And that’s just the commercials.

Meanwhile, we’ve had to discontinue our internet connection via Verizon Wireless. It worked fine to start with, but we lost the signal for a day or two and when I was finally able to reconnect my connection was sssssssssslllllllllllllllllllllllooooooooooooooowwwww, even slower than our dial up. And that’s saying something. (How slow is our dial up? You could eat dinner while a page was loading.)

So we’ve succombed to satellite internet by WildBlue. (They gave us a better deal than their competitor.)It’s the only option for us out here. Satellite is a unique technology: it seems to be nearly universally despised (cost, speed, unreliability), but out here nearly universally used. Now I know why.

And as for all the ickiness I so gleefully condemned above? Isn’t the Internet more slimy than television? Three answers: 1) Not possible. 2) We strictly govern our kids’ use, Jess only uses Gmail and Facebook, and I never have time for Internet anyway. 3) We use NetNanny.

Now it occurs to me that the oil still isn’t changed in that vehicle, and I’ve already installed a new oil filter. Oil level is too high. I should drain off some of it even though the old yucky stuff is now well mixed with the new stuff and probably cramming the new filter full of old glock. Oh well, if it’s not one thing it’s another.

What does this picture have to do with the BGF? Oh, nothing. It’s just that I had it on my flash drive, and today it caught my eye. I’m pretty tired this afternoon.

This is Harrison Lake from my campsite taken a couple of summers ago. The peak, which I drew, is off to the left. But I think it’s pretty neat the way the land drops off just at the edge of the lake like this. Maybe I’ll have to make this into a drawing sometime. It’ll have to wait until I have time to do it, and money to scan, frame, and ship it out. But if you like the idea, let me know.

Our dogs will stop at nothing!!!! to destroy Jessica’s plantings. Flowerbed? Dig it up. New lawn? Dig it up. Newer lawn? Refuse to play anywhere else; chase each other relentlessly for eight hours a day until the grass seed is ground to powder. Fence? What fence? Doggie repellent? That’s for city dogs. Flowerbeds strewn with rose branches bearing vicious thorns? What’s one punctured paw pad–I have 19 more!

Jess’ response this year was to build a compound in the front lawn. She took my sledgehammer and pounded steel stakes around the perimeter. She wrapped a double layer of our garden fencing around the stakes. She fastened the fence to the ground with stones. She made sure the dogs couldn’t come up the steep cutaway in front and slip under the fence; and she gave them a little gap to pass by in front so they wouldn’t have to try to jump over it.

Then she scraped up the hard soil with a rake, scattered seed, and added lots of manure. You can even see some of the pine shavings she threw down in an effort to soften the ground. Recent rains have kept it moist; now all we need is a bit more warmth for a while. She’s added abundant seed; she’s bought a 25-pound sack from the local feed store and put a quarter of it down inside this compound. (This is in addition to the grass seed I planted last fall.)

So far, her fence is working. There’s no sign of green grass yet, but it’s early. Her plan is to plant half the lawn at a time, and move the compound over to the north side when grass on the south half is well established. It might take a few months, but that’s better than nothing. Between the energetic dogs, the hard ground, and the poor mountain soil, the grass has a hard time. But with much protection and even more manure, it may grow.

Now we have to deal with the birds. They’re eating the grass seed.

(Sorry for not catching it sooner. My life is already so full as to strain credulity, but last week I was called to be the president of our local branch of the Church. I am glad and grateful for this call [I enjoy Church work more than anything else on earth], but it does mean that my attention is somewhat scattered.)

Well, last week was the annual ritual known as Missoula Childrens’ Theater. This year’s production was Jack and the Beanstalk, and we had four kids participating (Emma as pianist, as usual). We were coming home late from a rehearsal and remembered that the poultry had not been “put to bed” (our term for locking them safely in at night). I stopped the BGF at the garden driveway to drop off Emma and Becca,, so they could put the birds to bed and then come up to the house. But as soon as they opened the car door,

Hoo-EE! Skunk bomb.

