alternatetheory

6 inches in just two days

not viagra spam, but our rainfall. 

which was nice for the forest and all, but a bit of a pain for us, to be cooped up, and to run out of power for our distractions (like blogging, frinstance).

was an interesting test of the drainage systems. my primary french drain tube is at least partly clogged, and possibly crushed. yeah, oh well. i need to run some tests, but it doesn't really matter - the gravel works just fine. i made an awful little video of the water flowing out of the trench, it's trickling out the french drain, and flowing out of the gravel. well and good, and now i stop worrying/puzzling/pondering.

the workshop is something like ten days away. sigh, okay.

honestly my biggest worry is just that no one will come and i'll beat myself up about it. 

my second biggest worry is that LOTS of people will come, and i wont know what to do with them all. but it's a distant second.

okay. i have lots to do, even after cleaning up from the storm. time to stop procrastinating.

Quaternary drain

Quaternary drain
Originally uploaded by hellbender

if my french drain collapses, and my 2" pvc (running through a 4" corrugated pe pipe) collapses, and my back-up 4" corrugated pe pipe collapses, there'll still be this 10" corrugated STEEL pipe to prevent standing water from ever collecting in the house.

tomorrow, i'll call the drainage system done. for fucks sake, i've barely worked on anything else yet.

test brick

Brick. Buckstand.
Originally uploaded by hellbender

made a test brick t'other day, showed pretty minimal cracking, for no added sand. would probably need more sand for cob, but this isn't cob. i'mna get a few tons of sand delivered as soon as i figure out exactly where i want it.

in the background is the "buckstand" for holding the bobwire so that it can be easily taken off in long strings. (the wire goes between the courses of bags to lock them together. yes, that works.) totally functional but shakily repurposed out of an attempt at making a wooden bagstand that failed. i'll get a pic up soon of the bag stand made of bar stock. a project that would have been so easy if i could find flat stock in 100" lengths, instead of just 48" and 72".

#10 cans and a new wheelbarrow w solid rubber tire

#10 cans new wheelbarrow w solid rubber tire
Originally uploaded by hellbender

use big cans to get dirt in the bags, whenever the angle makes it difficult to shovel into the bag, such as five feet off the ground.

new wheelbarrow (landscaper grade, 6cu ft, $70 at lowes) with a SOLID RUBBER TIRE. whoo, no more flats! i want a dozen!

lets get rigorous.

yes, a tedious debate, but with mathematical rigour!

Conway and Kochen say this search is hopeless, and they claim to have proven that indeterminacy is inherent in the world itself, rather than just in quantum theory. And to Bohmians and other like-minded physicists, the pair says: Give up determinism, or give up free will. Even the tiniest bit of free will.

Their argument starts with a proof Kochen created with Ernst Specker 40 years ago. Subatomic particles have a property called “spin,” which occurs around any axis. Experiments have shown that a type of subatomic particle called a “spin 1 particle” has a peculiar property: Choose three perpendicular axes, and prod the spin 1 particle to determine whether its spin around each of those axes is 0. Precisely one of those axes will have spin 0 and the other two will have non-zero spin. Conway and Kochen call this the 1-0-1 rule.

Spin is one of those properties physicists can’t predict in advance, before prodding. Still, one might imagine that the particle’s spin around any axis was set before anyone ever came along to prod it. That’s certainly what we ordinarily assume in life. We don’t imagine, say, that a fence turned white just because we looked at it — we figure it was white all along.

But Kochen and Specker showed that this assumption — that the fence was white all along — can’t hold in the bizarre world of subatomic particles. They used a pure mathematical argument to show that there is no way the particle can choose spins around every imaginable axis in a way that is consistent with the 1-0-1 rule. Indeed, there is a set of just 33 axes that are enough to force the particle into a paradox. It could choose spins around the first 32 axes that conform with the rule, but for the last, neither 0 nor non-zero would do. Choosing zero spin would create a set of three perpendicular axes with two zeroes, and choosing non-zero spin would create a different set of three perpendicular axes with three non-zeroes, breaking the 1-0-1 rule either way.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/35391/title/Do_subatomic_particles_have_free_will%3F

blessed passiflora incarnata

came back in to post a little note about how hard it is to be add and do this work, and how sometimes when you're all alone, and the little side project refuses to work right, your ipod dying can lead to dizzy spells of overwhelmed confusion, struggling to find some clarity out of the whirlling mass of priorities and tasks. 

and then i smoked some homegrown, home-harvested maypop, and chilled out.

sigh. this nature-provides moment brought to you by passiflora incarnata, the sun, rain and decomposition.

strange discoveries

living in/of/on/with the land, there are things that are unmissable. 

some strange things. 

