Another step closer!

Well, we did it.  We decluttered, fixed up, painted and prepped the house, and sold it!  On Canada Day (July 1st), we moved all our worldly posessions down home to Saint John, New Brunswick.

This is a big step for us!  It's something we've been wanting to do for a long time, and suddenly the stars and planets aligned:

• I changed to a different team and started working from home
• I got really, really tired of our crappy satellite internet connection for working at home ;-)
  
• The housing market was hurting in Ottawa, but started an up-swing
• I took the lawn tractor to a shop for some work and mentioned that I didn't want to spend much on it because I'd be giving it to whoever bought our house, and the owner of the shop turned out to be in the market for a house!
• The buyers had already sold their home, and were motivated to downsize to a smaller house with land (our place fit the bill perfectly).

So now we're down home, with our stuff stored at Laura's parent's place and living at my Mom's place.  Definitely a temporary situation.  :-)

We figured it would be a perfect opportunity to build our dream home out at the Drawlyn, but after a bunch of research we've determined that it's not feaible at the moment to get any form of high-ish-speed internet out there.  And I need that for my job.  I made do with crappy satellite internet for too long at our place in Ottawa.

Since we can't get any real form of high-speed internet out at the Drawlyn, we're going to have an "urban interlude" in our plans.  We've bought a house on the west side of Saint John (closes Oct 1st), and plan on gradually building a "cottage" out at the property on the Drawlyn.

Over time, we'll gradually improve the cottage (still plan on building an earthship design), and eventually a better Internet option will be available to us.  At which point we'll move out to the homestead full-time and sell the west side house.

Things are going well.
Grant and Laura

Yoghurt Making

I haven't made yoghurt for many years but last month I became really annoyed looking at all the containers in the recycle bin. Since we added yoghurt to our daily diet the soya milk cartons, soya yoghurt containers, and cow yoghurt containers started to add up at an alarming rate. So I did a bit research and found Bryanna Grogan's site on soya yoghurt making and haven't turned back. There are still the plastic bags off the soya beans and the cartons from the cow's milk but it has significantly reduced the packaging. Once we move I hope to buy milk in returnable containers and local soya beans in bulk until I'm able to grow my own.

The soya bean to yoghurt process isn't hard but it is a bit time consuming. This is some of the finished product the whiter stuff on the left is cow and the creamier coloured one on right is soya. This is also most of the basic equipment for making the soya yoghurt. But I have a soya milk maker in the mail! That will automate some of the process.

Making progress on getting back to the Drawlyn

It's been a long time since we posted to the old blog. It's time to rectify that situation. :-)

For a long time we had not made any progress on our plan to get back to the Drawlyn. Grant's job situation didn't make it easy to work at home. With the transition to a different team, that has changed. Now, as long as he has an Internet connection, he can login to work.

So now it's time to get the plan to move down to Saint John, New Brunswick into high gear.

The first step was to start decluttering and getting rid of things we no longer needed/wanted (or well, didn't want too much). Now, we've moved on to fixing up the house so it shows well.

Recently we went down home and visited for a week, and looked at a few houses while there.

The plan is to move to Saint John to be with family, and start building the "dream home" on the property.

While we were there, we visited Laura's aunt and uncle, Pat and Jim, at their 'Camp' and Sugarbush operation. We had a great time. Here are a few pictures from the visit.

It was a gorgeous day for a walk in the woods, collecting sap.
The dog was running around like a crazy thing after being in town on a leash for all her walks. All the hills, woods and streams are Jordan heaven. Here she is posing on a mossy boulder.




Here you can see some sap being collected.









As I said, we've been making some progress on the house. We are just finishing up the kitchen and bathroom, and here are a few pictures of the progress and what's left to do.














The kitchen is almost done. We got rid of the extra pantry, painted and trimmed the walls, painted and replaced the hardware on the cupboards among other things.






Still to do: install a different set of hinges and hardware on the cupboard over the stove.







Here's a view of the dining room all set up and ready for poker:











The living room was a big job. It took a few coats of primer to cover up the previous color scheme. The new coat of paint and trim really dresses it up.

