Landscaping Under the Poverty Line

This has been another year living below the poverty line. My wife and I run 3 businesses out of our house: my engineering consulting, her day-home, and her framing and art studio. This year, the only one consistently earning money is the day home.

But we bought a house 2-1/2 years ago with a disastrous yard killed by neglect. How do you revive a yard to preserve your home value when you struggle to pay the electric bill and the mortgage? The old way. Reuse, recycle, re-engineer, re-purpose. I built a 2 cubic meter composter two years ago. It's monstrous but holy shit it works. The first year nothing happened as the bugs and worms took a long time to establish. Everything goes into it: grass clippings, leaves, weeds we pick and the ubiquitous food waste generated by folks who home cook nearly everything. Last summer season it generated about 10 cubic meters of excellent compost. For the composter, I purchased the materials for about $120. I could have had a dump truck deliver a 10 cubic meter load of screened topsoil for about $100 trucking time and maybe $150 for the soil. But this option reduces garbage to the dump, will make soil forever and gives me a showcase project to promote my beliefs.

Our lawn is dying. Six rampaging rug rats every day driving Tonkas and peddle cars around the yard added to a dog and some years of near drought have left it spotty and brown. Last year I mowed it twice in the entire summer. The center parts weren't even tall enough to be cut by the mower blade. So I bought $10 of plastic garden fence, $6 of grass seed, and $20 of new lawn fertilizer. Piece by piece at about 15 square meters a time we are going to top dress and reseed. But I need more soil? We decided this is a good time to build a nice retaining wall but again price is a huge issue. So I'm digging out a foundation and reusing the soil to top dress and adjust the slope of the patch for seeding. It's slow since I dig it by hand and have to pick out rocks, crush lumps, and spread carefully.

The wall is going to be dry stone made of scrounged river rock. That came about after a trip to the local gravel pit. I got a cubic meter of decent sand for $20 to finish the kids sand box. The cost was actually beer money for the loader operator since the pit owners can't be bothered to charge for a pickup truck full of sand. But somehow the $150/hour rate of the loader and operator needs to be paid. Fine by me. Talking with the operator as he loaded my pickup he sent me to the back corner of the pit where all the large waste rock from the separator gets dumped. I can go and pick my own rocks at no cost. Just backbreaking labour. All of this is going to take months, but there are lots of hands here with my wife and I and the kids. If those rocks don't suit, we'll drive down to the river and pick them there while the kids splash about.

The older kids have decided to assist with the landscaping in some unique ways. Here's what you get with 3 recycled food tins, paintbrushes, some bricks of tempera paint and vigour.

Six years ago I built my kids a 2 meter by 2 meter by 1 meter playhouse for $50 dollars. It was made of scrounged mahogany plywood, old barn wood ripped into studs, leftover steel roofing, leftover mixed paints, and a couple of old railroad ties for the foundation. The only cost was a 20 L pail of barn paint in white. Barn paint only comes in two colours but it's actually cheaper than primer and you can buy latex or oil. The plywood I used was so old it took me 3 coats to cover it to just reach a white base. It's a great playhouse but sadly we had to leave it behind when we moved from the farm. That plywood was 19 mm thick making the entire playhouse about 500 kg. I built it into spruce tree patch so it's not even possible to drag it out to haul away. Some other kids get to have that one someday.

Down the road I hope to make a wind mill of scrap to handle rainwater. But that's still in the dreamy concept phase.

Online Friendships - I PWN JOO NOOB

Are internet friendships real? Do I need to know what you look like to figure out if you are my friend? Do I need to know your real name? Do I need to know where you live?

I started my online life in 1992 with Compuserve. At the time, I had moved to the arctic to persue my career, uprooting myself from all my friends, family and close associates. I was 1500 km from my nearest real friend or family member so I began to hang out online. In that time, online was a very different beast. The web was in it's infancy. I paid $24/hour for my internet connection at 2400 baud and another $20/hour or so for datapac services so I didn't go bankrupt. How do you handle that kind of cost? You only use text, never download pictures and you sure as hell don't browse the new WWW. My monthly cost was about $50.

