Allen Jackson

To clarify, does this BB require one to plant 50 seeds x 10 of the listed species, and show that at least 12 of the total sprouts/survives, or 12 of each species sprouts/survives?
EG., must one end up with 12 or 120 new trees?

Mike Haasl wrote:Some PEP badges allow for oddball points.  This was introduced in this thread.

When submitting something in the official Oddball badge, you get points based on the time it would take a professional to do the same task if they have a bit of luck.

When submitting something within a badge that allows oddball points (Homesteading, Metalworking, etc), they are based on the time it would take a talented newbie to do the same task.

When you did something that should be in a badge but there isn't a BB for it, post about it in that badge and maybe it will become a BB.  If that badge allows oddball points, you can submit it there, otherwise it has to go into Oddball badge.

Some examples:
You welded up a 20 foot unicorn - put it into the Metalworking Oddball thread
You made a candle - put it in the regular Oddball thread since it isn't a clear fit for an existing badge
You build a pump house - post it in Homesteading since it should be a BB there and/or put it in Homesteading Oddball

As I have read more and learned more about the PEP system I have come to think this particular job would be a good candidate for the oddball plumbing category.

I was visiting my baby sister, who owns a townhouse in Chicago.  She bought a new washer/clothes dryer set and paid for the installation, but the crew looked at her basement and refused to install because the numerous code violations evident, mainly the excessive length of the flexible exhaust piping. I told her I could fix the venting issue, which was the main hurdle to the installation team, but I highly recommended replacing the galvanized pipe and fittings that were mixed in with the black pipe.

For those unfamiliar with plumbing code for natural gas piping, galvanized pipe is illegal for good reason, as it will eventually leak because the zinc WILL leach out of the galvanizing, leaving it porous (not exactly what is desired for a flammable gas), although it will probably take a few years to leak that way.
The issue with the flexible vent pipe, it's legal to use flex pipe for the last (short) section going to the appliance, but the remaining parts are required to be smooth rigid piping. Flexible exhaust pipe can collect lint, and become a fire hazard, which is the reason for the prohibition.

I ended up removing and re-plumbing all the gas piping in my sister's basement, and I did take pictures of that job...
In total, this job took about 3 days, but there are no pictures during the work that I know of, since once the gas main was shut off, I was under the gun to get done as soon as possible, so her hot water and furnace could be turned back on, and during the job, the 3 cats and the dog were barred from entry to the basement, because of the hazard of loose metal shavings on the floor from the pipe threader - so my sister avoided the basement too, as the dog tends to follow her around.

I also removed and replaced the steel pipe hangers holding up the copper water pipe, as they were starting to show dissimilar metal corrosion, and put up copper pipe hangers for the copper pipe, so both her gas and water pipe should be good for the long term.  When I was done, the copper pipe had copper hangers, the black iron pipe had steel hangers, and the vent pipe was held up with plastic pipe strapping.


More ick

Part of the excessive flexible vent pipe

More mixed pipe fittings

More galvanized fittings to the water heater

Mixed fittings to the furnace...



More ick

This might be the feed to the gas range, but no matter, it's all being replaced


I have an electric pipe threader, so I could reuse sections of the old black pipe removed from the original layout. You can tell which sections are reclaimed, because they are the rusty parts.
After the makeover:




Also, the replacement rigid exhaust piping

More vent pipe and fresh gas piping


More fresh plumbing





I do have a natural gas leak detector, and I went back through the installation afterwards, to confirm all joints were solidly sealed, and I also confirmed that all the gas appliances worked thereafter. More importantly we both feel better about her gas piping now - she bought it from a pair of retired school teachers who probably fancied themselves as DIYers, mostly because on their budget they did as well as they knew how...

Linux Mint was a gentle enough transition to Linux back when I converted my wife's laptop to it, that she found it easier to use than Windows 10 was. That's been several years now, we're still married, we're still on speaking terms with each other, and unlike Windows, when she wants to print something, it just works, whereas with Windows, the right driver had to be installed and one had to sacrifice a male virgin goat on the 3rd full moon of each year... Even when we've changed printers, it just works... She did Microsoft Teams meetings with it during the COVID lock downs. Everything she's asked of it     just     works...

