alternatetheory

pure frosting

so lets see if i can turn this into a narrative;

backstory: we have solar power. nice, expensive batteries. big fat lugs on the big fat cables. lugs so big they need washers (too big lugs, ok). here's the moral of the story at the start: dont use galvanized washers (duh?). 

story development: for months now, over a year in fact, our power capacitance has slowly dwindled. each day, the batteries would be empty quicker until yesterday they were completely depleted by our single cfl bulb in under an hour. 

crisis: not the pathetic, near-second-world electricity situation, but the slow crushing, the imperceptible accretion of real loathing for the evening, for the situation, and the dread of tackling the project, after a couple unsuccessful attempts at repair.

climax: so today i filed all the corrosion off the lugs. problem, apparently, so far, after two hours of power use without a beep from the charge controller.

anticlimax: a beeping charge controller is actually my power monitor. short of climbing under the house with the multimeter, an annoying beep has been slowly taking over my life.

hahaaaaaaa ha ha ha ha ha ha hah ahaaa haaaaaaa heh heh heh heh, ack! 

no really.

erür

titles are worthless metadata placeholders when entries are so brief.

south is not where i thought it was.

also: dirty goat. 

(those aren't sores, they're berries.)

durr. titles aren't poetical.

general update. stuck in the middle, for the moment. 

the big bags are a joy to work with - they're so big, you can fuck up bad and have a fifteen inch wide solid mass wall. not that i have any four inch errors, but still. it's been good practice for switching to the smaller bags, which will only be 12" wide, filled. 

i'd love to go all the way up with the big bags, but i always knew i'd have to switch when i ran out of labor. the big bags are roughly 200# filled, you really can't lay them solo. it'll certainly be nice to have half as much dirt to move, per bag, even though it's not that drastic a reduction of mass per sq. foot of wall surface, as they're only 20" long, instead of 36". 

see the little vent, right above his head? corrugated plastic ventilation, baby. 

close up (from above) of re/movable window box. built by carl, the freakin awesome (that's his official ulinawi title). see that engineering? diz-ope.

more on the window; the view.