Nov 8 2019 The big let down

“Hope is tomorrow’s veneer over today’s disappointment.”

Evan Esar

I was expecting to wander out this morning in deep fluffy snow. There is a major snowstorm alert on right now, they mention up to 40 cm of snow falling. What I actually got was a sprinkle of snow over a layer of ice caused by a night of freezing rain.

As I look at the hourly forecast I see that the snow will actually fall at a rate of 1 cm per hour. And that sadly is not every hour. Yet I am still happy my van is inside the shop without a layer of ice on the outside of it.

Even happier that I have wood inside not covered in the same ice. My solar panels not so lucky there. They are covered in ice that will not disappear until the weather warms up, that might be awhile.

Ice not going away soon

Swing back to the good side of things, I have a tablet now, probably should have bought a muffler like I said yesterday, who knew. The idea of the tablet was to consume less solar power. I didn’t get my wind generator up, but I did anticipate that and had a backup installation method I can even do in winter. It involves a trailer hitch mount which I can use on the tiny house later, and the trailer is where I will mount it for now. It won’t get full wind there but some, maybe enough to help. That was an expensive thing to have welded up. I regret not getting a quote. The good thing they gave me the work and are allowing me to make monthly payments. it is very sturdy.

I am not crazy about using Android for doing posts in word press. I wish I would have bought a Bluetooth mouse. The worst thing there is no sketchup that works in android. Ironically I need it right now to design a tablet stand. I could try to put Ubuntu on the tablet, but that process may brick my shiny new.

I think I will try that next month or maybe spring. Oh yeah, the other thing no spellcheck or Grammarly unless I enable the virtual keyboard which takes up half the screen. So I still need to fix the mistakes there.

It’s not that I don’t love my miniature keyboard with the pretty lights, it is that I have fingers that are much too big for this thing.

Well, enough whining, I have to start the generator, so I can split some wood, I am having problems with my shoulders, joints and breathing. A new development is sudden involuntary deep breaths like I just surfaced from swimming a longways underwater, so swinging a splitting maul just isn’t in my near future.

Enough for tonight

It is 2:30 in the afternoon, I have split all the wood I had inside and brought in three more gigantic blocks ready for split. I will get those done in a few days. At least they are inside the garage and I don’t have to dig them out of deep snow. I have enough wood split for a couple of days. There is -25c coming Saturday and worse Sunday. It is way too early in winter for this weather, but what we get is what we get.

The snow has started in earnest now, I feel good at the amount of work I was able to accomplish today. Glad about the snow, I am running low on filtered water. The outside rain tank is frozen I didn’t drain it in time. In winter, I melt snow on the woodstove and will run it through the new filter system I am looking forward to that. Especially since I read that roundup is even the rainwater and snow that falls.

Well, I have to go it is time to fight the Braithwaites and the Grays, And then Angelo Bronte.

Just as I was about to fire up my xbox I had a terrible lazy thought. What would I rather do, split wood and haul it through 14 inches of snow in -25 or do it now? So I went into my garage removed the three gigantic blocks of wood that I retrieved earlier and proceeded to split them. An hour later I was pushing another 500 lbs of wood through the inch of snow and into my fire room.

Lazy maybe, body hurtin? Definitely. It saves me doing this when it is colder and the snow is deeper also means not having to start the generator and sweeping out its location, but the truth is I may have to do that anyway.

If the snowstorm proceeds as warned it will be too dark to generate power, and add to the fact there is thick layer of ice and snow on them I won’t gain any solar power over the weekend. Even if I had the wind generator installed and functioning there is little to no wind. Just snow falling.