In comparison my roommate spent $500/month on 1-900 calls. I was even able to download hundreds of kinky stories for that $50. Self actualized sex was not that bad.

But I made some cool friends. I joined the Science Fiction group on compuserve and then joined the IMPS. I can't really remember what the acronym IMP meant and probably I have it stored on some hard drive somewhere. But it doesn't matter. The IMPS were a group of aspiring SF writers joining online by text only communication to learn to write. We had a couple cool mentors. C.J. Cherryh dropped by once in a while and Mike Resnick was sort of the unofficial bash your head critic. Were those real friends? I sure thought so at the time and I remember a few of them. I've never met them in person. I have no idea what they look like. But I honestly did some writing. A real life friend even published one of the stories I wrote for that group.

One of my best memories was discussing food management on space ships. What kind of meat can survive acceleration? How do you feed people for 10 years? All of this was an asychronous talk with Ms. Cherryh.

Much later I became a die-hard Diablo II player. I remember many of my friends although we have lost touch. To anyone from The Amazon Basin in the late 90's early 2000's I remember you. Wappawappa, Baalos, and my other pals. Where are they now? Probably the same place as 90% of my high school friends. Things change and you move on. That does not mean those weren't real friends. Some of them I talked to for 5-6 hours a day. Try doing that with a real life friend.

I also tend to choose to live in small towns in rural locations. It can be a lonely existence given that the chances of meeting like minded folks are slim. The internet feeds my need to have intellectual conversations about something other than the weather, my kids and school, or our yards. And since I hate cities with a passion I can live where I like and still feed those needs.

Some of my family have caused me great pain by moaning and bitching about the time I spend online. But it's not a substitute for time with my children or wife. It's a substitute for innane conversations with morons who happen to be related to me or my wife. I can't help that most of my family doesn't like me nor understand me. I do my best to participate in greater family activities. However, don't be surprised if I don't much care about your latest scheme to buy up slum housing to make money. Or when you want to sell me some shit herbal crap because "It's good for you." It's not good for me. It's good for your pocket book. Fuck it.

I'll take my online friends any day. At least they are smart enough to understand what I'm talking about.

External Combustion

A month ago I watched the arborists come along and mangle all the huge trees along the power lines. It's a sad state where a professional tree trimmer just hacks the branches off at random to clear the power lines leaving the trees diseased and lopsided. But that's all they get paid for.

What does this have to do with external combustion? We love oil and gas. Everyone in North America loves oil and gas. Is it good for us? Not particularly but for all the yack and crap about alternate energy and alternate fuels nothing much really happens. We drive Hummers and giant Expeditions. We burn oil and gas to heat our homes. We pour it on the roads to make smooth surfaces for our cars. Can we become less reliant on oil and gas?

There's an old model which has lost all favour in our high tech society. External combustion. It used to be the primary source of mechanical energy before the internal combustion engines took over. What's the point? It's fuel independent. You can use any fuel that you can burn with external combustion: wood, garbage, straw, old houses, take your pick. As long as you can find a efficient burner you can convert any fuel into mechanical power.

It's still big in the world of large electricity generation. Steam turbines powered by coal, natural gas, nuclear fission, and even biomass play a large role in static power. Is this relevant to the little guy? I think it is. Imagine you could have a nice little 5KW generator in your garage running on whatever locally available fuel you have in abundance. You live in the country? Burn your waste wood from trimming trees. Rent a chipper. Convert compostable crap into electricity.

There are two main external combustion designs: steam and stirling. I have a dream project to make my own steam or stirling engine from reused components. We'll see how it goes.

Family of Grognards

I'm working to turn my entire family into grognards. My 3 year old is learning type on IRC and manipulate my commanders in Dominions 3. My 10 year old is a decent Civilization player and a beginner in Dominions 3. Sadly, I just can't get my wife to move beyond Heroes of Might and Magic.

We'll see if my attempts succeed.