Well, my Spouse was asked to stay longer aboard the M/V Manoa so, as I believe we all knew was inevitable, it fell to me to winterize the inboard engine of the Golden Girl. It being my first time I had to be guided through it by telephone. But what doesn't kill me makes me stronger, right.............?

On my way to the Big Top yesterday I took the truck instead of the Prius and threw in the large ladder needed to climb up to Golden Girl where it sits on its cradle. The winterization consisted of running the engine to make it suck antifreeze out of a bucket, pushing out all the water currently in the engine for coolant. 

There were a lot of firsts for me here. For example it was my first time to climb into the surprisingly deep crevice inside a boat engine compartment to retrieve a hose way too far away to reach by hand. It was also my first time personally observing the phenomenon of the sun heating up a clear hose and making it suck up fluid without any motor doing the work. Apparently this leads to boats being sunk upon occasion. By far the most memorable part of this process was afterward when I was asked to stick my finger in the boat's... well, I can only describe it as the boat's nostril, to see if the um... discharge... was green. If it hadn't been, I'd have to repeat the exercise adding more anti freeze to push more water out.

I'm here to say it was indeed green. Note to self... bring hanky for wiping finger next time.

Also someone had left a discarded lamp near the dumpster, which I kept in revenge as a present for my Spouse:



It's about a 6" diameter chrome spotlight head with what appears to be a good working lamp inside. The head itself appears to have been dented at one time, and the dent successfully pounded out. There is still a small crack where the dent was pounded out.



The other end resembles a chrome eyestalk with a fitting allowing it to be mounted on a deck or some such. The inside/underside half of the mounting has a handle, presumably for rotating the head, and also a toggle switch for on/off. I would judge this thing needs to be rewired. That will be a good project for someone who missed out on all the fun of the winterizing.

I was so thrilled about how nice the windows looked in the downstairs stairwell after I cleaned the paint stripper off them, I decided to do the same in my office today. Imagine my dismay when one particular pane did not clean up, and instead even got worse! I was completely baffled. It was as if the goo smeared all over it had mysteriously become hard as diamond when all the other panes cleaned up just as easy as that other window had. WTF??



Well, I showed this to my Spouse and he took one look at it and said, "it's not glass, it's Lucite". Ehhhhhhh? I tapped my finger on each pane and they sounded exactly the same. They even looked the same, in the middles anyway. I'd been looking at these windows for 2.5 solid years and never saw the one as different than the others. Then, to prove it, he took his keys out and tapped on each pane with the metal keys. The dirty one made a conspicuously dull "thud" compared to the other two. D'OH!!! You can't slip one past an engineer! LOL. It will remain like that for now, but ultimately I will have to replace that piece... preferably with a nice piece of glass.



Speaking of the stairwell I have the new door nearly completely stripped now. It matches the trim woodwork perfectly, as if it was always there! Oddly enough it has a powerful scent of pine unlike any of the other wood I stripped. I don't know if it's just a slightly different species, or if the wood is newer, or was preserved differently, or what. When the doors have all been shut up and you first walk in there, the alcoholy piney scent is about enough to knock ya out. Whew!

As reported in a previous post, I had nearly given up on my Shiitake Mushroom Log I bought on Amazon.com, after 2 months of non performance upon arrival. However after trying the techniques I described in that post, 2 actual mushrooms began to get extruded from a drill hole at the bottom and a break in the bark next to that. Orange arrow indicates the items in question below:



( Click here to read more.... )
 

My Spouse and I both have the habit of perusing the local Craigslist listings for good deals. The other day my Spouse spotted a small farm selling off 200 mature blueberry bushes at $5-10 apiece, all cold hardy low bush cultivars. By the time we managed to get there a day later, we were the very last stragglers, picking off the final 6 bushes available. We got two Northlands and four North Blues, each about 10 years old. The farm was an interesting place, where the 2 guys were a sheep herder and an artist respectively. They had a number of sheep type dogs about the place. The ex-blueberry field was going to become a formal garden.



Here are the blueberry bushes -- George, Barbara, Jeb, Dubya, Laura, and Jenna -- resting in our back yard after a journey in our pickup truck. The first two, the Northland cultivars are much larger than the others and take two people to lift. The others are only 2-3 feet tall.



