Home Skills: Chimney Works

Looking at the new heating season, DH and I were looking at two tasks.

1. Clean the wood stove chimney. It had been two years, so we felt it was time. Instead of hiring a chimney sweep ($150 a visit) we bought a chimney brush with rods ($165). DH climbed up (our house has only one storey), I fed him the brush and the rods, and the job was done in 15 minutes.  We’ll add these tools to the Transition Wayland Tool Pool (chimney sweep not included).

2. All of last year, whenever the furnace would come on, the house would fill with an exhaust smell. Not enough to set off our carbon monoxide alarms, but unpleasant. We diagnosed the problem as a crack in the old chimney flue. We asked for an estimate and it came back at $1200 (materials and labor). But when the woodstove was installed and we had the other flue lined, it didn’t look like rocket science. So we bought the metal liner, the connectors and the chimney top online and the high temperature caulk and silicone ($400 total ), and with the help of two friends installed it in an hour or so.

It was pretty warm out today, 50F, so both chimney flues were unused until around 6 pm. I even opened the windows wide. I emptied the rain barrels for storage, reattached the gutters, put the hoses away. I am eager t0 clear the downed limbs from the garden beds so I can plant my garlic. I’ve got 4 pounds of seed garlic and plan to put some in every bed to “sanitize” the soil. I need to fix the hoop house (only one tear from the fallen branch). And I want to get some horse manure from my neighbor and start spreading it all over. Also, I need to get me 5 bales of straw from  the feed mill…

All that will depend on Amie. Her school is canceled a second day because the building still doesn’t have electricity, but she is ill, anyway, and will probably be home tomorrow as well.

Nor’easter > Without Electricity Again

The Nor’easter of October 2011 hit our town pretty badly. Actually, it was just a small snowstorm, not too heavy, not long-lasting. But the trees were not ready for it. It was only the fourth time that there was snow before Halloween in NYC since the civil war! Add to that that the trees now “think” (for good reasons) that it’s summer at the end of October…

So they were still flush with green leaves, which had only just started turning. The snow stuck to them and that’s what weighed them down. This was the view out my living room window the morning after the storm.

Gorgeous, but dangerous. None of those trunks or branches are usually that diagonal. Several tops snapped off after the picture was taken.

The night before this picture was taken, the night of the storm, I lay awake in bed listening to the creaking and straining of the trees, the tearing of wood fibers, then the crack, then whoosh and finally thump of limbs and branches crashing to the ground. After a couple of hours of this, you just fall asleep from exhaustion, your brain telling you: que sera, sera.

None hit the house, the cars, the roof with the panels. But the hoop house was hit, and two of our fences (metal) are beyond repair. The veg garden is a mess.

There are still a lot of snapped limbs – some the size of small trees – hanging in the canopy, waiting for a good gust of wind to tear them loose. It’s the reason why Halloween is canceled!

Well, to be precise: the town is leaving it up to the discretion of the parents but advises to do an “alternative Halloween”. DH and I know what swords are hanging above our heads, so we’re not letting Amie venture outside.

Another reason for canceling Halloween is that, after over 50 hours, 25% of the town’s population still doesn’t have power back. School was canceled today too, and Amie’s elementary school might still be out of power tomorrow. 56% of people in my town were without power.

We were among them. The evening of the stormwe heard a loud thump and then the power was out.  Our solar is entirely grid-tied. The grid goes down, all our solar harvest gets diverted into the ground.

But we were prepared with one head lamp each with batteries that are always charged.

We also had our trusted stove – the best investment we ever made – and lots of wood! It provided heat, crucial because the temperature dropped to 25 F the following night. The town opened an emergency shelter in one of the schools.

The stove also allowed hot water for washing dishes and even for a bucket shower with shampoo, and for tea. I also made a wonderful stew on it of garden vegetables and sausage.

Our power was restored after 40 hours. Not too bad, compared to last time (after Irene), which was a little over two months ago. That time we were without electricity for 6 days. So we knew the drill (it was warmer then and I cooked outside on the camping stove).

With the way the economy is going I don’t see all those wires and cables going underground, as they are in most of Europe. So we’re looking into battery backup for our solar.

{UPDATE} When I told Amie we couldn’t go trick or treating she burst into tears, so we went along the safe side of the street, just 10 or so houses. She also opened the door and doled out a lot of candy. So she was happy. Not our usual Halloween, but some of it, anyway. Many people from the North of our town, which is still without electricity, came to our neighborhoods.

Bill McKibben at Occupy Boston

Last week Thursday a group of us from Transition Wayland carpooled and took the train into Boston to add our numbers to the 99% at Dewey Square.  The special occasion was Bill McKibben’s visit. He was there to let the 99% know that the 1% is ruining it for the 100% for the sake of quick profit. He had some choice words about and for President Obama, especially about the XL Pipeline and the exploitation of the Alberta Tar Sands, which, according the NASA climate specialist Jim Hansen, would mean “GAME OVER FOR THE CLIMATE”.

Here’s the video I shot:

http://youtu.be/j3tWIL_UCDg

In other news, we burned our first fire in the wood stove. The perfect thing to redeem a  wet and chilly, gloomy day!

