Month: March 2011

Typewriters: A new symbol of cool

Back in November when I had my IBM Selectric III reconditioned, I speculated that there ought to be clubs for typewriter enthusiasts. As I posted at the time, “I’ve been thinking that there ought to be typewriter clubs these days — for people who still have and use typewriters and who send each other typewritten notes in the mail just for the heck of it.”

Today the New York Times confirms that this is the case. Nor is this a case of old folks like me being sentimental about old technology. Today’s typewriter clubs, according to the Times, are mostly young folks, members of the literati and technorati. They have typewriter sales, as well as “type-ins,” and they send each other notes by snail mail (as I have been doing with a few old friends).

Most of the renewed interest in typewriters seem to be focused on manual typewriters, particularly portables. But it’s the Selectrics and the office-size typewriters that I really love.

Be sure to look at the photo side show attached to the Times article.

My faith in the younger generations just went up a couple of notches.

Radiation report

I am measuring slightly elevated background radiation today. There is a random factor that makes short-term measurements unreliable. A more reliable reading would average radiation levels over, say, an hour or so, and I’m not equipped to do that. But it does appear to me that background levels are trending more toward .03 and .04 milli-Roentgen per hour, as opposed to the .02 that I measured eight days ago.

That’s nothing to be alarmed about, but since the Associated Press is reporting that this radiation is coming from iodine-131 blowing in from Japan, it could do no harm to start taking a kelp-based iodine supplement now.

The real lesson here, though, is to start thinking about being more prepared for future radiation events. Sooner or later it will happen. Take a look at the Radiation Network web site. It shows radiation monitoring stations around the country. It also shows the locations of nuclear plants. Here in western North Carolina we are particularly exposed to nuclear plants in eastern Tennessee. Prevailing winds blow this way.

I’m guessing that iodine supplements including kelp are sold out and hard to find right now. But as soon as you can find some kelp tablets, I’d recommend buying it.

Cabbage report


Ken with our organic cabbage. The seeds were started 49 days ago, and the plants have been in the ground for 11 days.

The cabbages were transplanted outdoors on March 15 and have now been in the ground for 11 days. They are doing really well. It was hard going at first. When we planted the cabbage outdoors (they were started from seed indoors on Feb. 4), I thought that our main concern would be cold weather. Cabbages can stand a frost, but not a hard freeze. Instead of cold weather, we had hot, dry weather. There were two days in the cabbages’ first week when the temperature was over 80 degrees. I had to carry water to the cabbages to keep them from wilting.

The cabbages are much happier now that they’ve had rain and established some roots. With any luck, they’ll be water self-sufficient from here on out.

We also started our tomato and pepper plants from seed today, in the grow-light system. The plan is to plant them outdoors around the first of May.

All in all, the garden is going well. The snowpeas are five inches high, and we also have some onions (started from sets) coming along.

A Chinook helicopter

I’ve commented before on how much helicopter traffic there is in the sky above Acorn Abbey. Usually these helicopters are Huey-size military-looking helicopters, dark gray. Yesterday while Ken and I were working in the yard, there were three Chinook helicopters. We were not able to get a photograph.

This morning, though, I heard a helicopter approaching and ran out with my camera. I caught this Chinook helicopter seconds before it vanished behind the trees.

These helicopters always fly at very low altitude, usually east to west.

That military helicopters frequently fly over North Carolina is not surprising — there are three Air Force bases in eastern North Carolina. But what puzzles me is why we see them so frequently at low altitude over the abbey.

My best speculation is that the helicopters are on training flights, on visual flight rules. We usually see them in good weather. The sky is overcast this morning, but the ceiling is high. When pilots are casually cruising on visual flights rules with no particular place to go, they like to fly toward what is visually interesting. So my guess is that they’re attracted to the unusual mountains in Stokes County — Pilot Mountain, Hanging Rock, and Sauratown Mountain. Also, from looking at a map, it seems to me that if a helicopter from, say, Pope Air Force Base wanted to fly toward the nearest mountains, it would head northwest toward Stokes County.

I found a news report from 2009 about Chinook helicopters landing in a rural field near Raleigh. The military bases said they knew nothing about it.

Getting ready for the asparagus

We ordered 3-year-old asparagus crowns online from AsparagusGardener.com in Tennessee. They should arrive any day now. Ken is digging a bed for the asparagus and amending the soil with compost, sand, and organic fertilizers.

Asparagus is a perennial and will come back year after year, but there’ll be no asparagus to eat until next spring at the earliest.

The chickens go crazy whenever he digs.

On thinking ahead

I bet that some of you who live in California are feeling a little paranoid right now. Can you trust the authorities to tell you what the radiation levels are? And maybe you went looking for iodine supplements and couldn’t find any because it had sold out. You’ve got to think ahead, folks.

Several years go, I bought old Civil Defense radiation detectors on eBay. They’re from the 1960s, but they’d never been used and were in great working condition. They were inexpensive then. If you can find them right now, I’m sure the price is sky high. As for iodine tablets, why not just keep kelp tablets on hand, which you can get at health food stores (though I’m sure kelp supplements are sold out right now as well).

Here’s what you need to do. When this crisis has passed, start looking for radiation meters. Keep in mind, though, that there are several models of the old Civil Defense radiation meter. The one you want is the CDV-700, which is a true Geiger counter and is the only one sensitive enough to measure background levels of radiations. Other meters, such as the CDV-715, are less sensitive and would be helpful only during high-radiation events.