We spent a bunch of time today preparing the base of a new garden bed for the Bushes. This is the 6' x 9' area we selected. After marking it off with string we used a mattock to chop away the sod, then again to break up the clay soil. A hoe to break up the clods the mattock left, and then a spade to turn it all over once. I did a pH test and it came out between 6.5 and 7 -- way too high for blueberries which prefer 4.8 to 5.2. We're going to build up a 16" high retaining wall of landscaping timbers, then mix the old dirt with peat moss and aluminum sulfate to lower the pH. It'll need elemental sulphur added each year thereafter to keep it down. Ideally you're supposed to start preparing a bed for blueberries a year in advance, but this was all so sudden we didn't get that option. The Bushes do have some of their original dirt with them though which should help a little. Cross fingers!



The deck container plants are doing nicely. Everything that was sown outdoors so far has sprouted. I am having to water these once a day and I am thinking that maybe twice a day will be necessary for the potatoes in the wood crate. I've already eaten several thinned-out sprouts from spinach and radishes... yum! I also stole some of the more spindlier yellow onions for Chinese Foo tonight. There are still a ton of small sprouts and things in the house that cannot be placed outside yet. Tomatoes, peppers etc. We had a 20 degree night last night!



I fooled around with my PlanGarden plot tonight and added the Bushes (each one labeled with his or her name) where their new plot will be. I also changed my overall plot to show our entire yard, and segregated the container plants in a to-scale outline of the deck. I then altered the containers and their plants to match what is actually out there, so this should match the photo now. I still have a whole lot of "to be planted" stuff that was shown on the original PlanGarden plot so I could figure out which size containers to use for what. Those are kind of stashed off to the side of the picture out of sight for now, but ultimately I'll be placing outlines of the house, garage, shed etc. where they can be shown wherever they are throughout the year.

Be sure to click on that to see it close up, it's much better ;-)

Yesterday the weather was gorgeous -- nearly 70 degrees, sunny and breezy. The sort of weather that makes snowbirds come back from Florida and Arizona each year! My Spouse and I both worked on my Fine Yacht. We got the rest of the bondo sanded off (using the angle head grinder and a cup brush) to bare aluminum and oddly enough there was no holeage underneath, only some dents.



My Spouse recommended fairing the hull near the dents and caulking the seams near where the bondo had been, in case the leak had been there instead. Here's the other side:



There was also a noticeable pit or air bubble in the old resin at the seam between the 2 stiffeners. I tried various times to get good pictures of that but it was in shadow, until I got this crazy shot:



Holy digital macro zoom Batman! That is way too much detail, yuck.

After doing some research I had picked Boatlife caulk for the patch job -- such as it is. I ordered that online and then as it turns out we already had Boatlife solvent lying about so I had that too.



Here's the caulking job as it currently stands. The seams are done but I think the fairing part could use a second layer. I am still trying to figure out if a second layer is allowed with Boatlife Caulk or if I need to just wait 10 days, sand it and hope for the best.



If it looks a bit messy it's because the boat was rocking back and forth on its precarious perch on the trailer while I was at work. This was due to my Spouse going after the trailer taillights with a sawsall. They needed replacing (as well as the whole trailer needing rewiring) and the bolts were so rusty they were never going to come off any other way. They were replaced by nearly identical el cheapo taillights available from Wal Mart.

The next step for this boat will be to take it to a body of water and put it in, and see if it leaks or what. I have an underwater writing wax marker for notating leak points, and a liquid version of the Boatlife caulk that will be good for stopping fine cracks and loose rivets type leaks. There is also a little of the thick type caulk left as well. So after going back and forth on that for a while the metal repair part of the boat should be done for this year. Cross fingers ;-)

In other news, the Johnson HD-25 outboard my Spouse bought me is now totally rebuilt. It too has reached the point where nothing else can be done at home. What remains is to test it in an actual lake and see if it pumps water well enough to keep itself cool. It doesn't work in the barrel of water my Spouse set up for running the motor in, but that is apparently not necessarily a realistic test fixture for the pump as the water pressure is nothing like what it'd be in real life.



I also have some fabulous pictures of what they looked like new. Or at least refurbished. Check this out:



This is from Peter McDowell's North York Marine website. He sells the paint and decals if we were ever obsessive enough to paint this motor. Of course, then it would be way too nice for the boat ;-) Also check out this link for a beautifully scanned 1949 folding brochure from Johnson displayed on a German website.

