Into the Woods – Page 193 – Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere

Insulation = cozy

The house’s internal systems are coming together fast. The wiring, plumbing, and heating/air conditioning ductwork are in the walls and inspected. Today, the insulation was put in. All of a sudden, the house is snug and warm. I couldn’t resist sitting by the fire for a while tonight.

The insulation inspection should happen tomorrow. On Thursday, the installation of the drywall should begin. The drywall will take five to six working days.

Above, the living room as seen from the radio room on the second floor. The radio room is a balcony and will have a railing.

Above, the radio room as seen from the upstairs bedroom. The upstairs bedroom will have an window open to the living room and will have a railing. That 2×4 is a temporary railing to keep workers from falling off the balcony.

New insulation around the gothic window

I’ve put my nerd instincts into coming up with the best security systems I can afford. Video cameras with infrared night vision, for example, watch all the doors and all sides of the house. I’ll also have motion detectors outdoors that will silently and wirelessly report any outdoor activity up to the radio room. I’ll have a panic button. My amateur radio antennas will be hidden in the attic. I’ll have battery backup for my computers and radios. Emergency communications is too important to be allowed to fail if the power goes out.

Obsessing about water

It goes without saying that sustainable living is not, um, sustainable without water. Farmers obsess about the weather, as well they should. Their livelihood depends upon the weather. Here in the Southeast, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, we’ve been in a drought. There is no shortage of surface water at present. We’ve had around 2.5 inches of rain in the past few days. But groundwater, the aquifers that feed our wells and keep our springs and streams flowing, still has not recovered from the drought years early this decade.

The United States Geological Survey maintains wells around the country to monitor groundwater levels. The two nearest me are at East Bend, North Carolina; and Mocksville, North Carolina.

The chart above shows the groundwater level at Mocksville for the past seven days. The soaking rain we’ve had for the past few days is definitely bringing up the groundwater.

The chart above shows the groundwater level at East Bend for the past 60 days. That chart, too, looks good.

Nerd note: The daily data in the chart above shows a saw-tooth periodicity that made me curious. Some quick research suggests that barometric pressure causes fluctuation in the groundwater level. But solar and lunar tides also seem to affect groundwater levels.

But if you look at the long-term Mocksville data, which is available only as far back as 1981, you can see that, long term, groundwater level is still below the mean, and we are still in a drought with an unfavorable long-term trend.

Speaking of periodicity, the groundwater level here normally falls during the warm seasons of the year and rises during the cool seasons of the year.

Scenic Stokes

Californians, note: Those are tobacco barns.Winston-Salem Journal

The Winston-Salem Journal has a story this morning on plans to expand the Hanging Rock Scenic Byway in Stokes County. The expansion would connect the tiny town of Danbury to the scenic loop.

Fifty years ago, parts of neighboring Forsyth County were scenic, with fields and barns and pastures. When developers come in, that kind of appealing terrain is their first choice of areas to slash and burn and suburbanize. Forsyth County still can’t agree on a tree ordinance, because a citizens committee wants to protect trees, and developers (in cahoots with the planning board) want to slash and burn as they please.

Let’s hope that what happened in Forsyth County doesn’t happen in Stokes.

A booger from the woods comes to get Lily

Lily, who is about nine months old now, has played outside and practiced her tree-climbing since she was a kitten. Her practice paid off this morning. A dog got her up a tree. I heard barking and ran outside with the broom. A nondescript dog I’d never seen before was bouncing around the tree, and Lily was about 20 feet up a slender, bent pine tree, holding on for dear life. I chased the dog off and made poor Lily wait while I got the camera to record her humiliation. I was afraid she’d be afraid to climb down, but she made a very well-controlled descent, first head-first, then tail first, and came to me with her fur ruffled to be petted.

I’ve always told her that there are boogers in the woods, but she doesn’t need to be told. She hears the boogers all the time, though this is the first time one ever came to get her.

Now I’m rethinking letting my chickens roam free. My new chicken house will be ready as early as next week, and I was hoping to get biddies in early April.

Safely down

House update

The Ditch Witch machine makes a ditch, and a mess.

I’m sure I’ve complained before that the part of the building process that bothers me most is the excavation and the muddy mess it leaves. I plant grass, and it gets trampled, or dug up. On Tuesday the plumbing crew laid the underground pipe and wire to connect the pump house to the house. The house now has water. (The plumbing fixtures aren’t installed yet, just the pipes.) They also connected the house to the septic tank. The good thing is that two important inputs and outputs for the house — water and septic — are now working. The bad thing is that I have a scar from a ditch upon which I need to plant grass and throw straw before the rain starts.

