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Giant drafty holes

Live and Learn part XLVII

Forty-seven is one of my favorite numbers (right after 27, my membership number for the new Durham Central Market Coop)

We've been wallpapering, of all things. Beautiful, recycled, wallpaper. Wallpapering forces you to get up close and personal with your walls and windows in a way that painting via roller brush on an extendable pole does not. 

So it follows that Stephen mentioned noticing that the top casing of our windows was not tight to the wall.  I kind of shrugged my shoulders, like, well, whatever, the house is 75 years old, what else is new, just caulk it and be done... 

 

So he said, "really, the top casing is about an inch off the wall, it would suck caulk in like a black hole, and cold air is blowing through like a reverse hairdryer."  Ok, I embellished that last part, but seriously.  The lower arrow in the photo below points to the top of the window where the drafthole was. The other arrow points to the new duct in the ceiling coming from our solar air heater, where lovely warm air blows in. 

 

 

I really thought we had done everything we could in the past two years to weatherproof. We insulated the walls and ceiling, looked around for air drafts and caulked the base boards, got heavy curtains, added storm windows and caulked those too. I couldn't think of any way to improve the weatherproofing in the living room. But obviously we weren't thorough enough, as there was basically a huge gaping draft hole over every one of our downstairs windows.  If we had done a blower door test (replacing a door with a strong blower fan to blow air out of the house lets you see where leaks are as they pull replacement air in), we would have discovered the leaks, surely. But I tend to actively resist projects that I can't do myself, so no blower door test.  Character weakness or strength?  Both, yeah, but I place my bets on a future where we will have to depend mainly on ourselves and our neighbors, so sometimes I make mistakes calculating cost/benefits.

 

Here's the finished wallpaper - pretty cool hunh?

 

 

 

Connecting for Change

 

Stephen and I just returned from a weekend at Bioneers by the Bay.  It was a great event, where we got to meet some our of favorite Chelsea Green authors, like Rob Roy and Eliot Coleman, plus many of the hardworking behind-the-scenes folks from Chelsea Green.

 

Solar Air Heater installed

Here's a picture of a small solar air heater we installed last week:

 

My long-awaited water feature

It's a mantra I've repeated over and over for the past 2.5 years: water feature.  I've longed for a water feature in the yard. Somehow I knew that when I found the time to build my water feature, it would mean my life had eased up from the rapid-fire pace of the past two and a half years, and I would be able to look around, slow down,  and take a breath.  With the house projects, book writing editing and touring, teaching, installing, etc etc etc, I wasn't sure I'd ever have free time again.  But yes!  Here it is...
 

 

Teaching the New York Foodies about Solar Cooking

We had a great time yesterday showing off a Sunoven to the hungry customers at Brooklyn's Greenmarket. We cooked up some acorn squash the day before on Rebekah's sister Rachel's sunny roof a few blocks away, mixed in some panfried sage, butter, sugar (I think maple syrup would have been better), and salt and served it up on some fresh-baked bread. We also pulverized the seeds with some olive oil, which made a yummy pepita spread. There's nothing like giving away some food to get folks' attention!

 

W/ Richard Heinberg, Lyle Estill and Rob Hopkins

 Wow, all our favorite authors are going to join us on the radio Saturday morning (the 13th) for a rotating panel discussion.

 

Elberta peaches, shiitake mushrooms, and other news from the front yard

22 months of waiting. That's nearly as torturous as the five years it took to grow ginseng. Patience, patience. But it paid off Friday when we got our first crop of shiitake mushrooms from the inoculated logs that have been taking up space in the backyard.  Good thing those fungi decided to fruit, because I was contemplating burning the logs in the woodstove this fall! 

 

Huffington Post

We've started blogging for the Huffington Post on occasion. No one told us that when you finish writing your book you have to continue writing blogs into infinity like some kind of carpal-tunnel purgatory! We thought we were done! It's fun to have a soap box to shout from, though, so we won't complain too much. We'll give our readers here (readers, are you there?) a head's up from now on when we post stuff there. In general, useful stuff here in this blog, verbose ranting over at huffpo.

 

Unwitting nurdle makers; Plus Wed. at Quail Ridge Books

So about a year and a half ago Stephen and I bought rugs made from recycled plastic bags to go on top of the black walk pads on our green roof (which got searingly hot in the daytime).  The plastic rugs had lovely patterns like woven oriental rugs, weren't too expensive. I thought it was a good use of plastic, and would reflect more heat off the green roof than the black walk pads. Many "green" stores sell these rugs, like Real Goods, etc. 

 

The Book Tour Ends - Sustainable Cities

Well, we made it back from our book tour and the house hadn't burned down and the garden wasn't shriveled up and our dog was alive so everything's hunky-dory. We had a lot of fun and it was nice to take a break from our own burg and see what's going on in the rest of the country.