A harsh day on the surface of the planet

29 March 2015

The wind is from the northwest at 20 to 30 miles per hour, with gusts to 40. The temperature is well below zero Fahrenheit. It may be snowing or not, but if it’s not there’s a strong ground blizzard. In other words, harsh conditions by almost anyone’s standards.

And those conditions excite me in a way that nothing else does. It’s so harsh that I don’t even feel as if I’m on Earth any more. I feel as if it’s a harsh day on the surface of some planet that’s entirely indifferent to my existence, that is not nurturing, that may not even be habitable by humans. And yet there I am, out in it, challenging it to kill me.

And it could kill me. Skipping over all the science-fiction fantasies going on in my head, a fairly simple mistake could result in severe injury or even death. But that’s part of why it’s exciting.

Another part is that usually when I’m outside in those conditions, I’m moving — snowshoeing, skiing, walking, running, biking — and both my mind and body are fully engaged in staying upright, moving forward, and calculating direction and location. It’s an intensity of mental and physical effort that completely involves all that I am, and crowds everything else out of my mind. On the best days, I approach a meditative state, focused entirely on the now.

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Cooking Hubbard Squash

29 March 2015

When I cook a Hubbard squash, I generally cut it in half with an ax, put it on a baking sheet, and pop it in the oven. The problem with that is that my ax skills are not what they should be, and while one half usually makes a good seal with the baking sheet, the other half does not. The one with the seal cooks much faster than the other one because of the trapped steam.

So today I decided to eliminate the whole cutting-in-half hassle and just put it in the oven whole. That’s a squash a little bit smaller than a basketball. I made a couple of holes in it with a Phillips screwdriver so it wouldn’t explode. (That’s why I love cooking in the same way that I love gardening — it’s all one big experiment.)

Cooked at 350 for 90 minutes, and it was great.

And by the way, that squash has been in the basement for at least six months, and still tasted good. Hubbards are amazing.

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Writing Every Day

26 March 2015

All I’m asking of myself is that I write every day. That’s all. It doesn’t have to be profound, but it does have to be as well-written as I can make it at the time. That means that even if I’m writing poorly and I know it, I still have to write. I don’t get to put it off until I can write well. I do have to write every day.

This also means that instead of collapsing in front of the television with a beer at the end of the day, I’m going to have to make the effort to write instead.

It doesn’t have to be a lot, but do write something every day.I feel the need to exercise that muscle.

Maybe longhand, so I’m not staring at a computer screen before bed…except I want it in Evernote. Scan after? That sounds like a pain. I can just transcribe the best ideas.

So here are two concrete tasks that will help me achieve my goal of becoming a better writer:

  • Publish something to a blog or newsletter once/week. It can’t be tiny, but doesn’t have to be huge.
  • Write every day

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The Carbon Cycle

28 November 2013

The carbon cycle describes how carbon moves through the natural environment.

Plants take CO2 from the air, use the carbon in combination with water to make carbohydrates, and release oxygen to the atmosphere. When the plant dies, that carbon is released again as CO2. That release can be a result of decomposition, fire, or probably other means.

Right now, there is a relatively high concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. I believe in anthropogenic climate change, so I think that high and increasing concentrations of CO2 are a result of burning of fossil fuels. In effect, we are adding carbon to the current carbon cycle. If it weren’t for humans, the vast majority of carbon in fossil fuels would remain buried and irrelevant.

Okay, I wrote the above without looking anything up, just using what was in my head.

(Looks at Wikipedia)

So I’m grossly over-simplifying and leaving out many aspects, but I’m not wrong. I think understanding the carbon cycle, even on a superficial level, clarifies what we need to do.

Posted in Biochar, Climate Change | 3 Comments »

Thermal Mass

20 January 2013

I’ve surrounded our cast iron wood stove with some thermal mass: about 9 gallons of water and a couple hundred pounds of brick and concrete. This has:

  • slowed the rate at which the stove warms the room & house after lighting a fire.
  • extended by 6 hours or so the time during which the heat from the fire heats the house after the fire goes out

That’s all fine and good, but what has it really gained us? There’s not enough thermal mass to allow us to treat it like a Russian stove and build just one or two fires a day. From a time and effort standpoint, considering the extra labor involved in splitting kindling and building a new fire, it doesn’t make sense to let the fire go out and relight it every few hours.

So as I see it, we don’t yet have enough thermal mass to have just a couple of fires a day, and it might be hard to get enough around the stove. And if you’re not at that point, the only real benefit is that the stove/mass keeps heating the house for six hours or so after you let the fire go out. More thermal mass will further slow the rate at which the  stove warms the house, but will extend further the stove/mass heating of the house after the fire goes out, and eventually you would arrive at the ideal of just one or two fires a day…probably.

There is the possibility that a cast iron or steel stove lets too much heat escape up the chimney to ever be able to adequately heat whatever thermal mass surrounds it to get down to the 1 or 2 fires/day ideal. One of the advantages of a Russian stove is that exhaust gases from the fire are channeled through masonry, capturing more of the total heat output of the fire. Surrounding a conventional iron or steel stove with thermal mass would be like building a Russian stove that had thermal mass only around the firebox — obviously much worse at capturing heat.

And so it’s still a question in my mind as to whether conventional stove with thermal mass can ever get even close to the Russian stove performance ideal.

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