Happy 2008!

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Happy Hallowe'en!

Who are those spooky trick-or-treaters?

Could it be? Granddaddy & Grandma?

Happy Hallowe'en!!

Rain barrels! (if only it would rain)

At long last, by popular demand, pictures of the rain barrel. The only things you can't see in the pictures are (1) the screen in the top of the leaf screen/settling chamber, (2) the makeshift spring that holds the screen in place, and (3) that the end cap on the settling chamber is not glued on, so that the settling chamber will leak out after the rain.

Materials and where I happened to get them:

• 2-bung plastic barrel with at least one threaded plug (Out of a dumpster; the less daring can go to State surplus which is a fascinating place for detritophiles like me)
• 3/4" (?) NPT threaded spigot (hardware store)
• Window screen (Habitat ReStore)
• 2.5 ft scrap piece of 3" PVC (Habitat)
• PVC "Wye" fitting, 3" to 1-1/2" (Hardware store)
• 1-1/2" PVC elbow and straight coupling (Hardware store)
• 1-1/2" PVC pipe scraps (found in my house when we moved in)
• Teflon tape

Pipe sizes can be adjusted to fit what you are able to find, but 3" is the minimum for the screen/settling chamber (so it will catch everything coming out of the downspout).

Tools:

• Drill w/ boring bits - I think that's all.

The spigot threads right into the bung plug. The 1-1/2" PVC pipe overflow from the settling chamber fits snugly into the barrel, keeping out mosquitoes, if you use a boring bit of the same size.

The leaf screen/settling chamber works very well - I had these barrels set up for a year without a leaf screen and the water was always funky-smelling and brownish. Since putting the leaf screen on, it's always clear and never smells.

You can see on the smaller barrel the non-leaf screened method of connection - just cut the outline of your gutter downspout and pop it in.

A stand makes the water much more useable unless you have a pump.

Broke out the old Pentax 35 mm SLR today, just for old time's sake. I've got to re-acquire the ability to focus the thing (it doesn't have a split-ring focus), and I know there are digital cameras (probably including my own) that can do all that this one can, but these pictures beat my own digital pictures hands down for capturing the feeling of the moment.

Took the kids to the state fair last night. Boy, did they have fun. (So did we.)

Mmmm...delicious suckling pig!

Lily's birthday continued...

Julia says this is a picture of her favorite person (she later volunteered that Gramma Pat as her other favorite person).

Summertime, and the living is easy...

First day of school...

Lily's birthday...

Bike ride to House Creek and environs...

Oh man, we're the grownups now...how'd that happen?

Trolls under the bridge

I have come to the conclusion that the only way out of our many environmental problems is $10 a gallon gasoline, but I don't know how to work towards that fast enough. I don't think I have it in me to be a part of a Monkey Wrench Gang. So barring that kind of radical activity, we should all be rapidly shunning the "easy motoring lifestyle" and all its trappings, and it seems that how we feed ourselves has the greatest impact there.

I cooked some farm-raised rainbow trout a few weeks ago. Tending to the fish over the burner, it occurred to me how many thousands of calories in the form of electric heat I was pumping into these fish, only to get a few hundred calories that were usable to my body. Then I went further to the air pumps aerating the farm ponds, the processing of the feed on which they were raised,the shipping, refrigeration, etc etc. On recent drives out of town for work I saw rolls of hay in farm meadows and wondered how many orders of magnitude fewer calories were contained in those hay rolls compared to the calories it took to run the harvester and baler. It amazes me that this system works, even in the short term. But for fossil fuels it wouldn't, I suppose. Earth receives a fixed amount of energy each year from the sun and its own internal radiation. We need a balanced budget amendment for energy. William Schlesinger at Duke hit on this idea quite nicely in a recent opinion piece when he said, in effect, that we must learn to live within "the sustainable economy supplied by nature." (The actual quote was "coastal citizens should realize that the sustainable economy supplied by nature will be with us long after the phosphate deposits are gone.")

So today I rode my bike to work again. By the end of the year I may have done my penance for the two trips to out of town this week.

"Pig" by Julia.

Happy sisters. 'nuf said.

At the risk of subjecting my child to inappropriate criticism (offensive content warning, grandparents!), I'll share this self-portrait by Julia, with peanuts in her tummy. The orange dots along the mouth are her teeth. She also points out that she has bangs and ears and that she is a little crooked. The day after she drew this, she exclaimed that she needed to add hands. She then asked me, "how do we draw a hand?" I held up my hand and said, "well, let's look at a hand. What do you think we should start with?" "The palm!"

Just a couple of pics I had knocking around on the computer. These by the stream are from back in October, when Lil McGill and I went for a bike ride on the greenway. We stopped at a creek a few miles from the house to have a picnic, catch a crawdad, and throw rocks in the water. The pic below is from about two weeks ago.

Equal time for Julia forthcoming.