Hoofing it

Students from the introductory class in captive wildlife care came to the farm Monday and Wednesday to learn how to handle sheep. These are first years, but they were intelligent and spirited and willing to get stuck in.

Each group got a sheep in need of dung tagging and hoof-trimming. The animals were checked for fly strike and anemia caused by barber pole worms, a nematode parasite. The groups that worked with the new ewe-lambs were able to see, or in one case learn to give, tetanus shots.

We had a few high jinks as students learned to handle animals competently. Animal handling takes practice. You have to move quickly but smoothly, with a good deal of confidence. Each move has to be with full, firm force, no half-measures. This takes a good deal of practice, and your first moves might seem very like the first blasts of a trainee bagpiper, or the first attempts to drive a stick-shift car.

On reflection, I'm reminded that this characteristic might be what makes animal handling training such a good thing for them at this age. Well over eighty percent of the students in this program are female.

Needless to say, this is not the normal kind of movement exhibited by teenage people in public. Students of both sexes at age eighteen, but especially female ones, routinely lack this kind of confidence in their movements and persona. Our society, with its emphasis on appearance and glamor, mitigates against development of other kinds of confidence and agility in young men and women. One of the ways it does this is by assigning them both unfairly them to certain kinds of roles, and by repeatedly providing the message, especially to women, that what matters is always looking good.

As any trainee sheep shearer will tell you, it's not actually possible to look good while learning how to catch, move, and "throw" a 150 pound woolly-minded animal for the first time in your life. You do not have a spare second to consider how your attempts look to any audience you may have. You just have to learn on your feet.

A couple of our class members hesitated a second or lacked the proper confidence or applied less firmness than was called for and their sheep were gone in milliseconds, off to the far corners of the home paddock, not to be caught again that day.

Oops. Oh dear, how sad, never mind. Try again with another one.

Get back on the horse that threw you.

There are lots of other good things that come out of animal handling training. We emphasize the responsibilities of any post involving animal care -- you're the one that has to get up and feed, water, and check your flock, whether it's Monday, Friday or Sunday, Christmas or your birthday, and while that duty can be delegated to a responsible person, you have to be absolutely sure that the person you delegate it to will do it and do it properly.

The animals won't understand if they have to go without clean water or feed or needed medical care for a day because you were derelict in your responsibilities.

We also emphasize the animal carer's role as a scientist. First year students' eyes tend to glaze over in Bio I and II, but once you learn how important it is to know your parasites, or plants, or diseases, and once you realize that biology is foundational to animal medicine, and that animal care is actually applied biology, then you might have a better reason to crack open that fat old biology book and learn some of those Latin names or some of those important cycles of respiration or those pathways of protein synthesis.

So the briefing for the sheep handling training gives us a chance to lay this all on again, and we lay it one pretty thick, with emphasis, because it's such a good teaching moment.

Who knew you could get so much out of learning to move, throw and tend sheep.

A lousy tea-leaf

Other than the fact that fall is obviously here now, with leaves beginning to turn color and days getting quite short, there isn't really anything particularly new or noteworthy happening around the Great Farm, but I thought I'd better write something. or regular readers will think we've disappeared.

But mostly what has happened is that the pattern of getting stuff done at the old Bale House on the weekends, while working 45-50 hour weeks at Unity College, has set in and is proving hard to shake. The Bale House has to be finished, more or less, in time for the new occupant to move in in early October, and that's taking up much of my spare time. As a result, everything else on the farm is in a holding pattern.

This is alright actually, no problem, really. I enjoy the work at the Bale House. Aimee doesn't much mind having the Farm House to herself on weekends.

Of course, she's never alone. There's the small matter of our thirty different animals to keep her company.

The new Golden Comet layers are laying small dark brown eggs. The rooster is rampant. Aimee torments him by pretending to be some other rooster, faking cook-a-doodle-doos, and he goes nuts, looking around for the competitor. The pigs are in the fast-growing stage and need feed twice or thrice daily, but that only takes a minute or two. As we keep them on deep bedding they don't need mucked out. Instead they work over what was the sheep's winter bedding. Not exactly super-sanitary, but done by design and the pigs don't seem to mind. There is an outbreak of stable flies which is annoying but not a health hazard, and a frost should put an end to it any day now, so I don't plan to spray.

The sheep need some fall doctoring, hoof-trimming, dung tagging, booster shots, but we will do that with students on Monday and Wednesday afternoons. It's good practice for the introductory classes in animal care, and so they come over every fall.