You also need to educate yourself about radiation — the types of radiation, what the normal levels are, how to shield against radiation, and what the dangers are at increasing levels of radiation. This small document is a good place to start. Print it out and keep it with your radiation meters.

Here in North Carolina, I can assure you, background radiation is normal, about .02 milli-Roentgen per hour.

It’s no so much that I’m paranoid that I have things like Geiger counters, though it’s true that my trust in any kind of authority approaches zero. A bigger reason is that I’m a nerd, I have some obsessive-compulsive tendencies, and I love to measure things. I have all sorts of measuring instruments — oscilloscope, magnetometer, capacitance meters, inductance meters, frequency meters, and so on.

But as an ham radio operator, I also have an altruistic motive. I ought to be of service to the community during a crisis, able to provide information and communication.

It’s good to know some science and have a few tools.


The meter shows the current background radiation, March 20, 2:45 p.m. — .02 milli-Roentgen per hour.

What's blooming and budding at the abbey


Daffodils

Spring officially begins later today. Here in the Blue Ridge foothills, we’re still weeks away from the full riot of High Spring. But the spring blooming and budding have started, and we’re gathering momentum.


Blooms on a young peach tree


Wild redbud at the edge of the woods


Blackberry shoots on the edge of the rabbit patch


Day lily shoots by the hundreds


I believe this is sedum.


New growth on the fence roses


Pansies


Heather — non-native, experimental


Pear trees by the neighbor’s pasture


Pear blossoms

Microsoft Hohm and energy consumption


In June 2009, using analytics software licensed from Lawrence Berkeley National Labs and statistical data from the Department of Energy, Microsoft launched a web site permitting homeowners to enter data about their homes and energy use and compare their energy use to that of other homes. The web site is www.microsoft-hohm.com.

Microsoft launched this web site the very month I first turned on the lights at Acorn Abbey, so each month since June 2009 I’ve entered data from my electric bill. The web site stores this data, graphs it, and analyzes it in interesting ways.

Acorn Abbey, I’m happy to report, is energy efficient. It rates a 91 on energy efficiency, on a scale of 100. The national average for energy efficiency is 61. In my Zip Code, the average is 57. The average in the wastrel, free-market utopia of Texas is 51!

In dollars, here is how it looks. Acorn Abbey has an electric heat pump for both heating and cooling. All appliances including the water heater are electric. (In densely populated areas where piped gas is available, some gas appliances are more efficient, but that’s not an option here in the sticks.) The overhead insulation exceeds the building code requirements. My annual electric bill comes to $979, compared with $2,228 in my Zip Code for houses of the same size built around the same time.

So my electric costs are 43 percent of what others in this area spend for similar houses. Or, to express it another way, people around here with similar houses use two and a quarter times more electricity than Acorn Abbey does.

I stay warm in the winter and cool in the summer. I use the heck out of the kitchen. I take showers with pure hot water (my water heater is set pretty low). My Macintosh stays on all the time. In other words, I live comfortably. How in the world do others manage to use so much electricity? I don’t see how it can be anything other than waste.

After 17 years in California, where the cost of electricity is much higher than it is here in North Carolina, I became accustomed to being frugal with electricity. When I returned to North Carolina in 2008, I was stunned at how promiscuous local people are in their use of electricity. When something is too cheap, people waste it. And I’d better not even get started about the horrors of the McMansions and new suburbs that are going to be with us for a long time, squandering energy, ugly in every way.

The nuclear catastrophes in Japan have renewed the national conversation about the wisdom of building new nuclear power plants. But the thing that is almost never discussed is that we wouldn’t need so many power plants if people didn’t waste so much electricity. Most Americans still blindly live as though they’re entitled to endless consumption and endless waste.

Microsoft Hohm makes two suggestions for making Acorn Abbey more energy efficient. Its data includes the percentage of my light bulbs that are compact fluorescent vs. incandescent. It wants me to install all fluorescent lighting. I will, eventually. All my frequently used lights are compact fluorescent, but I’ve not yet spent the money to change out my seldom-used lights. I’m also hoping that the cost of LED lighting will come down.

The other step Microsoft Hohm suggests is caulking around my windows and doors to control air leaks. They’re exactly right about that. Last fall, I had a plague of lady bugs and stink bugs getting into the house looking for a warm place to spend the winter. They could have come in only around the windows and doors. Before next winter, I must do some serious caulking. In retrospect, caulking would have been a much better investment than the heavy curtains I bought for the windows. And it would have kept the stink bugs out.

The cabbages are in the ground

Today we put almost a hundred young plants into the ground. These are the plants that we started indoors five weeks ago from seed — cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, and brussels sprouts. We also have eight small celery plants. I think the odds are low that we’ll be able to grow celery here, but I wanted to try that as an experiment.

The soil was a bit wetter than ideal, and the plants had been “hardening” (getting used to the outdoors) for only five days. But we thought it best to go ahead and plant because the forecast looks good. We should have some rain starting this afternoon, followed by a week with highs in the 60s and 70s and lows in the 40s and 50s — good cabbage-growing weather.

Next step: Starting plants for the summer garden indoors from seed — tomatoes, squash, etc. Those plants need to go in the ground in late April.