Person 1: “Let’s have gourmet pasta for dinner, shall we?”
Person 2: “Pasta sounds good, but there’s one problem.”
Person 1:Â “And what problem is that, pray tell?”
Person 2: “Our one and only pot is upstairs in the attic catching rain.”
Person 1: “Oh. Right. Corn flakes for dinner?”
Person 2: “I’ll get the bowls.”
Last month, we took a day off and went to some Canada Day celebrations.
This month, we spent the day at the Dundas Plowing Match and Agricultural Fair, which is, as their webpage touts, a “down home, real country fair.”
We enjoyed ourselves immensely. Highlights included:
Watching a pig scramble, during which excited children herded pigs into a tunnel.
Watching pairs of oxen plough with old-fashioned single ploughs.
Riding in a horse-drawn carriage.
Listening to a “wife-hollering” competition, in which women stood at one end of the field and yelled across to a judge at the other side with their best call to get their husband home for dinner: “Donnie, dinner is ready!!” Points were awarded for high decibel levels and creativity: “Ditch your wife and come on over to my place for dinner!” was the blue-ribbon winner.
Here I am, waiting for the competition to begin. I could have joined in, but I chickened out at the last minute.
Watching tons of plowing competitions and pretending to join in the fray.
We also met a number of interesting and inspiring characters.
We were excited to meet a local organic farmer who shared some of his experiences with us. We snacked on his delicious organic broccoli and tri-coloured beans all afternoon.
A whole day’s worth of entertainment (or a month’s, in our case) for a $6 admission fee. My kind of lovely day!
Now, I send my sleepy, over-sunned self into bed, because tomorrow we’ll begin re-shingling the other side of our roof.
I’ve recently discovered a perk of living inside a half-finished house. Unpainted walls can be a lonely girl’s canvas.
So when you’re feeling homesick, grab a carpenter’s pencil and turn to the nearest wall. Let your mind wander to a loved one who happens to live 6,000 kilometres away, and commence doodling.
The only downside is that, eventually, no matter how dear your doodle of your spriteliest niece is, it will get puttied over.
This is why one must learn to appreciate the moment. Because, eventually, we all get puttied over–in a manner of speaking, of course.
When we purchased our home, we knew that the roof was ancient and leaking.
Even I, who knew little about home renovation when we first moved in, could tell that the shingles were drastically deteriorated. Although I suppose it doesn’t take much to recognize that if a windy evening means that you’ll wake up to roof shingles littered throughout your flower beds, you’ve got a problem. (Not that we have any flower beds, but you know what I mean.)
We took possession of the house in the height of Winter, so we had legitimate reasons for putting off the re-shingling of the roof. Whenever Cameron would mention us doing the work on the roof ourselves, I would grit my teeth and say, “Remember, we do not talk about the roof! I can’t handle this topic!”
Because, seriously, have you seen our roof?
The pitch is 13/12, which, other words, means that it is extraordinarily STEEP and there in no possible way to walk on it unassisted.
This project is all the more complicated because neither of us are fans of heights.
Example: I once lined up to go on the Big Dipper roller coaster in Santa Cruz, California. I thought I might like it.
I didn’t.
By the end of the roller-coaster ride I had a headache, a stress pimple, and had said my last rites. Look at me, clinging on for dear life with a frightened half-smile.
So, no, I did not think that re-shingling our steep roof was something that I could handle.
Once the weather started to warm up, the roof conversation began to come up again. “Silence!” I commanded.
Eventually, the topic had to be discussed, because August started to tick by and there are only so many sunny days before the rain and snow is set to begin again. And so we started to do research about steep roofs.
We came across this site about shingling an old house with a steep roof, which ended up serving as inspiration for us. If I must admit it, it was this picture that put me over the edge:
There’s something about this woman that made me feel that maybe I could do it too.
And so we agreed to try it.
First, we rented “roof jacks” and boards; these refer to the horizontal boards that are attached across the bottom of the roof in the picture below.
Sadly, once we installed these boards, I discovered that there was no way on this green earth that I could will myself to get up on the boards.
No matter how much I wanted to (or needed to) I could not make myself stand on the roof via these horizontal boards.
This led to much worrisome discussion because Cameron, who is not that comfortable with heights to begin with either, would have to tear off the old shingles, repair roof boards, attach tar paper, and hammer thousands of shingle nails by himself without a trusty helper.
That night, we went inside worried. I tried to psych myself up as best as I could, but it just wasn’t going to happen–no matter what the pep-talk.