I can't wait to take it out on the water!

I am not sure this indicates a great confidence in my new boat (nor my abilities to master operating it) but I was advised to make a bailer and that using a bleach bottle is the easiest way. Here's how I did it:



The idea is to cut the end off the bleach bottle so that you can hold it by the handle and use the open end to scoop up water. So, first I needed to figure out where to cut the bottle. I reasoned that if it is to hold water, the easiest way to create a straight line to cut on would be to put it in water and let the waterline determine that. First I filled it partway with water itself (to weigh it down) and then I placed it in a partly-filled sink. I set one end down in the drain (to keep it from sliding around) and propped the other end up on something so that the water came to the bottom edge of the bottle. The deeper the water, the more of an angle the cut will be at.



While the bottle was still in the water I used a Sharpie to mark the waterline. If you have the newer, non toxic Sharpies they are not waterproof so every time I accidentally touched the water I had to dry the tip off to continue. On the plus side, this kind of Sharpie comes off real easy with Goo Gone if you want to clean up the bottle after you're finished.



I stabbed the line once with a kitchen knife to get it started, then used my trusty Fiskars to cut along the dotted line. I'd put a link to buy these Fiskars if I could but I wasn't able to find one. I got these at Jensen Tools in 1996 and they say made in Finland -- not made in China like the ones I see for sale at Wal Mart. I hope they never break! As a note, if you have the chance to use an older bleach bottle I would. The new ones are awful thin-walled.



Here's what it looks like finished. I put a rope and clip on it but I don't really know where it'll be stored in the boat yet so I may have to change that part later.  The fuzzy gray thing in the lower right is Daisy, one of our cats. She was crawling all over me bumping my wrists with her head while I was trying to focus. This new camera has no setting for "cat helping" that I have found yet.



My intention was to field test the new bailer by emptying out this water accumulated in the base of the doghouse project. Unfortunately we were having a cold snap today and it's frozen solid all the way through. What beautiful clear ice! So that will have to wait for now.

I play DragonRealms, an online text-base RPG (that means you type everything and there are no pictures; you just imagine it all in your head). At one point my character went to a festival with a lot of booths selling things and one of them had tiny pets such as crickets and katydids. The pets would ride on your shoulder and do cute things like chirp, walk in small circles and look up at you curiously. What really stuck with me was the name of the tent though: "Small Friends". So when I got a refurbished replacement for my first (dead) PDA, a Palm Tungsten T3, I named the unit "Small Friend".



The first one only lasted a few months so I didn't have a lot of hope but lo and behold this Small Friend has provided years of service and has stood up well to my usual treatment of dropping it on the floor a lot. In fact it has lasted so long the original rechargeable battery has now gone south. This month I found someone selling cheap replacement batteries for only $5! I figured if they are that cheap now they will soon no longer be available, so I went ahead and bought 2. In the unlikely event my Small Friend lasts another 5 years, at least I'll be set for batteries. There is a great website with photos and instructions on how to swap out a T3 battery. I followed these and my only comments are to add that you may need to use a small flathead to pop a small tab holding the bottom on (on the ass end of it between the "tabs" they tell you to pull out) in step #3. Also, in step #8, on my unit it was a little hard to tell if they meant you to include the black piece with the top or pry them apart, because mine were fairly firmly attached together. It turned out you definitely want to leave the black part behind attached to the front. It helps a lot to go around and pop the rest of the sides first, despite them saying you should start with the top :-p

Anyway the $5 battery worked great, and the only headache was it wouldn't resynch to my PC right away and kept crashing whenever it got to the Versamail part. Since I don't use Versamail anyway I finally just deleted it off my Small Friend and everything synched up properly. A few years ago we both trained ourselves to stop keeping tiny pieces of paper with notes on them, drifting up into big mounds of clutter. This thing syncs with my Outlook and my SplashID so all my tasks, notes, calendar, contact information, and passwords are portable with me and shared back and forth. I don't know what I'd do without my Small Friend! <3

Also in small buddy news I now have a new Camera! My Spouse bought it for me as a belated birthday present. Excellent! It is a Canon PowerShot SD900 Digital ELPH. They can be gotten on eBay for about $60, or at least that is what this one was.