Within a week we should be ready for the all important dressing and staging of the place. New curtains throughout and art back on the walls and new furniture arrangement to show the place to its potential. It's been a great place to live so we want others to see that too.

Who knows, maybe the place will have hens again.

Cheers,
Grant and Laura

Building a recumbent bike - part 3

This weekend Mike and I made some good progress on our bikes.

First up, we weren't happy with the alignment of the rear triangle on Mike's Marauder bike, so we cut it off, adjusted, aligned, cursed, tack welded, adjusted, and finally re-welded the rear triangle. Note the "sacrificial hub" in the back forks. We needed something to keep the forks aligned while welding, but couldn't have a whole wheel in there as it would get in the way and probably catch on fire from the heat of the welder. So we cut up a wheel and used the hub.







Then we built the seats. They're just plywood, jigsawed into the roughly-correct shape, and connected to each other with angle brackets and bolts. The seat angle is roughly 120 degrees, which gives a fairly comfortable riding position. Here's Mike's bike with the seat just sitting on the frame.







And of course you can't resist a "test ride".











We fabricated a couple of support tabs to get my seat up off the main bar, and to provide the correct angles.










And here it is with the seat actually attached to the tabs.










And of course a "test ride". Looks like the distance to the cranks will be correct.










Next up, we need to move on to the steering hardware. That should be interesting as it's "remote steering" using a couple of ball joints and a connecting rod. And we'll set the locations of the bottom bracket (the pedals) based on what is comfortable for the rider. But before we get to that, we need to source the foam for the seats, as the measurements will be changed by the extra inch or two of form padding in the seat. We plan on getting together once more this week to make some progress on it as we'll not be around next weekend -- we'll be down home for Thanksgiving.


And finally, after a hard day of work in the garage, there's nothing nicer than lounging on the couch with the dog, watching poker.



Cheers,
Grant

Chickens are "processed"

This morning we put the new trailer-chicken-coop to use and delivered 36 chickens and two turkeys to be "processed" for us. The place is about 45 minutes away, which seemed like a long distance, but now that we know how to find it, it's not such a big deal.

They people that do the slaughtering have a very clean, professional operation. We had an appointment scheduled for 10am, and they were ready for us. We came back at 1:30 and picked up the birds, all neatly cleaned and dressed.

As you can see, the two tractors are now empty:













And the fridges are full. The birds need to be chilled for a couple of days in the fridge before they can be put in the freezer.












Next up, these guys. We have six turkeys left and we've got an appointment for November 28th. We wanted to let them get a bit bigger before we took them in. Besides, I don't think they would have fit in the trailer!









Whew. It was a bit of work building the trailer box and running the birds back and forth, but it was definitely a lot nicer and easier than "processing" them ourselves.

Cheers,
Grant

Recumbent bikes and chicken transporters

We put in a bit more work on the recumbent bikes over the weekend. On my bike we concentrated on getting the rear triangle set up. It was relatively straight-forward.

Here's the rear triangle being tacked into place.










Now that we've got everything tacked together and verified that it's all straight and true, it's time to weld it permanently in place.











It's finally starting to look like a bike!
Note that I've got my BionX electric-assist wheel on the back. Since this bike will be a commuter, it'll definitely have my electric-assist system on there.







Here's a "test fit". It's a bit uncomfortable right now as I'm sitting on a piece of plywood, leaning back against the boom that is still hot from the welder. And with no pedals or handlebars, it's very tippy.








Next up, getting the rear triangle setup on Mike's Marauder. This was a real challenge, as the forks had to be tacked into place in two parts and manually aligned. The design calls for chopping the forks off a donor bike and attaching them to the boom without any jig or supports to ensure correct alignment. We spent a LOT of time eyeballing it, adjusting, moving, cursing, breaking tacks and re-tacking. Finally we got it level with judicious use of a level, a long threaded rod to show any mis-alignments and a good amount of force applied to the forks.



Next up, the chickens. This year, we got enough meat birds to justify the cost and effort of taking them to a place to be slaughtered for us. Last year we did them all by hand, and proved that we know how to do it, and most importantly that we CAN do it. Now since we don't have anything to prove, we got 35 chickens and 8 turkeys. We're going to take them to a place about 45 minutes away to be processed for us.

