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aesthetics, plots

Esther at different “resolutions”, rendered with Ivan Murit’s Texturing

Robin & Esther, the lines created pen motions conducive to ink goop

Nicole Texturing’d I need better lit pictures of my subjects.

I got a CMYK pen to experiment with multi color renders, particularly ones where the colors can mix into the full spectrum.

And so…

Nicole CMYK, the result is cool but I definitely want to improve. On a wall it’s a bit spooky, it captured her essence perfectly but it dissolves into chaos as you get closer.

Interpolated Random Grid courtesy of llemarie @ turtletoy.net

Bricks courtesy of markknol @ turtletoy.net

The Great Seal of Vermont, courtesy of Vermont

Appalachian Autumn courtesy of base12 @ turtletoy.net

I was looking for blue ink, I pretty much had to get this “the last color of the king”. A nod to the 1789 scholarly experiment to check if noble blood was in fact blue. Spoiler alert, it wasn’t. I love Noodler’s Ink, I came looking for UV ink and stayed for the jokes (and the quality). Gee I wonder what color billionaire blood is.

The fountain pen is loaded with it now, I’ll be playing with handwriting in the near future.

I was never an artist, at all, but I have really enjoyed how my pursuit of perfection with the plotter, mechanically, electronically and programmatically  has ended up making me care deeply about ink quality, flow, and paper properties. It reminds me of all the times artists explained their art medium and I was completely oblivious to it. I never understood that the medium was relevant, yet today it defines the boundaries for what I can do. It’s the possibility space. Much of the artistry of pen plotting comes from the various algorithms, processes, programs, one manages to get running and combine. It’s as much a skill as learning how to draw, it takes effort and skill. Only a borderline unhealthy obsession with seeing a machine wield a pen drove me develop one for years, yet today I’m happy the journey took me from the automaton to exploring more artful things. I’ve been bathing in computing for as long as I can remember, it’s nice to look outside a little. And in the end, it’s computing that took me there. How’s that for a stream of consciousness?

agriculture, self sustainability

I asked a neighbor if they were doing anything with manure from their horses. turned out they had a ton extra and were cool with giving it away. It also turned out it was all piled up nicely already, and was pretty much already compost. I left things very tidy and we gave them some soaps Nicole made, what an absolute score.

6 loads without a dump truck

I added the 2 buckets of ash we keep for icy weather. We’ll have time to rebuild our stock come Fall. We’re mixing in wood chips and grass clipping. Pretty much anything green we can get our hand on. It will be a serious pile of serious compost soon.

agriculture, self sustainability

3 year update after planting 3 little Chestnuts, piggybacking off a New York guy’s effort to reintroduce Chestnuts to American forests: they all look wonderful.

The stronger growth comes from the one that’s in the shade, go figure.

We got a few more this year since they’re doing so well and promise to deliver a bounty in a few decades.

We’ll find them a spot in due time.

building, self sustainability

I worked through the week end, but it was really fudging hot and that slowed me down. Still, the deck it taking shape. And that shape is that of 2 decks to be joined with a couple of steps.

 

self sustainability, water

The intermediary seasons between Summer and Winter have always been a challenge for us. When it’s not cold enough to make a fire, but it’s cold enough to not take a cold water shower outside. With Megadouche‘s ability to deliver infinite hot water, it really is not an issue to bathe outside even when it’s cold. It was evident immediately after “inventing” it last year, that it would remain as a permanent fixture of our homestead. This year I set it up as soon as possible in April and I polished it a bit. And boy has it been nice, it really is the absolute best thing we’ve made. It’s not just nice as taking showers outside is really pleasant, it also changes the dynamic of our day completely. When it’s too hot, or when we work hard, we can just hop under and just get a refresh. No longer are showers something that needs to be planned, moved with buckets, and kept for the end of the day.

The solar setup is all scrap lumber and spare parts. Old panels, old batteries, old charge controllers. It looks funny but it performs well. This year I added 1 panel because we started moving a lot of water right off the bat and I could tell the batteries were getting depleted.

The sediment tub with the siphon coming from upstream. A great formula.

nature encounters

We often have signs, rarely sightings. This guy’s been bold. Esther shooed it (from the house) with great vehemence.

building, self sustainability

It seems as though we build something substantial every other year. This construction season, we are building a deck and focusing on siding (which is very much overdue).

Ken is back to help me plant piers

 

Chatting about what to do where

 

Some piers go in very close to the house and septic pipes. Having an actual toilet is still something new here, and we want to keep it this way by not crushing the septic pipes.

Esther is fascinated by the “big tractor”

It’s going to be a big deck 🙂

We also planted 3 piers by the Sugarhouse to extend its coverage of equipment. The piers will be ready for me whenever I get inspired.

Ken helped us plant 32 piers so far, including the 9 first piers which got us in a tiny house in the middle of a very rough land. I’m extremely bummed to hear him talk about retirement, and extremely happy to hear him compliment how much we’ve done here.

agriculture, self sustainability

Between the housing market, the empty nurseries, and how hard it’s been getting compost; all signs point to the pressure Vermont is receiving from pandemic migrants.