The tomatoes are still producing, no frost yet to stop them, but we're all canned and frozen out, so I just pick what I can every few days and refrigerate them, hoping to eat fresh toms through the end of next month at least. The local market for free tomatoes appear to have been saturated too, we can't even give them away. There are some potatoes and peppers still to pick, and I may make some of the last of the tomatoes into salsa using the peppers, but I don't know when I'll find time right now.

The vehicles are all holding up well this fall, the large amount of vehicle work done in the late spring and early summer having paid off in spades. This is our biggest driving season. In summer we reduce our driving, and in winter you can't drive very far, so in fall there are extra trips here and there and I would guess we do twenty percent more driving during this period than at any other time of the year. There is usually some technical mishap or breakdown to contend with, but none so far this fall. The only bad thing going on with vehicles is that I can't get Aimee to wash the dust and mud off her "new" 13 year-old Camry, so I'll have to pinch it from her and wash it myself at some point. Again.

So the main thing is the Bale House. I'll go over there again today, soon, as soon as the Jackson Transfer Station is open so I can do the weekly trash and recycling run on the way.

I was a little upset, while over there working yesterday, to find that the place had been burgled. The small red generator we bought to keep over there had been stolen. Some lousy thief had clambered in through the open back windows and walked out the front door with it.

On the one hand this pisses me off because we can't afford to buy a new five-hundred dollar genny. On the other, it makes me want to laugh because no good-for-nothing tea-leaf is going to be able to make that generator run. It's just too tricky. Anyone so stupid they have to steal for a living will not be able to get it started. I doubt whoever took it will even be able to start it even once.

I'm not going to say here what the trick is to start it, but it sure isn't in the instructions, even if the thief could read them. And it's a very reliable snag. You have to use the trick every time or it just won't run.

And so it will likely appear in the secondhand market, and at real low dollar because it won't start. And it does have one or two unique recognizable features, so it may be possible to prove that it was ours.

At which point The Law will maybe be able to find it and sort the culprit, well and good, as they might say on some old seventies British cops-and-robbers show.

Anyway, the State Patrol will be over there today to investigate. It should be the Sheriff's Department, but apparently northern Waldo County doesn't have a Sheriff on Sundays, and we had guests at the Great Farm last night so I couldn't be at the Bale House for the Sheriff's deputy to meet me, so it will be the Boys in Blue.

Maine's finest, and several of them graduates of Unity College and my own students. As are quite a few Waldo County Sheriff's Deputies, for that matter.

It might be interesting to see what happens here.

So if you're reading this blog in Waldo County, Maine, or hereabouts, and your trailer trash neighbor who never had enough spare dough to even buy a pot to piss in has a new red Honeywell suitcase-type generator, 2,000W rated, do the right thing:

Call the cops.

Or email me the details and I'll call the cops.

The real work

I don't know what I'd do if for some reason I couldn't do practical work anymore. I'd go crazy, for sure.

Ordinary white collar work -- and education is no different than any other in this respect -- is often so nebulous in so many ways that you have a very hard time knowing when you're succeeding.

I spent so much of my life making or fixing things, from F4s to solar power systems, that I have a very great need to be able to sit back at the end of the day and say, well, yes, I managed to accomplish something today.

Call me neurotic, but the satisfaction I get leads me to think that we'd all feel a little better if we had a little bit of what Gary Snyder has called "the real work" to do, every so often.

My most recent practical project is the straw bale house restoration. This is the building that Aimee and I built years ago as a way to avoid paying rent while we saved, and while Aimee finished grad school, so we could afford the mortgage on the Great Farm farmhouse.

The Bale House was also an experiment in building, using straw bale and recycled materials, which is why it looks so old-worldy, with hemlock posts and beams and clay cob and lime wash all major materials used in construction. It cost less than $20,000 to build, and costs less than $200/month to run, including taxes and insurance.

The Bale House was, however, never finished. We had to move in before it was finished, and once we moved out, another family moved in before we had chance to do any more work. There are also some mistakes and poor design features I'd like to correct.

So every weekend for several weeks now, I've been spending quite a few hours each day over there fixing things up. I've had a little help from the future occupant and her friends, but mostly I've been alone and it's been great.

The first project, once we cleaned up the mess left by the previous occupants, fixed the roof, and got the solar power system working again, was to add insulation to the kitchen roof. The old roof was only R10, a major design flaw. This was done of course to save money, but actually cost a lot of time, and now some money to correct. This led to several problems, not the least being ice dam formation. I fitted recycled metal roofing at the start of the latest retrofit, which will stop water getting in from ice dams, but I'd like to stop the ice dams completely, and make the kitchen more energy efficient. the answer is to fit R19 insulation and sealed drywall over the old rafters, bringing the R-level up to about R30.