Thankfully, some time that night, Cam came up with an idea that saved us and our roof.
He built railings.
Without railings, walking along the boards was like balancing high on a balance beam. There is no way to reset your balance, and there is no feeling of security (for someone like me, anyway). Without railings, all of my concentration was focused on shuffling along, er walking. I could do nothing else.
With railings, I was able to walk comfortably along the plank with my hand resting on the railing. It gave me a sense of safety and something to hold onto. I could reset my balance by just touching the railings.
And so I got up. And we got to work.
The unfortunate and untimely thing is that my old Canon Powershot A60 digital camera has finally given up the ghost, so at the moment I have no way to share our further progress with you.
Just believe me when I say that since these photos were taken, we have both touched the peak of the roof, and we (ahem, Cam) just hammered the last shingle into place on the above-pictured side of the house. This means that we are half-finished re-shingling our entire roof!
We’ve set up another set of jacks with railings half-way up the roof, and there’s an elaborate and sturdy home-made stair system linking the two.
I must say that once again I am amazed at what we have accomplished, especially when I think about that first day when I thought there was no way in the entire world that I would be touching the peak of our roof. It’s like anything else: baby steps!
(Post-script: On this project, Cam does 98% of the work; I usually just hand him stuff.)
In my spare time I can be found writing: tapping my keyboard and scrunching my face up in deep thought.
Cameron, on the other hand, seems to accomplish much more tangible results with his limited spare time.
Our home is heated by wood-stove only, and, let me tell you, the Winters can get cold here on Prince Edward Island.
As is our way, we seem to be half-tackling thirteen to-dos at once, a glaring to-do being “cut all wood needed for Winter heat.” We recognize that we should have all our wood cut, stacked, and seasoning by now, but we could say the same for a thousand other things, as well; there are only so many hours in the day, and we’re doing the best that we can.
We recently bought an Echo CS370 chain saw, which we’ll be using to cut our wood from our own land. This afternoon, Cameron took a monumental first step; he broke in the chainsaw and cut a few pieces from a downed tree close to the house. I love this picture; I see pride and happiness and beauty and the outdoors and, oh yes, warmth!
Once we’ve finished re-shingling our steep roof (by the way, have I mentioned that that’s our latest project???!!), we’ll spend a week or two cutting and hauling mountains of wood. I’m actually looking forward to cutting wood, as I seem to enjoy simple projects that require little finesse and can’t be done incorrectly: one piece of stacked wood means one more morsel of warmth–no matter which way you look at it.
For now, though, we’re happy to have christened our chainsaw and to have cut the first few logs.
I am now referring to chainsaw christenings; I really have become a woman of the woods. I’m not sure how I feel about that.
After much consideration, since I seemed to have become such a woman anyway, I might as well embrace it.
Love,
Laura-Jane
Woman of the Woods
This afternoon I wrote about places to sit; now I tell tales of places to sleep.
Our house has three bedrooms. All three rooms have been stripped down to the studs. Two bedrooms are still in stud-form: one bedroom is packed to the seams with our stuff, since we haven’t unpacked anything but the necessities since we moved in, and the other bedroom serves as a work shop/tool storage area at the moment.
The third bedroom shines as a beacon of sanity. This room will eventually be our spare bedroom, and for now it’s where we sleep.
Here you can see the spare bedroom as it was a few weeks after we moved in. This photograph actually makes the room look quite cute, but believe me when I say that hideous surprises lurked in every nook and cranny.
Before this photograph was taken, we removed the 1950s linoleum flooring and killed upwards of 200 large house flies in this room alone. Elsewhere in this very room the wall paper was peeling off the wall, and underneath the wallpaper slept literally hundreds of large dormant house flies who had made the room their home during the cold winter. We spent a few days vacuuming and smashing as many huge house flies as we could. We would think that we’d got them all, then, two hours later, the room would be swarming again. And let’s not talk about the mouse houses.
Of course, we needed to insulate the room, so out came, well, everything. We did salvage the original trim, but we’re using it in other parts of the house.
It’s also interesting to note the changing of the seasons through the window!
While we were working on this bedroom, we were sleeping outside in our car in the middle of Winter, so you can imagine our motivation.
Here’s the finished product. Simple, simple, simple, but clean, clean, clean.
This bedroom gets the most glorious morning sunshine right across the bed, and I envision this room as a great place to read a book in the mornings.