It fits in this great pouch to which a small tripod gleefully (and conveniently) hugs:



The main advantage of this camera over my other one, a Canon PowerShot A40, is that it will focus a lot closer. A LOT closer. It also has much bigger pictures pixel wise. I was playing with it today and here's a picture I took of our cat Zinger while he was sitting on my lap:



Using PhotoShop I kept cropping it farther and farther to see how much detail was available... amazing! And this is nowhere near as close as it can focus either.







Fun stuff!

Also courtesy of my industrious Spouse I now have a fabulous new Outboard for my 12' aluminum fishing boat. It's a 2.5 horsepower gasoline trolling motor. It is a Johnson HD-25 produced from 1946 to 1950. I can't really show you a picture now because it's already clamped onto my lumber rack and taken apart into about 1,000,000 pieces, but here's what they look like when complete:



The 2nd one from the left is a Johnson HD-25. Apparently they are a fetish item for fishing because they will fire at one stroke per second, making for incredibly slow trolling. Putt... putt... putt.... I hope my Spouse can get it working! I am given to understand I may be helping out by manufacturing some leather washers in the not so distant future.

I also did buy replacement oars for my boat. They are new, blonde varnished pine oars. I also had the old ones in the living room while waiting for the new ones to arrive. There have been a lot of jokes about me "bringing 'ores home" especially the twin blonde "'ores". LOL

Alas, my Prius (whose Bluetooth name is, by the way, "New Friend"... my desktop is "Big Friend" and my iPod Shuffle is "itty bitty friend") got hit by a deer on the way back from the trip to pick up theoutboard. It looks like a lot of damage cost-wise but luckily my Spouse was not hurt.  I'll take it in tomorrow for an estimate.

Last night I was making "Chinese Foo" (don't ask!) and considered using some packets of takeout soy sauce that were in the fridge. I had a closer look at the ingredients and to my surprise, soy was not listed!



I searched breifly on Google for soy sauce without soy, and even looked up the company which appears to be rather large. You wouldn't think an American company would be allowed to call something soy sauce without there being any soy in it, but who knows? It might even be bad packaging artwork. 



In any case, I tossed them in the trash and used the Kikkoman soy sauce we had in the cabinet. No thanks!!

Today was a big gardening day for me. Well, big in terms of work, not size ;-) I had found out about this neat online tool called GrowGuide which lets you put in your region's typical last frost and first freeze dates, and a target date and it'll tell you what you should be planting that week. I wanted to follow it this year with a container garden that I sow indoors and then move out onto the rear deck for the summer. I printed out the first several weeks and put them in a 3 ring binder with 1 page per week. Then I also designed and printed some little forms I could fill out to tell what I had planted on which dates, so I could refer back next year.



Today I planted 4 small (1") pots each of broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, leeks, romaine and iceberg lettuce, chives, parsley (same kind as before), green and red bell peppers, yellow and orange mexican sweet peppers, and Jalapeno peppers. Those are all noted on the page shown above in my little book!



I still had a lot of compostable organic seedling pots left from my first round of sprouts so I used those. Since I had a problem with seedlings drying out and dying after about an inch tall I decided to use large Zip Loc bags around each set of pots instead of putting Saran Wrap over them like last time. I figured this way the sprouts can be kept steamy until they are as large as necessary. Also the bags will be way easier to re-use than Saran Wrap. Above sets of 4 pots are soaking in bowls to get their initial moisture. The labelled bag for each is folded underneath.



Once they were soaked (the pots were lightly damp and soft to the touch all over) I moved them to their bags, sealed them and placed them on the light table where they immediately began to steam up. LOL we'll see how it works out this time!

For my birthday, which was earlier this month, my Dear Spouse gave me my very first video camera! It is a Canon FS100, which is just like a Canon FS10 or 20 except without any internal memory. The distinction is moot because everybody just uses removable SD cards anyway. Also I had received Corel VideoStudio 12 to handle any editing. I immediately produced a very bad test video which I won't punish you by linking to here, but if you really want to know, you can look backward in my LJ ;-)



Here's my new purple friend overlooking the scene of my new opus. No, I did not PhotoShop in the LCD display, that's really what it showed! No, don't ask me to pull that lucky shot off again, I'd never manage in 1000 years ;-)

The video I am working on has a working title of "Reparing a Christmas Light" and it shows me soldering electrical wires and then glueing broken plastic parts. It even shows the light working in the end! Right now I am just doing silent shots, since I figured trying to coordinate the scenes to be the exact length with good dialogue at the same time would probably make my head explode.



