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Tuesday, November 2, 2010

In other news,

I am a big Barbara Kingsolver fan. I am not usually a hero worshiper but she is borderline. I just finished her most recent book "The Lacuna". As it started out, I was not jumping in with both feet. It was a bit on the political side for me, but then as usual, her storytelling magic comes alive and I burn through it, struggling to glance up to check on the kids every once in a while...She is an author that has been able to tie up lots of loose ends for me. In one book she will touch on so many ponderances that are or become near and dear to my heart. Anyhow, in "The Lacuna " the story is set over the course of an authors life in Mexico and later the United States. I think one of the most mind blowing parts of the book was that during the World War, the people of America teamed up to support the war. The women took over the factory jobs, because the men were all off fighting. Americans young and old scoured the country for any metal that could be melted to manufacture bullets. Writers donated their typewriters, Grandfathers their brass canes. The slogan of the people was something along the lines of "In America, we make do with nothing new"..It was said that after the war, manufacturing would boom and there would be products formulated that were beyond all imagination. Now, the part I find touching is the slogan. Where has the mindset gone? It seems to have disappeared into that manufacturing boom. Consumerism is at an all time high. We are trashing the planet with our disposable lifestyles. Many find they are trapped in the this lifestyle, an affliction that leads to many of our societies greatest problems such as depression, anxiety, broken families, alchoholism....the list of consumerism based ills is infinite...How are we to break this cycle? In the greater scheme of things, this is a short lived trend. The disposable opulence of the 20-21st centuries is something never seen on such a massive scale in world history. I firmly believe that change is in the wind. The information superhighway that is the internet and all the mobile communication makes education of the masses as easy as typing in google. More and more people across the globe are acting with intention and starting to see that we aren't required to repeat the mistakes of others....
Since my last post the fall harvest time has been coming to a close and as I write, the first sticking snow (1&1/2 feet)has fallen. In the last two months, between our biggest kids starting school and a longish wait for the rebar to arrive:


10/10/10 was a Global Work Party put on by .350.org. In this area, our house was chosen as the official site for that days work. That Sunday, around 25 volunteers from 2 to 65ish years old worked on putting together our first beer bottle wall(15 bags of mortar and approximately 1000 beer bottles made two 8 foot long by 3 feet high sections of wall) , making bottle bricks
for the south walls that we will be working on once the house is closed in, scraping and cleaning the Thermopane glass panels for the trombe wall and installing the track to hold the Thermopane glass. A good time was had by all who attended and our heartfelt thanks go out to all the people who were there to help. We finished the day with a potluck. Good Fun, Good People, Good Food!
We have tarped off the entire second floor and roof area as our beautifully built subfloor could not be left exposed to the
elements. We now have a temporarily dried in house to work on/in...
Cleaned up the yard and consolidated all of our building materials, camper and coffee bus as well as covering more area for shed and storage space.
Finished the rough dirt moving and landscaping( We had a tractor on loan for the summer and before we returned it made sure that any water coming off the roof would drain away from the house)

The rebar did finally arrive (See entry from Friday, May 28; Life 101), praise be. In anticipation of its arrival 1/4 inch X 6 inch strips of steel plate were glued and bolted down to the subfloor all along where the roof will attach. We also cut the lodgepole down to 10 feet from the subfloor and affixed another piece of steel plate to the top the log. Before we go any further I should tell you a bit about our roof.
Our roof will be a welded frame of rebar and a mishmash of wire mesh. We have been and continue to be in the R & D stage of the roof process. The closest design name I could find is a folded plate dome. That name and tons more information is available at flyingconcrete.com, an amazing website full of houses that will blow anyones mind. Our original thought was to go with a concrete roof but we have such a large roof that it would be too heavy to risk doing without professional help. However, everyone we talked to felt that the shape we were planning on was sound we just needed a lighter material. I purchased a large amount of torch on roofing (or Brai) this summer out of someones yard and we will torch it on to the rebar/mesh framework. Once that is in place, we are planning to sprayfoam the underside of the roofing and framework. At this point, sprayfoam is the only suitable product available on the consumer market. We are not too happy with this plan, though we do plan on using the product that has a percentage of soy based ingredients. The only other possible hope at this point is a new mushroom based packaging product. Right now, it is only available to consumers in the form of packaging, but it is supposed to be super light and super strong...I don't know much more, but we have sent a letter to the company/research firm asking if they would be interested in testing their product on our house. We'll see. We have some time to figure it out. We have 8 vaults to build out of 2500 feet of rebar first.