Biannual Post

Today is MLK Day.

 The Donalt(sic) has had his fat attitude(ss) pried out of the White House for about a year now but he continues to thrust it into everything with the eager complicity of way too many of my fellow citizens, possibly even some friends and neighbors.   I don't know that I can explain any of it, and simply railing against it doesn't seem to do much either.   But I try to do some of both.

Here at Otowi Bridge, where Edith Warner, a comfortable-class single (Quaker) woman chose to settle to escape the confines of being a young woman in "polite" eastern society, things perk along in what appears to be the warmest (least cold) year yet.  I've been here nearly 22 years, but have been watching this home(stead) evolve from the highway for more like 42.   From a couple of ratty mobile homes to a pole building to an apartment perched over a 2 car open garage to an adobe-style stucco-clad modern(ish) home to the evolving home(stead) that fits (or reflects) me more and more every year.   I have buried 3 dogs and 2 cats on the property during my tenure, with several more cats being lost to predation along the way.   2 dozen chickens have lived here at one time or another as well as 4 geese.  Most of those moved on to other flocks where they continued their lives on a more traditional arc of farmyard life.   Our very last cat was buried 2 days ago.   It is very quiet.

Edith befriended the Tewa speaking peoples in the pueblo defined by the Spanish as San Ildefonso, granted soveriegnity within the larger Spanish empire in 1623 by the King of Spain (extending 2 Spanish leagues in each of the cardinal directions).  "Po-woh-ge-oweenge" is their own name for this place, "where the water rushes through", reflecting the break in a lava dam where a giant lake eventually drained, leaving sedimentary badlands as far north as 30 miles upriver.   

She was installed at the railroad crossing of the Rio Grande just a few hundred meters (or yards if you prefer) west of here to manage mail/freight deliveries from the Chile Line.  Leading up to WWII this narrow guage line connecting Santa Fe to Denver was closed.  The rails were removed to relocate to Burma where the US was trying to back the resistance in the rising conflicts between Japan and China.    Once the Manhattan (atomic bomb) project was underway, she opened a tea house to serve the Lab Scientists who might travel off the hill, including a standing invitation-only dinner for the top Scientists every Tuesday.    The Wikipedia article on her does a good job of catpuring some of this, and the seminal text on her life is usually considered to be Peggy Pond Church's The House at Otowi Bridge.

She took up with a native man who helped her with heavier chores and eventually lived with her.   After the War, when a new automobile bridge was put in and traffic picked up, the Pueblo and the Lab Scientists joined together to build them a home away from all the noise and traffic where they lived until she died in 1951.   That house was abandoned and allowed to deteriorate sometime since I moved here,  the original house and depot on the Rio Grande itself has been abandoned now for a handful of years and will surely deteriorate beyond use eventually.    

Meanwhile, the Rabbit Hemorrhagic Fever pandemic decimated our Cottontail population just about the same time COVID-19 was ramping up.   Where we used to see a number of adult and baby bunnies daily for months during the Spring, we saw absolutely none in 2020 and only a few in 2021.   I saw one just the other day and hope that is a good sign for their recovery.   It has been reported that the severity in the southwest US has relieved.   Perhaps as a predator-prey-forage dynamic, the flux of ground squirrels and pack rats has also reduced significantly.   We have also been under increasingly warm/mild winters and a drought that goes with it.   

I'm starting to lose the plot of this post so will close it now...  maybe the only value here is to add a little background color.

Obligatory decadal post

It is now 2020 at Otowi Bridge, and true to the saying "a lot of water has passed under the bridge" while I have ignored this journal.

Most notably, the infamous NY Real Estate bankrupt billionaire Donalt Trump has been the US President for most of 4 years and is possibly on the verge of starting a major if not world-scale war with Iran.  He seemed more than a little surprised when he won the election (by the gerrymandered nature of out Electoral College while the popular vote went against him by a small percentage, much like the 2000 race between Gore and Bush II).

And perhaps *more* notably (how can one have more than most?) is the increased awareness of the impending disasters afoot in the world, roughly recognized as "Climate Change".  While there is still a modest contingent of "deniers" (probably well correlated with "flat earthers" and "intelligent designers") and a significant contingent of "deer in the headlights", there are more and more people across all generations trying hard to take the impending (already unfolding) crisis seriously.

I prefer to refer to it as "the End of the Anthropocene" which reflects the significant likelihood that one of the key consequences of our having "grown too big for our britches" is that we might well extinct ourselves along with many other species.   The Anthropocene nominally started when humans began to shape their environment significantly.   Some suggest 50,000 years ago as Homo Sapiens displaced/outcompeted/extincted other extant Homo species (Neanderthalensis, Denisovan) and began to radically change the local landscape through the hypercompetition with other apex predators, leading to the extinction of many megafauna, predator and prey alike.   Others start the clock of the Anthropocene with the advent of agriculture and city building around 10,000 BCE, and yet others don't consider our presence in the geologic record to be significant until the beginning of the industrial revolution when we began to spike the CO2 in the atmosphere with our abrupt and significant adoption of fossil fuels.  Finally, others consider the date to align with the first test of nuclear weapons when the geologic record will show wide distribution of radionuclides not to be generated by any other terrestrial source. 

