As the season passes and the meadow area of the lawn grows it is interesting and beautiful to see all the different kinds of plants growing in it.  By far the most apparent plant right now is goldenrod, but there are others too, thistles, vetch, daisies, and some I don’t know.

Some people mow their entire lawns even with more land than us, I see them on Saturday afternoons riding their mowers on lawns it must take the whole day and more money in gas than I’d care to spend.  They don’t get to enjoy the different plants and scenery afforded by a wild lawn.

We have some tame areas too of course, and a veggie garden that is producing!  It feels good to be working with our land finally, and not just being tied down to “maintaining” it.

Take a look at your own yard, are you using it for your own purposes?  Or are you maintaining it to a standard you are expected to by your neighbours and society?  We think we have struck a good balance between mowed lawn for playing on and wild meadow for habitat for wildlife, bees, etc… and garden space to provide us with food.  And we are using as little gas as we can to do it!

The Dr. Steel Recital Hall concert is being held as a fundraiser for the completion of Collierʼs latest project; a live recording of improvised solo piano+computer music recorded on May 18th at The Living Arts Center in Mississauga, Ontario. Tickets for either concert are available at the door for a cost of $10, and people can reserve tickets for July 3rd by emailing aaroncolliermusic@yahoo.ca or by calling 566 3771. Collier’s first full-length electronic music recording “Love” will be available and people will be able to pre-order copies of his new recording mentioned above at the July 3rd show.

This video is so powerful and shows how we should all know more about math and sciences.

On Thursday, July 1st, The Al!bi Lounge is hosting Aaron Collier’s “Synth/Beats/Remixes” show as a Canada Day dance celebration. Just two days later on Saturday,July 3rd, Collier is presenting his “Solo Improvised Piano+Computer” soft-seater concert at the Dr. Steel Recital Hall at UPEI.

Part 3, page 104.

Our GHG emissions (calculated through to 2008) are about 1% below 1990 levels.

Decreases seem to be significant  in residential energy use and heavy duty gasoline vehicles while increases are significant in light duty gasoline trucks and off-road gasoline vehicles as well as halocarbon production and use.

Not great but we are moving in the right direction at least.  The Kyoto target for Canada is 6% below 1990 levels for 2012.

It was an amazing experiential learning course and everything we learned has stayed with me and I think it will stay with me and will be built on by my own experiences as I work in our family woodlots and observe nature throughout the seasons.  We learned about plant identification techniques, assessing forest health, ecological diversity, pruning and harvesting techniques and so much more.  We also got to take a piece of the woods at MacPhail’s and design a restoration plan and then actually implement it.

Ecology, plant biology and forestry had never really entered my thoughts on what I might want to be doing but after this course I intend to take a few more biology courses to see if that’s something I might want to pursue.

In house news we tilled up a garden, planted some more trees and shrubs (native plant like service berry, bayberry, red osier dogwoods, high-bush cranberry and common elders from MacPhail’s nursery) and planted some mint and rhubarb donated from my Mom-in-law’s garden.  I also found a patch of ostrich fern (fiddle heads) downstream from Carragher’s pond and planted an ostrich fern in the woods next to our house.  We have started some herbs and tomatoes (the tomoatoes are 2 feet or more already!) and have plans for a much bigger garden this year.

We built a bedroom for our daughter, also creating an office nook we hope to finish soon.  The bedroom is small but expandable, with a whole wall built from storage shelving and very cute.  It also has an 8 foot ceiling creating storage space above it as it’s on the second floor where our ceilings are vaulted and 12′ tall at the center.  There are more plans for construction projects this summer and much more landscaping work to do as well as a wood shed to build.

We’ve also added another addition to our household, a 4 month old Siamese mix kitten named Stella.  She’s settled in nicely and is getting used to the attentions of an almost two year old who is VERY excited to have a kitty in the house!

It’s shaping up to be another very very busy summer, maybe I’ll be able to take a break this year though to relax but somehow I doubt it!

Our friends from NY Stephanie and Daniel visited us last summer at the house and Stephanie, a filmmaker, made a short film about it.  I love the fast forward action on Izmo, these days she’s looks like that in real time!