At night, while lying in bed you can look right up at the stars; when it’s clear, you can see HUNDREDS of stars. In July, there was a star so bright that we thought it had to be something of another world. After much research, it turned out to be Jupiter, the gigantic planet–the planet that has a storm on it that is bigger than Earth! (I can’t think about that too much or it makes my mind explode.)
One night the moon was so bright that we tried to read by its light alone; it was just a smidgen too dark to actually make out any words, but it was almost possible. We both kept trying to just focus a little harder with our eyes, but we never quite got it.
When we lived in the city, I wasn’t too keen of a star-gazer, but it’s impossible not to be fascinated by the stars when they keep you company at night.
When we moved across the country, we sold every piece of furniture that we owned (except my wooden hope chest, which was a gift from my parents).
Indeed, by the time we had our urban Victoria BC condo for sale (we marketed and sold it ourselves, the only way to go in a hot real estate market), there was almost nothing left in it except our bed, my cello, and my hope chest.
Now that we’re on PEI and in our current home, our recent lack of furniture has been imperceptible since our place of residence is half construction-zone / half house anyway.
Up until yesterday, all we’ve had to sit on are some wooden chairs.
Yesterday, however, we came across a very reasonably-priced used three-piece couch set, and, as a result, we now have a couch, love-seat, and arm-chair in our (still unfinished) living room.
As soon as we got the furniture into the house, Cam silently splayed himself out on the large couch, I immediately flopped back on the love-seat, and we just sort of lay there–each in our own long, extended, blissed out moment.
Couches, it’s been a long time; it’s good to see you again.
This post was written by Cameron!
I’d like to introduce a new series here at Whimfield: Fun With Numbers. Often during my research looking for new ways of reducing our cost of living, I crunch numbers. I often find it fun to come up with different statistical scenarios, crunch the numbers, and see how things pan out–the results are often very surprising.
Hybrid cars have been around for a few years now and are gaining in popularity. Governments here in Canada are starting to see the benefits of Hybrids and are encouraging citizens to buy new Hybrids and “green” vehicles by providing cash incentives and rebates. Sounds good right?
Well, it does sound good yes, more people driving Hybrids should mean less gas consumed, less oil demand, less pollution. But, I often wonder about what sort of cost there is to this “new is better” type of attitude–after all, there is a cost to manufacture a new Hybrid, how much does that account for in terms of gasoline consumed?
Ok, lets have some fun. Lets see how much gasoline will be consumed over a 7 year period (assumed age at which owner sells new car to buy another, the new car ownership period–see below) by looking at our old reliable 1982 Toyota Landcruiser, and three 2008 Hybrid vehicles.
Average miles put on a car per year: 10000 (16000 km)
Median age of all vehicles on the road: 9 years
Median age at which a new car buyer sells to buy another new car (new car ownership period):  Couldn’t find data on this one. It has to be less than 9 years as that figure includes all used cars with N previous owners, lets assume 7 years.
Energy in a gallon of gasoline:Â 115,000 BTU
Estimated energy required to produce a brand new hybrid vehicle (as modelled with GREET):Â 38,650 BTU per lb of curb weight
1982 Landcruiser BJ60 Diesel
2008 Toyota Prius
2008 Toyota Highlander Hybrid
2008 Chevrolet Tahoe Hybrid
Hmm, that old 1982 Landcruiser is looking pretty good. The Landcruiser’s fuel consumption is statistically equal to that of a new Prius over its 7 year new car ownership period.
But if compared to vehicles of equal size, our Landcruiser would use 40% less fuel than the 2008 Highlander and 54% less fuel than the 2008 Tahoe. Wow.
Now, obviously I have made a lot of assumptions here, but I believe the general outcome to be true–old cars can be considered “green”. I wonder if I can take this data to the government and request a “green” vehicle rebate? I can picture it now, “What? a 4200lb 1982 S.U.V. ? Are you kidding me?”.
The reality is that Toyota has been making efficient diesels capable of 30-45mpg since the early 80ties and there are plenty still around. Thanks for playing!
This post was written by Cameron!
One of the main goals we have with our house is to make it as cheap as possible to live in. With the cost of electricity being the most expensive in all of Canada here on PEI ($0.19 kw/h + $30 per month flat fee), we are looking for ways to cut back on our electricity usage. Our ultimate goal is to consume 0 watts when the house is idle–that is, when we aren’t using anything, we shouldn’t be paying for electricity.