like the evident fact that the microfauna divide up the year into brief windows of dominance. for instance early spring is the season of the squashed frogs in the road.

right now it is the week of honey bees hovering in the short grass. we're at the apogee of rattus rattus and all his siblings, and as a result it is also snake season.

eastern arctics' #1 nightspot

a friend who was working with me for a bit the other day caused me to realize why i've never seen a house built on a french drain/rubble trench foundation hybrid. the plastic pipe is not exactly... stout. 

and THEN he pointed out that instead of backfilling my secondary drain ditch with a couple tons of gravel by hand, i could've used a nice galvanized, corrugated steel conduit, nearly uncrushable, and a bonus to the strength and lifespan of my back-up drains. but he mentioned it just a couple days too late.

so i added a quaternary, that's a FOURTH backup drain at tire level. 

i was stressed for a couple days, thinking about subsidence and flooding, but finally remembered today - 

i'm using bags that will fill to 19 inches wide. they wont fucking fall.

and if this house floods, it'll already have to be the end of the world.

yeah, the house will be a little overbuilt, but that's because this is my first time, and because my cultural affiliation is "slacker," so i allowed for at LEAST a bit of a screw-up, by making the fucker ginormous.

which i'll never do again. no more earthbag for me, unless i'm building into an even bigger berm, like a root cellar or something. i live in the american rainforest - wood is the way to go.

not that i regret a thing. now i'll have a nice cozy tornado-proof(ish), earthquake-proof (mostly), virtually gamma-ray-proof house. which is what i've always wanted.

oh yeah, and zombie-proof. that was really a big design consideration.

the workshop is on

trying to figure out what i can say.

my floaty life has been shaken, slightly in the grand scheme, but i've realized i'm more alone in this endeavour than i realized. and that's always unsettling.

i've been without a wingman for quite a while now, and while it's certainly something i miss, i've been revelling in the married bliss instead - which, when it's good, is far better than having an ordinary best friend. wondering how long it will be until the next time you'll find someone to touch is just about the worst thing in the world. so married life is a total joy on that level.

and i suppose thats one of the things thats insulated me from missing having a real best friend. it's been a long time since i had such a relationship, i traveled heavily for so long, and didn't end up near any of my old friends.

which brings me to this "mentor" character. i've been living with or next to him for the past two years, and intermittently for the past seven. and we're close, we can basically communicate, but he's a fucking alien, and i've always known it. he's in his own world, and it's points of contact with my own little world are fairly limited. but we're both here all the time, and do the same sorts of stuff, etc. etc. etc. so we'd approached, recently, the general area of "best-friend" status. which was sortof wierd, in itself.  despite our similarities, we're not the same fucking species. i'm an american-bred slacker, i'm a.d.d. as fuck and a media/internet junkie.  he grew up in india and guam and shit, majored in world peace in college, a real "son of the planet" asshole.



so now, here's me, in the middle of my most ambitious project yet (after having a kid), about to have a fucking open-invitation, come-one-come-all workshop, for which i have asked and he has promised his "total support."

AND THEN HE FUCKING LEAVES. 

for like 10 weeks. to go sailing in alaska.

and i can't help but feel like he cares about learning to sail (no, really) certainly more than he cares about the house that i'm building, but perhaps more than he values our friendship?

and this was my best friend?

was this really the best male companion i've earned/developed/cultivated after thirty fucking years? someone i can't rely on for the FIRST AND ONLY important important IMPORTANT favor i ask of him in the entire course of our fucking friendship?

and now what the fuck am i supposed to do? i live next to the jerk, my little homestead depends on his/theirs/there for it's fucking justification for why the hell we live among all these fucking assholes instead of in asheville or somesuch happy shit.

forgiving and forgetting is something i've always been good at. i'm too fucking zen to usually care about what drama happened last week, or i'm too fucking short-attention-span. either way, i've always been good at letting go of bad shit (or just bad at remembering to care about it).

but this feels different. whatever else, our friendship can't be what it was.

and so it happens that as soon as i set my foundation, everyone in the community is suddenly saying "why do we live here again? why dont we live in california, or on a sailboat, or somewhere thats not so hot and buggy?"

and i'm totally powerless against that. 

i'm totally without defense against being left out here in the wilderness. i have no illusions of being a self-made man, being some kind of island, or that i can make it on my own. that's all bull. lonliness is the worst, most life-killing thing in the world. 

i guess it's really ironic that as i was working on my brick-and-mortar foundation (actually rubble trench and gravel-tire), my community foundation was quietly eroding out from under me. 

but what the fuck ever. the workshop is still on. 

lets hear it for being a pridefull stubborn jackass, too proud to admit defeat.  at least not yet.

the workshop is on.