Laine has been after me for years, basically since we met, to try yoga with her.  This fall I finally relented and did a set of Conditioning and Stress Release yoga on her old Yoga Zone VHS tape.  After two sessions it made such a difference in my back and shoulders and overall well being that I was converted.

Unfotunately, the VHS version meant if I wanted to do a set early in the morning I’d have to use the noisy VCR, and since Laine had lost the other tape in the series she owned I thought it’d make a good gift to get it on DVD.

The man behind the Yoga Zone series is Alan Finger, talks about Hatha Yoga here on youtube, and I think it’s his clinical and scientific approach to Yoga that comes through in his videos that really converted me from thinking it was fluffy mystical bull!  There are meditations and what not, but as he points out in the youtube vids, they are done for a specific purpose.

Anyone who wants to improve there posture, flexibility, overall health and wellbeing should at least give Yoga I try and the Yoga Zone series is a good place to start!  Then if you want to try a manlier version why not try mountain biker/trials rider Ryan Leech’s brand of yoga?

The games lined up so far include:
Oudoor:

Biathlon: snow shoe to stations to shoot icicles with an air pistol for a point each. 4 possible points.

Ice putting: Four putts from the edge of our ice “green” for a point for each “hole in one” 4 posssible points.

Snow shoes: get a point for knocking over a shoe with a snowball. 4 possibl points.

Bomber run: target downhill enemies with snowsled, four shots at targets with a point a “hit” 4 possible points.

Indoor:

Crokinole: Four attempts at the “button” for a point a piece. 4 possible points.

Wii Party Games: details to follow. 4 possible points.

Trivial Trivia: randomly assigned 4 trivia questions about Canadian winter, 1 point for each correct answer. 4 possible points.

Hit the sauce: Bring a wing sauce and get 4 points, if a couple brings one sauce they each get 2 points, or 4 each if they bring two. 4 possible points.

This morning at 6:00am I got up, put on some thermals, sweater and pants, jacket, hat, boots and gloves and strapped on some snowshoes and set out for a long walk in the fields around the Shire.  I was accompanied by Rosie and the sweet sweet voice of my new musical obsession Ariana Gillis in my headphones.  40 minutes and 2.5 kilometers later I arrived back home my heart rate up, jacket open and feeling great.

The really nice thing about snow shoeing is that your route is pretty much whatever you want it to be. This boundless type of exercising appeals to me even more than my morning runs on the Mill Road did and is definitely something I want to continue year round, snow shoes and maybe x-country skis in the winter and trail/x-country running possibly paddling in the summer.

When I was a kid I remember one of the joys of being in the woods was getting off the farm/logging trails and just scrambling cross country in a straight(ish) line finding ways through around and over obstacles.  I’m sure it also is a more natural way to exercise with a full body component that jogging down a road could never match.  It speaks to me like rock climbing (also on my to do list) and tree climbing (which I miss!) do.  So here’s to a more natural year of activity and enjoying the woods and hills and fields all around me!

Now I was good at math in high school and the material I have been studying is coming back to me, my problem is a lot of the formulas and rules that you should memorize (sin/cos/tan formulas etc..) I had completely forgotten. I need 60% or higher to stay in the class, if I fail this afternoon I have another shot next week, but that is it.

If I DO pass and get to stay in, I am going to have to keep studying pre-calculus math just to get my basic math up to snuff for tests and assignments.

What have I got myself into?

The more I rediscover old ways of doing things and preparing our own foods the more I think I could really enjoy being a stay at home Dad!  I am going to branch into other types of bread this weekend I think, maybe even try making a beer bread!

There are some things you should know and experience first though.  This, in all likely-hood, is going to be one of the most challenging things you will ever take on.  Unless you are an experienced home builder, and maybe even if you are, building a straw bale home on your own is a daunting task from your POV and you are probably underestimating almost every aspect of it right now.  You are underestimating the time, cost, effort and patience it will require.  There are some things you need to realize before you start and some things you will not be able to realize till you do it for yourself.

If at all possible try and volunteer or take a course on straw bale building, and if you can participate in EVERY stage of building!  Even if you think you don’t need to experience the finish carpentry parts of building a straw bale home because the bales are all done at that point, you should!  Having uneven, lumpy and delicate walls makes every other step afterwards more difficult.

