New Hardware

On Tuesday the 5th I was hit by a car.  I was attempting to make a left hand turn from the center lane across two oncoming traffic lanes,  who were stopped at a red light. I was signalling & the vehicle in the left lane was allowing to me to enter their lane to proceed and check the oncoming right hand lane. A vehicle did not see as I was moving forward to look around and plowed into my front tire. My weight was on the front, so the impact spun the bike 180 degrees, I landed on the hood of the Jeep, they stopped suddenly and I was thrown. I saw my right leg snap with the sky behind it. Landed, rolled into the gutter. My leg heel was also fractured, road rash and bruising. My helmet protected my head and my tiger backpack protected my torso. I believe the two young college kids who were in the Jeep were distracted while driving. Texting and driving is a huge problem here. I just don't see how they could have failed to notice the stopped break in the traffic ahead of them, could have failed to see what of me was visible... they couldn't bring themselves to speak to me as I lay there in the road. Bone fragments from my tibia were lost in the road. 

 I was brought to the hospital, surgery to clean the wound was performed, I rested for a day and underwent a 2nd 4 hour surgery to insert a nail through my tibia and a wire through my fibula. The old hard ware from the previous ankle break in 2015 was in the way of the new, so they took it out and gave it back to me. Hex head self tapping screws and a plate: titanium. Look away if the photos below will make you queazy. 

The narcotic pain medication is powerful and horrible. It is an effective painkiller, but it makes me incredibly paranoid, anxious, and irritable, which I just have to keep admitting, and remembering that I have two broken legs. 6 days after the wreck and I have stopped taking it, in favor of a few Advil for days when I am just laying still. I know about the pain of broken bones and the soreness and muscle bruising. If I need the strong stuff for days when I have to move okay, and when the script runs out I will thank GAWD.  I am terrified of this drug. The addiction of hydrocodone is a hell that I know all too well from childhood, and I will be very glad when the meds run out, even if I have to lay in pain. I don't think there is a family in this country that hasn't been touched by opioid addiction, and this experience with the drug is heart-breakingly close to bad memories from the last break and from growing up.

 There was enough bone loss that there is a question if there is enough bone to bone contact for healing to occur. If not it will require a bone graft in about 6 weeks. If I do heal on my own it will be 6 months before I can walk. I worked four jobs: a handy ma'am, with the local stage hand union, running my business, Pedal Promotion, and as a model. I will be able to continue 2 of the 4. It would be really fantastic if more clients hire my business because not only would it keep some income coming in for me personally, but also pay the people who work for me $15 an hour. I am so deeply thankful that I built my house, so that even when horrible things like this happen I know I can reply on the stability of my housing. I have recovered from one major injury there, and in that case I didn't have the use of my upper body strength, and my home wasn't nearly so complete. Also, having stabilized the cost of my living expenses means that I can buy higher quality food to rebuild my body with.

Here's the hard ware from when I fell off Contentment Falls in 2015, all shiny and ready for some new purpose.

Here's a pretty cool video about how the body repairs shattered bones:

Discovery Channel: Body Story: Episode 2: Breaking Down

Here's an animation of the tibia nailing surgery in case..... 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQTHIPdGRig

& my GF made me some adorable little x-mas themed toe warmers to go on top pf my bandages!

New Solar Panels!!!!

We just got a stack of five 340 watt solar panels today!

Re-roofed + cedar sun deck

So, I am going to run out of projects pretty soon. People I haven't seen in a while have been asking me lately, "Did you ever finish your house?' or "Are you living in your house?".
Yes.. and Yes... although with home ownership it will never be completely finished. There is always something to do, but at this point I just keep making it more deluxe. Many people, when I answer their questions, admit that they never thought I could build it in the first place. Hum.

 Anyways,

I had installed some through bolts in the low side of the roof when I worked the solar panel rail supports into the roof trusses, intending to use them to mount an extra climbing rock hand hold and a cedar sun deck up there. It's hard to find a private and safe place to work on an all over tan! Plus, it's peaceful to be up on the roof and now the square footage is increased a tiny bit more. It has been a deluxe dream since the beginning.

When I bought the standing seam roofing for the steep pitched side they didn't have enough to do the low side, and I bought galvanized corrugated instead, but it has caused some corrosion where it was cut. I wasn't able to get right to the projects the through bolts were for because of injuries, so a little bit of water has been dribbling down them onto the ceiling panels, and caused some mold, and separation of the panels from the frame.

