Tuesday, February 2, 2010

February 02, 2010

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Well we are officially indoors now, because we have installed our door!  The sliding glass door gave us a little bit of a headache because it is recessed into the living area, but we figured it out, despite the confusing and poorly photocopied instructions. It definitely makes the house feel more like a home, and we love the added sunlight inside.  After we sheathed the stub walls of the recess, the house was officially closed in and it immediately became heatable and therefore much more comfortable. Even we were surprised when upon returning home from our trip to Study Butte on Monday, we opened the door and were hit with a rush of hot air.  Apparently it had been warm enough while we were out for the house to get some substantial thermal gain, and the thermometer was at 90 degrees when we came in. The stagnant hot air gave us a good impetus to install our windows, so now we have one of them in what will soon be our "computer nook" corner of the house.

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Another great upgrade to our standard of living was the installation of our stereo.  Casey salvaged the stereo head unit from my car after it was totalled in the collision last year, and held onto it in hopes that we could use it in our small house. So on Sunday we pulled it out of the box it had been inhabiting for the past ten months and Casey wired it to the input cables from the battery bank to the inverter, that way we can use it without having to run the noisy inverter. For off grid living car stereos make a great solution to the problems associated with other systems.  Car stereos are designed to run on direct current electricity, and therefore integrate easily into battery banks or to solar power directly. The car stereo also has a much stonger radio reciever than the battery powered radio we had been using before, and a better tuner.  My favorite benefit of car stereos is that they are equipped with a low-draw setting that turns the head unit off except for a small current to keep time and presets. This is the state your car stereo enters when the key is off in your vehicle, and I think it's great for anyone who wants to eliminate excessive power usage from their lives, whether they are on the grid or not. There were definitely a few moments of being weirded out by the idea, especially when Casey wired up the system and the cd player immediately started playing the disc I had been listening to before the collision.  It didn't start in on the same song, though -- that would have been disturbingly creepy.

Sprocket seems increasingly better at entertaining himself these days, though sometimes I worry what havoc he might be wreaking elsewhere.  It seems as though he has found the remains of a young buck somewhere in the hills around our property, and he occaisionally brings back bones to gnaw.  So far he has brought us an antler and some jaw pieces, but we have not yet coaxed him into taking us to the rest of the skeleton (if there even is anything else).  I can only assume the young male was taken down by coyotes or some other predator, since it seems unlikely that human hunters would leave antlers from a kill behind.

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Today was a pretty unusual day meteorlogically, as we were treated to a beautiful sunny morning only to be enveloped by huge, thick clouds that came slinking across the terrain from the northeast. The prevailing winds around here seem to be from the southwest, though close to the ground be have a lot of turbulence and unpredictability.  Still, it was unexpected to see this grand scale air mass moving contrary to my expectations.  At around 11 am we noticed white plumes rising out of the Little Corazones Springs valley, and at first feared a fire in the valley.  It became apparent that it was mist; a low cloud creeping over the hills.  We watched the cloud for an hour or so, and as it neared our homestead the moderately-sized cloudlet revealed itself to be an enormous mass of water vapor, a cloud miles wide and sweeping down from the north across the entire North Corazones, and possibly other regions.  The show reached it's apex when the edge of the cloud began to crest the West Corazón and spill down the face and sides of the mountain.

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It wasn't long after these photos were taken that we became completely enveloped by the cloud.  The rest of the day was a wall of white, and we opted not to install the ridgecap on our roof.  Instead Casey fixed our stair problem, so now we no longer have to climb the ladder to enter our house (though Sprocket has almost mastered going up and down the ladder).


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