Doing a one day or even weekend workshop is not going to give you a feel for what the sustained level of work and care is required to construct a bale building of any size.  Workshops and seminars are usually scheduled on dry weekends complete with large groups of volunteers and people who have done this many times organizing things and solving problems for you.  You on the other hand cannot count on sustained levels of volunteer labour to help you finish your house, if you are lucky and well liked you will probably be able to convince friends and family to attend 2-3 work parties over the duration of the project, the rest you will be doing on your own.

You will spend an unimaginatively large amount of time tarping and untarping your house as you deal with weather unless you live in a desert.  You will become attuned to the weather in a way only our pioneer/farmer forefathers were, you will constantly assess how much time you think you will have before bad weather rolls in on a given day and the time it takes to tarp you work for the day.  You will buy more tarps than you think is possible, start looking for sales on them NOW!

Unless you are an expert on natural plasters, you’ll need to at least use lime in your stucco/plaster mixes if not portland cement.  Earthen plasters may be romantic and extremely eco-friendly but a leaky, rotten bale wall isn’t exactly a sustainable building practise!  If you can, hire experts for this step, it’s one of the most critical components of your house and by far the most time and labour consuming one.   If you do your own stucco, buy a mixer and start collecting buckets of every size and shape you can.

Speaking of tools, here is a list you should seriously owning:

• scaffolding – Enough to completely cover one side of the house minimum!  You can always sell it afterwards and if you are doing your own stucco the time frame you will be renting scaffolding for makes buying a much more affordable option.
• compressor -From spraying slip on bales, nailing trim and blowing straw dust out of your other tools, you will use this every day!
• chain saw – Cutting bales without one isn’t really feasible.
• concrete mixer – as romantic as mixing stucco in a pit with your feet sounds, mixing literally tons of stucco is a lot more realistic mechanically!
• common home-builder tools –  you should have the basic tools used on any construction site: corded and cordless drills, circular saw, recipricating saw, jigsaw, table-saw, chop saw, hammers, levels, squares, chalkines, snips, pliers, screwdrivers, chisels, prybars, saw horses, etc, etc, etc

I naively estimated I would finish my house in 6 months working evenings, weekends and with 4 weeks vacation.  I am not a builder but have construction experience, had help from a long time carpenter and lots of friends and family.  Two years later we limped across the finish line (more on that below).  Easily the biggest area of time and labour was spent on stucco, tarping and untarping walls, erecting and moving scaffolding.  If you choose to subcontract any part of the building this is the part I would strongly suggest you leave to the experts.  It is the most important part of keeping moisture out of your house, which of any building technique is the most susceptible to water damage!  If you live in an area where there are companies with experience stuccoing straw bale I would definitely recommend hiring them!

This is a small list of the major hurdles and challenges of building your own straw bale home, the main thing you should remember is to remain flexible and adaptable, learn how to problem solve and think creatively.  Take things one step at a time and remember that the hard work is part of the journey but completing the house isn’t the destination, just another road marker.  If you spend the whole time thinking of the end as a finish line you’ll burn out.  About half way through I had to stop dreaming of the day we’d be done and focus on the moments we were creating being builders.  We weren’t enjoying the process anymore and the whole thing felt like a massive burden.

When I was able to accept that this was just a phase of my life that would last some unknown length of time and only carry the burden of the task I set out to finish that day/hour/moment was I able to set down the burden of the project as a whole and enjoy life again.  It was still a struggle not to slip into the old way of thinking but I got a lot more done and felt a lo better if I could set that burden aside.

When you are done (for the moment, there are always future projects for a home owner!) take the time to enjoy your home and sit back and take it in now and then!

The heavy lifting and continuous work of building our house and stuccoing it might have built up some muscle on my body and burnt some calories but it’s nowhere near the same sort of feeling of pushing yourself aerobically. In fact the work on the house has if anything made me feel worse and worse, as strains and injuries pile up!

