Research suggests that 94% of New Year’s Resolutions are broken by March 1st^*. With that out of the way, we’ve decided it’s now safe to admit we have goals for the year. The 2010 goals page is available in the right hand menu. Yes, we copied the concept from other blogs. No, we don’t really expect to accomplish everything listed there, but it gives us something to work toward.

*In other news, apparently 80% of people can pull statistics out of thin air.

We are fortunate that nearby Eugene has three home shows each year. The spring show focuses on gardens, the fall show on homes, and the winter show on green living. This past weekend we visited the winter Good Earth show, attended one of their free seminars, and browsed the vendors. I thought it might be interesting to report on some of the highlights for us.

• Passivhaus Seminar – Peter Reppe, a local Passivhaus certified engineer gave a presentation on the goals and basic technology behind Passivhaus. I was interested in this seminar for two reasons. I wanted to see if the free classes were going to be really commercially oriented (this one was not), and I was curious what was going on with Passivhaus in Oregon. In short, Passivhaus is a German standard for building extremely air-tight energy efficient homes. There are perhaps 15,000 such homes in Germany, and only 1 in Oregon. Our own plans for a superinsulated remodel are partly based on Passivhaus. Robin was reassured to see that there are other crazy people working on this sort of thing, and I got a chance to talk with the presenter after the seminar about his own remodel. He pointed me toward WUFI, which is a free program for modeling the moisture performance of a wall system. I’m running it right now on our wall design.
• Lane County Beekeepers Association — The LCBA had a booth at the show and we stopped in to talk about pollination. Robin and I are convinced that some of our garden productivity problems last year were due to poor pollination, so we wanted to see if there was an “easy” solution without diving head first into honey production. The short answer is no. If we just wanted fruit tree pollination (Cherry trees for example), then mason bees are a great low-maintenance solution. However, their life cycle wraps up in June. For a vegetable garden, you need honey bees. The person we talked to raised wild swarms of honey bees and believed in minimal intervention. This seems to indicate that the local association supports a variety of opinions — if we are going to raise bees, I don’t want to be dousing them in medications. Robin and I have put the next LCBA meeting on our calendar. I’m usually a “I’ll read the book” sort of guy, but why not learn from people who are already successful beekeepers in our climate?
• Columbia Gorge Winery — Who passes up free wine samples? We bought a bottle of wine from this small batch winery which makes organically processed sulfite-free wine. Sulfites are a relatively new addition to wine making used to kill the yeast and stabilize the product, but with questionable health effects. Columbia Gorge isn’t unique in their sulfite-free production, but it was nice to be able to ask them some questions. Here’s one I’ve wondered a long time: can you make sulfite-free sweet wine? Answer: No. To stop fermentation when there are still residual sugars in the wine requires using sulfites to kill the yeast.
• Oakshire Brewing — Beer samples? Is this a great home show or what? Oakshire is the small local brewery responsible for my current favorite beer: Overcast Espresso Stout. It’s made with organic espresso, if you’re wondering about the “green” connection. Oakshire will be at the upcoming KLCC Brew Fest (an NPR charity event), and will be one of 11 local breweries creating their own collaboration rendition of a Belgian Style Cascadian Dark Rye Ale. I’m still not sure what that will taste like, but living in the northwest is great!
• Rags to Rugs & Stuff — This small booth caught our attention. An older couple from Lincoln City, Oregon make wool rugs woven out of the scrap end cuttings from Pendleton blankets. The rugs are heavy, well made, and very reasonably priced for solid wool fiber. Robin wanted to buy one on the spot, but couldn’t select a color. When we get a room sufficiently complete, we’ll definitely be tracking down one of these rugs.

A little over a week ago I mentioned that the ground was disgorging trash again. Since today was pretty nice, I went around with my bucket and picked up trash until my back got tired. There are a few things that I always seem to find when I do this. So, I thought it would be funny to dissect for you the set of items I always seem to pick up.