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists coined a "Doomsday Clock" in 1947 to represent their best estimate of how much time we have left "in the grand scheme" before total self-annihillation.  In 1947 it was set to 7 minutes before midnight. In 19523, with the first tests of Fusion weapons, it was set to 2 minutes.  It was downgraded to 17 minutes in 1991 after the end of the cold war.  With the acknowledgement of Climate Change and President Trump's belligerent style on the world stage, it was back down to 2 minutes by 2018 and remains there to this day.

There are multiple Endogneous Existential Threats to consider, of which Climate Change (Crisis?) is but the most obsessed with publicly currently.   Nuclear war continues to be a major threat.   Species Extinction may be even more fundamental than Climate Change, but the two are inextricably linked.  General Environmental destruction (pollution, habitat loss, ecosystem collapse) is also directly related to the former  two.   The global rise of fascist governments is another direct risk to humanity and seems to be a driver for (and consequence of?) these challenges to the biosphere (rampant industrialism, deregulation, subsequent climate/political/environmental refugee migration).   And lastly (or not, and maybe not leastly) is the threat of Artificial Intelligence which might be on a continuum with Industrial Automation and even "the technological singularity" and "transhumanism".

It is hard to pick one of these issues to focus on these days which leaves many stuck in variations on denial, anger, bargaining, depression.   It is essential that we *act* now, but at the same time to remain deeply grounded and self-aware in our actions.   I believe that we "got where we are" by a combination of "willful ignorance" and "ignorant willfulness" in the guise of "action".   Trading out the classic players of the willfulness and ignorance for a new caste playing at the same game in the name of "saving the planet" may be a little too much like the myriad other "movements" in history which ended or peaked in events like "the Inquisition", "Colonisation", "Manic Hypercapitalism", etc.

Fortuately there are somewhat sane minds and voices responding to this unique moment in history (near the end of the Anthropocene if NOT history itself).   Bill McKibben, Rebecca Solnit, Joanna Macy, and Elizabeth are but a few of the most notable.

Many are rallying to the defense of their favorite, most dear, or just most notable cause right now.   It may be Climate Change, or a specific species (humpback whale or spotted owl), or a habitat (old growth forest, Great Coral Reef,  Arctic, etc.) or a specific subculture (LBGTQ, LatinX, Muslim, African-American, Native Peoples, etc.) or the Democracy Worldwide (or just the US Democrat Party?) or something else.   But my hope lies in an emergent awareness of the synergistic relations among *all* of these issues. 

A recent summit on Climate and Complexity that I attended in Stockholm Sweden helped to give me hope that this is on the minds of many and that many already embrace Systems Thinking and apply systems approaches to trying to understand *their* smaller piece of the bigger puzzle that is this "Impending End of the Anthropocene".

I too, am a bit of a "deer in the headlights", sitting here in my comfortable home, typing on my coal-powered laptop (most of the electricity provided at my location is generated by burning coal) connected to a coal-powered (or at least fossil-fuel) internet, thinking about eating some highly processed food (Red Pepper Soup from Trader Joe's) and going swimming at an olympic sized swimming pool whose water is heavily treated with industrial chlorine and heated by the burning of natural gas derived most likely from fracked wells near the same place the coal is extracted to make the electricity I will use in my (nominally) Electric Vehicle (Chevy Volt).

In self-defense, I may spend a few minutes or even hours working toward changing some of those things to reduce the impact on the planet that first worlders have (roughly 10x that of third-worlders and 110x the basal metabolism rate of other mammals our size).

Maybe I will post again this year/decade/geologic era...

Second Annual 2014

Second snow of the season, rain/sleet/slush...  first snow was gone in a day... rain in the intervening time... hard to sort out...  everyone is screaming "global warming!"... certainly possible.

Heating season so far has been "easy" but Im trying to keep it "comfortable" rather than "merely tolerable"...

Feeling the impending Solstice... sun its the mountain further south every day.

Annual 2014 Obligatory

Here I am again.

Heating season is past despite the occasional freeze and a few days of cool and windy.   Picked up a great load of down and dead oak from Tres Piedras at the beginning of the year.   The rest of the wood was marginal as always...  in size...   I just hate to pay for a cord of wood that I still have to cut down more to use...  

I deliberately ran the house as warm as I could easily in Nov/Dec so that come January coldest, it would not be as hard to keep it up above 65.   Setting up my "desk" next to the living room woodstove helped a lot...  easier to tend a fire you are directly warmed by!   

I got the pond operating again yesterday, the fishes (overgrown feeder goldfish from the pet store) survived the winter, or at least a number of them did, despite my not keeping the pump recirculating the whole time.   That was a relief, I am always saddened when I find orange "fish sticks" in the ice.   The fish who survive a full year are always much more robust to the threats of racoon hunters.   I do see snakes in the pond area but the garters just can't gulp a 3" carp, so I don't think they are having their way!

Annual Post

I can't even seem to make an annual post here!