I am running early mornings on the Mill Road next to our home and enjoying the quiet natural beauty of the area again. The road follows a stream on it’s east side and meanders along in a natural soothing path. The brisk frosty air this morning with clear skies and a moon and sunrise to light the way was very peaceful and quiet. This time of year there are few birds around and the only sounds were the quiet music in my headphones, the water flowing in the stream beside me and a faint rustle of gentle breezes in the evergreens and beech leaves stubbornly holding fast to their branches.

I have the first two days down on the C25K program and 28 more to go, hoping to be back to 5K runs by January!

The BIS program because it is aimed at mature students who are employed full time and are looking into a degree for professional advancement and the Engineering diploma as my background fits into that path.

The more I looked into the BIS program the more it seemed like it was not a good fit for me and I started looking into full degree programs instead. While looking into the Engineering path I noted you could get a degree in Math or Physics while getting a diploma in Engineering. But the engineering diploma, while sounding good, is useless without an intention to finish it elsewhere; which I didn’t have.

I have been watching a lot of Sci-fi lately (namely Star Gate SG-1, Atlantis and now Universe) and the heavy emphasis on science, and physics in particular, along with some coincidental reading on Carl Sagan I had been doing and reading sci-fi by Ray Bradbury, Arthur C Clark and Larry Niven kept pushing me to review the course descriptions in the physics department. They all seem really interesting to me!

Physics has always come naturally to me, and reading articles and books by physicists has always engaged me and my sense of wonder and curiosity. Also, my work in energy efficiency is related not only to engineering but to physics as well, maybe even more to physics than to engineering. So last Friday when I sent in my application to UPEI I marked down Bachelor of Science, with physics as my major of choice. Who knows where this new path will lead me? grad school? research? back to where I started? It should be a challenging and very interesting path to travel though!

Enjoy the photos!

I am a little worried that I will be able to handle the workload, however I think things on the house and at home should be calming down somewhat soon.  We have moved into our house, are finished of three outside walls and 99.5% of the interior.  Two weeks of rain have given us a good test for the wall system and it seems to be performing admirably.
*SIGH*
Relief.

I will hopefully be putting up some new photos of the house moved in and dressed up, as well as some photos of the completed outside walls.  I wish Aliant would hurry up with the high speed expansion so we could get internet at home, but alas it is not available yet to us.

I would like to build a few raised beds and experiment with square foot gardening or dense planting and natural weed/pest control and integrated composting.  Some methods I am interested in is keyhole gardening, square foot gardening, companion planting, etc…

I want to experiment with cheap DIY seasonal solar hot water heating systems and maybe even DIY wind although the latter will probably have to wait a while.  There are lots of really simple ways to supplement your summer hot water heating with out going to all the trouble of installing a full solar hot water system.

We want to build a workshop/studio building next to the house, something that’s even a little more alternative than the strawbale house.  This would be ultra low cost and ultra low speed building as we don’t want the stress and pressure we put ourselves under buiding the house.

Firewood sheds and garden sheds.  I want to build a nice firewood shed, but I want to do it cheaply from all recycled/freecycled materials if possible.  I think we’ll need a couple more outbuildings in the future too.

Farming and livestock!  We want to soon start using our land to actually supplement our needs and make owning acrege in the country a useful thing instead of just wanting to own land for lands sake.  Chickens, sheep, goats, a couple cows, veggie gardens, etc.. are all possible routes we would like to take.

I try not thinking about additions, but we may have to do one in the next few years as well, athough I’m not happy about it!

The electrical work is 99.99% complete.
The light fixtures are all installed and working.
The stairs are in and the railing is up but still needs balusters installed.
The cedar bathroom vanity has been built (from scratch by me!)
The kitchen cabinets are installed, the cabinet doors are half done and drawers and countertops are starting soon.
The window trim is 90% done.
The interior doors are just under half done.
The baseboards are about 20% done.
The washer and dryer are in and working!

Here are some photos from Canada Day of the lights after they were installed. Link to Picasa album with larger photos.

Fashion and Earth is an online clothing retailer based out of my home town of Emyvale!  I found this through another link actually, thegreenpages.ca.

Maritime Breeze is a local hub for green resources, retailers and blogs in the maritimes.

