Burra Maluca

One of the main noticeable differences in my life since having the rocket mass heater is that I no longer use a heated blanket on my bed during the winter. I'm usually totally addicted to it, but now the temperature is much more even and I haven't felt the need for it all.

The only exceptions have been due to some weird health thing I have going on where I go hypothermic if I over-exert myself. I've managed to do this four times this winter and I've used a small heat pad (and big steaming mugs of cocoa!) to sort myself out again. The only time we've cheated and put an electric heater on was one exceptionally cold day when we'd been out all day attempting to get some tests done to figure out what is actually wrong with me and we'd come home with me hypothermic and the house cold because we hadn't run the the rocket mass heater that morning.

It's also been notable that as winter has progressed, we've both gradually adapted to lower temperatures. At the start of winter we'd feel cold at 18C (64.5F). Right now it's 16C (61F) and we both feel warm and cozy. The same sort of thing happens in reverse during the summer and we gradually adapt to the heat. Which I find fascinating, especially as it seems so many people can't function unless their homes stay within very narrow ranges of temperature. I suspect our bodies are capable of adapting far more than we give them credit for.

We've also decided, for various reasons, that we're not going to follow through with tying up bundles of sticks to feed en masse into the firebox. At first we thought it would save time, but in actual practice it's really no problem to grab what we want from the piles of sticks. Plus sometimes there are still loads of hot coals which, when pushed to the back of the firebox, mean that the floor of the firebox is no longer level so we need a bit of creative stick-stacking. And at other times we've let the coals run down a bit, so we want smaller sticks so that they catch fire more easily.

But the main reason is actually dragons. In particular, baby dragons. They are breeding. Again. And the babies hang out on the piles of sticks. If we pick up sticks singly and bundle them together, the baby dragons jump off. But I'm scared that if there are ready-tied bundles of sticks they will just hide inside. And Portuguese house-dragons simply aren't fire-proof. So I've banned the tying up of bundles of sticks for fear of accidentally burning any.

I mean - just look at them!

And, um, speaking of baby dragons, exciting things may be happening, which has instigated some new developments in and around the rocket mass heater. Which may soon become an official hatchery...

My dog eats sheep poop, goat poop, chicken poop, donkey poop, duck poop, cat poop, probably any other kind of poop he encounters, olives, apples, figs, oranges, persimmon, grapes, prickly pears (very carefully), wild mushrooms of all kinds, fish heads, ants, any small critter he finds before I do, bones, bits of wood, blankets, rubber, shoes, sleeping bags, the middle bits out of corn cobs, strawberries, the insides of some poor deceased critter he found in the forest a week or so after the fire when he ran off after a lightning strike (I know because he pooped the intestines out the next day, and he also stunk of dead-critter as he must have rolled in it first to soften it). He seems to cope fine with all of those!

Does he ever have digestive issues? Oh yes. But only if we are foolish enough to buy him anything other than the cheapest available dry dog food.

Go figure...

Also, don't kiss him. He's terribly fond of cat poop and knows all their favourite pooping places...

Thom Bri wrote:Trying to figure out how to get the grass under control given the rules.

I'm hopelessly behind updating my thread, and I'm not doing 'proper' GAMCOD because I'm not in the right climate zone, but we smothered the grass in our bed using grass cut from other areas around the place. If it's laid on thick enough, the grass underneath dies off enough that other stuff can be planted through it, which then gets a good head start.

A shovel will cost more than what anyone spent, above

Why buy a shovel?

My gamcod type bed was no-dig. The only time I used a shovel-type tool was to set the tiles around the edge, which was just because I happened to have some surplus old roof tiles and a suitable tool for putting them in. It wasn't strictly necessary to make a pretty raised edge for the bed. Putting those tiles in was also by far the most time consuming part of the whole experiment, and I only did it because I wanted the bed to become a permanent feature.

Vermelha, my fiery little red dragoness, heartily approves!

Deane Adams wrote:OK, for those of you who may not know, during one of Paul's presentations if he says "someone check my math on this" Don't, the guy is an engineer.  The concept or approach may be proven to be wrong (at some point), but the MATH will be correct!!

I was brave, or maybe foolish, enough to do this once. Sometimes the maths itself is correct while some of the inputs or assumptions are a bit off - calories per acre confusion

I have no affiliation with Leroy Merlin by the way. They are just a place that sells in both Portugal and Spain with a reasonably usable website. There are likely other, better builder's merchants near you.

LeroyMerlin sell sheets of acoustic and thermal insulation made of recycled cotton textiles for 8 euros per square metre - leroy merlin acoustic insulation

I have no idea how effective it is...

I seem to remember buying a big box of surplus groceries a few years ago, including a classic English Christmas pudding in a plastic bowl.

The instructions were something like 'steam for two hours, or pierce the lid and microwave for two minutes'

Tereza Okava wrote:I also (gasp) LOVE TANGLED YARN. I have seriously thought about being that person you can send yarn to for untangling.

Hehehehe - this is bringing back ancient memories of being a young child. My parents would go out to the local woollen mills taking used fchicken-feed sacks with them and pay a few pence to fill them up with the sweepings from around the looms. They would come home and tip out a great tangled mess of brightly coloured bits of woollen yarn and we'd all sit around it and tease out individual strands and wind them up into mini balls. When we'd done it all, the next job would be to sort the balls into different bags of different lengths, using the edge of the dining table as a measuring stick. The bags would be labelled one to around seven if my memory serves me right. Then mum would crochet granny squares using a teeny ball from bag one for the middle bit, and so on using a ball from each bag till the square was complete. Sometimes we'd help 'design' squares by choosing a colour from each bag and sliding them in turn, biggest first, onto a knitting needle.

Oh, and I use the old definition of hanks and skeins too.