The next job is to fit finished drywall to the ceiling of the main part of the house. This ceiling, originally R20, had already had the R19 treatment, plus another layer of 1/2 inch foam board leading to R44, and had ceased making ice dams. But I had never managed to get drywall over the last layer of foam board.

This is a cathedral ceiling and so needed a drywall lift. I also used the lift for the kitchen work. because I'm working alone, I need the lift even for a relatively low ceiling like the kitchen one. Often, on a drywall crew, three guys will do a low ceiling, two to hold each board, a third to drive home the screws. I have to do it all myself, mostly because no-one is available to help me on the days when I'm working.

The last shot is of the almost finished kitchen ceiling. Since I took this shot last week, I've already sanded the drywall mud and added a good coat of primer. The finished drywall looks a lot better than the old smoky rafters. Now all it needs is another coat of paint and a bit of trim.

In other GFD news, that unexpected rooster has matured and become a little rambunctious. He certainly is crowing a lot. Aimee, with her usual disregard for the feelings of the male of the species, has been baiting him, first by imitating him with her own voice, more recently by playing the recordings of another rooster back to him.

So I think we're going to have a fairly neurotic rooster. This might be unfair treatment, since he's already here on sufferance, and likely to be souped the first time he pecks one of us or a neighbor.

Soggy sheep and Earl-y endeavors

Here's one of this year's poor ewe-lambs whose Q-name I can't remember because the names Aimee had to choose from this year were all so weird. Queira, maybe, or something like that?

I could find out from Aimee's Facebook page, but then I'd be exposed to the evil Facebook virus and when would that stop?

She's looking pretty soggy, heading for one of the small sheep shelters we have dotted around the place, photographed through a rain spattered window.

The rain is from the western edges of Tropical Storm Earl, formerly Hurricane Earl, which ground its way very slowly all the way off the east coast of the North American continent, and will hit land properly for the first time today just east of here in Nova Scotia.

So we dodged another one. Lucky. All those warnings weren't wrong, although a lot of people will say they were. This was a very big and powerful storm. It just happened to stay offshore.

Those Nova Scotians are pretty tough buggers, most of them ex-Highlanders or Acadians or Irish or Tories from the Revolution. This is now only a big storm, really, not a hurricane. I doubt it will cause very much difficulty. Volunteer fire departments will be out, as well as linesmen. There will likely be at least one old lady or old gentleman that wanders away from their home or nursing home because they forgot there was a storm and so the police and SAR will get some exercise in the rain.

That's my job, actually, in all of this, to sit by the phone for a few more hours in case we do get a similar call-out here. We did this time last year too, or was it the year before, driving to the Blue Hill peninsula in the pouring rain or a tropical storm to look for an older lady. We got lucky and she was found by another asset, search dogs, if I remember right, before we were directed to leave the SAR HQ on our first assignment.

But we got pretty damp just going from the van to the HQ, even wearing full rain gear, the rain was so heavy.

As for the Womerlippis, all my powers of reason were not enough to convince my lovely wife not to undertake her long-awaited last research trip of the season. Aimee loves her peace and quiet, and she loves the ocean, and she loves her research. She'd been looking forward to this for weeks. Luckily she works with some very good people at this particular site, many of whom are actually in Maine SAR, so while I thought that heading right towards the path of a predicted storm for the weekend was not exactly the best choice, I wasn't worried about her safety.

Not much, at least.

And now the storm has bypassed her, or will do so later today, she's going to have some very nice post-storm weather, cooler and clearer and a nice ocean breeze. Big swells, though, for a few days. That doesn't matter too much since she works at low tide in sheltered anchorages.

As for me, I'm bone tired today after the first week of class and expect to sleep some more. I slept pretty good through the most of the rain last night. I'm going to go to Newport town later and get a haircut and some gear I need for my work at the Bale House, I'm going to listen to my favorite Saturday radio shows, and then I'm going to take a nap on the couch. I may can some tomatoes later.

Small ambitions, easily achieved.

Ancestral aspects

My sister Carol, who lives in Wales close to where our Mum is in hospital, just took a small vacation and went to our home town of Sheffield, Yorkshire, to see relatives and take her friend around the sights.

She took pictures, which pleased me to see.

The end terrace on the left is the home where our grandad Arthur was born in 1899, where his family had already lived for probably fifty years, and where they would continue to live for almost exactly another hundred years after that, until the death of grandad's sister Jessie.

One family living in the same home for 150 years is nothing in the UK. neither is it unusual that they never owned this home. It was always a rental, or as they say in the UK, a "let."

