709-218-7927 The Landfall Garden House 60 Canon Bayley Road Bonavista, Newfoundland CANADA A0C 1B0 |
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Diary
Back to Diary_2024_12
Wednesday, January 01, 2025
The year starts with spring-like weather; the snow is melted. But the Real Winter is yet to come, I know. I have removed the panels around the first three in-bed bins. Each of these was a one-cubic-metre pile of grass clippings, weighed down, topped up and so on.
When the three piles are completely rotted down, ready to be dug into the bed, they will make about one half a cubic metre between then; a reduction to one-sixth their original size.
YouTube videos for better mousetraps abound, and it seems to me that about half of them are based on tumbling mice one-way into a 25-litre pail. I have no doubt that they work.
That said I seem the have bypassed the work and skill in the construction and caught mice very simple.
Above is an image, taken from above, of the inside of a 25-litre pail in my kitchen. The bottom appears to have been littered with debris and mouse droppings.
Not too that the dirt on the bottom of the pail appears to have an annulus scraped clean, a running-track as it were.
I found a dead mouse in the pail yesterday morning. The mouse had found its way into the pail but, not being able to escape, had died probably by hypothermia or exhaustion.
After tossing out the mouse, I set it back, unwashed, with the litter of potato crisps that I find in the empty bags.
How did the mouse gain access to the pail? I suspect that the mouse ran up one arm of my wooden tongs, which hang across a power outlet, and then just walked across the rim and dropped in.
No fancy pivoting rods, no accurately balanced platforms, no water, no electricity, motors and so on.
Just an empty 25-litre pail and – accidentally – a way for the mouse to reach the rim. From the outside!
Saturday, January 04, 2025
A view from the SE corner of the yard, not the lot, but giving a view of my in-bed composting initiative of late summer last year (already!)
The panels that had made three compost bins are drying out and waiting to be neatly stacked; maybe next fall.
A view from my kitchen window, looking North, taken around 1000 hours when the temperature was at 4c already, more like March, you ask me, than January.
My friend Bruce dropped around and we chatted about the food bank, the shoe shop, and other social outlets for a while, and as he was leaving we waked to the foot of the driveway and enjoyed chatting a bit more, just to feel the sun on the back of our necks.
Then I saw David wandering around his garage, so I said "Well, I better get back to work" and Bruce headed home and I wandered across the street to ask David about a couple of things, and since he had a visitor we played tennis-insults for fifteen minutes, then, saying that I had to get back to work I came inside and lay on the bed, basing in the sunlight pouring through the bedroom windows, and read a bit more of a Wayne Johnston historical fiction before falling back to sleep ...
Monday, January 06, 2025
Well, we did exceed 130 KM/hr.
These gusts are enough to yank the screwed hinged lid off the old Book Bin – now a storage bin for small flower pots.
The lid sailed about six feet to its temporary resting point. In its prior life it had survived three years of brutal northerly gales at the foot of my driveway.
Thursday, January 23, 2025
I keep an eye on my energy consumption. Specifically I read my electricity meter each morning. Laugh, but my estimated annual hydro bill dropped to $1,427 this morning; that’s the running total for the past twelve months. And my house is all-electric – no wood stove, no oil stove, no oil furnace.
We are in our first burst of cold weather, with a wind-chill of -24C predicted this morning, northerly winds (and you know where THEY come from!) and last night, indeed yesterday afternoon, I noticed that my 9’x9’x8’ bedroom had dropped to 17c, whereas the thermostat was set for 20c.
I believe that I know why: About three months ago I installed custom-sewn curtains of a Mylar sheet sandwiched between two cotton sheets. The idea being that the Mylar sheet ( “emergency blanket” ) with its film of aluminium would block car headlights. They don’t but that’s another story.
I suspect that the heat from the baseboard heater beneath the window rises upwards between the double-glazed windows and the curtains. The layer of aluminium reflects any heat towards the windows. After all as an emergency blanket it’s purpose is to inhibit heat transfer. I think of molecules of rising air bouncing back and forth in the horizontal pane until they transfer their heat to the glass and thus I am heating of the town of Bonavista!
Around ten p.m. I rose and used a sharp knife to dis-member a cardboard carton to act as a crude baffle, deflecting the rising air into the bedroom-side of the curtains, and within an hour the room temperature had shot to 19.5c, close to my goal.
My day’s consumption was a staggering 82 KW hours. Admittedly I baked bread yesterday afternoon, but I haven’t recorded 82 since February 18th last year.
This morning I shall make a better baffle, isolated from the heater itself, and we will see what the next few days bring.