I shot it in our exercise-cum-junk-room because it has a high ceiling. Also it had a closable door to keep our "fur children" out.  Here's the "stage" surrounded by camera, 2 lights, etc.



My very high tech soundstage is made of cardboard. Note the soldering iron, sponge, electrical tape, etc. ready to hand. There's also a Maglite I used to illuminate a clear part from the inside so the camera could see through it well.



In the interests of not making myself crazy my first time learning the camera I skipped some stuff you're supposed to do, for example white balancing. However, I did make a shot list and crossed off each one as I accomplished it.  Aren't I organimizated?

The next step will be to take all the stuff I shot today and put it together in VideoStudio 12 to make a silent movie. I'll keep you guys appraised as to how that is going. 



And yes, there is a happy ending ;-)

--Kaas

OK here is my first attempt at making a video with my new Canon FS100 and Corel VideoStudio 12. Don't watch if you are a vegetarian!

OK, this was definitely not one of my finer moments... hours... weeks. However, I have found that our moments of greatest uncleverness often make for the best reading for everybody else, so here we go. Grin.

( It all began when I thought that right before it snowed 15 inches would be a good time to pull both cars out of the garage and do a huge mucking-out of the garage and getting rid of all the remaining junk in there.... )

An update on the snowblowing: my skill and artistry with the snowblower is, if anything, only getting worse. Our front walk looks like Dennis the Menace took a lawnmower to a wedding cake. Our very prissy (well, about their lawn anyway) next door neighbors actually came and re-snowblowed their own sidewalk after I got done with mine if that gives you any idea. However I'm pleased to report that the snowblower starts at 0°F as easily as it did at 20. That is to say, persistence was the key. (Oh yes, and throttle at full too :-p)  

It's getting down to seriously, -17 tonight with -40 windchill, possibly as low as -50. We have a severe windchill warning in the area. That is just too cold! Brr!

Success! I managed to wrestle the rusty, crusty, old, and very cheap snowblower to the ground and subdue it. Then it proceeded to kick snow's ass. Yay!



It turned out to be way easier to start than I was led to fear it might be. There were only two... small.. details I had to figure out. Firstly, I had to put a drinking glass over the handle with the drive clutch since my arms weren't long enough to hold it down and pull on the starter cord at the same time. And secondly, despite the fact that the snowblower's manual failed to mention its use or even its existence, it was very important to have the Throttle at Full for easy starting ;-)  

Up until today I always figured a Throttle and a Choke are the same thing, but this has both. So I investigated and the more I read about this, the more I am convinced it is a big mechanics' conspiracy to maintain their own job security. They both control how much air gets into the mix... right???

It was only 20 degrees out so it may be more difficult to start again tomorrow when it is closer to 0 out, but at least I've seen it run once now so I have some hope!

This was my first time using a snowblower and now I am very impressed at the snowblowing skills of folks I have lived near over the years. It clearly takes some practice to do a good job. However, since we had 8-12 inches of very heavy (though not sticky.. it had a lot of ice balls) snow it would have been insanely difficult to shovel. After I got done hacking away the worst of it with the snowblower I went back to neaten it up with a shovel and it was heavy duty work even for just 10 minutes! LOL

LOL I rarely run into English words I don't know anymore, but this is a good one!

Splenetic

Adjective

• S: (adj) splenic, splenetic, lienal (of or relating to the spleen)
• S: (adj) bristly, prickly, splenetic, waspish (very irritable) "bristly exchanges between the White House and the press"; "he became prickly and spiteful"; "witty and waspish about his colleagues"

Oddly enough the context I saw it in was also talking about the White House. Kinda makes you wonder doesn't it? This definition was from Princeton's Wordnet.