For most of the time my family lived there it was owned by a "gentle" family, not a knight or lord, but an ordinary kind of British upper-middle class property owner, who used it and other investments as a form of predictable annual income. When you read in Austin or Dickens that a landowner has so many hundred or thousand pounds a year, this is the kind of investment they are talking about.

And of course, my grandfather and his father and all my family would have been expected to show them deference.

Eventually the property fell into the hands of the Sheffield City Council and became publically owned. I'm not sure why. It might have been taken for back taxes. It might easily have been taken by eminent domain because of its location. The cottage is very nicely positioned on a trail head into one of Sheffield's many city parks and greenbelt open spaces, a place called Whitely Woods, and there has always been much public interest in it since it is in such an idyllic setting. There are even these great Edwardian postcards of the place. In fact you can hike on trails from the house right up to the moors without having to do much more than cross a couple roads.

There's a old waterwheel dam close by, called Wire Mill Dam, with a monument to master cutler Thomas Boulsover, who used the cottage at one point in the 1700s. Family tradition has it that the experiments leading to the creation of Sheffield Plate took place in the kitchen, but like a lot of family traditions, there's a formal historical version that denies this.

In any case, this house was home for my people for long enough that it's come to represent home to myself and my sister. This is the place where my great grandfather grew prize roses and hydrangeas, where my grandfather played as a kid with his brothers and sisters in the dam, the place he returned safely to after the First World War, the place where my mother lived for safety during the Second World War, the place where mother's cousin Ron, an RAF Bomber Command navigator, came home to between postings, and the place where my sister and I would be walked, alongside our mother who is now so very old and sick, but then could out-hike us any day, to see our older relatives.

In the 1960s and 1970s this house seemed like one permanent old folk's afternoon tea party to us kids, with all our great aunts and uncles hanging out there most days whether they lived there or not. It was home to Uncle Bert and Aunt Jane, as well as their unmarried sister Jessie. You could always rely on being teased by Jane, or that Uncle Tom would show you the place where his eye used to be (shot out in the war) or that there would be milk, or later when we were bigger, tea, ham, salad, cake, or if we were really lucky, trifle.

Of course they're all gone now, at least the old folks are. In fact there's a second generation of old folks that are now dying out. My mother is living out her days in her hospital bed full of memories of this place, while her cousin Barrie still lives a few hundred yards up the hill, very frail but still walking around the block each day with his two sticks.

And I live in a house in America that is nicely positioned on a historic site on a trail at the edge of the woods. I grow roses but not hydrangeas, and a lot of tomatoes.

But I own this house with my wife Aimee, and indeed we own another one at the other side of the forest ten miles away, one I built with my own hands.

And I am not expected to defer to any man or woman by reason of accident of birth.

I think the old folks would appreciate all that, even though I had to come to America to make it happen.

Destabilizing the capitalist system

That's what Aimee and I say whenever people ask us why we give away food.

It's actually a Zen koan, with an edge of Forest Gump-type humor (like, would we really be dumb enough to think that if we gave stuff away for free, that would actually destabilize capitalism!) but you'd be amazed how many folks don't get it.

Anyway, once again we have grown more food than we can possibly eat now or use later, even if we did put it all up. One freezer is completely full, the other needs to hold a whole pig later.

We could try to sell these surplus toms, but really we don't have time. Our day jobs start tomorrow.

So we'll give away these three-pound bags of nice ripe tomatoes at work.

These are just the very best of the ones I picked a couple days ago. I have the same amount again already.

The ones with blemishes I made into that big white bowl of fresh salsa, which we already tucked into some. There's nothing quite like real fresh salsa.

Aimee's been preserving herbs. A work-mate told her that if instead of just hanging them (like I've always done) she would put them in plastic bags, they'd still dry, get no dust on them, and when the time came to use them there'd be some already loose in the bags.

Solar system failures

Here's my latest renewable energy project -- repairing the solar power "motherboard" at our Bale House. This is just one of many repair and restoration projects I have to do over there to make it all work again.

This was all set up because the house is too far from the nearest grid power lines. Originally we had provided the house with a small scale solar power system providing 110V and 12V, backed up by a fairly expensive propane generator and a dedicated wiring system.

But the house's occupants broke the generator in the first couple years, mostly by running it too much, which they had to do because they refused to take or didn't listen to our advice to downsize their TV from a 100 watt cathode ray tube TV to a 25 watt flat screen TV. When the generator quit on them, I was able to go over over and salvage the unit. I repaired it, and decided they couldn't have it back if they were going to treat it so badly. They would have to live off their solar "income" instead.

