Staying warm

Brrr. The winds kicked up something awful yesterday evening, and it sounded like the end of the world most of the night.  We woke up to temps in the 40s, and cold fog sitting heavy on the mountains.

After coffee and morning chores, we loaded up Deb's bicycle-powered water pump for delivery.  She seemed pleased with the end result.  We look forward to hearing how it performs.

While at TFL we also got to see Stacy's rocket stove, which is like a mini-gasifier. By using a metal chimney and a small inlet orifice, you can create lots of concentrated heat for cooking, with just a few twigs.  It makes cooking with wood so much more efficient.  To learn more about wood gasification, follow the link to our website.

la bomba bicicleta

Had a great visit with Dr. Deb and her friend Stacy, who drove out to Terlingua from East Texas.  They are staying at le Chateau TFL, and came by to have us fabricate a bicycle water pump. Got to give them a tour of the homestead, too.  It turns out that Deb's a whiz at ferro-cement, and had lots of questions about the Presidio Gallena.

We recently got this nifty little band saw for cutting metal, and now we don't know how we got on without one for so long.  It makes the whole process more precise and less dramatic (we had been using a chop saw with an abrasive disk).

 

The mercury is supposed to drop tonight and into the next couple days with a big cold front that's moving in, but today was just perfect.