evan's ant village log

Thanks Inge! Jocelyn is an amazing cook and hostess, and as great as the food looks, it tastes at least twice as good!

Thanks Sean! I'm glad to hear that it was helpful. One option for becoming a gapper here at the labs is to work out an arrangement with one of the ants to come out as one of their guests, then once here you've got lots of options. In fact, Paul has specifically stated that ants can undercut him on the gapper fee. He's made it clear that ant-organized projects, like the PEA Workshops for instance, are a totally viable alternative to the standard gapper channels. Just something to think about.

Day 281

Above freezing and raining. Not enough to melt much of the snow on the ground, but enough to relieve many of the trees of their burdens.

The Abbey has been around root cellar temperature most of the time, so my kraut is fermenting very slowly, but I see some bubbles!

The ducks got a chance to frolic outside of their run while I vigilantly stood guard.

Day 282

We went to Missoula and picked up Kai from the airport! Yay! Kai's back! Ava is reunited!

While in town we harvested some linden seeds. Linden, also known as basswood, is super hardy, a great carving wood, the seeds might be edible if you can crack them open, they're great bee trees, and some species have edible young leaves! Let's grow some linden!

Now that the red shed at basecamp is insulated, and one of the stoves Peter Vandenberg built, the Mini Mouse, has been installed in there, it's a pretty comfortable space. Good for crashing in when you're too tired to walk all the way up to the lab.

Day 283

A couple of the tractor attachments, the box blade and the back blade, have been sitting in less than ideal spots around basecamp for a while now. Paul wanted them moved, so Kai and I spent some time figuring out how they are supposed to be attached and then we moved them down to Arrakis. Apparently, the attachments are what's known as category 1, whereas the tractor is category 2, so the pins that connect them are loose unless you use adaptor sleeves. The sleeves were nowhere to be found, so we rigged up temporary cardboard sleeves just to get the attachments moved safely, but the plan is now to change out the tractor's balls to be category 1 to avoid this issue in the future. TMI, I know...

On a lighter note, we got a sled! It's just a cheap plastic one, but it works great for dragging stuff in the snow, and is super fun for getting down the hill really fast!

Day 284

Kai and I have been cutting, splitting, and stacking tons of wood, and now we've got a good little stockpile. The Allerton Abbey thermal inertia experiment redux has begun! The idea this time is to get the inside temperature up to about 75 for about 12 hours a day for ten days in a row, and at the end of every day to blast it up to 85 before letting it go out. After ten days of this, we stop applying heat and see what happens. The thermo-sensors are still in place and recording, so we should have some pretty neat graphs before long.

Keeping it around 75 inside all day means that at least one of us needs to be there to keep the fire going, so Kai and I have been trading off between fire duty and working outside. One thing that can be done inside is woodcarving. I started on a spork but ended up breaking it. Kai made his first spoon!

Day 285

We saw a woodpecker eating bugs out of the Abbey's wing walls. Go woodpecker go!

Since it's so warm in here, the little potted pomegranate from Thekla, (thanks Thekla!) in the windowsill thinks it's spring and has started putting on new growth. It might be a bit early...

Kai and I played some chess, and also played some cards. The cards we used were a gift from Jocelyn, (thanks Jocelyn!) and each one profiles a different wildflower of north america. So cool!

Good to see the Mini Mouse has been put to work. Maybe a good opportunity to see how it'll hold?

Regarding the Abbey's thermal inertia experiment: halfway in that 10 days it should be easier to get up to 75 F, needing less fuel.
Ten days seems a bit short to me, a month would be more like it!

I'm curious about the thermal inertia experiment - will you be weighing the wood before it goes into the firebox? It could be interesting if there's a log of how much wood went in when...

Thanks Peter! It has been getting easier and easier to get it up to temp. We may, in fact, extend the initial heating-up stage of the experiment for at least a couple more days, (not a month, fortunately, as keeping it that hot inside all day is both uncomfortable and time-consuming.) The reason for an extension is that Paul donated a 1/2 cord of wood to the experiment, (to answer your question, Jackson, no, we didn't weigh it.) And even though we've been keeping it at or above 80 most of the time, we still have more wood than we can burn in the next two days.

Days 286-292 (part 1)

Two more ducks down. Elrohir disappeared without a trace, leaving me with a clarity that my reformed defenses were little more than mindless and reactionary security theatre.

Kai and I got to work on building a mobile micro-coop, hopefully one that would be more secure. But before we could finish the new coop we lost Mortimer too.

There are 6 ducks left: 5 females and 1 male.

Days 286-292 (part 2)

We got the duck ark, (aka Petunia's Palanquin,) finished. And while a bit heavy, Kai and I were able to move it. It'd be easier with 4 people, or if we added some wheels, but for now it's at least technically mobile. If the chicken wire doesn't seem adequate, more thin boards may be added. It doesn't have a floor, and while the ground is currently frozen enough to make it difficult for predators to dig under, eventually that could be a future weak point worth addressing. It probably would have been less work to renovate the duck hollow than to build this new coop, but after the winter the idea is to keep the ducks shifting through paddocks so a mobile coop would be needed eventually anyway.