Glad I'm more regular than my writing!

Got my green house finished not long after my last post, and the tomatoes have been doing great in there. The wife really likes playing in there, she can stay nice and warm and out of the wind or skeeters if it is calm.

Speaking of the wind, I've never ever lived anywhere that has such a regular wind as here. I'm certain I'll be able to supply the majority of our electrical needs via a few windmills, but of course the only true test will be actually doing it.

We've been watering the garden from water collected off the roof last time we had some real rain. something still sitting on my list is to redirect the downspouts coming from the asphalt roof into a 250gal water hauling tank we have. Hauling buckets last rain worked, but I still missed out on a lot via overflows.

Dump runs have been ok, but nothing too spectacular, a few UPSs with mediocre batteries, and a few other good SLA batteries, also 1 good small deep cycle and 1 good starting battery. A couple more computers and a 24" full suspension bicycle. The SLA batteries will be used for my electric bike project, right now I'm just Jerry rigging a 24v motor & gearbox from one of those mobility scooters you see old folks and the morbidly obese riding around on. This will be a test platform to try gear ranges, then I'll build the low slung electric recumbent bike I've wanted to build for a few years now.

If the economy is tanking as fast as us doomers and the stock market bears think, I better figure out what computers I'm going to keep and sell of the rest while there is still a market for them. Canadian economists are saying that we have about a year before the recession that is on going in the States reaches the same levels up here, this must be focused on Ontario & Quebec as usual, I doubt that anyone from a forestry driven town in BC would agree with that time line.


I'm finally going to attach some pictures of my A frame greenhouse, the frame is nice and solid, the plastic is a worry, but has already weathered some good wind storms favorably.
You might be able to tell from the pictures, that I ain't no Finish Carpenter, in fact I'm pretty sure I don't have any Scandinavian in me.

Anywho, keep preppin' and learnin' or the Reptillians are gonna gitcha.

Truck full, including kitchen sink

I made another scrounge run at a local dumps recycle section yesterday. Lets see, I came back with a roll of chicken wire and some fencing for around the garden, two mountain bikes with front suspension, a small wheel barrow, grass rake, pick axe head, a stainless steel double kitchen sink, a suitcase sized tin trunk, 5 unwritten CDRs, and a few other items I'm not remembering right now.

Bicycles are a great item that I figure I can collect now for free, and refurbish as the pile of organ donors builds up. As I see it, bicycles will soon not be tossed aside so freely as they are now. The simple economics of it right now is, why would anyone pay a bike mechanic $50 or more dollars to fix my bike when I can go to any store and buy a happy shiny funtime Lao Tse brand slave labor new one for $100. Of course it rarely works out that way, they plan on buying the $100 bike, but wind up taking home the $200 one that only looks a little beefier and has some sort of "me too" feature.
I might as well go a little further on the bike rant. How bloody crazy is it that we buy a new bike, break a little something on it, or let it rust, throw it in the dump where it gets crushed and then shipped halfway across the damn world to be melted down and turned into another new bike. I could go on but have now reached the point where I'm boring myself with this.

So on to the kitchen sink, I'm not sure how much money I saved myself in the near future by picking this up, but you can bet that a new stainless sink would have cost me a heck of a lot more than the $10 gas it cost me to go to the dump, and there isn't a damn thing wrong with this sink. I can only guess that plain old consumerism landed this sink in the dump, it probably clashed with their new cultured granite countertops that they got a home equity loan to install.
Arrrg, I guess general consumerism is weighing on me today, I should be looking on the bright side, consumerism got me this stuff for nearly free.

I finished boxing in the two garden beds, but have yet to fence the wall for the climbers to hang on to. I'm working tonight on the head scratchin' and costing for building a smallish greenhouse. It's gonna be a simple 'A' frame built primarily with 2x4 by 10'. I'll have to purchase the lumber as I'll need full length uniform pieces, plus I haven't looked much for a good scrounge site for lumber. The father-in-law had a nice pile of scrounged lumber but it's getting eaten up pretty quick.

I guess that is all for the moment.
Don't let the Reptilian Overlords get ya down!