• go on some dates with my girls (Laine, Izmo and Rosie too!)
• go on a few photoshoots with my new(ish) very underused camera
• harvest fire wood from our family woodlot
• spend some time drawing again
• go mountain biking and camping!
• explore the woodlot in Lewes
• play with my new GPS (thanks Chris!)
• start jogging and trail running again
• cook more meals for my girls
• make some more beer (that hopefully turns out)
• harvest, process and preserve local wild edibles (blueberries, strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, apples, chanterelle mushrooms, lambsquarters, pineapple weed etc…)

I am sure there is more I am forgetting, and I shouldn’t really be focusing on what I want to do in the future but rather how to complete the tasks in front of me, but Spring is a time for hope and imaginings and I can’t help myself!

The impetus to get the stairs done was the impending delivery of the washer and dryer which were going up stairs, we didn’t think they would haul it up our scaffolding for the $47 delivery fee.

The other areas getting closer to being done are the bathroom and window trim.  With the scaffolding being removed we put on a push to get the stairwell window trim done.  We finished the trim, sill, sill edge and then blended the stucco into the new trim. The new lime stucco used to blend the windows was painted with two coats of Quartzguard paint.

The bathroom floor tile and half the wall tile has been laid, grouted and sealed in preperation for the installation of our toilet and bathtub tomorrow by the plumbers.  They will also be roughing in the shower fixtures, installing the  hot water heater and drainwater heat recovery unit.  The only plumbing  left after that will be installing the kitchen and bathroom sinks and dishwasher line.  The tub, toilet and shower installation will allow me to finish the kitchen ceiling below the bathroom which will then lead to the cabinets being installed!

We are on track for a June-ish completion date of the interior and that will leave a few weeks of exterior touch-ups left before we are completely done!

I live the progression of this animation through housing “advancements” in the last few generations.  Take a look at it!

A few days early of the two week mark I opened the partially filled last bottle I capped, which was room temperature, to see if there was any action. There was too much! The beer immediately began to foam up in the bottle and disturb the sediment present at the bottom of all home brew bottles! Crestfallen i thought the batch was ruined again for good this time but my father-in-law suggested I wait and open a full bottle, properly chilled, at the two week mark.

Tonight was the night I the verdict is success! I just drank the last sip of the tasty cream ale from that bottle and may even have another!

Of course some of the sills fit better than others and the slight gaps will have to be trimmed somehow (maybe rope, maybe with drywall compound and paint…) but all in all the sills turned out great!

The tile in the bathroom was started yesterday as well, with keith doing half the bathroom in the morning.  The large 12″ x 24″ tiles look great and we can’t wait to grout and put our tub in place!

Hopefully, the window trim will be done by the time I go back to work on Thursday!

We also have been having stronger and stronger summer windstorms and more exotic weather occurances such as funnel clouds and water-spouts.  I have no hard data to back up my anecdotal observations but I know many people younger and older than I have noticed the change in the weather patterns in recent years as well.

The results I think you will see is a differnt manner of planning and constructing infrastructure, agriculture and building to deal with forces and variables we never had to consider before.  I hope it also drives home the seriousness of climate change (whether it is man made or natural) and that warmer winters for PEI may sound good but there will be serious negative side effects as well.

Now that times are bad, people are divided as to whether government should be increasing spending to stimulate the economy or reduce spending to keep our debt from spiralling out of control.  People wonder whether increased spending is going to mean a heavy burden later to pay for it, or whether reduced spending will mean deeper recession and even depression.

I don’t pretend to know the answers to those questions, but it suggests that we think of governments as a fluid entity, one that’s roles and responsibilities are always in flux.  I think we should be defining what we want the role of government to be and instead of expanding when times are good (tax revenues high) we give people a break in taxes, pay down debts or create a reserve for bad times.   If government had clear mandates to it’s roles, we might even see efficiencies in the system as rules, roles and departments don’t get changed, reorganized and redirected every time a new budget comes in or regime changes.

I think it should take some sort of referendum or other momentous action to redefine the role of government departments or programs.  Announcing a $6 billion child care program may have been a good idea, but is it something we should allow politicians to decide to create and cancel without serious input and buy-in from us all?

In my opinion, the time for government reform has to be now, and a sober look at how government behaves, either as a consumer whose spending adjusts to match it’s income or as a responsible provider of basic services in an accountable manner.  Which sounds better to you?