We've made it through the 2012-13 heating season for the most part.   We've had a false spring the last week with days topping in the 50's and even some rain when you would expect snow!

We are roughly 2 cords of wood in and days like today, the house only dropped to mid 60's overnight and back up into the low 70's without any direct heat input.  

It remains difficult to get the firewood sizes needed for the cookstove, but a little extra effort and patience have paid off.

The dog now gets a 6 mile run every day up an arroyo nearby, behind (or in front of) my truck... this is just enough to make her sleep well, but not nearly enough to entertain her opposite our sedentary lifestyles.

Sigh...

Good Mooorningggg Otowi!

We woke to a small amount of snow, the second measureable snow of the season...  The last having *just* melted off yesterday in our indian summers lasting until Solstice!

I've been burning fires hot for a month now, trying to keep the heat-mass of the house "up" and for the most part it has worked.   I burned about a half cord of wood left from last year(s) and procured another cord just last week.   It might be enough to squeek by on, but the wood was not ideal.   I hit this every year, whomever I try to get wood from promises things but delivers different.   The hardest part is getting consistently small pieces for the cookstove.   When they advertise 14"-16" I usually get a LOT of 16-20"
and even some >20", often in large diameters.   Most of it fits in the medium sized stove, all of it fits in the big stove in the sunroom but very little of it fits in the cookstove which is what we use most often. 

The sunroom has been doing well for having *still* been unfiinished.  I got all the storm windows repaired *only* to have two of the upper-deck exterior windows break.... leaving me with two of those single-paned!    One of the two bancos is in but the brick floor is not, the space is almost as insulated as it is going to ever be, and it is still a tad leaky...      So far, I've fired the stove in there maybe a dozen times, one or two, rarely three charges of wood.... and it is maintaining roughly 40-80 degrees which is suitable for the plants (Agave, Aloe, Elephant Ear) and probably ideal for some winter greens if I can ever be bothered.

Over the summer we had a mother bear and cub in the Bosque, a consequence of the fires in the mountains... the Pueblo Ranger caught Suzy out walking in the arroyos and ran her off... making it very difficult to walk the dog (twice?) daily as she seems to need.  It feels unfortunate, as we would rather be "just good neighbors" than unwelcome trespassers.   We've kept watch over their fences, roads, cows, horses and even a few teens from the pueblo wandering to the bosque with rifles... nothing extravagant, but we thought we were being good neighbors... calling in with unusual activity... I even hopped the back fence with boots, gloves, shovel to help one of the members maintain/watch a fire he had going in his fields...  I think he had it under control, but I also think he welcomed the company and the potential help.   But...

Solstice is nigh.  This Thursday at 5:30 AM it would seem... all downhill from there!

and Of Course (again)

I am totally remiss.   Today was the last heating day of the winter.

Actually today was the day I turned off the active Solar...  the 8'x12' section of hot air panels facing south (right into our now giant cottonwood) which pump heat into a rock-bed under the floor of our house.  I don't have a precise number on how much heat they provide to the house but I'd roughly guess half of our BTUs come in that way.   It tends to run for a few hours in the morning and a few in the afternoon when the big tree is not shading it completely. 

It still dips below freezing most every night and may for another month or more, but the  days, when sunny are in the 60's and the solar gain is high.   

I did some significant pruning on the tree's lower branches which might allow good sun in during the coldest months, when the sun is very low...     Fall and Spring are not as important in any case.  The new Sunroom will definitely pick up the added exposure right away.  The sunroom was dried in, 90% sealed and 50% insulated for the cold months.   It was dropping below freeze inside during the colder nights, sometimes even if I ran the woodstove.  Of course half the windows didn't have their double panes (snap-in-storms that were broken, now repaired), and half the ceiling insulation was not in, many of the cracks not sealed well, and the floor is dirt, not the heat-absorbing, higher specific-heat brick floor  and bancos planned.  For the moment it was merely a big insulator for the south side... in place of the R20 wall is probably the equivalent of an R100 buffer.   The heat-flywheel effect will be fairly important, especially if we have the courage to let it get hot in there in the Autumn, rather than follow our summer instincts to keep it as cool as possible!

We haven't burned wood for maybe a month, or maybe only once or twice.  I fire up the cookstove with a few days worth of trash (mostly junk-mail) on a cold morning and the warmth from that is often welcome in at least two ways!  We burned maybe 1.5 cords of wood this winter, compared to 2-2.5 normally.  Part is a mild winter, but some is the sunroom I'm sure.   And extra, large, convenient, airtight stove in the sunroom will make it easier to pump heat into the house "on-demand" and when the sun is not out, but also an opportunity to burn more wood.  The branches I pruned might yield as much as 1/4 cord...  again, a double bargain from the sun.   At $150/cord purchased, I don't mind a $300-$500 winter heating bill.   I plan to build some flues through the bancos/floor/etc.  to capture/re-radiate some of that heat, to add to the flywheel effect.  I might even couple in the solar heat system somehow... to pump that heat into the floor rock-bed.   It is, like life, all a big experiment.