She wasn't a novice computer user, she was an office worker with a good understanding of how to use a computer to do her job, but completely unfamiliar with Linux. To this day, she's using Windows 11 at work, but Linux Mint at home, and we're still speaking to each other 🙂 - she was even willing to go spend a week with me at Allerton Abbey last month, and afterwards, she said she would do it again, if given a chance.

If a "Mug" is familiar with using Windows, they can find their way around using Mint. I think there are even desktop shells that can mimic the IOS look and feel, if one desires.

More trouble in Little China...

I'm not suggesting that the existing standards be changed, by any means, but I would like to point out something that the last 6 years seem to have clearly born out here.

Getting to PEP4 may be impossible to achieve.

Here's why:

A formal PEP4 program could take a little over two years (~4700 hours).  Requires 3 iron badges + 12 wood badges + 7 straw badges (a badge in all 22 aspects). Natural building and Gardening are required iron badges.  The third iron badge is your choice, but cannot be Oddball or Homesteading.

Getting any Iron level badge, requires that one first achieve all the lower level badges...

Getting a Wood level badge in Natural building requires that one successfully build a freezer wolfati...

There's been no public discussion about even the concept/theory of doing this, at least in that thread, since I posted about the physics of it 6 years ago.

When I touched on the subject of freezer wolfati at the pizza night, when we were there recently, Paul said he'd love to try it, but the manpower to do so wasn't available in the foreseeable future...

NO ONE has yet to complete either the Wood level version of this, or the Iron level Round Woodworking task to build a larger variant

Badge Bits are currently supposed to have been done with 90% of the labor by the person submitting.  Building any wolfati solo is a pretty big ask?

To be clear, my interest in this is as strong as ever, and I fully intend to build at least one of them at some point in my life.  I am no where close to that point right now, and while I don't mind being the first to accomplish any given BB, it seems a shame if the entire permaculture universe is waiting for me to be the first one to qualify for PEP4...

The badge acquisition is automatic now, but I'm posting here to say count me in on the seed offer if it still exists

Dave Burton wrote:This is a badge bit (BB) that is part of the PEP curriculum.  Completing this BB is part of getting the sand badge in Greywater and Willow Feeders.

In this Badge Bit you will give urine to a plant.
To complete this BB, the minimum requirements are:
  - give urine to growies
     - urine must be put in just one spot so the plant isn't forced to drink if it doesn't want
     - this technique is not suitable for pots unless it is a very big pot
     - one pic technique
         - soil must be moist and plant must be a urine loving plant
         - pic includes urine being applied and you can see the plant
             - probably using a jar or other container for transfer
                 - (yes, direct stream is okay, but make sure to crop out your junk)
         - report on what the urine loving plant is
     - two pic technique
         - first pic of urine being diluted (10 parts water to 1 part urine)
         - second pic of mixture being put in one spot for plants

To show you've completed this Badge Bit, you must:
 - one picture of direct peeing on moist soil around a urine loving plant and what the urine loving plant is
 - OR two pictures: one of urine being diluted and one of mixture being given to plants

I'm unclear as to what constitutes a urine loving plant, but I chose a fir tree that was certainly large enough to take up what I can produce in the moment, without stressing it.

If this plant doesn't qualify, I'll just have to find another one, but this time of year, the smaller plants are dying off as the temps drop.

Dave Burton wrote:This is a badge bit (BB) that is part of the PEP curriculum.  Completing this BB is part of getting the straw badge in Animal Care.

For this BB, you will prove that your animal’s water is fit for human consumption!

Discussion thread for this Badge Bit:  https://permies.com/t/139963/Brainstorming-Animal-care-Prove-High

To document your completion, provide proof of the following as pics or video (less than two minutes):
     - a pint of water from the animal's drinking source
     - actively drinking the water (video preferred)
     - feeling fine 3 hours after drinking the water (video preferred)

I don't have a YouTube account, so video is not an option at this time.

Never in a million years would I have expected giving my dogs fresh water, would be a badge bit, but here we are...

Our dogs drink water from the same municipal source that we do, so I would expect it to be as safe as they certify in their annual water quality reports.

I think this might be my 20th BB, so it's appropriate to share it with my dogs!

