This magazine is 25 years old yet completely full of Solar inovations & energy creating/saving tips. I’m not just talking about photovaltic panels either. This covers solar heat exchangers, solar hot water heaters, and the United States Vs. Japans program for photovaltics just to get started. There is even an ad in there for Ford stating they hit a new personal best for MPG in a pickup truck. What happened to this trend? I know I shouldn’t consider it astonishing but this is just one random magazine from 1983. All the technology was already there and the need to get away from fossil fuel is more then obvious. Just glancing through it makes me wonder if we are making steps forward as an intelligent civilization or if we are just destroying the spinning rock we live on.

Roadle’s New Shelter May/June issue 1983 (Right Click, Save As) It’s 12 megs.

Here is Zippy’s Glock 23C with an empty 29 round mag in it.

Since I have been shooting Zippy’s glock I’ve really grown fond of how it functions, how it field strips & cleans, the size and how fits/feels in my hand. I’ve had a few friends come over with their guns to shoot on our makeshift shooting range in my yard and I just haven’t been impressed with them. A lot of people seem to dislike discharging ammunition from a piece plastic. I find it more comfortable than holding a piece of metal. Although it’s half plastic, the Glock still feels very sturdy and comfortable. With all that in mind I decided to purchase the Glock 19. It’s darn near exactly the same gun as Zippy’s (Minus being ported) but the 9mm ammo is much cheaper, especially in bulk. The 19 is a little lighter than the 23C and the standard mag holds two more bullets (15 rounds vs 13).

Taken right before I put the first round through it.

Still before the first shot. The targets are actually a bunch of turkey targets a few inches square stapled right next to each other.

Zippys on the right (G23C), mine on the left (G19).

G19 on the right G23C on the left.

Now it seems everyone that doesn’t own some guns, shoot for fun or have some overwhelming paranoia of pending doom always asks me, “Why do you need a gun?” or “Why do you need a hand gun?”. I have yet to “need” any guns. I do however like and want them. All the guns we have can be used for hunting or self protection. I personally & very simply like guns because I find shooting them to be an extremely enjoyable hobby. I’m not a naturally good shot and I really like watching, reflecting on & feeling the progress I make as I get better at shooting. I spend 99% of my time shooting still targets and I love it. I really can’t think of too many friends of mine who don’t enjoy shooting with me. Zippy and I intend on going to a weapons training course on July 19th so we can learn everything the state of Missouri wants us to know about carrying & using a weapon. After which we will promptly apply for our Missouri (and/or Utah) conceal & carry permit. Since we have guns to use, enjoy & protect our self with then why would we not want to be ‘officially’ trained on their proper use? Whether we actually carry a concealed weapon or not has no bearing on the fact that we legally do not have the choice to do so if we don’t have the permit.

I will follow up with some pictures of both the Glocks. I haven’t even taken a picture of just the gun itself yet but everyone knows what a glock looks like. Work has kept both Zippy and I pretty busy so we haven’t had much time for extracurricular activities. Work during the day, code at night & work on the homestead on the weekends.

What’s next? I’m interested in adding a nice compound bow to our collection.

[edit] I’ve put ~400 rounds through it now. I don’t know if it’s just in my head or not but it already feels like it’s shooting better although I still seem to pull down and to the side a little at the point the trigger clicks to release the pin. I have to work on pulling the trigger with the tip of my finger while maintaining a straight shot.

We had a freaking great time down there. We both were feeling really good the whole time we were down there. We spent most of our outdoors time at one of two beaches. I don’t remember the first (where most of the pictures stem from) but the second beach was Cocoa Beach. Since Steve has been a long time resident of Florida he drove all of us in our rental car everywhere we wanted to go. I think he even figured out how to get the darn car to turn on every time you pressed the power button. I never did quite understand it although having a vehicle that was really nice on fuel (42+mpg) was quite convenient.

I’ve never had the opportunity to try surfing and have always wanted to so we had Steve drive us to the beach a couple times. Sadly the waves weren’t quite what we needed but regardless of that the beach was a heck of a nice place to hang out.

Our shadows.

Steve & Zippy…

Crystal, Steve & I

And of course.. Zippy & I.

Steve & Crystal are two very awesome individuals. We enjoyed every minute of our vacation at their place and definitely want them to visit us when they can. If all goes well they will hopefully get a chance to visit us within a year or two and quite possibly join Zippy & I on a trip to Europe in November 2009. I’m really excited about it.

We have a ton of landscaping, trail blazing, planting & tending to do over a good amount of space. We figured an electric golf cart would be the perfect tool for moving people, tools, and supplies around the property. The two straps on the back of the golf cart normally used for holding two golf club bags work great for carting around all our garden & landscaping tools.

