs and tall grasses, slash. Within the 30 feet defensible space perimeter, the trees also to have adequate space between clumps to ward off crown fires.
after felling tools. see peavey below.
The Splintered Forest guy taught me that lodgepoles need to be in clumps for their own health so the ten foot between crowns rule applies to small clusters of lodgepoles, not independent trees. Weaker lodgepoles will blow over easily due to their shallow root structure unless they have friends to break the wind.
Late fall, early winter work outside. Good aerobics. Especially when I cut the trees down with an axe like I did yesterday. With a lot of huffing and puffing. I’ll use the axe when I can because I like the handwork aspect, but the chainsaw will allow me to finish the task in a timely manner.
My limbing axe works great. With most of the branches on a lodgepole I can stand on the opposite side of the trunk and flick them off one handed. Standing on the opposite side of the trunk makes it much less likely that the axe will find its way into my leg.
The last bastions of unopened boxes have shrunken. The garage is ready for flat surfaces, pegboard and shelving reassembled. That will mean the pile of file boxes in the loft here can be stored, at least some of them, downstairs. The small mound of file boxes, dvds in boxes, art and office supplies will disappear. That’s the almost final step in the creation of the loft.
Sundays always leave me a bit discombobulated. Neither a work day nor a leisure day in my long-term conditioning. I find myself wandering around a bit, not sure where to light, what to take up. Today we went to Brook Forest Inn to watch the first half of the Vikings/Bronco game. We were the only Vikings fans there as you might imagine.
A pretty good game, really. The Vikes showed some signs of life.
This post is like Sunday. Not sure where it’s going, so I’ll just stop.
We sat down with Kaleb Waite of Golden Solar yesterday afternoon. He impressed us both. He had a clearer plan for our panels, which ones we needed. Smart panels. He had a nifty gadget that can project shadowing throughout the year from any tall object near the roof, like trees or chimneys. He did not dumb down his presentation and walked us through the particular advantages and challenges of our roof. When he finished, we’d made up our minds. Golden Solar will get our business.
With the eventual development of capable storage batteries, we may be able to go off the grid entirely, though for the time being we will still be connected to the Intermountain Rural Electric Association (IREA). The concept of radically distributed power generation, a form of disaggregation, is a small piece of the path leading to a sustainable future. Our choice, by itself, means almost nothing; gathered with others though and through that putting real change forward, an individual choice is not a small piece.
Unboxed most of my art yesterday. So good to see the prints, paintings, maps and photographs again. Most have been boxed since about a year ago this time. That’s a long to time to go without seeing old friends. I’ve never been sure of the role art plays in my life, just that it’s a big one.
Over the next week or two we’ll get the garage in shape, moving the last things up into storage spots, making work tables, starting up the freezer. When that’s done, shelving from up here in the loft, no longer needed thanks to the wonderful shelving Jon has put up will have a second, really third, life. I’ll move many of the bankers boxes remaining up here down into the garage.
When they’re down and the wire shelving is up for the ones that will stay, the work up here will be close to done. Jon’s making a top for the art cart and walnut shelving for the lower units, the pull-up bar needs to get hung and I believe I need to put a thick rubber mat under the treadmill. Too much bounce when I hit the 10 second, fast as I can run mark in my workout.
Kate’s thumb surgery is Friday. That means a change in the cooking, grocery shopping detail. One I’m looking forward to. In true third phase fashion we’ll swap caretaking chores. Oddly, my recovery from prostate surgery will have been faster, by a lot, than her thumb procedure. It’s been a medical year so far.
All the books are off the floor and shelved. Not finally organized, but shelved! My crude tool, measuring the height of stacks, was accurate. I have some empty shelving, but some is always needed. The art will now come out of the boxes and from the house to be hung.
A large number of bankers boxes that contain research for various projects and manuscripts, notes and other material for all my novels, my go downstairs into the garage for storage. The final configuration of the loft, where the reading area will be, where my computer and desk will sit, is not finally determined, but will be in the next week or so.
