Huckleberry is an indoors-outdoors cat, but yesterday he decided that he was most decidedly an indoors cat. 

When Mark and I came home from a day spent visiting, we were a bit surprised to find Huckleberry curled up on the futon.  Surely I'd put him out before leaving the house that morning --- but maybe he'd slipped back past us as we were leaving?  He seemed quite content to be inside away from the cold weather, so I didn't think any more about it. 

Until a few hours later, that is, when I put him out for the night and snuggled up in bed with a book.  Just as my book sucked me in, little feet came padding down the hallway and Huckleberry announced his presence with a pleased "Meow!"

What in the world?  I shot out of bed and did a little exploring, quickly discovering the new "cat door."  While we'd been gone all day, Huckleberry had deviously ripped the air hose to the outdoor wood furnace out of the wall, creating a massive hole through which he could easily prance into the house.  Thanks a lot, Huckleberry!

This morning, I discovered that scientists are right --- cold hands make cold hearts.  Between Huckleberry's cat door letting in frigid air, the golf cart having frozen into the mud overnight so that we couldn't get the tires to roll and collect the wood Mark had cut at the other end of the property, and the chainsaw's gas having somehow frozen solid so that we couldn't cut any closer wood, I was cold and irritable.  Luckily for me, Mark solved all of our problems, even managing to start a fire out of wet kindling on a cold day.  As the interior temperature tops 60 F, my heart has begun to thaw.

Is your laptop running slow or occasionally freezing up on you? When is the last time you flipped it over to see if the little cooling fan is still turning? Even if it is spinning, is the bottom hot to the touch? All you might need is a laptop cooling pad, but maybe you're like me and you don't like any of the boring plastic models available and would rather make your own and save a handful of dollars in the process.

I found a piece of scrap plywood in the barn, cut it to size, lined up the cooling fan hole with the location of the laptop fan, secured the new fan which was scraped out of an old desktop computer power supply (Thanks Steve).

Attach the legs, power up your fan and you should notice an increase in the smoothness of operations, and a decrease in the heat coming off the bottom. You might not even need the fan, just the increase in space could make enough difference.

This entry is intended for women.  Men, feel free to read along --- I'm not going to be talking about reusable sanitary pads (not in this entry, at least).  I'm only warning you because it might not be as relevant to you.

Why is this aimed at women?  Because I read somewhere that women tend to have stronger legs while men tend to have stronger arms --- and this has been very true when comparing me and Mark.  I watch us work and notice that I dig with my feet while he digs with his arms, I happily trot up hills while he happily lifts heavy weights, and so forth.  This post is also for women because up to 9% of women have carpal tunnel (like me) while only 2% of men have carpal tunnel. 

Both of these sets of statistics are very relevant when it comes to one of the major chores of winter --- chopping wood!  Wood chopping takes major upper body strength and can also really exacerbate your carpal tunnel.  Luckily, I've found that by chopping smarter, I can chop quite a bit of wood (though I don't compare to Mark's levels.)  So, how to chop smart?  Read more....

A red letter day --- off with the space heaters and on with the fire!  With the temperature hovering around 40 all day, Mark decided to fire up the wood stove this afternoon.  Now it's warm as toast inside. 

This was another one of those gargantuan entries, so instead I've posted the complete how-to (and why) on installing an exterior wood furnace over on the resources page.  Check it out --- and stay warm!

This morning, Mark and I followed coal trucks up the highway to go to court in Wise.  We weren't in trouble, but some friends of ours were --- young people who had chained themselves to barrels last month to protest the construction of a coal-fired power plant which is being built about ten miles from our farm, and about two miles from another coal-fired power plant.  (The picture to the left is the power company's idea of what the plant will look like, with a little smoke photoshopped in by me to make it more realistic.)

Unfortunately, prevailing public sentiment in our region runs pro-plant.  We passed a massive yard sign a few miles up the road from the power plant site which proclaimed "Elect McCain-Palin --- they support coal!"  Although our region (in my biased opinion) is one of the most beautiful spots in the world, Wise County is also the most economically depressed county in Virginia and its residents are quick to believe the full page ads Dominion has taken out in the local newspapers proclaiming the riches which will flow into our region once their power plant is built.

