John Weiland

Totally understanding the pain and associated discussion here and have dealt with more bouts than I care to.  My herbalist (amateur) sister put me onto this remedy some years ago and it appears to work for me.  It can actually be taken at the time of onset for relief and may be something you wish to try.   Just adding for information's sake as I'm in no position to be prescribing medical advice.  Good luck, Eric, as I have past experience with that degree and quality of pain!  Photo below clipped from an online add at Walmart.

I'm hoping to piece-meal together a small system that would be expandable in the future for more off-grid power.  Initially, I was hoping to school myself by focusing on two essential items of the homestead-- the furnace (propane) for winter and the well pump for water.  As you might expect, non-winter months are not so crucial.  Even if the well becomes inoperative for a period, livestock watering can be done from the river near the house.  

I've already dabbled a bit with 12V-powered inverters for producing low-wattage 120V AC power.  What I'm envisioning for the current project is a 48V inverter/charger (Magnum Energy being one brand of interest) that would keep batteries topped up while grid-power is active, but be able to switch over to powering the furnace motor (120V) and well-pump (220V) if grid-power goes down.  A side angle here is the fact that I'm preparing to convert a 36V golf cart to 48V soon and this likely will involve several (3-4?....more?) 48V/30Ah LiFePO4 batteries.  Clearly one can get larger individual batteries, but I'm interested in keeping individual battery weight as low as possible so that they can be used in the golf cart (solar PV panel roof) in summer and shuttled easily to the basement for winter.

Questions arise around sizing the inverter/charger and battery bank for powering the furnace fan and the well-pump.  The furnace is less of an issue as it should be readily powered by an inverter of 4000-6000W (pure sine wave, peak surge watts nearly double the running watts). If memory serves me, the house well pump was ~2/3 - 3/4 hp submersible running at 220V and while the running amps/watts aren't terrible, the starting amps may be up in the 20s to low 30s.  So I'm more concerned about making sure the well pump won't trigger a system shut-down due to either batteries or inverter (or both) being under-sized.  A parallel string of 4 batteries each at 48V would yield 120Ah with internal BMS's sized for golf-cart amp surges (80 - 100A per battery...typically double that for short spike surges).  As finances allow, I would be integrating solar energy into the system as well as part of the expansion.  Input on this vision and design is most welcomed...  Thanks!

Just our experience with multiple LGDs over the years fenced in on ~15 acres.  Mixing these with the general public, both casual visitors and repair/maintenance persons over the years has generally been a bit nerve-racking.  With the best visitors, there is a break-in period where the dogs have to see that we are welcoming of the visitors and that the visitors additionally are no threat to the other barnyard animals.  Even under these conditions we are always present to ensure that some mishap does not occur to produce an issue between person and dog.  Again, that's with the best visitors.  Then there are visitors that just give off certain vibes that the dog(s) don't like and greater sequestration of the dogs away from the visitor(s) needs to occur.  As you are noting a desire for an actual business on the property involving a rotation of transient visitors, I would recommend your idea of fencing the air-b-n-b and market stand separate from the LGD.  (I also will note that LGDs often will bark through the night as they ward off predators...and some people in the air b-n-b will find that annoying if the dog is a barker.)  That way, only when desired, can interaction occur between the LGD and visitors.  Legal liability here in the US is a large driver behind our concerns regarding visitors on the property and interactions with our dogs so we try to confront the issue very much up-front. Good luck!

H Bhajan wrote:......I have a senior in high school who has his P P L(private pilot license /certificate) and wants a career in commercial aviation. I’m a first gen college graduate myself and struggle to guide him on a good path for what he wants to accomplish, so many things are changing quickly it seems. I understand if it was many years ago but it will still give me an idea of what to search for. ...

If he does not mind cold winters, the program at the University of North Dakota may have special scholarships for his interests:

https://aero.und.edu/success-center/index.html

https://aero.und.edu/aviation/current-students/career-pathways.html

Good luck!

Thanks for these responses.  I will try to see if I have an email account available with our ISP and will try to use that if possible.  Otherwise will seek out another email address solution.  Thanks!

Hello,

Received a notice from the staff (?) about the inability to contact me using my personal Hotmail account. (The initial notice did not appear as a "moosage", but rather as a screen that occured prior to my being able to access the Forum which then directed me to a Moosage with further information.)   I do recall some time back Paul W. mentioning a desire to see movement away from Hotmail accounts although I can't recall why.   I've double-checked and the address on file is correct.  Additionally, I don't see any contact attempt recently that were sent to my 'Junk' mail folder in Hotmail/Outlook.  I do not see a 'SPAM' folder separate from the 'Junk' folder so don't know where else attempted contact messages may have gone.  Ultimately, the message posted to me within Permies.com indicated that my account may be suspended if a correct email is not provided. Please advise at this point as I do not wish for that to happen.  Thanks!