Finally though, after months and many phone calls, we were able to score a truck load of compost, from a super cool local farm at that!

self sustainability

6 years is how long  I’ve been after the goal of closing a loop of trails all around our land. I started the day with a mission, to close that loop from the disparate trails I pushed a little each previous year so that I could go all around the land on the ATV.

It is notable that an ATV is not a tractor. It is less capable and it is much lighter. There is no way I could take the tractor through the trails I made, yet it would be very useful to work on them and turn them into nice trails. Even, dry, wide, this is not where we are now. But… I can take the ATV through the loop and that’s one heck of a start. It means access to fire wood, it means the trails forming the loop are bound to get nicer and better managed. It means being able to bring equipment & material to various places of the land (sugaring, lumber, et cetera).

Today’s mission.

 

Parts of the patchwork of trails I’m sticking together for the loop were obviously man made and used, all I have to do is clear all the trees which came to obstruct them.

Closing the loop means going through a marsh, this was definitely the hardest part. I shouldn’t have done this after 3 days of rain, on the other hand I won’t be able to see the ground very soon when all the greenery sprouts. It was now or never.

I’ll need some slab wood to help, and now I can take it there :).

aesthetics, plots

Raytraced Sphere (reinder @ turtletoy)

Digital render

 

Analog render

 

Close up. The imperfections of ink flow is 80% of what makes pen plots appealing

 

Curl noise (reinder @ turtletoy), playing with a color changing pen.

 

When I don’t know what to plot, I can always browse through the hundreds of cool mandalas people draw on Mandalagaba every day. By happenstance, my life is set up such that a steady stream of plotting material is pointed at me.

Hava, by far the most advanced user of Mandalagaba, never hesitates to mix tessellations, radial symmetry and then fine tune the parameters of each resulting cell.

 

Simple mirror symmetry is often used to draw fauna.

agriculture, self sustainability

Every year in January, we spend one evening dreaming of greenery and raiding nursery websites. Then we forget all about it and random trees & shrub show up in the mail through April and May.

7 plum trees, 2 apricots and a few more shrubs not pictured here

We are starting to have a lot of fruit trees around. We try to pick a good spot for them all, but some just don’t make it. Since we put an emphasis on variety, we couldn’t possibly know and cater to all the optimal conditions needed by all. So our strategy is more on the carpet bombing side, imprecision and loss are part of the equation.

I rarely post about the garden as it has mostly become Nicole’s project, but it’s starting to be seriously amazing. I’ll have to post more pictures of it this growing season.

self sustainability, solar power

With our recent solar upgrade, we are able to produce much more than our charge controller can take. In fact, on days of perfect sun (full exposure, perfect angle) we need to turn off half of the array or the charge controller, which can only take up to 80A shuts off. This sounds silly, but on cloudy days, having all these panels is invaluable. So right now we’re a bit in a manual mode of turning panels on and off based on the weather.

3 years ago we had a brutal heat wave which sent us away from our house. I vowed then to have some sort of A/C capabilities before the next one. One of the nicest thing we’ve done to ourselves was getting a “regular” fridge. While at the time, it pushed our solar install to the limits, today it’s really not a big deal to keep going, even though it’s by far our biggest consumer of electrons. So we bought an 8000BTU A/C unit, I was expecting it to be maybe “a couple of fridges” worth of power consumption, but let me tell you… This thing is 7 fridges put together! Ouch!

We’ve been testing it now to make sure we won’t have any bad surprises when the heat comes.

We’ll never have the battery bank to store and supply 70A through the night. Also true, when the Sun shines, the solar panels can most definitely keep 70A coming and more. We’ve gotten good with stove heat, at managing not heat itself, but how to buffer it in the house, to buy us time through a cold night. It looks like we’ll have to do exactly that, but with cold. Run the A/C all day while the Sun gives us more energy than we can do anything with, to buffer the house as much as possible against the heat. Nights usually provide respite from heat in the Summer, in the Winter this is also true but it’s the opposite of a respite when you are fighting the cold :).

So our panels are more than enough, our storage is essentially null for the purpose of A/C, and our charge controller is too close to its limit of 80A to funnel all the panel energy to the A/C while doing the few other things we need electricity for.

I think this tells us we need to upgrade the charge controller. This way we can have a more pleasant Summer, and more specifically mitigation of heat waves.

All for free, money wise and carbon wise. Amidst these mundane concerns of solar system design to tackle such a juggernaut device as an A/C, it is easy to forget how beautiful and elegant it is that the hotter the Sun is, the more we can turn it into Cold. How often are problems their own solutions?

maple syrup, self sustainability

We only had 1 good week of sap flow this year, and only boiled 1 batch. It just wasn’t a maple syrup year. We still made 5 gallons which is enough for our family’s yearly consumption, and we still have 2 gallons left from last year. We’ve been experimenting with making granulated sugar with it. Last year we tried maple candy, and that was delicious but it was a lot of work. Granulated is much easier to make and to substitute in recipes. We will try to ramp up our sap production next year.

It’s cleanup time.

 

The loot

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