This guy is getting closer to the house every day, it would probably be on the dining table if the glass door allowed it.
Onetouch Delica 3D Printable Replacement Cap
Over and Under
My brother & I just spent a tough week end tackling 2 projects which are needed to take the house addition through next Winter.
The first project was to cut a hole through the roof for a stove pipe to come out. This will allow us to hook up a second stove: the alpiner. Woodstoves are very low tech and unlikely to break, but I’ll be relieved to have a backup source of heat. At this point we have no idea how much or even if we’ll need to fire both stoves, the addition will be fully insulated for this Winter when it wasn’t for the last one.
High, slippery & dusty, but with a nice view on our energy independence
And our maple syrup independence 🙂 
While I’m up there enjoying the views
When I designed the house addition, I framed a section in an odd way so as to be able to pop out the roof and grow half a floor. I’m not sure if we’ll ever do it but I wanted to have the option. Being up there is a great reminder why.
Ok let’s get to the business at hand, a big hole
I did this one with full climbing gear, I have no idea how I did the previous one without.
I have yet to take a picture of it with the flashing, I’ll be back up in a couple of days to put the cap on.
2nd horribly shitty project, insulating the floors.
We spend the hole day working in the dirt and against gravity, it sucked just as much as I remember from when we last did it to the original tiny house. Here we’re covering everything with plywood.
Thank you to my brother for suffering through 2 rewarding yet miserable days, to Russ for the climbing equipment, and to Dan for the reciprocating saw.
If it’s not keets, it’s chickens
We ordered 12 more Rhode Island Reds, they will be our 3rd “batch”. They are indeed a good breed in the cold. They arrived with their beaks trimmed which is 100% barbaric and we will never order chickens from this place again. The old timer farmer we had gotten them from thus far stopped doing it so we had to look for alternatives. It didn’t even occur to us that this could happen, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised when stepping out of a personal interaction with a local farmer, and into one with an out of state large scale breeder. This shall serve as a great reminder to not ever do that for chickens and anything regarding food or animals. Fuck these guys.
The Wordiest Word
With Markov chain based random word generation, I essentially have tables of the probabilities for letters sequences. With this I’ve always wanted to know what the most English word was. The word with the highest probability of each letter following its predecessors.
I finally bit the bullet and produced it; well them, because it varies depending on the corpus & depth used. All in all it’s not that impressive, just kind of cool to know. I don’t know what I was expecting, some amazing word that would rock my socks off.
Without further ado, here they are:
| Corpus | Depth | Wordiest Word |
| basic_english_words | 1 | st |
| basic_english_words | 2 | st |
| basic_english_words | 3 | struction |
| basic_english_words | 4 | statement |
| basic_english_words | 5 | store |
| unabridged_english_dictionary | 1 | prerererererererere… |
| unabridged_english_dictionary | 2 | press |
| unabridged_english_dictionary | 3 | press |
| unabridged_english_dictionary | 4 | preconcer |
| unabridged_english_dictionary | 5 | preconcertification |
-1 racoon
After the keets were taken out by a racoon, we bought a trap. We left store bought corn in there for weeks, but the racoon has standards and prefers local organic stuff. So instead it destroyed some of our corn plants not 10 feet away from the trap. As with the keets, leaving 80% the food untouched. Their modus operandi: destroying everything and taking a couple of bites is extremely enraging.
The day I found our half eaten corn cobs on the ground, I decided it was time for the big guns. I opened a can of super fancy French canned fish we reserve for special occasions.
I reluctantly shared a tiny bit of it with the trap, and special occasioned the rest myself.
It had been many nights of failure, but this stuff is potent, and so the very same night, the racoon was trapped. Proving once again that French food is to die for.
Notice how it pulled inside 30′ of the string I had attached to the trap’s handle and proceeded to gnaw and pee on it. It’s only fair that it would spend all night being a jerk under the circumstances.
I had setup the trail cam next to the trap,
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and now I know there’s 2… So far though, second one seems to have wisened up to what the trap means, or maybe the stench of pee and fear hormones isn’t an enticing accompaniment to a fancy diner.
The Secret World of Leaves
Some sort of eggs under a zucchini leaf.
There’s a Japanese party at the currant plant.
I have no idea what is going on there, at a first glance, it looks like ants are gathering sunflower seeds (this is a sunflower plant); yet upon closer inspection, other insects are involved and and the seed looking things could be their cocoons. Maybe some aphids the ants are raising?
I found several of these neatly folded birch trees leaves. Some halfway done and tied up with some web. I opened one up but whatever natural cycle this is was already over and there was nothing in there but refuse of some sort. I love the idea that some insect is making a little sleeping bag with available material.
Petals are leaves come on, a bumble bee got in and the other insect decided it wasn’t welcome in that flower any longer.




