Les Frijo wrote:

John F Dean wrote:I have had it in the house for a while. It lights up, but it doesn’t run.  Yes, I checked the chain break.

Interesting! That would suggest the condensation theory. Maybe more time inside will lead to more functionality. Sounds like a design flaw to me. Maybe worth trying to contact someone at Makita and see what they say.

John,   I'm going to assume that you have pulled on the chain to rotate the chain and the cog wheel around a few times?....  I ask because I have two more legacy corded Makita tools, a drill and an angled buffing tool, that also sit for months, sometimes years, without use in an unheated garage with humid summers and frigid winters.  This past summer I need the angle tool and it would not run when I activated the trigger.  After several rounds of adjusting the speed control and rotating the head by hand, it finally started running and ran fine after that.  But I'm wondering now as others have stated about the condensation possibility.  Just a thought...

John F Dean wrote:.....if I can only have one handful a year in present times, I will grab the candy corn for the flashback to my childhood.

Yet inquiring minds want to know:  When younger, did you nibble one color of each kernal at a time, starting with the yellow portion at the end and progressing to the white tip?  Somehow in those early years, my impressionable mind was convinced that the yellow portion tasted more buttery.... :-)

Cécile Stelzer Johnson wrote:...............
[i]"Sunchokes thrive in full sun and loose, well-drained soil with a pH between \(5.8\) and \(6.2\). While they are hardy and grow in many conditions, they produce the best crop in loose soil that allows for tuber expansion, making harvesting easier. Sunchokes are adapted to a wide range of climates, growing well from USDA hardiness zones 3 through 8. Soil Ideal: Sunchokes prefer loose, well-drained soil. Adding aged compost or sand can improve heavier soils.
pH: An ideal soil pH is between \(5.8\) and \(6.2\). They can tolerate a wider range from \(4.5\) to \(8.2\).
Tolerance: The plants will grow in a wide variety of soil types, even poor or rocky ones.
Drainage: Avoid heavy, waterlogged clay soil, as this can result in smaller tubers and make harvesting difficult. Climate Sunlight: They do best in full sun but will tolerate partial shade.

This would explain why our decades-old patch produces such puny tubers.  They aren't bad to eat and can be relatively abundant in certain years, but rarely are larger than your thumb.  Our soil (zone 4/3)   is on the heavy side of clay and poor in drainage even as the organic matter is quite high. Soil pH hovers around 7-8.  I think our sunchokes are feeling the insults of these conditions....and the presence of a little invasive worm/grub in many of the tubers doesn't help matters.  But none of this effects its hardiness and intentions on taking over the garden! ;-)

paul wheaton wrote:I had huge hopes that we would embrace the scenario I laid out, and then explore permaculture solutions.  

With a humble home and a huge garden ...

  - maybe it doesn't matter if you lose your job

  - maybe you have a MASSIVE advantage

  - maybe all this stuff becomes interesting rather than scary

  - is better than living in the city with a lot of money ...  which will drain away

  - maybe you can share your bounty with friends

I think all of the above is possible, but always run into the issue of property taxes and costs regarding infrastructure and health emergencies of all kinds.  How this impacts the orginal topic of college or not will depend much on the person's ability to weigh costs, benefits, and sources of goods and services they both need vs. desire.  When I ponder, based on my family of origin's history, my life NOT having gone to college and grad school, I do shudder a bit.  That experience not only gave me some reasoning tools quite valuable in my adult life, but navigating the educational world itself was a lesson in frugality.  Not to say all of this couldn't have been come by outside of educational institutions, but some of it made easier by their existence.  Like the cost of owning and maintaining land itself, the changes underfoot in higher ed are troubling....just seeing the degree to which costs are rising is disheartening.  But as I've told many families whose kids are grappling with these decisions, you don't need to go to Harvard/Stanford for your education to be decent and worthwhile.  A quick tuition perusal locally showed many state colleges still coming in around $10k per year (don't get me wrong...I consider that exhorbitant relative to my 1980s annual tuition at UW-Madison of $1K!) and graduate work payed me a living-wage stipend.  Compromises surely must be made to go this route, but there can be some real payoffs in certain job areas and even more crucial and tangential payoffs in finding out what is important to YOU in your life through the process.  Thus, what started off as a more urban life, but with much socking away of income in early years, led to the realization that using that capital to gain a rural situation made much more sense for wife and I....and allowed for early retirement to bring it to fruition.  So just another view for the discussion...