Judging by the strength of the smell, Jess and I was sure that the skunk had sprayed (as opposed to merely walked by). We thought we knew who the lucky winner was. And sure enough, for the fourth time in his young life, Hank had received the honors.

Fortunately Jessica knew what to do. Hank smelled so bad that she wouldn’t even let him in the house for his bath, as previously. So she brought a bucket out to him filled with the following potion:

2 gallons warm water
1 T dish soap
1 bottle hydrogen peroxide
1/2 box baking soda

Those are the precise scientific measurements (I think). The amazing thing is that this potion works. When washed thoroughly with it, not only will a dog not smell like skunk—he won’t even smell like a dog. He smells like nothing. The stench is utterly neutralized.

Well, it worked again. We’re just hoping Hank doesn’t encounter any porcupines.

My, how the future changes.

For whatever reason, these ten lighting grids did not end up in an office park in Poughkeepsie, but in the free pile at our local dump. Jessica picked them up and hauled them home, still wrapped in their shipping plastic. She thought they’d be perfect for greenhouse shelves and indeed they will be; since a grid allows spilled water, dirt, and organics to fall straight through to the ground. The poor grids huddled together under a tree all winter, awaiting their destiny, thinking, This doesn’t look like a cubicle farm. It looks like a real farm, with chickens and ducks and dogs and fruit trees and a garden and gung-ho kids.

Then along came a man in blue coveralls, hauling 2×4s and grumbling because he’d left his hammer up at the house, and then his speed square, and then his tape measure, and then his level. When things got all squared away, the grids were the only things that were square; because their destined greenhouse looks like it was built by Robinson Crusoe with nary a square angle in it. The man pounded together a rickety-looking frame, came and got the trembling grids, and dropped them in between the wood frames, three on the bottom shelf, three on the top, blip blip blip. (The other four grids are for frames on the opposite side of the greenhouse.) And hey, they sort of fit!

Now that’s not a bad destiny for a bunch of forlorn lighting grids. They’ll get used. They’ll support pots and trays for years and years, they’ll have dirt and weeds and roots dropped all over them, they’ll get water stained, and sure as shootin’, a kid or two will climb up on the shelves and break through one of them.

But they’ll be happy. Man shall not live in office cubicles alone.

I didn’t think so, and after a lot of research I found that I could buy a set of antennae, cables, and an amplifier that would capture and amplify a weak cell signal from Verizon Wireless. We tested our setup for over a week, and that was a three-ring circus: 1) I was outside on a ladder, holding up 10’ ABS pipe (left over from construction) with the Yagi antenna bolted to the top, slowly aiming it in various directions to get a signal; 2) Emma or Becca standing inside holding a borrowed cell phone and hollering “one! No, two. No wait—one. I mean three!” to indicate the number of bars the phone was reading, and 3) cables strewn out our bedroom window, all over the floor, and everywhere in between. I dropped my screw gun 15 feet to our flagstone walkway, sending pieces of plastic spinning to Kingdom Come. I risked my life a score of times with an extension ladder leaning up at maximum extension. (I didn’t know that they start wobbling when they’re extended all the way out. Now I do.) I brought stuff back and forth from the store half a dozen times.

But after a week or so of this circus, we found a strong, consistent signal. We can pick up the best signal from a tower near the Bull River junction, rather than from town, which is an hour away behind Turtleback Mountain. And viola! We’ve gone from No Signal Whatsoever to four bars, and the internet comes to our computer like a firehose. Okay, a garden hose, but that’s still better than the eyedropper pace we had with dial-up.

Which reminds me, I need to go cancel our dial-up service.

There, all done. That’ll reduce our internet bill by $10 a month.