We have been working on a few nice walking / cart trails that go pretty much everywhere. We even borrowed the neighbors bobcat loader to get a lot of the hard earth moving done. Cutting nice wide walking trails through steep hills of rock and clay is a a bit difficult to say the least. But the feeling of accomplishment and knowing we made what we have makes it well worth it. Now we have nice trails leading around the pond, horse pasture, and a good start on a trail going back through the hills down to the water. It’s definitely time consuming and seems like we’ve barely started but it will be well worth it when we are done.

How we are building trials:

1. Build Culverts - Since we have lots of hills and tend to get crazy amounts of rain when it falls I have a relatively labor intensive method of creating inexpensive culverts so water doesn’t destroy the paths
   1. Dig out & flatten the existing ravine a little bit
   2. Bolt two (or three) used/waste car tires together and place them on one hill/edge of the ravine & do the same on the other side
   3. Place one or two pieces of field tile, PVC drainage pipe, or metal culvert at the lowest point in the ravine. There will be a set of tires bolted together on both sides of the field tile.
   4. Pack the tires with earth to create a rammed earth brick just as they use in Earthship home construction. [video] This is the hardest part because the tires have to be rammed completely full of dirt so they retain their shape. This protects the field tile from being crushed if you drive a vehicle over it and also acts as a dam since the tires are nearly void of any weakness to erosion.
   5. Cover the tires and culvert with as much dirt as necessary to build the makeshift bridge as level as possible to the ground surrounding it using dirt cut from the side walls of the ravine if nothing else. We generally take dirt from another hill.
2. Make the Trail - Level off the ground through the whole trail as much as possible with the loader/Bobcat. It can take a while to break up and/or move all the big rocks we’ve run into but this is where the trails really start to come together. All the big hills, bumps, and ravines have been leveled off. In some spots, such as the edge of a hill that goes down to the lake, we can’t (or don’t want to) drive the bobcat in fear of getting it stuck, rolling it, or otherwise damaging it so I have a pickaxe, shovels, hoes, rakes & a bunch of other tools for manually tearing into the side of a hill and leveling off a flat surface for a trail.
3. Smooth it out - The bobcat does a great job of tearing through hills, flattening bumps and building culverts but doesn’t quite leave a perfectly smooth finish on the hard clay ground we have here. For this step I use a hoe & a rake to rough up the ground a little bit and smooth everything out as best I can.
4. Grass! - Zippy and I want the trails to blend back in with the rest of the yard and landscape so we are re-seeding it with grass. This should also help prevent erosion when our torrential rain comes. To get started I Just bought a 50lb bag of tall fescue, spread it around with a walk behind spreader & covered it with loose hay. Since our ground is mostly clay I try and loosen it up a little if I can with a rake before throwing the seed on it. In less than a couple months we should see some good results.

I will try & remember to get some pictures & video of the trail building progress thus far this weekend. We have a lot of work left to do as we want trails down the ridge of the hills in our back yard, between the hills down to the boat dock & a connecting path that goes around the far side of the horse pasture along their fence.

For the past few years he was fighting cancer that had spread throughout his entire body.

I never really got the chance to get to know my Grandpa Moran since we always lived so far a part but he’ll be with me forever. Since quite a bit of family spent the weekend at Craigs house in Cherry Valley, Illinois I learned a lot about Grandpa listening to the stories everyone had to share. I’m glad I got to be there as everyone talked about his attitude and personality. I also heard a lot about what he thought of me. I was his first grandson and the idea appalled him untill the day I was born. For almost the first whole year of my life I was the world to him. A year after I was born my mom moved to Minnesota with my dad. Sadly, I only had the oportunity to visit him a few times after that. Lots of stories and memories were created in that first year.

I learned a lot and absorbed good values last weekend that will stay with me forever.

I forgot about that stimulus package. Too bad I broke a pully on the lawn eater. I would really like to try and get the lawn mowed some time in between all this work we’ve been doing. Zippy has been getting settled into the office here and we’ve both been putting in a lot of hours now that we both contract labor from multiple companies. Sometimes it feels a bit overwhelming to work from sun up to sun down on this and that project but it really makes me put away the tech on the weekends and enjoy the fact we live out in the country. Right now there doesn’t seem to be anything more enjoyable then going home, sitting in a zero gravity patio chair near the pond, listening to the frogs and watching the horses, turtles, birds, cats, and dogs.

Needless to say: I haven’t posted much becuase I’ve been busy and it’s spring/summer so I get outside every chance I get.