 Can you kinda see the orange colored spolching of the mold?

 The panel around the stove pipe with the mold had to be completely replaced, not hard to do. I just popped the chair rail off and pulled the panel down, cut a new one to fit, caulked it and painted.

Fixing the roof took about 12 hours. I forgot to take pictures, but while the metal was up I added a water proof sheet of plastic, kind of like a pond liner meets a fiber house wrap, and then installed the aluminum standing seam roofing over the top. No fasteners showing! (except on the overhang, they just lead to the gutters) No roof penetrations exposed to the weather. No leaks!

I decided to build up the wall along where it meets with the roof with some strips of pressure treated wood, screwed, flashed, caulked and painted. 

The cedar was left over from an awning I built at work on a house reno project. Waste not want not! Dados, and wood screws. No finish, just sanded.

 70" x 24"

and... the climbing rock roof hand hold, which will be really helpful!

Kitchen Sink Drain and Home-made Sand Filter.

Plumbing is happening. The two blue lines on the right are the vent and the supply lines, the middle line in the drain.

And here shows the propane hose, should that ever be required. Finishing out the paneling under the sink has been on the to-do list for a while, and recently I bought another piece of paneling to fix some water damage to the ceiling, and there was enough left over to wall up this area too. The re-roofing is finished!!!! Standing seam aluminum instead of the over lapping galvanized metal roofing I used at first, because I didn't have enough of the standing seam. The cut edges rusted and dripped corrosion into the joint of the exterior wall and the roof flashing. Bolts I had attached to the trusses and that penetrated the roof from below, to mount a cedar deck and another rock climbing hand hold.....[ work I did before the injuries of 2015 and that remained unfinished], leaked around the temporary seals I put up there, and rotted the paneling of the ceiling. So, now all that is fixed and this project in the kitchen is done too!

 This is the food grade lidded bucket I used to make the under the sink sand filter, using bulk head unions. On occasion I add alum to the water, and close the spigot on the bottom so the water in the bucket has a chance to suspend the particles and then it comes out less turbulent when I open the spigot and drain the bucket. The owner of a local bakery: Independent Baking Co. gave me the bucket. Thank you!

On wheels for easy moving when it's heavy with wet sand and needs to be cleaned.

Inside: a screen to keep the outlet from getting clogged.

Top inlet port.

Here is the drain air admittance only vent stack assembled.

In position.

Here is the drain connection, with a easy hose disconnect, and a Y filter for one last cleaning pass through, and to make sure no sand gets in the tank below the floor.

This is probably the best job I have ever done threading brass into plastic straight and to full depth.

Hard to see under here but the real motivation for finishing all this was to install these collapsible bike baskets to store the meat grinder and pasta maker in.

 All hooked up to the double sink drain.

 Kind of patriotic, completely in-intentional. Oh, Canada!

 Fixed up an old egg crate with some wheels to store what-not in under the sink that is also easy to move. My work as a stage had has taught me how convenient and easy life can be with stuff is on wheels and you can roll it around. House on wheels full of stuff on wheels. The toilet is on wheels, the storage crate/seat, now the sand filter and this crate. Next the chest freezer.

 Here is the "basement" plumbing access hatch.

 As seen open to check/clean the second Y filter before the pump, the carbon and biological filter...

 And there's lots of room to arrange things underneath, and a second egg basket held up by wood cleats under the counter top, which usually holds dishes that are waiting to be washed. Keeping the dishes in a dry holding state like this helps keep the whole situation more manageable; having things pre-scrapped into the compost bucket and given and wipe to get it all residue free and dry helps keep the washing water less turbulent and easier to filter and recycle.

Extra Kitchen Storage: Re-used copper pipe scraps

Made a shelf to live inside the window frame of the port side kitchen window, over the stove, with compartments for the cherry plates and bowls, and copper pieces on the bottom. The frame is made from scrap copper pipe pieces left over from plumbing jobs.

One more

Bicycle Erotica

Not that this has anything to do with solar powered tiny house life,  but.....when you're life style is so low-key it leaves a person free to work on art projects!

I took a batch of low quality test shots with my phone to use in making the next "Babes on Bikes" zine. Any editing help would be appreciated 'cause there are too many too fit in it now. Let me know which ones are the best in each set. I want to collaborate with other ladies & photographers who are interested.

https://egretion.blogspot.com/2017/07/bicycle-erotica.html

Breaking it Down.

