Meet our animals

This weekend I attended the Oregon Flock and Fiber Festival in Canby, OR. To those of you who like to spin or knit, or who just think that animals are cool, it is something that you should really try to check out.

A couple of months back, Ryan and I were researching the lawn. Right now we have a neighbor, Mike, who mows the property for us. Once we are out there however, we don't want to have to spend a few thousand dollars on a big lawn mower. That would kind of defeat all of the good that we are trying to do by having one of those. To address this we have decided to add to our brood once we get to the property. I will tell you what we have decided in a later post but at this time, I feel it appropriate to introduce everyone to our current animals and more importantly, why we have them.

On our 75' X 100' lot here in Vancouver, we have a lot of animals already. Well, I should qualify that.

For years and years and years, we had two dogs. Period. Our dogs are all rescued. Lacey is rescued from the big Burns, OR, cruelty case that you all may have read about a couple of years ago. Lacey will never be normal because she was deprived of food and shelter for the first two years of her life. She will always be scared but we are working on her self esteem. Ginger was an accident of a breeder / hoarder and she is the Viking Explorer of the group. Fearless and feisty. She will protect her yard against all invaders that are at or near her size. Ginger and Lacey are each others safety, as it should be. Best to have a friend. We all need at least one good friend, don't you think??

Why so many animals now???

Recall my next door neighbor. You may remember him from the Clothesline post. The guy with the Tyvek.. Anyway, about 5 years ago a screw came loose in his head when it came to me and I became afraid. I was afraid for 4 years. Then, due in part to my relentless recordkeeping and sheer strength of will, he suddenly stopped doing what he was doing. Four years of being scared to go in my yard affected me deeply.  Ryan and I decided that we live here too and we should be allowed to do what we want and to not be scared to do what we want anymore. What we wanted to do was to have a couple of chickens so that we could have fresh eggs and so that we could cease having to use fertilizer on our lawn. It is expensive and I was always a little worried about the dogs getting it on their paws and maybe poisoning themselves.

Well I don't know anything about chickens but it seemed pretty easy. We figured that we would just eat them after they were done laying and that we wouldn't really care one way or another. While researching what the best chickens to get, I stumbled upon this duck site ( Live Ducks ). I am a water person, I have always liked ducks and ate them once ( they tasted weird). I started talking to Ryan about getting Ducks too because their poo is just as good as chickens, they eat the same food as the chickens and they are super cute. Ryan was worried that they would fly away but I didn't think that they did and once I found proof that they were not all going to disappear, he as willing to try them out. We figured that if they didn't work out we would just eat them and that would be the end of the "Great Duck Experiment".

I ordered the ducks from Metzger Farms (see Resource List) and we set about to get the chickens. We picked up the chicks from the Urban Farm Store in Portland. The baby chicks were cute and everything but they were ravenous feeders. They would attack your hand when you got near them. I saw that it was going to be easy to eat these chickens. They seemed like little serial killers in a feather covering.  The ducks were arrived the next week. I think Ryan finally came on board when he told our mailman to be on the lookout for some ducklings and he replied, "You'll be the first this year."  That signalled that this "duck" idea wasn't as "out of the box" as he thought. The ducks arrived and Ryan was in love.

It has been a year now and I have a lot of chores out in the yard,. This has helped me with my fear and been very helpful in getting me to feel like myself again. I always liked being in the yard and the birds are a very good reason.  The ducks are teenagers now and have a pond. They tried to have a family this spring but we didn't let the eggs hatch. The chickens have grown up and are as friendly as can be. One of them, A Buff Orphington called "No-Name" is just like a dog. She follows us everywhere,. She helps me with the gardening and she is a very pleasant chicken. The Silver Wyandotte called "PJ" (for Paige Jr.), is just a little bitch. She is moody and just seems on the verge of having a nervous breakdown most of the time. We named her Paige Jr. because she was so fearless and independent as a chick. She didn't hang out with everyone else and did her own thing... just like me. I have to admit these last 5 years have made me a bit moody and sometimes I wonder what else is going to happen to me. So maybe I can identify with how PJ feels a little bit.