When we bought our place we had piles of trash to contend with. While almost all of that is gone we are still finding lots of small things that work their way up to the surface. Eeks, I am making myself shudder just looking at that picture. I forget sometimes how much trash we have hauled off this place.

Here is a shot of the bucket with everything that I picked up today. I took most everything out of it for the pictures. Yes, you read that right. I picked it up, and then put it back on the ground. (Then picked it up again.)

It is a given that I will find a handful of match box cars. I found 4 1/2 this time. I will find at least one kind of ball (if not more, remember the ball grave yard?). This time it was a tennis ball. Along with that I will find random sorts of small happy meal toys, Disney toys, and other miscellaneous ones. There is always a funny/odd sort of find that I will pick up. One of todays was a pocket knife.

There will also be a pile of roofing pieces in my trash bucket. These seem to be scattered all around as I will find them back in the chicken pen, by the house, and around the shack.

Probably the bulk of what I pick up will be pieces of candy wrappers, shreds of rotting plastic tarps (that were used in covering the previous tenant’s stuff), broken hard shards of plastic, and various other plastic things. In the left of the picture you will see some Lego’s. We find those scattered everywhere. Another odd find for the day was a syringe. That is in the upper right of the picture.

Finally, there will be a few random metal objects. Not too much on that front, as most if it seems to be plastic bits. So there you go! You have now seen into the bucket of trash. Give it a couple of months and I will have new things that will have been uncovered. Then a trash treasure hunt will commence again.

In physics, quantum entanglement is a property of a pair of particles derived from the decay of a single particle, whereby they develop interconnected states. In other words, if one particle is altered by an external force, the other will respond as if it had also been so altered. This instantaneous correlation can occur across great distances and at many times the speed of light. Einstein called this property spooky action at a distance.

So, why am I talking about particle physics? Because, I have recently become suspicious that my well system and my brother’s well system (about 16 miles away) have somehow become quantumly entangled. If this could be proved, it would be the first case of quantum entanglement at the macro level. What is my evidence you ask? The best kind — anecdotal! It all started about a month ago. During an unusually cold spell our well pressure switch froze and I had to heat the riser with a torch until it thawed out. We proceeded to cover the tank and switch with a tarp and hay, and it survived the rest of the freeze without incident. A few days later, my brother mentioned that their water had also stopped, and he had found their well switch frozen and proceeded to thaw it with a torch. This was the first time their switch had frozen in 10 years.

Okay, switches freeze during a cold snap. That’s hardly anomalous. Wait, it gets better!

Last week my brother’s well went out again. He traced the problem to a pump controller with a corroded capacitor. He called out a well guy the next morning who replaced the capacitor and it started back up without a problem. I didn’t think too much about the story, until …

“Lee, the water’s out again,” Robin said about 2 minutes after we got home tonight. “Oh crap!” I replied. (This has indeed become a typical reply around our house.) I went outside. It was too warm to be frozen. I checked the switch. It clicked normally for the off, prime, and auto positions, but the only response was a buzz from the controller. I opened up the controller and looked it over. “Wait a second, does this capacitor look corroded to you?” Spooky indeed Mr. Einstein.

So, are the laws of physics being bent here?

Nah, it’s more likely a case of synchronicity — the human tendency to perceive patterns and causation between random events.

Then again … next time my brother starts talking about a well problem, I just might take notes!

I’m getting my list ready for this year’s vegetable garden. Seed catalogs are coming in and I swear it’s like drugs for gardeners. Before I could make my new list of things I needed and wanted to try out, I had to go through all of last year’s old seed. I have quite a bit left over, so that is good. Then I went through and made a list of the things I grew (or tried to grow) and what I thought about them. I ended up only getting rid of two seeds packets from last year, as we really didn’t like those particular strains.

I’m also going to order from a couple of new places to try out their seed. I will continue to get most of my seed from Territorial Seed Company just because they are local and have quality seeds. The new places that I am going to order a few seeds from include Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, John Scheepers Kitchen Garden Seeds, Abundant Life Seeds, and Nichols Garden Nursery. Are there any seed places that you order from that you would recommend?

