MIDGE means Modified Inverted Downdraft Gasifier Experiment, and no, we didn't make that up. You can search for MIDGE on the internet and you'll find the Adobe PDF I pointed you at two days ago. Click here to see Ed and I build a MIDGE and test it. I

Phil came over from the knap-in in the afternoon to show me the dagger he had finished for TJ. Thought you would like to see it! TJ had requested a Danish Dagger out of optical glass. That is the type of glass used to make fiberoptic glass wire that carries data. In blocks the fibers are all lined up, yet it still remains as a glass so Phil can work it like obsidian to create the an ancient glass dagger from the most modern of materials. Also tres cool about this glass is that if you light it from the bottom the light shoots out of the dagger sort of like those little optical wire displays with all the ends of the glass filaments glowing. It is rare and unique, and now it is on it's way to TJ's - or will be after the weekend. Click here to see other lithographic work by Phil Churchill.

Friday, February 2, 2007 8:48 PM
I had 1/2 a glass of wine tonight and now there is nothing in here, in my head. Yep, just went around front and looked in. Nada, no thoughts. Luckily Gary is writing in his Daily Pill Blog so I went over there to look. Gary moves in a rush and once he starts a project you have to pay close attention!

Yesterday when I was standing in line at the soup kitchen with my Sierra cup, wait, no, that didn't happen. Let me start again, yesterday, when I was at Vickie and Kent's house begging diabetic muffins, She brought me blossoms from barrel cactuses (plural? cacti, cactuses?). Picture below.

Vickie gave me these off of their barrel cactus, they are the flower. When you break these "fruit" off the plant, the seeds, slightly smaller than poppy seeds and perfectly black, pour out. These were a seed that the ancient Indians counted on as a food source. Learning more about your local wild foods is a good idea. In the Cuban video I watched about their peak oil crisis and economic collapse (and US embargo), they went from eating just a few vegetables to over twenty. We will have to learn to exploit all specific local food sources in the natural rhythm of their appearance.

Tomorrow morning at 10am Ed and I are going to build the MIDGE stove. That is the Modified Inverted Downdraft Gasifier Experiment (MIDGE). I picked up cans of various sizes at the grocery store today and none of them seem to line up the way the instructions mention, so we're just going to spit ball it and see if it sticks.
Ran Prieur has an interesting link to article on M$ Vista. I was very successful at idle time today, raising the idle time average out there for many of you hard workers who don't understand how close we are to extinction from you working so many hours a day. Lighten up, I can't not do enough nothing to make up for you dick weeds. Just pull it over to the curb and shut it off will you?

Thursday, February 1, 2007 7:40 PM
So the muffins are great! Thank you Vickie. Earlier today I was thinking about timing and preparation. What I gather is meant by the Russian proverb "don't bring your spoon late to the party," is that you should prepare for events before they occur, and you should maximize your time in those events to your best personal benefit. Also there is an overtone of there being only a window of opportunity to get what there is to get.

I believe we are living in the lull before momentous change in our society. I can't know what change, say currency collapse, debt bubble burst, oil wars, or a complete failure of the power grid will occur, or when it will occur, but peak oil is now and there is no place to go but down, down, down. Our society demands more energy, more oil all the time, it cannot even function tomorrow with as much as it used today, it needs more, not the same amount. So something untoward this way comes. What can I do about it? Can I prepare for something where I don't know what it is, how it will impact us, or when it will come?

Well one thing I can do is make sure I have a spoon. In this period of time, if you are reading this on my blog, on the internet, you possess unsurpassed individual wealth and power. All your access to information, or your ability to ship anything to yourself, whatever you want, is a very brief moment in time that will never come again because all of it is based on you using a million years of oil in 100 years - it is energy that is your slave, your servant and your mechanism for controlling the world around you. You are almost the bionic man or woman because of the force multiplier of cheap energy. We have huge energies and resources at our finger tips and we should use that energy in this "calm before the storm" to do many wonderful things for ourselves.

We can learn CPR, we can develop a hobby, something fun, like, cooking, welding, boat building, sail making, shoe and boot making and repair, oral story telling, candle making, wind generation - the list is nearly endless of the technologies that are only fun to learn now but will crucial in the future. These skills will make you valuable and I daresay, less "disposable" than the mass of people who will simply freeze, wait for help, and die.

