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.
Decisions from Winter Stupor
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.
Cheating the Laws of the Universe – a LOT of Amps
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?
Not the best sap year
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
First Build
I’ve heard from several people building their own PlottyBot but it’s the first time I see a picture of one :). It truly is a great honor.
Built by Jeff.
Not a Banner Year thus far
Very little flow and we’re already mid March.
Ipad Test
It works really well, I need to think about what cool doors this opens up.
UV Snowflakes
Pictures don’t do justice to what it looks like in person unfortunately.
Snowflakes
I finally tuned the plotter a bit to make it perform faster. I was trying to make it move faster by increasing the stepper motor speed, it turns out optimizing the pen up/down action was really where all the slowness was and makes everything appear to run faster. It’s quite spiffy now and I’ve been plotting non-stop this past week.
Snowflakes courtesy of llemarie @ turtletoy.net.
RC On Ice
Sick drifts bro!
And that was bound to happen
RC Car upgrade
Chasing the cat is even more fun