Those of us who submitted comments to the DEQ, spoke up at public hearings, begged our elected leaders, and pummeled the local papers with letters to the editor made no headway in preventing the plant from receiving its permits (though we did reduce the permitted mercury emissions from 72 to 4 ppm.)  Eventually, hot, young heads cooked up an act of civil disobedience.  And even though I don't really approve of civil disobedience in non life-or-death situations, I ended up driving to the courthouse to show my opposition --- again --- for the power plant.

In the end, the judge agreed to give the young people fines, community service, and probation instead of the threatened jail time.  Most of them were taking time off college to come to the hearing, and they had travelled from across the U.S. both to chain themselves to barrels and, now, to pay for their "crime."  The county ended up taking in over $4,000 in fines and fees --- I always did say that tourism would be our region's saving grace.

"I know what I did was illegal, but I do not think it was wrong," said one of the young women in her prepared statement.  Personally, I know that building a dirty power plant in a region with the highest asthma rates in the state and some of the lowest levels of healthcare infrastructure is wrong --- I just wish it was illegal.

If you want to read more, or help out, check out some of the major players in the battle:

• Sierra Club
  
• Chesapeake Climate Action Network
• Wise Energy Alliance
• Southern Environmental Law Center
• Appalachian Voices
• Rainforest Action Network
  

This week's question comes from Laura in Cincinnati Ohio.

I wanted to ask you if you have a generator for your deep freeze?  I got to thinking about this after the storm a few weeks ago.  A lot of people in the tri-state area here would have lost their harvest without one.

I have had the same concern since I started seriously freezing food last year. A couple of months ago I started doing some research on how much a generator would cost us and what type we should get.

We settled on a Champion 3000 watt generator from Home Depot.com. It sells for 349 dollars plus 40 bucks for shipping. I tried calling the local Home Depot store to see if I could order it and pick it up there. The woman informed me that they only carry Coleman generators in the store and online items had to be shipped to your house. We placed the order 10 days ago and if everything goes as scheduled it should show up sometime next week. Once it's here we will fully test it and post a review to let everyone know how it performed.

It is possible to make your own generator from an old lawn mower engine and a car or truck alternator. I found this site that provides some advanced tips on such a project. I considered giving it a try a few years back and decided it would cost just a bit more money to buy a new one.

The last few weeks have had everybody wondering about the future of our economy. Common sense says that hard times will require a good deal of sacrifice. It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to predict that one of the first areas most folks will feel the squeeze is in higher fuel costs. This post will be an attempt to share with you what I've learned about building your own electric powered vehicle.

I'm sure everybody has seen those futuristic looking hybrid cars on the road, and I'm also sure that only a small percentage of you have the extra cash to spend 40 thousand dollars in an effort to save a few dollars at the pump. There is a lot of information on the internet these day about home made electric transports, and a good place to begin is EV Album.com. Here you can find an easy to navigate collection of projects including electric powered bikes, motorcycles, cars, and trucks. There's even a guy who managed to get a small tractor working with a golf cart motor.

The cheapest way to get moving with electric power is to convert one of your pedal powered bikes. There are some nifty kits available that use a small motor that attaches directly to the hub of your bike wheel. These packages start at around 300 dollars and can go up to a thousand and more depending on battery size and motor power. I've heard of several people adapting starter motors to power a bike chain, and if you're lucky you might be able to get a bike motorized for less than 50 bucks this way, but be prepared to walk home a few times before you get it perfected.

The next step up in electric mobility would be converting a motorcycle. The average low end cost seems to be about 1500 dollars with some people managing a bit under that and most going several thousand over. You can expect to get somewhere between a 10 and 50 mile range on each charge depending on road conditions and how good your batteries are.  

The holy grail of electric locomotion would be the elecrtic car/truck. Once you find the right car to convert and take out its gas powered engine you should be prepared to spend at least 10 thousand dollars and 100 or more man hours to get something reliable. The maximum range people seem to be reporting is around 50 miles, which will most likely improve as battery technology gets better. At the time of this writting the most popular vehicle for this type of conversion is the Chevy S-10 truck.

I considered what it would take to replace our old Isuzu farm truck's engine with an electric motor. Once I priced the motor, batteries, motor controller, battery charger, and other various items I concluded that it would be easier and cheaper to just buy a used golf cart. We found one on Craigs list a few months ago and have been pleasantly surprised at its performance crossing our creek and dealing with the muddy conditions here. Of course it doesn't have the same power as the four wheel drive truck, but it's a breeze to get unstuck if you have someone pushing from behind, and sometimes it just feels better to get by with less.