Preparing yourself for change means learning something of use to yourself and others. What do you know that I can't do? Each of us will be looking to the other for the simplest of things. Can you cut my hair, fill a tooth, pull a tooth, splint a broken arm, make my glasses? Oh how I would love if you could make insulin? Oh yea you do, but you do it without thinking inside yourself. Good trick. The point is we all have the opportunity now to create the paths that Ran Prieur says will become the roads of the future.

What is the world you want for your children and grandchildren? You don't get to say, I want them to have have a life just like mine, but more, better, because it is our parent's and grandparent's mantra of "I want my kid to have a better life than I," that got us in this place where we have eaten most of our world and the edge of "out" is just outside our doorstep.

Think harder. Envision, imagine, and speak up for a new world were we will matter once again to each other, where our children will be necessary, not a burden, and they will know they are NEEDED. Imagine a world that feels as well as thinks. When we begin to act locally we will energize our society. If you make shoes, I'm going to have to go to you to get mine made and I'm going to actually meet you, so you'll be a person to me, not a company, and I to you. We will grow our gardens and pursue that idle time that is our biological mandate and right. We will tell stories at neighborhood gatherings and communal projects. We will get small, the cars will stop, and slowly, I HOPE, we become human again.

All this is dependent on you taking the time right now, to go get your spoon before the party, because this is a party the world has never experienced. Don't even listen a minute to the dickheads who say "oh this has happened before, we'll solve it." There is nothing to solve. Its about consuming everything and polluting everything, and using it up. There are 6.5 billion of us on a world that can carry only a small fraction of that without oil, and the oil has/is peaked. Oil is the food that feeds that extra 4.5 billion. There is nothing to solve, and the noise that government will make as it collapses will be all about digging their own rat holes while telling you whatever the fuck will keep you quiet, drugged and dull. (TV?)

There is a line in book "Mosquito Coast," and I know I've said it before in past blogs, years ago, but it so so true now. It was something like, "this won't require your ordinary courage. This will need your three o'clock in the morning courage." Tighten that cinch buckaroo and invest your remaining "lull" time well.

In the moment of every great change, catastrophe, upheaval, crisis, plague, or famine, there is movement of the society, like a thing long stuck, the society fractures, jerks, moves presenting opportunity for real change. Many things will crash to the ground and it tempting to think it is all over, that is all she wrote, we're fucked now, but really, while the dust is settling, what we will have is a society that is slippery with potential. We can move it, for a while, like a car on pure black ice, before the schools and lawyers and churches and other parasites lock it back in place. Where it moves is what we are about, us free chickens. Where it moves and where it stops is up to the people like you, who will look up and out instead of down and in . Get your spoon and welcome to the revolution!


Thursday, February 1, 2007 1:34 PM
Good afternoon chicklets! It is an all information posting now, and later today, after I get back with the diabetic muffins that Vickie is trying out for me (splenda and fruits, bran to slow the sugar, etc.), I've got some ponderables. Here's the quote we'll think about together. Russian Proverb - I have to throw these in because as most of you know I paid a lot for my Russian education- "Don't bring your spoon late to the party."

OK, ahead full. Ed sent me a link to a camping stove that you can build in about an hour from three tin cans. Unlike the design I have on the boards to do (another project), this is not a Jet stove but rather a wood gasifier stove. It is simple to make but not simple to understand, but the pdf has many pics. You need adobe acrobat or a freeware open source pdf reader to follow the link. Here's the stove! Below is Ed's letter with a link to the Yahoo group. I haven't gone there yet, but I've read the whole stove pdf and I'm stoked! (forgive the pun).

Now here is the 36V welding project. Later when I build the cart we'll have pretty pics and nice and tidy, but it is important that you be able to do this if you need to, and it was very simple.