Definitions of potash on the Web:

• Any compound containing potassium.
  www.zulumoon.com/glossary/p-glossary.htm
• Potassium carbonate. It is an alternative to soda as a source of alkali in the manufacture of glass. Potash glass was particularly suited to cutting and engraving.
  www.steincollege.com/glassdef.htm
• Prepared by evaporating the lixivium of wood ashes in iron pots
  www.ifdn.com/teacher/glossary.htm
• This term generally refers to potassim oxide (K 2 O). Wood ashes are also a source of potassium.
  edis.ifas.ufl.edu/HS123
• Potash is used primarily as an agricultural fertilizer (plant nutrient) because it is a source of soluble potassium, one of the three primary ...
  www.energyweb.net/mining/jargon/default.asp
• Commonly used for the chemical potassium carbonate (K2C03), a component of oil emulsions.
  coombs.anu.edu.au/SpecialProj/ERIC/gdaglos.html
• A form of potassium carbonate, also known as potash or in its more refined versions, salts of tartar or pearlash. It was the precursor to baking powder. Developed in 1742, potassium carbonate is a white salt that forms a strong alkaline solution when combined with water. ...
  www.eddybles.com/culictionary/2007/1/5/a-dictionary-devoted-to-culinary-words-phrases.html
• Potassium compounds mined for fertilizer and for use in the chemical industry.
  www.intierrainvestor.com/glossaryp.asp
• Usually made from wood ashes. One of the three main minerals in fertilizer. A term used to denote potassium.
  discoverorganicgardening.com/glossary.html
• a potassium compound often used in agriculture and industry
  wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
• Potash (or carbonate of potash) is an impure form of potassium carbonate (K2CO3).
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potash
• the water-soluble part of the ash formed by burning plant material; used for making soap, glass and as a fertilizer; an impure form of potassium carbonate (K2CO3) mixed with other potassium salts; (archaic) in the names of compounds of the form "... ...
  en.wiktionary.org/wiki/potash

-----

Greetings!

The wood boiler produces a lot of ash. Not as much as I'd have expected, because it's fairly efficient at burning stuff, but every 2-3 days a small bucket is partially filled. After some consideration (about a year's worth), I have decided upon a plan to get some more use out of our wood ashes, which are currently treated a bit like hazmat. What we do now is put them in a sealed metal bucket to cool down, then after 2-3 days (when the bucket is needed for the next batch) they are dumped into a much larger sealed metal garbage can in the garage. Last year I accumulated one and a half garbage cans of ashes; I believe a full winter of burning would produce about 3 garbage cans full in total.

Well, it turns out that potassium from wood ashes (Potash) are useful for a number of interesting self-sufficiency related substances, including garden fertilizer, homemade soap, and caustic potash (which is very similar to lye). With precision craftmanship one could even use these to go on and produce say for example, homemade biodiesel. Potash production used to be a really big deal. Millions of acres of New York state used to be covered in hardwood forests, but it was cut down in the late 1700's to burn just to make potash! Now cheaper chemicals are used instead in most industries.

My original intention was to place the dead ashes in either the compost heap or on the lawn using a lawn spreader, during the summer. However I hesitated this last summer because I had read there could be problems with the large amount of salts still contained within, tending to accumulate. My original thought was to perhaps run the lawn spreader with the ashes right before a heavy rain, so that the salts would all be dissipated. So might the potassium, but at least the ashes would be gone ;-) The actual scheduling of this proved awkward however. I define awkward as, it never seemed to happen for a host of different reasons, and by the end of the summer I still had all the ashes in the garbage cans as well as no room in the compost heap anymore. D'oh!

The New Plan:
I had read extensively on the web for instructions regarding lye and potash and it is apparent that the commercial means of producing such stuff is better and cheaper. The instructions available on the web were mostly along the lines of "well I never bothered to try this, but here they are... let me know if it works". I took each one with a grain of salt as a result, and designed my system based on the broadest possible interpretation that included all caveats and instructions read on the most reliable seeming sources. Believe me, I would not do this at all if it had seemed to be a very dangerous reaction but the main thing appears to be the handling of the the more caustic versions safely afterward. Not getting it in eyes or on skin for example. Luckily the liquid seems to be much easier to handle safely than dry potash would be.

I am taking this easy, one step at a time. I am hoping to find someone who would like to buy (or hopefully, trade) my Potash off me before I have actually suceeded in making something, so there's no need to rush.

The first step is to soak the ashes and obtain the relevant liquid. I am going for the $13 solution: $10 for a bucket and $3 for a plastic spigot. The potash will attack metals, so they cannot be used. Ideally wood would be the material but I thought I'd better prove the concept and find someone to trade something fun or useful with before investing in an oak barrel!