Mail order seed companies usually do not produce most of their own seeds. Instead, they resell seeds from a variety of suppliers. When I order from Territorial, I ask for their list of Seminis sourced seeds and cross those off my list. There’s nothing particularly wrong with Seminis, but they were purchased by Monsanto Company in 2005 and I’d rather not send any money to that corporation. Monsanto’s many “contributions” to mankind are summarized by their wikipedia article, or you can refer to some of the many other sources.

We are slowly getting back into our normal routine after this last month. I decided I would write up a post on some random things going on around our house. Nothing too earth shaking.

First off, Jack is going in to the cat shop to get spayed this Thursday. No baby Jacks for us. She spends all her time sleeping in the house, which explains the next picture two pictures.

Since Jack likes spending long lazy days in the house the gophers are declaring war on us. I find it somewhat humorous. She was our only hope on the vermin front, as Lee’s cat Jasper is nonchalant about mice.

It’s about time for me to go around our property again with a bucket as the ground is disgorging trash. I swear it seems to just pop up out of the ground from a place you would be positive that nothing was there before. What bothers me the most is I am always finding broken bits of glass that work it’s way up. I’m assuming that it will be a few years before we find it all.

Today while walking around I discovered an airplane crash and a car wreck. Car wrecks seem to abound here. There have probably been over a hundred on our property.

We are using our wood supply faster then what Lee thought we would. He thought that we would have oak left over for next year but we are thinking that’s not likely. The really cold temps that we got combined with our leaky house made it so we just tore though it.

My Aunt gave me some starts from all her fancy iris’s. They sat on my porch for three months in the summer before I got them planted. I will have to transplant them later to a more sunny spot but I don’t have an area ready for them yet. I was pleased to see that even after all the abuse I gave them they are starting to sprout.

My garlic that I planted this fall seems to be doing well. I hadn’t looked at it for a couple months and a lot more had come up and grown taller. I am very pleased with that as Lee and I LOVE garlic.

When I was walking though the veggie garden I noticed a few of these plants. How they got there I have no idea, as they are growing in the part that got tilled last summer. I think they may be lambs ear, but I am not sure.

Our back fields are still looking like winter is on. Lee needs to mow them so the low growing blackberry brambles are scalped again.

And lastly, when we went to Bend in December we stopped by the Bend Bungalow store and came back with two tiles. The tiles are going to be a focal point in the new bathroom. It will also help decide the colors that will go into the bathroom so they will complement each other. Guess you might as well make something around a piece you like rather then trying to fit things in that you don’t really just because they happen to match. The tiles are adapted from the block print of artist Yoshiko Yamamoto.

Lee and I have been enjoying some lazy days on his vacation. A few days ago we went to the coast for the day with his parents and did some exploring. This weekend we took a 2 day trip to Bend and had a great time. Upon returning Jasper and Jack (who had been locked inside and out respectively) were desperate for attention, even if it meant sitting next to each other. Jack then moved on to a friendlier snooze buddy.

We are in the process of picking new windows for the second floor. There are two windows to be replaced: one on each end of the house. These are the major sources of light on the second floor, other than the dormer (which lights the hallway) and the solar tube (which will light the master bathroom).

The existing windows are double hung, with each sash having about 26″ by 24″ of glass. They fit into rough openings that are about 4″ too wide for a modern window, because the old windows have sash weights fit between the jams and the studs. We see ourselves as having two options: 1.) Install a new window which exactly matches the existing in terms of glass area (and furrow out the studs to fit). 2.) Install a larger window which takes advantage of the 4″ larger rough opening, sized to be taller as well to maintain the proportion.

The following picture shows the existing window on the right, and a mock-up of the proposed larger window on the left. The larger window is 4″ wider and 3″ taller.