But I failed to make allowances for ignorance. Pretty soon the solar system was damaged in a lightning strike. It shouldn't have been damaged, and in fact had lived through dozens of storms in years past, but the ground wire had been disconnected, and so the excess voltage induced in the lines by the atmospheric electricity had nowhere to go. This most likely happened because the occupants had worn out the battery pack, but rather than tell me to have it changed (probably didn't want me over there to see their mess) they had hooked up a car battery. In doing so they had failed to connect the wire to the household ground rod. The inevitable power surge eventually came and a very expensive inverter and charge controller were fried.

But having started, this round of user-error induced failure couldn't end there. A car battery can't run one of these systems for more than a half hour or so, so when that didn't work for them, they'd tacked all these 12 foot extension cords everywhere, which they'd hooked up to a gas generator outside, no doubt using a veritable "Christmas tree" of double or triple adaptors.

And it was a very old gas generator to boot, and was probably producing pretty low voltage a lot of the time.

This burn is the result. Lucky the place didn't burn down.

And of course, no-one bothered to hook the generator to a ground rod either.

At some point the male occupant moved out and became an ex-husband. I took pity on the female occupant and went over and replaced the batteries and provided her with a safe new generator, properly grounded, but I for durn sure wasn't going to give her a new inverter to break. I used one her boyfriend had bodged up for her. I just wired it up more safely.

Now I have to get the whole system back to the original level of performance and safety.

Luckily the price of these components has come down, while the technology has improved, so the cost of repair is less than it would otherwise have been, and the results better overall.

I paid a lot of money for the old inverter, a Trace 600 W standby type, and Trace C 140 charge controller. These were standard equipment for small scale solar design for many years, and very robust.

I was able to replace the whole shebang with new, up-to-date gear for less than I paid for secondhand gear 8 years ago. I used a Cobra 1,000 RV-style inverter, which provided more wattage than the Trace but doesn't need a standby circuit because it draws very little power when on. The new inverter runs without a sound, and has a built-in input volt-meter and output wattage meter. The old inverter was slightly noisy, and the entire system had only a variably flashing LED (on the charge controller) for voltage, and not a very accurate LED at that.

Very nice. We'll see how long it lasts, though.

The white thing on the motherboard is the new charge controller, which is a Xantrex C35, basically the Trace C40 (with the same old LED!), but without a shunt for excess power, which experience shows is rarely produced by this system.

There were newer, fancier, and cheaper units, but the price of the C35 was much lower than before and they are very robust units despite being a 30 year old design. The black thing is the new inverter. I also went through and reconfigured the wires to make the connections more straightforward, and I put a smaller main breaker in to protect the inverter.

On reflection, I know and have always known that technological understanding evades some people. The level of complexity that is reflected in even a small scale solar power system is far more than a regular house with 200 amp supply, because the regular house doesn't run out of sunshine, while the breaker and grounding system is fail safe.

The solar house, especially the small scale, off-grid solar house, is always in danger of running out of power. You get a fixed maximum supply every day, and if the sun doesn't shine, you don't even get that. This house produces about 300-400 watts a day on average, about 1000 watts on a good day, and none at all on a bad day. That's enough for some light and music, a couple hours of a small TV, and to run the 12 V water pump, but no more. And it's only fail safe as long as you don't mess with it.

Here we provided the building with a breaker and grounding system that was initially fail safe, but we could never provide enough sunshine to run all the normal range of American lifestyle appliances that the occupants wanted to run. Instead of adapting to the new low power lifestyle, they tried to adapt the home to their original high power lifestyle. The result was a cascading system of failures, one after the other, each one adding another level of safety issues, and each one setting the system up for the next failure.

If we ever do have a major climate and energy crisis, one greater than the current chronic disruption, it will cascade like this too. The trick to avoid this is to call a time-out right at the beginning and work to get systems back to a safe and functional level before making things worse.

(And if the owner/designer says the house can't run a 100 watt TV, the house can't run a 100 watt TV. Even a secondhand 25 watt portable TV would have cost $50 and saved the whole system.)
Here's, too, the recycled metal roof I put on the Bale House kitchen last Saturday. We had a pretty good rainstorm Wednesday, and no water came in, so I'm happy with this job.

And here's another local numpty, a woodpecker that woke Aimee up, and surprised me, by drumming loudly on our house the other day.

In other GFD news, we have lots of tomatoes, so many that I am now canning only one variety: the miniature Roma-type called Juliets. We're going to make some fresh salsa, and then I guess we'll take them to college and give them away.

And the first day of the fall term is Monday. Global Change at 8am. Better get some coffee.