Either way, we don't even think about eating anyone now and are, in fact, excited about the possibility of Mabel and Bob having some little ducklings once we get to the property. Bob spent two months on her nest this year and she just seems to really want to be a little mother. We are going to let her do that. Dorothy is the runt of the ducks and we don't know if she will ever feel like being a Mom. We are currently hoping that she makes it through this winter. She seems to be the more sensitive to cold and illness and she was slow to understand how to take care of her feathers.We watch her everyday and cheer her on as she preens and tries to keep her feathers waterproof. The test will be this winter.  Bob and Mabel seem to be old pros and we know that they will make it. Luckily, we have a friend that will help us if it comes to that.

So now that you are up to speed as to why we have animals, it is time to meet them...

Introducing Bob, Mabel and Dorothy.  Welsh Harlequin Ducks

Swimming

Grazing

                    And No-name and PJ, the Chickens...

Not to mention Ginger and Lacey, the dogs...

Did I mention that this week we rescued a cat? Ryan has always missed having a cat.

Everyone, meet Otis. He was taken in by one of my clients on a fixed income. He is so friendly and mellow that the kids in the complex often threw Otis up in the air, and down the slide in the playground... because they could. Otis is lucky that they never broke his legs. He is the most mellow and friendly, not to mention smart cat that I have ever met and we feel lucky that he likes us. Even Lacey and Ginger (who hate cats) seem to be getting used to him.

Work on the Trees continues... status update on many things

Seems like I look away and another week has past.

Ryan and I are busily trying to get to Washougal every chance we get to cut on the trees some more. We are making steady progress. We have just started to get into the trunks of both trees and have at least a cord of wood in our pile already as we have been taking the time to cut up the branches as well.

This is where we were at as of a few days ago. We are trying to be fastidious so that we don't have to revisit areas once the wood has been cut. I think this also helps Mike navigate with his mower better.



Other than that, Ryan and I are slowly letting ideas percolate in our heads for the house. In the last few weeks we have revisited the entire first floor layout to address an issue of providing a buffer space between the entry and the living space, this led to the total relocation of the stairs going into the basement (AKA Ryan's new train layout) as well as positioning of the mudroom in the garage instead of in the house.

Moving the stairs and the mudroom creates a condition where we can completely seal off the heat envelope of the main living areas from the "transitional" areas where there will be a lot of movement from inside to outside. I will be posting the layout of our house on this blog at some point once all of the major changes have been made.

We are also researching quite a few things for the house and yard. The Living Building spec  (of which I have not posted all of the Petals yet. My bad  :( ) wants us to locally source as much of the materials as possible. However, the "ideas" for what we are planning can come from anywhere in the world. I like that.

We were contacted by Barry LaDuke of LaDuke Radiant Sales. He is a resource that can get our grubby little hands on an actual Daikin Altherma, now that we have decided that that is the way we want to go. His website has a lot of cool stuff on it, so check it out. He has also introduced us to a product created, developed and manufactured in Tualatin, OR. Barry will be sending us a sample and we are excited about reading into the Ecowarm Panel

A while back, I had helped my friend Allen Poole install the tubing for his radiant heat flooring. His method was to use plywood sleepers to hold down the tubing and create a surface to attach flooring to as well as absorb and redistribute heat from the tubes to the room. The Ecowarm is the same idea except that the sleepers use a smaller tubing, there is a recycled aluminum layer that more efficiently distributes the heat from the tubes and the tube size can be smaller. Thinking about it, it sounds like a no brainer, but we are eagerly awaiting the sample and want to consult with Allen to get his opinion on what he thinks as well.

Isn't this ingenious? Allen's Kitchen floor

Allen, I continue to be blown away by your project. Just looking at this picture makes me smile because when we installed this tubing, it just seemed like this is how everyone should have their floors. Who needs a bunch of noisy forced air vents everywhere? Why aren't more people doing this?  YOU are an inspiration to me.

We Pause this message for Station Identification... and the best refrigerators

This last week has been super busy on the property. The September 11 activities and subsequent reliving of that horrible day took the wind out of my sails for a few days but we are back.

Ryan and I have been making trips up to the property in between work shifts to process the wood. Our chainsaws just got back from the repair shop so we will be able to make some real progress in the coming days. We offered our neighbors the entire dead tree but that somehow was misunderstood, so between the neighbors that burn, we are giving away half of the trees fell. We hope that by the time we actually get up there they remember that we come in peace.

A shout out to Triangle Resources, they take as much as we can cram into our truck and let us dump it for only $7. They are 6 miles away from our lot, so it is gratifying for us to be able to recycle the wood waste rather than be forced to burn it.