Pros

• More light – Brighter rooms are nice, especially since thicker walls will mean a narrower viewing angle
• No rough opening alterations – Well, except for height, but that’s easy in a gable end wall

Cons

• Consistency – There are presently 6 windows of this size in the house. Two on each end wall (the other in the photo above is hid by the tree), and two framing the big window on the front. Do we replace all of these with the larger window? We can’t for the front windows .. it will alter the proportions and run the trim together. So this will introduce a new window size in two or four of the 6 locations.
• Cost – Larger windows are a little more expensive. Not by much, proportionally, but some.
• Balance – Does the window look too dominating in the altered photo? Does the original size seems a little lost on the gable end?
• Insulation – Bigger windows are colder than smaller windows. Not by much, proportionally, but some.

Which do you prefer?

There are many things I like about having left suburbia Arizona for an old house on a few acres in Oregon. One of the best, is that I feel so much more in tune with the cycles of nature. Each season holds new and exciting changes: warm dry summers, blankets of heavy fog in the early winter, and the cold evenings and lush growth of spring. We look up at night and see an expanse of stars on inky black, not circling airplanes on muddy brown. For some reason, I even keep better track of the moon (about half full and waning).

Unfortunately, our remodel-in-progress of a house leaks in a little too much nature when the temperature drops. This past week has been brutal, with outdoor temperatures never getting above freezing. We run the woodstove from morning until 2AM, and that keeps the second floor passably warm and the first floor downright cold. I’ve considered pulling the freezer thermometer out a few times to check the indoor temps, but decided against it. Best not to know. Water wasn’t freezing inside, so it must be above 32°.

Today the bottle of olive oil on our kitchen counter caught my eye. It was the wrong color and also not clear. I picked it up, and realized that it wasn’t moving. Olive oil froze on our counter! Eeks. A little browsing online reveals that this occurs at refrigerator temperature, about 37°. So … on the plus side the produce setting out on our counter should keep well .. but I’m still looking forward to when a coat and gloves are no longer standard issue for first floor living.

We recently bought half a pig from a local farmer. When you buy a pig directly like this, you pay the farmer a set price per pound “hanging weight”. This is the weight of the pig after it has been gutted, skinned, and the head removed. So hanging weight includes the meat, fat, and bones, not just meat. The butcher gets a flat rate for processing the carcass, and then a fixed price per pound (hanging weight also) to cut, season (sausage), cure (hams and bacon), and wrap the meat. Since there are so many variables, we thought it would be useful to present the the details of our purchase.

The graph below shows how the hanging weight of our pig breaks down into meat, fat, and waste. The fat would also be considered waste, if you didn’t want to make lard with it. The percent of meat should be representative of most modern pig breeds. (This was a Yorkshire cross.) The cuts of meat, however, is determined by your instructions to the butcher and can vary quite significantly. Robin doesn’t like pork chops, so we opted for more roasts and sausage. We have plenty of ground beef from our quarter cow purchase, so we wanted all the ground pork cuts made into sausage too.

So, our 113 lb half-pig produced 73.5 lbs of meat. We paid $226 to the farmer and $91 to the butcher. This works out to $4.32/lb for local, naturally raised (not organic) pork. Yes, this is a more expensive than the meat you can buy at the store, but we consider it a good deal for three reasons:

• Flavor – The sausage, bacon, and other cuts of meat taste awesome. There’s no comparison to the stuff you can buy at the store. Our pig was fed huge quantities of wind fallen apples, excess garden produce, and other things. You get out what you put in.
• Knowledge – We know the who, what, when, and where of our pig’s life. Store bought pork is a mystery. There might be a picture of a pretty farm on the label, but I wouldn’t suggest going by that. A pound of sausage might contain meat from dozens or hundreds of animals, killed under highly stressed conditions, and processed at a plant that has had .. how many recalls this year?
• Supporting Local – This is local meat from a small family farm. Hard to argue the benefits of that. For an overview of the social ills of the industrial meat system, I recommend watching Food Inc.