First Wood’s In

We brought in a little more than 1/3 of a cord of well-dried wood today. We still have a good two and a half cords under cover in the back yard, which should get us through the Winter. The trees that came down this year and that we’re still bucking will make for good dry wood next year.

We also scavenged three boxes of kindling from our property (thanks, Irene!).  Good (small anddry) kindling, I find, is worth as much as the firewood itself for getting a good fire going. Amie helped a lot with that so she wanted to pose with her handiwork.

Hanging above her is the drying sage.

We’ve still only had one night of frost here. Today was another rather balmy day. The tomatoes and peppers in the hoop house (still doorless) keep on growing and ripening.

The First Follower

This comes pretty close to what I was trying to say.

“It was the first follower that transformed a lone nut into a leader.
There is no movement without the first follower.
We’re told we all need to be leaders, but that would be really ineffective.
The best way to make a movement, if you really care, is to courageously follow and show others how to follow.
When you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first person to stand up and join in.”

Garden Harvests, and Deer

Right there, behind the sunchokes

What with the flurry of activity/activism around here, the garden has been neglected somewhat. On top of that, the deer decided to cross from backyard where they usually hang out (an extensive wildlife corridor runs behind our property) to the front. In the front yard they ate the weeds and strawberry plants. Then they started browsing my veg garden, first defoliating the sweet potatoes, then finishing off the green beans and swish chard and trampling the carrots.

Trying to chase it away. It couldn’t be bothered!

Still, we had some harvests.

It was mainly green beans, peppers and eggplants. Tomatoes did extremely poorly this season.

the sweet potato bed once the deer were done with it

sweet potatoes, freshly dug

sweet potatoes, curing. Once washed it was obvious that there is a lot of vole damage on them.

deer-grazed chard

deer-grazed green beans (the end of our green beans)

Remember that beautiful elecampane? It grew enormous. All those flowers have now set seed – billions of seeds, some of which I harvested.

And then there is all that wood that came down in Spring. The pile originally looked like this:

I believe we’ve bucked half of that now. Our property is lined with sawed logs, waiting to be split (we’ll rent a splitter). Amie is very much into counting and tallying these days. She counted 157 of these! In the picture she’s wearing ear protection because DH was running the chain saw.


Empower *Everyone*: Leaderless Movements

Today I read this article about leaderless movements like Occupy Wall Street. The article itself doesn’t quite deliver on its promise (“The history of leaderless movements”), but it got me thinking.

When’s the last time you were part of a leaderless movement? Can you remember? No guru, no one spokesperson, no one hero or “example”?

Some of you were probably part of such a movement, but you didn’t notice. That’s because we are blind to it. We think that movements need leaders, or they can’t go anywhere, right? I mean, if there is no leader then who is the movement going to follow?

But a following is not a movement. It’s a mob.

Oftentimes people regale me with stories of brilliant and wise or exceptionally good people. I always thought, hey, kudos to them. But now that I’m in this “let’s move” mode, when most of my conscious thought is driven by The Work that is Urgent,  I’ve become mentally allergic to such stories. People on the pedestal are anathema to the empowerment of the many, of all. They are the ideal we can’t attain. They also absolve us of our own empowerment and decision making, and all that comes with it, like responsibility and sacrifice.

Now I know why I am drawn to that saying: we are the people we’ve been waiting for! “We”: you and I, all of us, we’re all heroes. We should be.

All we need to do is move. Move ourselves.

I realize that when I introduce Transition, I usually invoke Rob Hopkins. Though I try to stress that he’s a normal person like you and I, I still always end up implying that he’s a saint. I’m going to quit that. I’m going to stress: Transition is what *you* do, when you volunteer to restore that apple orchard, when you grow your own food, when you walk or bike instead of drive, etc.

The movement is not in or because of Rob Hopkins. Or Richard Heinberg or Joel Salatin or Bill McKibben. Yes, they are exceptional people, or rather, they have an exceptional grasp of what is going on and what we need to do. Yes, we should listen to what they have to say.

But they must not be our leaders. If they are, then it’s not us, moving, making a movement, leading ourselves. We can adopt their ideas, their principles, but real, lasting action will only come out of that if we make them our own.

Riot For Austerity – Month 35

This is the Riot for the month of September 2011. Our numbers were pretty stable here on the ole homestead. Mostly just the 3 of us. Our first year’s averages were calculated here, our second year’s averages can be found here. Edson fixed the calculator!

Gasoline.  Calculated per person. A trip to DC in it for DH, for work, and he carpooled, but I’ve no way to calculate that. I on the other hand am now walking Amie to school – and it’s just been wonderful! – so though I drive more for the activism, all in all I drive less.

22.65 gallons per person

55% of the US National Average

Electricity. First full month since the installation of our solar and our bill said 0 KWH!

Yes, we produced more electricity this month than we consumed!

The electricity company even gave us credit for what we produced over and above what we consumed. Turns out we do still have to pay something, though: not production charges (obviously!) but still delivery charges, because our system is grid-tied.