After tackling obvious things like, how do we heat our hot water, we went on to other, less weighty, but still sizeable consumers. One of these consumers was our old, noisy, dirty, and dated headless server, Kibo. Kibo has been in our family for many years, acting as our network server. Kibo allowed us to share our files, centralize our email, download torrents while our laptops are preoccupied, etc. Kibo was great.
But the unfortunate thing with Kibo is that it sucked up a lot of power with its two IDE drives, dual P3 processors, and decade-old technology. Kibo cost us roughly $170/year in electricity. Too rich for our blood.
After toying with the idea of replacing Kibo with a cheap router and losing functionality, I decided that there had to be a better way. The solution I came up with for this problem was to look for a router that could run OpenWRT and supported external storage. The router of choice was the Asus WL-500g Premium with its two USB ports. Combining this router with a 2.5″ laptop HD in a USB enclosure seemed like a good solution, so we bought the USB-powered 160gb Seagate Freeagent GO.
Like most USB-powered external HDs, the Seagate Freeagent GO came with a Y-cable with two USB heads. The reason there are two heads on the cable is that the USB specification only allows for 500ma of current to be supplied from any one USB port. This is where it gets tricky. Sometimes this limit is not enforced, but sometimes it is. Seagate claims that their HD may need upwards of 1A to spin up, so, even though one head may be sufficient on one computer, two heads may need to be plugged in on another.
However, when I researched this subject I wasn’t at all concerned about the USB power issue as the WL-500g Premium convienently came with two USB ports anyway.
Once the router and HD arrived I spent a few hours setting up and installing OpenWRT. I was sure to plug both HD heads into the back of the WL-5oog Premium, to ensure it had sufficient power.
Well, it didn’t work! Nope, the HD just sat there clicking away–it didn’t have enough frickin power to spin up. What’s the point of having standards if manufacturers can’t even follow the specs, I thought to myself. After looking around online for a bit, trying to find a solution to my problem, I realized that this setup was a little too obscure and I wasn’t going to be handed a solution on silver. So, I came up with my own solution.
I had a hunch that the Seagate HD was consuming a little more than 1A on spin up, and with the Asus WL-500g Premium being a low-power device, I was guessing that it was going to be pretty strict about the 500ma restriction. So, the first step was to reduce the power consumption of the Seagate HD.
I disassembled the HD’s case and ripped out the huge crazy-glowing-alien-like LED. I mean, come on Seagate, what a waste of power.
After ripping out this atrocity, I attempted to try the HD again. No dice, but it was definitely a lot closer to spinning up.
My next step was to try and give the HD more power. Use a self-powered USB hub you say? Yes, that would work, but then one needs to use another wallwart, another lossy AC/DC transformer, inefficient I said! I found a better way–subvert the USB spec altogether. The WL-500g Premium just so happened to be powered by 5V, the same voltage USB uses.
I took the router’s adapter and spliced in a female USB connection connecting the red wire to the adapter’s +5V wire and the black wire to the adapter’s GND wire.
With this setup I was able to plug the Seagate HD’s first head into the Asus WL-500g Premium as I had it before, but I was also now able to plug the second head directly into the female USB connection, giving the HD all of the additional power that the adapter was able to supply.
It worked! The HD spun up and I was able to access the drive. After I disabled the Seagate FreeAgent GO’s lovely internal 5 minute auto-spindown “feature” to prevent OpenWRT from barfing out pages of IO errors, I was off to the races.
The little router has 160gb of shared storage, it acts as a firewall, a switch, a wireless router, and it is more than happy to run all night downloading our torrents while our laptops are turned off. Sweet!
If you were able to read the specs on the WL-500g Premium’s power adapter above, you would have noticed that it’s only capable of supplying a maximum of12.5 watts. You may have also noticed that it is a switching adapter with CEC efficiency level IV. What does that mean you ask? Well, it means that the setup is very efficient. I have yet to measure the actual consumption of the setup, but I estimate that it consumes roughly 6-10 watts on average during normal usage. This translates into a yearly consumption of approximately 70 kw/h–an electricity cost on PEI of only $14 a year and over $150 a year in savings over our beastly Kibo. And, best of all, the savings came without sacrificing any functionality.
So tonight we will say goodnight to our old friend for the last time. Good night Kibo.
A BAT IN THE HOUSE THE FIRST TIME WAS A NOVELTY.
A BAT IN THE HOUSE THE SECOND TIME, WHEN YOU’RE REALLY TIRED AND JUST WANT TO GO TO BED, IS NOT MY IDEA OF A GOOD TIME.
GOOD NIGHT.