There was major progress today on the inspections front. The county’s chief inspector came out today, and I now have those beautiful green stickers for four required inspections: plumbing rough-in, heating and air conditioning rough-in, electrical rough-in, and final framing. That means I’m clear to start the insulation job. The insulation contractor will start Tuesday. Putting in the insulation may take only one day. Then I’ll move on to drywall, which will take about a week.

I installed a lot of audio wiring today to connect the organ console, which will be on the first floor, to the speakers and amplifiers, which will be on the second floor. The organ’s wiring will be neatly inside the walls. For audio nerds, I installed three types of wire — speaker wire (10 channels, including 2 channels to the stairwell for the choir organ), unbalanced preamplifier audio wire (coax, 4 channels), and balanced preamplifier audio wire (shielded parallel pair, Belden 1800F, 4 channels). Some work remains to install wiring for telephone, television, and the security cameras. The inspector didn’t seem too concerned about that, since that type of wiring doesn’t present safety issues.

If there are no hitches, I’ll be able to move into the house next month!

When you're craving something fried…

Sometimes the craving for something fried is irresistible. It can get bad enough to tempt me to start up the Jeep in the pouring rain and go out and eat something I shouldn’t. Sometimes hot homemade bread and butter will extinguish the fried-food craving, but I’m always looking for alternatives.

I’d rate a pasta and vegetable stir-fry about B- for curing a fried-food craving. But it works.

Start by browning lots of onion. Then throw in the cooked pasta and brown that too. The pasta in the photo, by the way, is whole wheat pasta — it’s not that brown from being fried. Pasta likes to be lightly browned. It gives it a nice chewy texture. Tonight I added some walnuts and let them get nice and hot with the onion and pasta. I used “broccoflower,” which is cheap and good here in the wintertime. To cook the vegetables, I threw in a little white wine and covered the pan until the broccoflower was good and hot. Then remove the lid and make sure all the wine has boiled away.

Browned onions are a great seasoning. It’s easy to forget just how sweet onions are until you’re reminded how nicely they caramelize.

Tax rates

There was quite an outburst at the prospect of raising taxes for incomes over $250,000 a year. That’s radical, many said. “We’re running out of rich people,” said Michele Bachmann. “How Obama Will Bleed the Rich Dry” is the headline on Michael Gerson’s column this morning in the Washington Post.

The key point of fact is this: the Obama budget raises the tax rate on income over $250,000 a year from 35 percent to 39.6 percent.

Historically, that’s hardly radical. The top rate was over 90 percent during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, and 70 percent during the 1970s. We never ran out of rich people.

Historically, what’s radical was Reagan’s reducing the top tax rate to 28 percent in 1986. Though there were tax cuts on high incomes, wage earners actually paid higher taxes under Reagan. Part of this project of lower taxes for the rich and higher taxes for wage earners was to teach wage earners to hate government by convincing people that higher taxes always hurt the little guy. That is just not true.

Tweaking the snow photos…

I can’t resist tweaking the snow photos in Gimp (which, like Photoshop, is a photo editor) the better to imagine what the house might look like if it were old instead of new. Here it is converted to a duotone, with a Gaussian blur. The Jeep has been edited out.

Snow!

I’ll try these shots again at dusk with a bit of light inside the windows.

Denmark

Wikipedia

Those who say that the United States is on a course toward European-type socialist democracies could be right. Let’s take a look at Denmark…

In the past eight years I’ve made two business trips to Denmark and spent four weeks there. I helped install a Danish publishing system at the San Francisco Chronicle, so I worked closely with a Danish company, and lots of Danes, for several years. This publishing system, by the way, is the system that’s also used at the New York Times and the Washington Post. The Danes are fantastic engineers and smart, honest businesspeople.

Most of these factoids about the Danish economy come from the Wikipedia article on Denmark:

— Denmark has a free market economy.

— Denmark has a large welfare state.

— Denmark has one of the world’s highest levels of income equality.

— Danes are very productive, and Denmark’s GDP per capita is 15 to 20 percent higher than the United States.

— Denmark holds the world record for income tax rates.

— All college education in Denmark is free.

— 80% of employees belong to unions.

— Denmark spends about 1.3 percent of GDP on defense, compared with about 4 percent in the United States.

— The national health service is financed by an 8 percent tax. This is a local tax on income and property.

— According to Statistics Denmark, the unemployment rate in Denmark in January 2009 was 2.3 percent.

— In some surveys, Denmark is ranked the happiest place on earth.

— Denmark was ranked the least corrupt country in the world in the Corruption Perception Index.

— According to the World Economic Forum, Denmark has one of the most competitive economies in the world.

I realize that Denmark’s model probably would not scale up in a workable way for the United States. Still, in my opinion, we should be studying some of the European models and not let ourselves be scared by them. They work.