When your cat rubbing itself all over things impacts electrical production.
It’s fun but she doesn’t have enough surface to make a real impact :).
He Stepped Up the Defenses
He started watching Primitive Technology and was inspired.
Finished laying decking
The last board is ripped to size, then I try to mimic its factory round bevel with the sander. Worked pretty well.
The ends having been cut need to all be resealed.
228 square feet, half of the house we moved into.
The trees are perfectly placed for some late afternoon shade. These nice trees are the few sticks which survived our reclaiming the land from brush years ago.
Sealing Cedar Decking
Load off my back, money in his pocket.
Portraits and Stuff
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?
More Compost
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.
Chestnut Progress
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.
Deck Work
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.
Megadouche Back in Business
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.
Enchanted Entrance
I let wood piles meander through the land more and more. I love how it looks.
Ursine Visitor
We often have signs, rarely sightings. This guy’s been bold. Esther shooed it (from the house) with great vehemence.
Every Other Year
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.
Parental Achievement Unlocked
It took 10 years to get to this glorious point.
Feeling Wealthy in more Certain Times
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!
Closing the Loop
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 :).
Plotting like there’s no Tomorrow
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.
