No time like the present

I get by with a little help from my friends

 For all of my friends; from the oldest to those I havent yet met. Where would I be without you?

 A Disclaimer: Because it has taken me months to get around to writing this blog entry, I am going to post it without quite as intense proof reading as I normally would use. Also the apostrophe/quotation key doesnt work on our keyboard anymore so there arent any of those. Hopefully you still enjoy the read!

   The last blog entry accurately described approximately 2 weeks of this past winter. After it rained the dickens in December and our now 10 year old awoke to 5ish gallons of ice cold water falling on him when the foil bubble insulation we had stapled up filled up and gave way. We decided to seek a drier shelter for the remainder of the winter. At the yearly New Years Family Party we spent the night and didnt leave until March 4. Communal living seemed to be the theme of the winter, we thoroughly enjoyed sharing time, heat and food with family and friends. 4 kids were being homeschooled with 1 preschooler wanting to be a part of everything. I became the school lunch lady and occasional art and PE teacher. We will be homeschooling again this year and are very much looking forward to improving schooling techniques and upping the ante on extracurricular activities.
  On March 4, our family headed to Kauai to visit my parents who had had possession of our middle daughter for a month. We stayed in a tent in their front yard for 6 weeks through some amazing rain/thunder/lightning storms. When we left, our oldest stayed behind for a month and ended up taking a roadtrip up the Alaska Marine Highway with his Grandma. When we got back, we moved into The Bunkhouse. Kelly had built a spruce log platform with 2 rows of straw bales all round. Some of those dear friends I was mentioning gave us a wall tent and Kelly promptly built a frame complete with a loft for the kids with windows, a nice front door, camp kitchen with greywater collection and a killer woodstove that makes it nice and toasty. He also rigged up rainwater collection that helped with garden watering immensely(though for much of the summer it rained so much that I didnt have to water the garden). We got all moved in to The Bunkhouse and it was time for Kelly and Caius(10) to leave to go seaining. My dad became a Prince William Sound seiner this year and Kelly signed on to be a deckhand. (I grew up on a fishing boat and he wanted to experience some of these stories firsthand.) Before you get too worried Dear Reader about how progress will progress lets jump back to the earthship a bit....

   Kelly spent last summer finishing up the roof structure for the house. All 7 vaults are complete as well as having the framed in walls with windows installed on the faces of the vaults. The framed walls are welded into the vaults via sheet metal plates bolted to the dimensional framework. The roof structure of the garage wont be built until next summer at the earliest... The stovestack has been installed up from where the masonry/rocket stove will be, through the 2nd floor and up through the roof 4 feet. This takes the form of a 1 foot culvert salvaged from our local landfill. The plan is to run stovepipe up through the culvert possibly surrounded by perlite as kind of an improv metalbestos. To help with as/des(cent) Kelly welded some cool stairs into the NE valley where we will be getting onto and off of the roof.. When its all said and done you should be able to walk from the ground level outside up onto the roof via the large terraces/berm we will be building in the future. On top of the rebar framework went salvaged concrete reinforcement wire(have I mentioned we love our friends yet?) and hog wire 1 layer thick over the whole roof. Then came the expanded metal lath. it took about 110 sheets of it to cover the entire roof. We installed Pex tubing around the perimieter of the roof to give the lath a form for a drip edge and to melt off snow load so it doesnt fall on our heads(the roof or the snow)..
  Kelly and Caius fished for 3 months in Prince William Sound and got back just in time to experience the end of summer/ beginning of fall which werent easily discernable since all it seems to want to do is rain. We have had some great volunteer efforts this year including some new friends who have been coming and staying for a few days at a time thus helping us all keep the co-housing/communal living thought process at the front of our minds. The storage room bottle walls are bordering on complete( this is a short sentence for the amount of time/energy/bottles that went into these walls. The wine bottle wall has 1000 bottles in it and the beer bottle walls I have no idea how many.) which leaves us with the South wall bottles to fill in around all those windows. We have (finally) started applying cement to the roof(September 24) and are hoping to get it done before snow sticks and it gets too cold for the cement to cure.
 Our mixture for the roof contains:
1-portland cement
1-lime
2-perlite/recycled styrofoam(harder to find but cheaper and doesnt absorb water)
 2-sand
1 3/4- liquid (1/2 and 1/2 water and latex paint)
a small handfull structural fibers/ mixer load.
  It is an amazing product and fun to apply, kind of like a thick cream cheese frosting. We are applying it approx. 1 inch thick and will be going back to trowel it on from underneath in areas we find are too thin.. When we get all the cement applied, we will be coating it with some kind of waterproofing product.


    Normally I like to blog about some other topic that I find relates to our house and our journey at the beginning of an entry but today I saved it for the end.. Maybe because 2012 is coming down the homestretch or maybe because Im seeing through many examples in my own life right now that an end is often(or maybe always) a beginning.. A Close one door and another will open sort of thing. A lot of reformatting has been going on in the general vicinity of my space this past year. There are infinite opportunities to be active/reactive or passive. If we can allow ourselves the honesty to really examine our behaviors, I think we will see that often when we are dealing with a situation, we are not actively seeking the present solution rather, we are reacting based on an issue we have had in the past. We are feeling past pains rather than looking at the present issue. Repetitive Emotion Injury is a term I am wanting to add into Urban Dictionary. I havent found the right definition exactly but it relates to Identity Crisis and many of the woes of our culture. NOW is the time my friends(new/old/as of yet unintroduced) If we live in the present our journey will be that much more enjoyable. And it is the journey that matters. So reach out, be active in your relationships. Dont take out your pain/anger/sorrows on the person in front of you right now when the intensity you may be feeling has a deeper source. As Buddha said(or at least Facebook claims that he did..) You will not be punished for your anger; you will be punished by your anger. We all are one and feel the same ways. If we practice acceptance of this key point we will find that we know how others feel because we too have felt those feelings. And Practice it is. We may never be masters of our destinies but if you Practice in the now then that now will be well spent.