The second part of our Evil Master Plan is to get MagicJack to function for our phone service. If’n it works (and I’m having troubles getting it to connect right now), it will virtually eliminate our phone bill, and our wireless internet will actually save us money. This setup will pay for itself in three years, which is about the time it will take somebody tinkering in their garage to invent a way for everybody on earth to get a 10 Gbps connection using only a saucepan.

And I don’t know how well this will work in rough weather. We’ve had shamefully gorgeous spring weather lately, so I can’t test that. I’ll find out if the connection is diminished in a snowstorm; in a blizzard, we won’t get phone service at all and will have to go to ham radio.

But I’m ready for that too. And if you’re tinkering with using a saucepan as an antenna, I’ll be interested in three years.

The nautical efficiency is carried on in our selection of a home for the kids’ computer. The only public spot we had available was in the dining room, in the corner by the table. Our tax return budget included money for a new computer, and we’ve wanted to put the old one downstairs in a public area where anyone could use it and we wouldn’t have to worry about what they were doing. (We’ll be purchasing NetNanny shortly to keep the porn epidemic out of our house, and Jessica will be the admin on all computers—just to keep it safe.)

But we didn’t have space for a computer desk—not to mention no money. So I bought this 2’x2’ sheet of plywood at Home Depot for about $6 (yes, it’s expensive for a small piece of wood, but it’s cheaper than buying a whole sheet that I don’t need) and ripped it in half diagonally to form a triangle. I also nipped a couple of inches off the angle at back to leave space for cords in back. I found a couple of 1×2 scraps at home and, after measuring and levelling, had Emma screw them into place. (She’s been wanting to use tools more.) Then she helped me screw the shelf to the wall supports, I stained it, and brought the old computer downstairs to its new home. Viola! (or was that voila?) The $6 computer desk.

It’s quite comfy; I’ve tried it. It’s not in the way, since people don’t make a habit of walking into corners. I’ve run a phone line along the wall and over to the kitchen phone jack so that we can get “internet access” from this computer. (I hope to have a wireless connection one of these days, but in the meantime we’ll enjoy having The World’s Slowest Internet Connection: one page every ten minutes!) Kids still watch movies, play games, and twiddle in Illustrator and Photoshop like they do now; but they don’t have to throng Dad’s studio while he’s at work. Mom can do her Facebeook, and everybody enjoys the screensaver slide show with its 15,000+ images I’ve taken over the years. As soon as I have 20 minutes to get the external hard drive moved downstairs, we’ll even have dinner music.

Oh, and there’s one other cost. You have to clean out the ashes occasionally. For me, it’s less than once a month during the burning season, and I usually remove enough to fill the kindling bucket (about 2 gallons). That is, I’d guess about 5 pounds of ash for every, say, 1200 pounds of wood I burn. (This is a completely scientific ballpark guess.) This winter I found that wood ash functions beautifully as a snowmelt. It sticks readily to ice or compacted snow and won’t bounce all over the place like the snowmelt stuff you get from the hardware store. Ash is dark in color, so it attracts the sunlight and melts ice; and it’s also (what’s the buzzword?) “organic.” No artificial colors or flavors. When the ice is gone you don’t have to worry about some mysterious chemical residue like you get with the stuff from the hardware store. It goes into the ground and maybe eventually ends up in another tree. Pretty cool, huh?

Yesterday after church (and various home teaching visits) I came home and stretched out in my cushy chair. The fire was burning merrily just a few feet away. I leaned way back, put my feet up, and took a snooze while the wind blew outside. That’s the cost of wood heat.

Beats vacuuming out a furnace filter.

I know y’all live in the city and can’t do much about your heating bill. I’m guessing your landlord would frown on your building a campfire in the living room, and what would you do with the smoke? (I know; I used to be a landlord.) But you can vicariously enjoy our heat. And you can do one better: If you really want to, start planning for your own snug aerie in the woods. You don’t have to have all the answers right now; you can just grab a pencil and start planning. It’s a great time to buy land.

This is a good thing.