I was researching the fridge that we want to put in the house and stumbled upon this list of Reefers that are Energy Star Compliant.  It is such a big list that I had to share.


Energy Star Compliant Refrigerators

This is the one that we are looking at.. it uses so little power that they use them in places like the middle of the jungle in Guatemala. Sunfrost

The Materials Petal is next

September 11

Ten years ago, I was working for Louisiana Pacific in the Web Department. We had just been hit with the NIMDA virus and all outside internet access had been killed. Additionally, our company was going to through some major changes. At home, I was knee-deep in a "grandmother" situation. The week of 9/10 was going to be super busy and emotional for me. Then on Tuesday, I was getting on the 105 heading to work and the bus driver said, "Did you hear that a plane crashed into the World Trade Center?"

I think that I was lucky. For everyone else, stuff was happening but they could not get out of our internal network to see. As far as I was concerned, my #1 priority became getting as much information that I could to my companies internal sites so that our employees, company-wide, could concentrate on what they were doing and know that their Web Department would share anything that happened with them. It was all on the front page. A week later, our Internet access was opened again so that people could "get out", but that started a trend in what was to become, my department. 9/11 started a lot of things for a lot of people.

NYT Front Page

I remember it like it happened yesterday. For several years, I couldn't even listen to patriotic music without tearing up. Watching that second plane live as it crashed. Feeling such sorrow for the First Responders that gave everything that day. Watching month after month as the volunteers worked on "the pile". It is in all of us who watched it. I try, everytime I see a police officer or fireman, to say something to them. There never seems to be a good opening. It must make them feel as awkward as it does me to say, but it needs to be said.

You are the ones that run toward the fire. You are the ones that catch the man with the gun. On 9/11, hundreds of you ran towards those burning buildings and got those people out. You climbed thousands of steps for the chance at helping just one more person survive. I cannot imagine the fear that you felt down inside when you saw the first building fall, but you did not let it show. You are the ones who put your lives on the line every day to keep us safe. THANK YOU FOR ALL THAT YOU DO.

Victim #1:Fire Chaplain Father Mychal Judge. Killed when the first tower collapsed.

Shortly after 9/11, the comedian, Yakov Smirnoff created a giant mural which hung on a building overlooking Ground Zero for a long time. I would like to share it here. For a long time, this image was a backdrop for LP's Internal Homepage.  We cannot afford to forget the lessons learned that day.

Tomorrow is the 10th Anniversary of this fateful event. The day that we lost 3,123 people representing 40 countries. 

I hope that you all take a moment out of your day and remember where you were, how you felt and most of all, the innocent lives that were lost on that day.

Trees Down

On Friday, September 9, 2011, Wright Tree Service cut down our four trees. According to our neighbors, the process was exacting and very professionally done. They put those trees down with precision. In fact, even though they could have, they completely avoided the willow tree smack dab in their way and opted to fell two trees on either side of it. A few of the neighbors have already approached us about the trees. Ryan and I feel that there is plenty to give everyone some for the winter. We are most excited about being able to help some others who burn exclusively and have been hit hard by the times. Mainly we are happy about the PUD being able to help us with these trees, because we were kind of lost in knowing what to do.

The dead tree delimbed itself!!

Me and Lacey chillaxin'

This is our current view from the north end.  See the Willow Tree? Those guys are amazing!!

Ground View

The Health Petal

The Health Petal: Maximizing physical and psychological health and well being.

According to the Living Building Challenge 2.0:

"The intent of the Health Petal is to focus on the major conditions that must be present to create robust, healthy spaces, rather than to address all of the potential ways that an interior environment could be compromised. Most buildings provide substandard conditions for health and productivity. There is a direct correlation between decreased comfort and increased environmental impacts, since solutions in the physical environment to improve well-being are often energy-intensive and wasteful."

I know... sounds a little "new age-y" right?  I try to think of it as the Challenge architects want us to live comfortably and to breathe fresh air. How many of us, in an effort to save a little bit of money, turn down the heat just a little too far? Or how many times have you entered someone's house and all you smell is the fresh carpet that they just had installed?  That's formaldehyde (form·al·de·hyde) folks and a host of other nasty chemicals off-gassing from your brand new carpeting. That new paint smell?  Same thing.  Chemicals.