Of course, this led to the challenge transportation. I just recently got a trailer hitch installed on the Jetta (we seem to be gradually turning our diesel sedan into a work truck). I borrowed my friend's Costco trailer (which I like a lot, because it's light enough that the trailer itself doesn't consume a huge portion of my car's admittedly small towing capacity). Then I used scrap lumber and sheeting we had laying around from other projects to build a "get the birds to market" trailer.




All four compartments are hinged for easy access to the birds. The front compartment is twice the height of the back, for transporting the turkeys. They're quite large these days.









Lots of stuff going on in the ol' Homestead.

Cheers,
Grant

Building a recumbent bike - part 1

As I get more into e-biking and commuting on my bike, the more I realize how uncomfortable an upright bike is for long trips. Inefficient, too, when compared with recumbent bikes.

I've been riding to and from work 1 to 3 days per week, 60km per day on a "commuter-ized" Raleigh mountain bike. I've always been interested in recumbent bikes, so I decided to get one. They're quite expensive, and I've got a friend who is interested in recumbent bikes and knows a lot about welding and building things. So we decided we'd work together to build a couple of recumbent bikes for ourselves.

Initially I wanted to build a "Mach 2" using plans posted on www.recycledRecumbent.com, but my friend Mike convinced me to go with the Atomic Zombie Meridian, for several reasons.

Mike wants to build the Atomic Zombie Marauder, which is a low-racer style of recumbent. He wants it for the pure joy of speed that you can get from the low-racer design. I want mine to be a comfortable, stable, and reliable commuter that I don't mind putting on upwards of 300km per week. I also am willing to sacrifice some of that vaunted recumbent efficiency in the wind for better visibility in traffic, since my commute takes me through fairly busy car traffic. If I like it enough, I may get and install a WindWrap or Zzipper fairing to improve aerodynamics and help keep the weather off me in foul-weather riding.

We discussed our plans and designs, collected a few "donor" bikes for parts, and bought some 1 1/4 inch box steel. Then on a sunny Sunday we started cutting up donor bikes for the parts we needed. Here is a picture of the first cut-up donor bike.






Cutting up the bikes involved using a reciprocating saw and a couple of grinders (one with a cut-off wheel and another with a grinding wheel). Later we added yet another grinder with a cup-style wire wheel for cleanup work. Of course we made lots of pretty sparks.






Then on another sunny weekend day, we got started on cutting and shaping the box steel that would form the "spine" of the bike. The three parts are cut to specific lengths and specific angles (according to the design in Mike's copy of the Atomic Zombie book), then welded together. Here, Mike's cutting the main boom to length with the correct angle for the back-rest.





Next, welding the back-rest onto the main boom. Note the clamped jig that holds everything straight and true while you're working on it. That's why working with box tubing is so nice. It makes it easy to get everything aligned properly. If we were using round tubing, I think we'd still be setting up the jigs to get everything to align and stay in-plane.





With all welds you tack it in place first, verify that everything is straight and true and proper, then go around it again with the welder, completing the weld. Here's what the completed weld looks like before clean-up.








Next up, clean up the area around the weld with a wire wheel. You never want to weld or paint on a surface that hasn't been cleaned.










Here Mike is welding a gusset in place behind the seat back-rest. This provides additional strength.









And here's the start of one of our recumbent bikes! It mostly looks like a big steel hockey stick right now, but it'll look more like a bike soon.









We measured the angle for the head-set, according to the Atomic Zombie book, but it didn't look right to us. So we left it tacked in place, so we can easily remove it and change the angle if necessary.








Here's one of the bikes so far, with the headset tacked in place.










Double-checking the seat-back angle on the second bike.










And here's the result so far: two frames for our recumbent bikes! The different lengths are for the different heights of the riders.










Next up, sorting out the headset angle and adding more parts! Woo-hoo! This is exciting.

Cheers,
Grant

The Commuter Challenge.

Next week is the Commuter Challenge. I've signed up and registered for the Oracle-Kanata workplace (30KM from home).

I encourage you to register for this great cause! Let's improve our air quality by re-thinking how we get to work!