Finally!!! A major news organization Breaking It Down!!!! This sorties ran as the cover of the New York Magazine on July 9th.

Make yourself a cup of tea, take a deep breath, turn on your reading for comprehension meat computer program, don't try to read it on your phone. It's long. It breaks distills  and breaks down the impending and current effects of climate change into the 9 major categories of impact : the mass extinction underway, the extreme heat that will cook us alive, the collapse of our ability to rely on our food sources and our agriculture, plagues and the spread of diseases, the toxic chemical composition of the air, war and conflict provoked by rising temperatures and shrinking resources, permanent economic collapse, sulfide poisoning of the oceans, and finally the veil of denial and apathy that we are trapped in, and that will ultimately doom all current and future generations if we don't wake the fuck up right fucking now,

And if you really want to dig into the interviews and research informing the piece it's all there.

Here's the opening. Click on the title to go to the article.
The Unihabitable Earth, by David Wallace Wells. 

Peering beyond scientific reticence.

It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.

Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.

Even when we train our eyes on climate change, we are unable to comprehend its scope. This past winter, a string of days 60 and 70 degrees warmer than normal baked the North Pole, melting the permafrost that encased Norway’s Svalbard seed vault — a global food bank nicknamed “Doomsday,” designed to ensure that our agriculture survives any catastrophe, and which appeared to have been flooded by climate change less than ten years after being built.

YES! Worms at Work!

The population is growing! Soon there will be enough worms to handle the volume, but in the meantime....just soes you knows: YES! worms can turn food waste and human waste into "Black Gold!" So, if you get squeemish feelings every time you drop a big fat juicy turd into a couple gallons of  perfectly good drinking water, there IS a better way that not only saves the water but also can feed your garden too! And not only that, but using a composting toilet come sin handy for rhetorical purposes. If you end up, like me, having a nagging, irrepressible urge to talk to others about how to reduce their own carbon foot print, and they try to make excuses, or call you a hypocrite for pointing things out you can say, "I'm not pretending my own shit doesn't stink. I know it does because I take responsibility for it!"

Speaking of a squeemish feeling: I remember when I first started pooing in a sawdust filled bucket...boy did I feel weird! Ever since I was a little kid I felt embarrassed by the plop sound that poo makes when it hit the water, and in a public bathroom I would hold it until I was alone so no one would hear me poop.  Saw dust makes no plopping sound, so thinking about that was the first trick I pulled to re-adjust my mind to a new paradigm, but still...I felt so weird when I first got started with this. I would kind of gag and get a creepy crawly feeling when I started handling the composting operation. How incredibly suggestible and habit forming our minds are! Anyways, needless to say, I got over it.

I have posted this little tidbit before, but it's worth saying again: being a vegetarian/vegan makes human poo WAY less stinky than meat-eater poo. I am used to it now. It's a mild and sweet smell, and I use incense also, which I have noticed is common in bathroom with flush toilets too.

People's Climate March, Washington DC, 2017

 Photos from the People's Climate March in DC this weekend. 

 Took the bus up with not very many people from Athens (24), but more people that I see riding bike instead of driving any day of the week.

 I made this banner out of part of my plastic drop cloth and me tent poles. Rode my bike of course!!!! Wore my mask so that I didn't have to put sunscreen on my face It was in the mid 90's (33 degrees C) and sweat makes sun screen run into my eyes!

It says:

HOPE     RIDE BIKE     GO VEGAN     GO SOLAR    COMPOST     ZERO WASTE   SPEAK OUT   

 This is what we did for our anniversary!

 ​I met this awesome gal named Hannah who biked he 60 miles from Philly to DC. I loved her sign "Pedal Power! Basic Cycology!"

The other sign I saw that I really liked said "Whose Under Your Carbon Footprint?"

 ​We stayed near these Peruvian Indigenous Power Dancers. They were burning cups filled with Palo Santo. The smell was so thick in the air. It felt great.

Here's a few of about 250,000 people who passed by the Trump Hotel and made a lot of angry noise. Some people sat down and blocked the entrance.

The news team of Democracy Now! was on the streets covering the march all day. I am a monthly donor. You can watch the daily show @ www.democracynow.org . Amy Goodman, the host is coming to speak in Atlanta on Thursday and Joel & I are gonna go.