NOTE: Until this succeeds (or doesn't) I can't recommend anybody else try it. Know what I mean? Play it safe OK.



Here are some plastic spigot parts of the standard garden hose variety, as well as a double washer. My plan was to place this at the bottom of a bucket in which the soaking would occur. The shut off valve would allow releasing the water into a container or not, as needed. The nipple would allow attaching a small hose to the output if needed to guide the liquid down into the waiting receptacle. I may just screw an elbow on there instead though.



I cut off the end of the piece that was going inside the bucket, because I will not be attaching a hose inside there so it's just extra bulk. I wanted the flow of water out to be as unimpeded as possible. After sawing the end off with a hacksaw I used a matte knife to trim away the loose plastic bits.



Here's what it looks like installed in the bucket. This is a new clean bucket purchased for the purpose.



Here's a closeup of the rubber ring I used. It's got a groove down the rim to accept the edge of the plastic bucket. This seemed to work great and I tested it afterward by filling the bucket with water and watching for leaks. All looks good!




This paper is the moral equivalent to the rocks or marbles in the bottom of a flowerpot: it is intended to prevent too much of the ashes from escaping out the spigot. Straw was the recommended substance for this purpose so if the paper does not work I'll go buy a bale to keep in the garage. 



Here's the first batch of ashes inside. I did a very coarse sift to get the charcoal bits out so I could throw those back in the boiler. I will probably wait about a week (2 more stove cleanings) so that the bucket is filled before I pour water in, for the sake of getting repeatable results in the future.



Once it's ready to go I will pour a gallon of water in the top and close it again, then place the jug underneath the spigot to catch the seepage as it comes out. The first soaking will produce the strongest base and each subsequent one will be weaker with a point at which it's not worth it to soak it any more times. The potassium carbonate water would then be stored in sealed containers until it is time to boil it to adjust the pH.

I am keeping an eye out for the appropriate lab equipment to reduce the water content more safely than just an open boiling-pot. However that stuff is really expensive so that part will take some patience!

Testing soil is something I've wanted to learn for a long time, and even more so as I've become aware of how important it is to plant health. Since the cilantro/coriander seeds I have need to be sowed directly into their final pots, and they have specific soil chemistry requirements, I wanted to test the potting soil I have to see if that would need any modification before the seeds went in.



The way the test works is you get some water with the essence of the soil in it, and add the super secret test chemicals to the water then shake it up in a little box with the measurement markings on it. Here's a picture showing 1 part soil and 5 parts water soaking in a container. The three color coded test boxes are for Nitrogen, Phosophorus and Potash.



The test required me to wait until all the sediment had settled out of the sample so I could get the water that the soil had been soaked in. After a couple hours it still looked like black water, but upon closer inspection it turned out the potting soil had a lot of debris floating on top and the water between the debris and the sediment was actually clear. By the way I had been experimenting with camera settings and this was one picture I never could have gotten successfully with the original flash setting!



Here are the test boxes being loaded. The left hand one (Nitrogen) is filled with water to the test line. Each box has a color coded capsule of test powder that needs to go in after the water.



Here's what it looks like when the powder went in. It just lay on top of the water in each cell. Then I had to put the watertight, color coded top on each box and shake it vigorously until the powder and water mixed together well. 10 minutes was the official amount of time to wait to see the results but the colors pretty much started changing immediately as they were being shaken.



This is another photo that I never could have carried off before I started experimenting with flash settings! Here are the results of the soil test after 10 minutes. The Nitrogen was literally off the chart... way more N than the test was capable of displaying. This leads me to believe the little green round things that were amongst the soil must be largely made of Nitrogen. Guess if there are plants that don't like Nitrogen rich soil I won't be planting them in this!

Potash and Phosphorus stayed very cloudy at first and the color matched the test box label much better than it did any of the actual measuring strip. I tried looking at them in different light and with different backgrounds but viewed with the human eye neither matched anything on the chart.



To me the orange color of the Potash water was a completely different orange than the test results strip orange. As for the Phosphorus I could see a lot more suspended white test powder in there than coloration.

Ultimately after letting them sit for several hours, the tests had fully matured and it became apparent that Phosophorus was right on the mark (the center of the chart) while Potash was so low it did not register on the chart at all... it was clearer and paler than the lowest end of the scale. So basically what we have is potting soil that has crazy Nitrogen, OK Phosophorus, and is Potash depleted. The good news is, we have an almost infinite source of raw materials to make homemade potash in the form of the copious ashes produced by our wood boiler.