Big deal right?  Hey, I'm all about chemicals. When I was in the Job Corps, we used to paint every day. Every day we would clean our brushes with our bare hands in that vat of paint thinner that was half saturated with that "donated" paint [read: lead based paint].  Do I have cancer? Not yet.  But, even then, and even us stupid kids in the Job Corps would joke about how we were all going to get cancer someday. Nowadays there are some people that are so sensitive to chemicals that they can't even be around certain things in new houses or they get sick.  Chemicals have their place but it's pretty silly to go around thinking that you can breathe them and nothing will ever happen.So, we have the Health Petal and it's three Imperatives.

The Health Petal:

• Civilized Environment = Every occupiable space must have operable windows that provide access to fresh air and daylight.
  
  
• Healthy Air = To promote good indoor air quality, Renovations, Buildings, and buildings completed as part of Neighborhood projects must meet the following criteria:
   
• Entryways must have an external dirt track-in system and an internal dirt track-in system contained within a separate entry space.
• All kitchens, bathrooms, copy rooms, janitorial closets and chemical storage spaces must be separately ventilated and exhaust directly to outside air.
• Ventilation rates must be designed to comply with ASHRAE 62.1-2007 and equipment must be installed to monitor levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), temperature and humidity.
• Smoking must be prohibited within the project boundary.
  
  Conduct air quality testing at pre-occupancy and after nine months of occupancy to measure levels of Respirable Suspended Particulates (RSP) and Total Volatile Organic Compounds (TVOC).
• Biophilia = The project must be designed to include elements that nurture the innate human attraction to natural systems and processes. Each of the six established Biophilic Design Elements must be represented for every 2,000 m2 of the project:
  
  
• Environmental features
• Natural shapes and forms
• Natural patterns and processes 
• Light and space 
• Place-based relationships
• Evolved human-nature relationships

Remember wayyyy back (last week) when I told you it was going to get a little touchy feely? Biophilia is what I meant. Pete Dubois from the county says that this is more of an "intent" thing. We have looked at the Biophilia book referenced and it all looks like pleasant shapes and room design. Like Fung-sheui kind of. We are planning on tackling this part by making some allowances to preserve the view, allow in as much light as possible, make our house blend in as much as possible with color and size [Read: our house is not going to be Southfork on the Washougal River. Please tell me that you got that reference or I am truly too old to be writing a blog.  :) ] .

As far as the "Evolved human-nature relationships"... you've got us there. Seems to me that the Indians when Columbus landed had a pretty good "human-nature" relationship so shouldn't it be "uncivilized human-nature relationships"?  We are planning on going back to the Great Depression sans the killing all of our animals for food. I doubt that PJ and No-Name would appreciate being dinner and the joy that they give us is more valuable than any chicken dinner their bodies would afford us.

I'll let you ponder this latest Petal. The Materials Petal is next. Have a great Labor Day weekend everyone!

Trees.... Trees we want to cut down.

In our Solar Survey post, we demonstrated how the trees and buildings around you can affect your solar exposure. In general, our current solar exposure is truly great, but we can always dream, can't we?

That pesky bump on the right hand side of our survey was problematic for us on several levels: it limited both our solar and wind exposures (Ideally, you want your wind turbine to be above everything else.), they exposed our structure to a falling tree hazard and lastly, one of them was DEAD. D-E-A-D as a doornail. What is a doornail anyway?

Ryan called every tree man and yard he could find near our site. Four trees was not enough of a haul to even mess with.  We were at the property cutting down one of the damaged trees last week and our neighbor Mike showed up. He said, "You have a dead tree. Just call the PUD and they'll remove it for you."  Really!!!???  Seriously??!!!

These trees??    They're kind of tall. Mike went on to say that since the power lines go along the road, the PUD was invested in preventing an issue with the dead tree possibly falling over during the rough Washougal winters.


We were so disheartened that somehow we were going to have to figure out a way to cut down that dead tree ourselves.

Enter Jim Huggins of Clark PUD.   (Our new favorite man in the whole world)

We met with him and his tree man this week.

One signature on a permit and it's all set up.

The best part is that they are going to fall all four trees because the dead one is in the back and a real pain to get to.

Here is a photo of the marked trees. The dead one is the left one in the back. Right next to it is one that is dying and leaning.


They will be falling all four of these trees whole next week. We will try to be there and get a video.

For the next... year? or so, we will be chopping up these trees. We plan to give some of the firewood to our neighbors as a gesture. We will be able to use some of it but suffice it to say, we will have quite a bit of firewood if any friends or family are interested.