Solar doesn’t get as high a “percentage discount” (as a green technology) as wind does. De to the calculator being down, I was calculating it like wind, but now I have no excuse. So the percentage will jump a bit.  This is reckoned per household, not per person.

458 KWH (our solar) and 0 KWH (NSTAR)

25.3% of the US National Average

Heating Oil and Warm Water. This too is calculated for the entire household, not per person. During these warm months it’s basically for hot water, which is stupid.

8.5 6.5 gallons of oil

13.8% 10.5% of the US National Average

{UPDATE} 3 Jan 2012: The way I have been calculating our heating oil consumption is by reading off the furnace how many hours it ran, then multiplying it by .85 because that’s the amount of gallons of oil I *thought* it used. Now DH just told me that our furnace is more efficient than that and the correct number is .65. Hence the correction

Trash. After recycling and composting this usually comes down to mainly food wrappers.

10 lbs. pp per month

7% of the US National Average

Water. This is calculated per person.

511 gallons pp.

17% of the US National Average

Volunteer Activist by Day and by Night

On Monday evening there was an interesting meeting in my town, about a small wooded piece near a local pond that is under threat of the bulldozer and development. I wanted to go and hear what it was all about, meet the people organizing against it happening. Hear the arguments on the other side…

But I had spent most of the weekend “on the beat”: Moving Planet all day Saturday, on Sunday a presentation about Transition to my town’s First Parish Green Sanctuary Committee (which, I believe, I am now a member of), putting together a press release about the previous day, picking up the sandwich boards from the intersections, setting up some of our coming events, and in the late afternoon getting my neighborhood’s block party going.

So I stayed home, cooked a meal and had dinner with my family. We read books together and I took Amie to sleep. Then I read my novel (scfi-fi, these days, total escapism!).

I am now doing this kind of work, “volunteer activism,” pretty much full-time.  I email, maintain two websites, design fliers, write article, schedule talks and meetings, prepare presentations, and plot world domination plan events during the day, when Amie is at school and while she reads or does homework. The events, talks, presentations and meetings themselves happen in the evenings and over the weekends. That’s because that’s when people are “off work” and can come. This means I have very little down time anymore.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining! I’m saying, like I often do when I describe Transition, that it takes the whole person: heart, hands, and head. Weekdays and weekends. On and off. I think that’s right, I think that’s how it should be. I live what I preach. I am moved by the cause day and night. I think I am lucky, that I don’t have to tear myself in two, that I carry my passion around with me at all times, at home and “on the beat”.

I’m still going strong and I’ve got my buddies looking out for me, making sure I don’t burn out. So one of them went to the meeting instead. And I could stay home, and take care of myself and my family.

I got a report in the morning.

How Many Came? Waiting for Numbers

That question is easier to answer: 8 became 20 became 45 became 1500.

On the Walk to Walden, 7 humans and 1 horse. As we walked in the humid, mosquito-filled 80F weather, through Wayland, Lincoln and Concord, more joined. By the time we reached there were about 20 of us, and at Walden Pond we met up with about 20 more for our “Thoreau moment” with 2 speakers. Read all about this part of the day in the  Wayland Patch.

Then we high-tailed it to the Concord train station, where we just about caught the train into Boston for Moving Planet – New England. How many were there? Hard to tell. One radio station said 1000, but I’d say more, 1500 perhaps. We could count the heads on the mass picture they took at some point.

We had a great time, sauntering, chatting, listening to our speakers, dashing for the train, relaxing and networking during the train ride, marching through Boston chanting and laughing, meeting old and new friends, listening to the funny and moving speakers at the event.  I came home exhausted, limping, voice as good as gone. It was wonderful, we had been part of an event that took place in my own town and all over the world.

The day after, someone who had not gone to any of the events told to me “how disappointing it was” that not more people had showed up. Several things struck me about this statement.

First, the speaker didn’t say she was disappointed. She wasn’t, she was just making conversation. She meant that I must be disappointed. She wasn’t interested enough to have a feeling of her own about it.

Second, I thought I was disappointed but the more I think about it, I realize I’m not. I even have a hard time actually figuring out why I should be. I saw many people from my town there, some I had invited, some came as a surprise. True, I missed some friends who had done their best and couldn’t make it, but I wasn’t disappointed that they weren’t there: they had helped and were there in spirit. They cared. And then there were those who were there: all of us understanding and supporting each other. Tens, thousands of us!

Third, what does it mean when someone who doesn’t care, says that “it was disappointing”?  Is she really saying, “Only a 1000, it couldn’t have been that important, so it was okay for me not to be there”? Or even “this movement isn’t big enough for me to care about yet”?

Now there’s an interesting conundrum!

It’s akin to the situation of so many waiting to invest in solar technology because they’re waiting for better technology to come on the market – thus actually holding back that the emergence of the better technology they’re waiting for!

People!

We are the people we are waiting for!

The moment is now.

I’m struggling with all this.

I look forward to reading Frances Moore-Lappe’s new book Ecomind with  Transition Wayland. Its subtitle is Changing the Way We Think, to Create the World We Want.

Solutions to global crises are within reach… Our challenge is to free ourselves from self-defeating thought traps so we can bring these solutions to life.

I hope it delivers! I need some answers, soon!