For the past few days I've been working on various projects.

One of the Compaq Proliants is now partially set up as lmao.kfap.net, the PhP and MySQL enabled Apache webserver. LMAO is a nice single-processor PIII with a raid array. Unfortunately, although stuff works well enough to be used for now I am not satisfied with the raid array's setup and I think that machine will need to be redone completely. I think it will be fine barring any emergencies, and I can re-do it once the other system has been shut down and I've gotten to the other higher priority issues. In addition to PhP, Perl and C this machine will also allow Ruby and Python scripting. Fun!

Once LMAO is ready for action I will be transferring some of the existing client and personal sites from the old network (where they are spread out on 3-4 different machines) to there. Then I will get started on the other webserver that will have the Java and Tcl capabilities as well as high-speed CGI.

I got the Webcam working on ORLY. It is supposed to be mounted in the window of the server room to look up at the sky for weather reporting. However it also was instantly and automatically integrated into the Skype internet telephone capabilities of that machine as well. Surprise!! One of my odd quirks if you will, is that I do not trust webcams. I treat them like loaded guns. I don't point them at myself even when they are not powered up. So the camera is currently pointed at some stuffed animals and a blank wall. Snicker.

I also got Weather Display installed, which is a 3rd party weather reporting software package that I am going to try out instead of the WeatherLink II software sold by my equipment's manufacturer. As soon as I have a webserver running here so that I can start it auto-posting weather web pages for Ashland, I'll supply the URL here. There'll be a little picture from the weather cam integrated into the site too. I thought it would be funny to post it at the bottom of each entry here too if I can figure out how. Just basic "my weather" with a tiny picture of the sky.

I had my 2nd meeting of the study group for "Deep Economy" by Bill McKibben today. By now I have read the introduction and chapters 1 and 2. It's interesting that Chapters 1 and 2 are so different they could almost have been written by 2 different people.

I really did not like chapter 1 at all, but I was not required to read that one technically, had only been told to skim it. If I had to quantify what I didn't like about it is, it did not have good citations and had a visible bias in areas I knew enough about to realize what was going on. For example, it claimed that all the economic (dot.com) boom in the 90's did was increase misery all around, not make people happier. I beg to differ! I was there for the 90's and we were very happy indeed while the going was still good. Not only that but I distinctly remember that crime, especially violent crime, statistics shot way down during that time. So while I don't disagree with his basic points, I don't like having my intelligence insulted either.

Additionally it was just a bit heavy-handed overall. I felt a bit defensive even though the people it was talking about didn't really include me. I think what felt like "accusatory" to me was actually simple clumsiness and overdoing the message a bit. I've never been a big fan of the point being hammered home again and again and again and again, as at least one person near and dear to me can attest to.

However, Chapter 2 was a refreshing surprise. While Chapter 1 had been focused on the problems of today and the roots of their beginnings, Chapter 2 was about Local Foods, the concept, examples, and the benefits. Very nice! Citations were thorough and most times I thought "wait a minute..." an explanation arrived not long after. Excellent work and it makes me wonder if the 2 parts of the book were either written by 2 different people, or if the editors requested Chapter 1 cobbled on to give the book a beginning, or what.

For the meeting itself we discussed Chapter 2 and then did some brainstorming on what-all would be required to do the local food thing for a given locality, all the different angles and ideas for implementation. One thing that was kind of odd about this part was the other 2 guys at the meeting were both students and transient to the Ashland area. So every time I'd say something that was from the perspective of someone thinking in terms of implementing it right HERE, they would give me an odd look like... well it wouldn't be HERE. LOL

I will post the final drawing from the whiteboard when I can figure out how to transfer it off my cell phone to my art machine.

I will report on the later chapters as I can get to them, and subsequent meetings. I can't make it to next week's as I will be going to a Candidate Forum in town here which is, alas, at exactly the same time on the other side of town. But there should be at least 2 more meetings after that.

P.S. I almost forgot to mention that on my way to the meeting on college campus, I passed a house that had unfortunately placed their McCain/Palin campaign sign right next to a Slow Children at Play sign. I must go back today with my camera! :D