So I have created four new originals which I will be featuring in the coming weeks in this blog. They have been scanned and are, as of today, being framed for shipment to California in the coming weeks. Prints will be available shortly, in a multitude of sizes, on my website.

What is this? It’s a “painting in graphite.” I used to call my work “drawings,” but I don’t really draw at all any more. In fact, I don’t think I even touched this piece with a pencil at all. It’s still created by hand, using graphite—the medium in a common lead pencil—but you’ll see that my work, which is quite large (this piece is 24″x36″), is beyond the grasp of a #2 pencil.

This one is called May 12. Why give it a date instead of a title? Three reasons: 1) habit; 2) it looks like May 12 to me, and 3) it’s just too hard coming up with clever names for all my pieces. I can only hit upon a clever name when all the planets are aligned; otherwise the title sticks and it’s cringe-inducing. It’s easier to date ‘em. You’ll notice that some of the greatest music of all time is named things like “Allegro con brio” or “Lacrymosa” instead of “The Stupendousest Earth-Shatteringly Majestic Fanfare in Human History” or “Crushingly Beautiful Funereal Music” respectively. Fans attach names to compelling works of art, after the fact. The artist doesn’t have to.

If you like my work, you can see more of it at the website or on my Facebook page. I’d love to read your comments, and would appreciate your efforts to tell others about my work who might be interested.

And what does this have to do with Self Reliance? That’s easy. I don’t always want to rely on an employer for my income. This, coupled with my books, will help me in time to become as independent in my income as in other things.

Until that happy day, please help by passing the word along. Thanks.

Clean the pipe

Warning: this is a messy procedure. Learn from my woes and surround your interior chimney with an old sheet before proceeding.

Well, since we never actually had winter around here I’ll detail this procedure and post the pictures from when I cleaned the chimbley around Christmas time. The principles are still relevant and I’ll do this same thing in the spring when I clean the chimney again, because it’s a pretty messy operation. It will be better when I staple a sheet to the ceiling around the chimney before proceeding.

Also, this operation only works if you can actually access your chimney from inside. If your chimney is on the outside and you can still get the brush up from below via the cleanout, you’re cleverer than me (most people are). If your chimbley has an elbow and you can access the vertical run from below, you can still do this. That’s how I did it in our last house. If you can’t, it’s up to the roof with you!

It’s as easy as 1-2-3. It’s almost as easy as cleaning a chimney from up on the roof, without all that life-threatening stuff. Unless, of course, you don’t surround the interior chimney with a sheet and you get soot everywhere and your wife threatens your life. If you don’t protect the environs, you’re safer to go up on the roof. This is pretty messy, did I mention?

1. Disassemble the chimney and screw the brush to the first rod.
2. Push the brush up the pipe, adding sections of rod as you go, brushing clear up to the chimney cap.
3. When all is sparkling clean, pull the brush out and reassemble the chimney.
4. Clean up.
5. Clean up.
6. Clean up.

Let the soot begin

Cleaning the lower stovepipe

See? Easy as 1-2-3. Of course the last few steps won’t be necessary next time when I hang a sheet from …oh yeah, I mentioned that. The advantage of cleaning the chimney from roof is that all the gunk falls straight down to the smoke shelf inside the stove. Then you take apart the stovepipe and vacuum up all the gunk from the smoke shelf. (The disadvantage, of course, is the risk of a short-term trip to long-term disability.) The inside method is lots easier. You just remove the pipe first instead of last, with the result that all the soot and pulverized creosote floats out and coats the room. If you hang a sheet first …oh yeah, I mentioned that.

You’ll need to get a wire brush to fit your chimney and enough fiberglass rods to reach all the way to the chimney cap. Both of these depend on your chimney setup. I use a 6” circular wire brush and three 4’ threaded rods. Your local fire department may have everything you need available for free checkout, like the library. Ours did, and I did that when we lived in town, but it’s less hassle to have your own.

And either way, you save yourself a $150 visit from the chimney sweep.