I plan on e-biking to work and telecommuting from home next week.

Cheers,
Grant

E-bike commuting and errand running.

Have I mentioned how cool my e-bike is? ;-)

This week I rode to work and back on a couple of occasions (it's just shy of 60KM round-trip). It's amazing to me how quickly I'm making progress. On each trip I get a little faster, and yet feel less tired when I arrive.

I have to use level 3 assist on the way to work, as it's more uphill. All the hills are relatively gradual, but the dirt roads have been graded recently, which makes them soft and tricky as well as power-robbing. I can use level 4 (max assist) on the way home as it's more downhill. This is nice because I can arrive home and not be completely bagged. I still feel like doing things in the evening.

When I bought my bike, I let the salesman talk me into a mountain bike style. I had big plans for hitting the trails and doing real "serious" mountain biking. Turns out, I was just kidding myself -- I did about 5 technical rides in 10 years.

So I finally decided that what I really needed was a bike that I was comfortable going relatively long distances on - in short, a commuter. So I set about "commuter-ing" my mountain bike. Off came the knobby tires and on went semi-slicks. It got fenders, a more-upright handlebar, a rear-view mirror, the BionX assist kit (which I love), lights, kickstand, rack and pannier baskets. In short, all the things it needed to make the bike USEFUL.

Today's ride home from work included a side-trip to the grocery store. It makes me so happy to be able to pick up some stuff on the way home. :-)

Here's what my useful bike looks like:


Here I am after a 30K+ ride in 30C+ temperatures:


And one final shot of Jordan getting some lovin' with flower petals in her fur.


Ahhhhhhh. :-)

Grant

Early Morning Walks and Not-Forgotten Kitties

Here is Angel watching the birds happy to be laying in the soft Spring grass of the backyard. She still knows all the cute kitten tricks like the silent meow and the eye blink. They are never wear out. She is starting to take to the dog and has started napping on top of the dogs crate.

Velvet doesn't pay the dog anymore attention than she does Angel. Though it does seem the dog is forming a common bond between the two of them. Heard a yelp yesterday and looked out to see the cats had the dog pinned in the corner of the deck. Both were working completely in unison like lionesses trapping a wildebeest.

This is Jordan in her element, our morning walks. We usually hit the gravel around 6am and take random paths through our neighbour's land. This is one of my favourite places, an old laneway that used to end at an old pioneer farmhouse. Here she is waiting for the slowpoke.

This is how the off leash part of our walk starts - pyschopuppy! That's what my neighbour calls it. The condition's symptoms are an arched tail, ears back and wild bounding leaps. I wish she had been a little closer but it is hard to catch her with the camera when she's in that state. This was a glorious morning; dew on the ground and clear bright sky.

A few more Spring flowers and the turkeys in the new tractor.

The Antoinette are quite different now a week later. I'm really enjoying them so I think I'll pick up more bulbs this Fall.

I also planted more Narcissus large yellow ones, pale yellow with darker yellow trumpets, an all white one where the sepals grow away from the trumpet, and white ones with tiny trumpets that have an orange ring. This is the all white ones, they are very elegant slender flowers.

Here is the "Pheasants Eye" Narcissus (Narcissus poeticus). They are in the herb garden, you can see the rhubarb in the background covering the early yellow Daffs.

The crab apple is glorious this year. I didn't think it was going to survive the winter. The bark is a mess and riddled with woodpecker holes. Speaking of which there is a little Downy Woodpecker at the sunflower seed feeder.

One last plant picture. Here is the Solomons Seal that Chris's and Tracy's Mother Joyce gave me a year before she died. It has really filled in from the three skinny stalks it started as.

I'll sneak in this picture of Charlotte Bronte Turken. Once I was past her bare neck, I found she was a wonderful bird.

So here are the poults in their tractor. They've settled in well and are already quite the fliers. I think they are finding the heat lamp too hot now and seemed happy with just the little "tent."

Jordan doesn't pay the chickens much mind any more but will whine when I'm in fussing over the turkeys. She started doing that from the beginning especially when I made them peep in alarm by picking them up to do daily health checks (e.i. looking at their little bums - it always comes down to poo).