Jon has the walnut lumber we bought at Paxton’s and has begun to turn it into cabinet tops for the low shelving. Walnut and birch should be beautiful together. He’s also creating a top for my art cart/research table.
This space reflects my Self, my soul, if you will. It feels as if I enter a spacious version of my mind when I come up here. Kate saw this in her mind’s eye when she first saw this place on Shadow Mountain. Now it’s becoming a reality.
Have begun to shelve books. Will discover whether the crude tool of measuring book stacks has produced enough shelving.
A place to work, a place to be the person you want to and can be. Necessary. Kate’s sewing studio. Jon’s ski manufacturing space. The whole backyard for the dogs. And this place, this loft, for me.
Over the course of this week I’ll fill all the empty shelves, then begin to unload all the art now stored in plastic bins. Our art, up here, and in the house, is still packed away. The house will not feel like it’s ours until the art is hung.
We have yet more medical tasks this week, too. The crown that chipped when put on will be replaced today. Kate and I have separate appointments at Arapahoe Internal Medicine. Me for the elbow, shoulder pain and her for elevated potassium. On Friday is the last scheduled appointment following up on my surgery. The super sensitive PSA test for which I had the blood drawn last Tuesday will be done. Looking for a low number. If it is low, it suggest that none of the cancer cells escaped into the rest of the body.
We want to get past this constant medicalization of our lives, but…
While Kate’s at BJ’s place near Tetonia, Idaho, I’ve been working my way through a list of things to get done: installing uninterruptible power supplies to smooth out our occasional micro-outages, mowing the fuel in the front, upgrading the desktop and the laptop to windows 10 and trying to make work the bright idea I had for stabilizing our mailbox.
This was the original plan. Chains and a rock. Problems were two. Making the chains stay in place proved harder than I imagined and the rock I chose was too damn heavy. So.
Plan #2
This is a version of the idea I had, though more poorly executed than I want. Still, it’s proof of concept. It has so much chain because I bought the chain lengths for the larger rock. Also, I wanted black chain, but the two sources I had close by, Big R and the Ace Hardware, only had silver.
It’s not terrible. We’ll see whether it can keep the mailbox at a stable height while retaining the virtue of its original design. It swings to the side if a snow plow hits it, rather than sheering off at the base.
Rigel broke her thumb and dislocated the digit next to it on her left paw. She has a cast and a medi-paw over the cast to protect it. She stumps around like a one-eyed pirate captain, whacking the floor as she goes. How did she do it? No idea. Kep has furred out again, looking like an Akita about twice his real size. Over to Award-Winning Pet Grooming in Bailey on Monday. No kidding. That’s the name. Vet recommended it.
That generator I’ve written about so often? Still not installed and this time it’s the electrician who pulled out. He claimed his crew’s work on El Rancho, an Evergreen remodel, had overwhelmed him. Feeling a bit snakebit on this one. So, sigh. Find another electrician. The amount of work for the trades up here in the mountains is so high that smaller jobs get pushed off the calendar.
On Monday Ikea delivered the last of the bookshelves, five more of the tall ones. This time I took out the tape measure and measured the remaining piles of books, divided the total inches by the length of a bookshelf. Needed five to cover what’s on the floor. With the black walnut shelving on the shorter bookcases these birch veneer units will snap to attention. Jon’s also producing a custom top for what he calls my art cart, resin over a basin filled with various smaller pieces of wood. Not gonna make Labor Day for the finish up here, but the result will be worth the wait.
What a pragmatic, busy day. Generator installed! Yes. High fives all round. Vega groomed. She did not like having her nails cut. No big news there. Seeing the truck made her very happy. Groceries bought. Two more trees cut down. Still using the axe. Gonna get the chainsaw fueled and oiled tomorrow. I may use it. I may not.
