evan's ant village log

Maddie was recently at Wheaton Labs and tooks a bunch of great pictures. You can see them all here. But here are a few good ones of Evan and his plot.

Thanks Cassie for posting those pics! And thanks Maddie for taking them! Also, thanks Davin and Dianne for trying to remedy my rat's nest of a hair-do, and thanks Jocelyn and Paul for having us all over for such a lovely dinner!

Day 162

Finished bracing Siesta, (with Josh's help; thanks Josh!) It oughta hold up a few tons of dirt now.

Did a bit more excavating for Chris, preparing the site for the house he plans to build. If I understand correctly, it'll be modeled on Mike Oehler's $500 house. Seems like a good plan to me.

Day 163

Rex was running low on fuel, so until we can get more I worked on trimming the sidewalls of Siesta and building the drip edge of the duck hollow.

I'm still figuring this whole drip edge thing out as I go. The idea is to keep water from running into the structure by wrapping the tarps over a flat edge and fastening them in on the underside. But I don't want to see the tarps and I don't want them to photodegrade in the sun either, so then I'll need to add an additional drip edge cover or fascia sort of thing. I have a few different ideas. Maybe by trying them on the duck hollow first I'll come up with a better way for Siesta.

Day 164

Rex was pretty thirsty, and managed to drink down a good thirty gallons of fuel. That oughta keep us digging for a few hours.

Mixed up a batch of cob and started to fill the gaps between the roof and the sidewalls. With Josh's help, got about a quarter of the way done before running out of cob and daylight. Thanks for the help, Josh!

Day 165

Showed Chris how to grease up Rex. He greased his beard up real good and even got some grease into the excavator too.

Finished digging the foundation for Chris' house. Next stop for Rex will be to build the hugelberm along the border that Chris and I share.

Day 166

Nearly done with the hugelberm dividing Chris' plot and my plot. We split the excavator time it took to build it, so even though it's a fair bit of earthworks it was almost like it was built at double speed.

Mixed up a batch of cob, but it ended up being too wet to apply right away, so I left it overnight to dry out a little.

Apparently I'm not the only one building things out of cob on my plot. I found this tiny cob-esque structure on my suitcase. Maybe some kind of insect or arachnid built it?

Day 167

That batch of cob was dried out just enough to apply by the morning. And Josh helped me again by being a bio-lathe of sorts. Basically I was smooshing the cob through the gaps and Josh was stopping it from falling out the other side. Thanks Josh! He brought over a tool-battery radio thingy and we listened to Bill Mollison while we worked. Thanks whoever sent the sweet boombox!

Jocelyn and Paul had us all over for dinner again! Stuffed squash and salad and soup, and horchata! Oh, and also an apple crisp for dessert! Oh my goodness, I'm so stuffed! Thanks Jocelyn and Paul!

Jocelyn had arranged a really nice bouquet, with hollyhock, and snowberry, and little sunflowers, and knapweed, and sedum, and sweet clover, and shrub rose! What a gorgeous centerpiece for a lovely gathering! Jocelyn is simply the bestest hostess!

evan l pierce wrote:Thanks whoever sent the sweet boombox!

This is a bunch of the PDC folks that helped with the berm shed. They donated the bounties coming to them to the ants. And that led to the purchase of the stihl electric chainsaw and the little music box. The idea is that the little music box is needed for when folks are stomping cob!

Day 168

Rolled the excavator, good old Sabretooth Rex, over to Kailarado and dug out the foundation for Kai's house. It's gonna be just 8' by 8' but the design and placement is super nifty and I think it'll be quite liveable.

Then headed over to Jim's plot and started digging the foundation for his house too. Based on my understanding of his plan, I think Jim's house might end up being the most underground and invisible structure in antville.

Day 169

After fueling and greasing Sabretooth Rex, I finished digging out Jim's house site. The next excavation planned is to build the shared hugelberm dividing Jim's plot and my plot. But before jumping into more digging, I built the drip edge of Siesta.

Kai helped with the drip edge by holding up some boards for me when I needed just a couple extra hands, but he also made good progress hand-digging the drainage ditches for his house. Did I mention how this guy is industrious? Thanks for the help, Kai, and thanks for being an autonomous visionary!