July 2007



Trev's chainsaw carpentry comes good. The tongue and groove joins fit together and assist in the reduction of any torsion in the timber. (incidentally the house won't be on the same extreme lean as is depicted). The photo is of the tongue end waiting for its groove, and you'll note the surrounding area looks nice and slippery, as weather has been predominantly rain and drizzle for the past week or so, but is generally warmer than it has been.

The days are also starting to get a bit longer, which is fantastic. It seemed odd to be leaving work at 5.00pm to the last strains of light, and arrive home and have to venture out on the site to see Trev's handiwork by torchlight.

Typically, Trev is generally low key about his skills, and I guess I'm no great judge of them either, but to me, it all seems like mastery. "Come have a look Caleb, dad is making his own lego pieces, only they're 250kg each." I have to tutor him to awe and send him back to his father to relay his amazement.

Trevor, typically, calls the giant beams 'sticks'. He's been enjoying reading Brian Hodge's book,'Building your Strawbale Home, from foundations to the roof'.

Looking forward to watching 'The Great Global Warming Swindle' on Thursday, 12th of July 8.30pm on ABC.

Already read one rebuttal from ABC Radio National Science Show Click on the link for a transcript.

It seems, that the attempt to refute global warming has required statistical stretching and taking experts out of context to 'prove' their point. The only damage done, being that of watchers not getting the full picture. Especially those bent on denial. It would be nice for it not to be true, but science tends to boil down to proving what are commonsense theories. Eg, if you burn up millions of years worth of earths carbon sequestered material in a hundred there has to be an effect, one of those, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction things.

There is also the 'holistic' approach, that of seeing that reduction of greenhouse emissions means moving into alternative energy, something that we need to doing to ready ourselves for a post oil age, it also means we plant more trees, and combat soil salinity issues, water quality, support dwindling wildlife habitats etc etc, so lets not just talk global warming, it's an unbalanced view, and there is more at stake by not doing so.

July 21

	Trev is hard at the house. I've photographed him here while he is chainsawing one of the grooves for the 'sticks'. The series showing how he makes a groove, the tongue, well it's much the same of course. I think he does a great job, they look very neat and so far they've slotted together like the Lego they resemble. He's also done the first of the corners, something that has inspired a lot of head scratching, how to do it without reducing the strength of the timber. He's ended up making a massive lap joint/bridle joint and as a precautionary measure has used an 8mm angle bracket that he's made to secure the joint on the inside. I'm really impressed with his ingenuity.
	Last weekend we stopped off on the side of the road and misappropriated about 12 'hands' of NZ Flax. It was roadside and no ones land, so not really that bad I didn't think, however it seemed to attract the interest of a number of people, some of who turned around and drove back very slowly in order to see what it was we were doing, mostly what we were doing was busting mattock handles trying to wrench the stuff out of the ground. But finally, we did. I'd already tried a number of nurseries, none of which stock it, so felt obliged to go the road side steal. The flax is a part of another growing interest of mine, the weaving thing has broadsided into basketry too. I've been looking at lots of House & Garden type books and note how much basketry, weaving there is in these homes, looking around our humble abode we have baskets everywhere. Of course most of it comes from developing countries and we buy it in cheap. But it's one of our countries mostly forgotten skills, so I'm into finding out more. Plus the NZ flax will make good windbreaks for my rows of small trees that are growing up the fence line, provided, of course, that the wallabies leave them alone.
	Along with weaving materials I've become an inveterate roadside watcher. I've found enormous amounts of rosehips, and I'm going to try make rosehip cordial which is high in vitamin C, higher, apparently than citrus. Some interesting info and recipes in the following links. Dr Weil - Rosehip nutritional & Plan info Rosehip Recipes
	Today Trev (mostly Trev) and I carted the wheelbarrow up the hill and filled it with timber from a dead wattle that has been up the back for a while. I tried to roll some of the big round pieces down the hill to save carrying them, not sure it did much good as they all seemed to go immediately off course and I spent most of my time rounding them up again, but still, it's two or three weeks fire wood in a couple of hours and a good little work out. Trevor ended up consuming as much energy as he used during the process, every fat witchity grub was thrown back and eaten. 'The heads are a bit crunchy', he tells me, 'but there is such a sweet nutty flavour to them, yum'. Caleb and I tried to feed one to Nuju, and he wisely decided it wasn't food either.

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