I'm honestly not sure what a computer mug is? I see what Google calls a computer mug, but those look like coffee mugs, and I don't know how they interact with computers (sorry, caffeine doesn't affect me, so I never acquired a taste for coffee?).

Maybe not the best or fastest example of a mini PC, but it's my latest purchase and it's plenty for the dedicated job I want it to do:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FVXDFY2K?

Many of these are still the same size, but with different guts.

We have 2 great Danes. They're both about 130 lbs, and both are about 10 years old now (actually Bob, the male is 2 months shy of his 10th birthday, while Karma is working on 10.5 years).

Like myself, the concept of a 500 calorie meal is waaay short of normal to them, but here's my attempt to show their dinners. We have fed raw since discovering our 1rst great Dane was allergic to ALL grains, including rice. When we first got him, he was 9 months old and had seemingly permanent diarrhea, he was always hungry, and he was losing weight on 13 cups of kibble a day. My research suggested a food allergy, so we started shifting through numerous types of dog food to no avail.

About 5 months in, and getting desperate, I found a suggestion for a book from an online forum, that was written by a holistic veterinarian named Dr. Karen Becker called "Real Food for Healthy Dogs and Cats". I bought the book from Amazon for $20, read thru it and took it to the grocery store to buy one of the meal's ingredients. I fed our puppy with that meal in the early evening Saturday, and overnight it was transformative! He had his first normal solid stool since we'd owned him, and the diarrhea was gone! Our vet had told us that they couldn't really do allergy testing on the dog so I was thrilled to have stumbled on the solution. Thereafter we packed up all the kibble in the house and donated it to the animal shelter. We've never gone back to kibble since, and we're now on our 3rd & 4th great Danes since then.

What Dr Becker advocates for, is a species appropriate diet for all animals, and dogs were never intended to eat grains. Many can tolerate it, some lose that tolerance over time, but going raw helped us out of a bind. As an added bonus, the waste is reduced by about 90% from the amount of waste if they are eating kibble. We're never going back to kibble (but that's also why we traveled to Wheaton Labs with a freezer and a refrigerator and a power system to run them for the week+).


Our dogs eat twice a day, and their dinners are most often chicken drumsticks or thighs from Costco. They each get about 1.5 lbs+ for dinner, and according to the nutritional label, there's 170 calories per each 4 ounces of meat. That's at least 1020 calories in chicken alone, plus they get bone broth added, raw eggs, and a small amount of vegetables chopped up or pureed. In this example, they also got to split the leftovers from my wife's build-your-own salad she got from Jason's Deli last night. The chicken is NOT cooked, so I wouldn't eat it straight, but it has been truly healthy for them (for the record, DON'T feed cooked chicken bones to your dogs, but raw bones aren't yet brittle and are safe).

By the way, the breed Great Dane were originally bred to hunt wild boar. If your dog is too small to chew whole drumsticks, by all means, please chop up their food into something fitting their stature.

It occurs to me that what I did might be a badge-bit worthy task, and I did take pictures of the adventure.

Benign deliberate vandalism of Allerton Abbey

When we were staying there as SEPPers in October, the front door was very hard to open or close, because the door had sank down from where it was originally hung. Not sure how much of this was from the building settling, or the door just sagging, but it made the front door somewhat impractical to use, as it was not just hard to operate, but this had gone on long enough such that the door had gouged a sweep into the floor too, so it was limited to about a 60 degree opening swing.

The door was large/heavy enough that I was certain that my wife and I wouldn't be able to remove it to adjust anything, so on the next trip into town, we bought a set of chisels (from Harbor Freight) and upon returning, I tackled paring down the high spots of the threshold, which would at least ease the opening and closing of the door.

At the next morning's boot camp meeting, I confessed to my crime (but the door worked much better afterwards!)

This seems to perfectly fit the spirit and description of "Oddball" tasks, so here it is...

The original door

The depths it has sunk to presently

A combination of loose rocks/gravel from the floor degradation are making it worse

First carefully sweep the area to remove loose debris

Then see where it's binding up and pare it down (first pass)

Second pass


Door is working well enough to open with one hand now. Donate the chisels to the shop, and hope it will be enough to cover the security deposit 😉