While you wait a month for my next post you might join the secular sabbath movement or try and build an earthship.

We’ve started tilling up the ground where we want to have gardens. Zippy has been learning a lot about gardening all the while starting a bunch of plants in the kitchen. Here are a few bales lined up around a soon to be garden bed. Zippy is learning about hay bale gardening, composting and all sorts of crazyness.

I’ve spent a bit of time working on the pond. I want to try and keep the algea down this year if possible. I’ve already installed one 2,000 gallon an hour pump in the pond which is currently just blasting water out of a hose back into the pond. My intention is to setup two of them. One pump is going to be a fountain airiating the pond and the other will airiate a little by being the source of water for the small waterfall (you can kind of see the rocks I’m starting to stack up on the far side of the pond) but more importantly it will be pushing water to spickets placed on both sides of the pond so Zippy can water the gardens with pond water. I haven’t ordered the second pump yet.

This is how I initially setup the first pump. It’s on a thick wood skid pallet (untreated so I’m sure this will change by next year, we’ll see). My intention was to have one pump that acted as a fountain and source of water for hoses but although it pushes 2,000 GPH it does not create much pressure so this idea failed. I will be ordering another pump to airiate the water. This one is now reconfigured to have two hose attachments which currently just run hoses to the edge of the pond where I will affix a more permanent hose connection. It doesn’t provide much pressure but it pushes out more than enough water to water gardens. The next step after this (maybe next year after we figure out where all our gardens are) is to build an in-ground automatic or timed garden watering system.

Edit: This photo is also missing the cage around the pump so fish don’t get sucked in.

Bring on the Koi! A bit of this pond work is being done so we can keep our Koi alive. Zippy and I have done a bit of reading and found that Koi can be very healthy in large natural mud ponds like ours. They like the high temperature the pond will reach in the summer and should get along fine with the frogs so now we have 2 Koi and 4 Sarassas fish in our pond. Sarassas are bright red/orange and white like Koi but they are a little smaller and not quite as expensive. If all goes well we will get more Koi next year.

That’s all I’ve got for now. I hope to purchase a concrete mixer before long that will really help with a lot of these summer projects. I may slide into posting videos instead of text and images this summer. I just have to remember to bring the video camera with me more often. Cheers!

Working on fixing it. ^_^

All of this means we can finally stop hibernating indoors as if we are affraid of the sun. About two months ago I brought our chain saw in to Clinton Mower & Saw Shop to get sharpened & rebuilt. Unfortunately I can’t suggest anyone drop their equipment off there becuase every week I called they kept giving me the run around saying “It’s number rand(2,10) in line and will be worked on shortly”. Two months after I dropped it off I decided to just go pick it up and bring it elsewhere. I intend on dragging out the push lawn mower, the Lawn Eater & trailer, tiller, and the weed wacker this weekend to get them ready for a fresh year. The demonic honey locust trees gaurantee all our utility vehicle tires will be flat and the snap from summer to winter had me scrambling to hide the machines leaving fuel and oil in them which tends to get a bit crusty over winter.

The Lawn Eater back when I was testing the “foam tire” idea.

Once the machines are ready to go Zippy and I have a ton of work to do. To get the summer started we will be tilling up a lot of the clay ground we live on for flower and garden beds which also ties in with removing a lot of annoying Honey Locust trees. Then we have to extend our driveway around the pond which entails interesting construction plans and level off a good chunk of land where we ultimately hope to build a barn this summer. We bought a lot of wild flower seeds on sale last year to spread around the pond and along the driveway in hopes of bringing a lot of fresh new color to the land this year. Since we live on an old strip mine we have an abundance of rocks to use to complete the Stone Pump House Project. After that is complete all the rest of the rocks we find are going to line the outside edge of the pond.

If all goes well our property should look much nicer by the end of this summer. We are even considering buying a wood chipper to make use of all the extra brush we aquire from chopping down the trees rather than burning it all. I could see an overwhelming amount of wood chips coming in quite handy. I’ll keep posting as the projects keep cropping up and getting knocked out.

Just for nostalgia sake. Here are some old pictures.

This is before we even planned on living at the property. Now our driveway comes in the chute between the trees and the photo was taken from where the mobile is now.

Zippy walking near the pond years before our plans to inhabit the place. The photographer (me) is standing where the mobile is now.

And a more recent picture taken during the cleanup project to get the property ready to have the septic, cistern & electricity installed. This picture is taken virtually the completely oposite of the first photo. It was taken standing in the driveway. The house is now situated where the skid loader, pickup and camper is in this photo.