This is a 36V DC positive ground system. We put three batteries in series (positive of one to negative of the next, then negative of that one - >>
	(continued) to positive of the next. When all three are hooked up as above, you have two terminals with nothing on them, and that is where you attach the welding leads, the positive to the positive and negative to the negative. With your 4 dollar volt meter you should see 36Volts or a hair more. If you get a huge spark and there is explosion and you find yourself in an alternate universe, well you did it wrong.. There is a lot of power stored in these batteries. The just sit there and it easy to take them for granted, but if you instanteously could release the energy of just one if would make a good person sized white plasma fireball. Do NOT be distracted when hooking them up. LEFT: Here I am ready to weld. In this form of DC welding it is customary to put the red clamp on the metal of the thing you are going to weld - on a bare spot (sand one) and put the welding rod in the negative clamp. Hard to see in the picture but the welding rod is in the BLACK (NEGATIVE) clamp.
Hooked up in PARALLEL for charging and normal 12V stuff you should see something like this on your meter. 12.4V not 36V	After I was done welding I put them back in their normal order for charging and supplying me with extra power. positive -positive-positive and negative-negative-negative.

Here is a good shot of the red POSITIVE clamp on the frame off whatever you're welding. It only needs to have a good connection to the piece you are going to strike with your 6011 rod when you make a spark. The sparks melts the steel and that is the weld. You keep the spark going by not touching the steel, but making the spark jump over. It is both easier and harder than it sounds. But it is damn hot ass FUN! You won't electrocute yourself, all that juice wants to get back to the other side of the battery, not go through you. Though I suppose you could cover yourself in Aluminum foil and make the arc .. .. just a thought.

Here was my first hook up without the resistance wire and it was toooo hot. Burnt holes too easily through the metal. So, I took off the red welding lead and put a piece of fence wire about 10" long in between - see the top right picture to see the wire. It's that droopy piece. It is not copper, it is steel and it doesn't let electricity through as easy as copper so it stops the batteries from sending all their juice at once, it cools down the arc by reducing the flow of juice (amps) and knocking the voltage down slightly too.

Here is the first weld before I added the 10" fence wire as a resistor. It was easy to get the arc started but the metal of the solar frame was so thin it tended to blow away. Thus I began adding the fence wire.>>

(continued from left). I added a longer piece of fence wire and was getting close, but I will increase the resistance still further before I begin welding the shopping cart into it's new function - my mobile battery welding and power station! After I was done for the afternoon I took the beans out of the solar oven for my famous (to me anyway) beans and rice, yum sauce, topped with salsa! yumm

Wednesday, January 31, 2007 8:34 PM
I welded this afternoon using the various shunts and 36 V battery setup. I have lots of pictures and will have those up in the morning. I need a longer shunt wire (even more resistance), and I will pick that up from the debris where I found these two pieces (a discarded mattress) and do more on that tomorrow. I am really pleased with how much less spatter DC welding has then AC. It is quite pleasant.
I also picked up a couple of hacksaw blades to get into the sawing up the grocery cart phase, and ordered the bicycle tools to be delivered by UPS to Ed's place in Rainbow acres.
Here is a link that Garth sent me that is self explanatory - written by a farmer that would like to be able to sell their bio diesel without a middle man. Also, Mike W fixed my pictures from the barbecue this weekend and sent them to me. I've replaced the originals. Thank you Mike!
I've been over to see Phil at the Knap-in and tomorrow if the weather is good I'll ride over there and take some pictures. They have been having wood carving classes as well as all the lithographic work you would expect.

Wednesday, January 31, 2007 9:14 AM

A heavy piece of sheet metal, debris for some, treasure for me! A stealth project that I'm not allowed to talk about until I build up the courage to be laughed at (more than usual)! It is early morning and the sun is just peaking over the mountains. I'm headed back to the Airstream with my prize.	This was taken yesterday, cloudy at the top of Q on my walk. This is looking down the easiest descent to the west.
I was crossing the flank of Q, when I saw this little cactus, tenacious and vibrant. Even when you're in inhospitable climes you can still look sassy!	All the way up the almost steepest side of Q this morning I was following horse shoe prints. I wondered where they horse and rider would veer off, because the last few feet are pretty much a scramble, almost on on hands and knees. This horseshoe print is right at the flag on the top of Q. Wow.
Near the cactus above I saw this boulder that had been sheared off. I brushed it off and saw --- FEATHERS. I've been looking for dove feathers on every walk. I looked around and found the collection on the right this morning.	I took this on the desk in the Airstream. The top feather is pure white in the upper half and is the feather I found many weeks ago. I want to decorate Barstick with it but needed some smaller feathers. All these that I found today are wing feathers and underlayment. Here is a link to a great feather decorating page on Native Tech's website.!

Tuesday, January 30, 2007 8:59 PM
What a blah day for the blog, sorry chickies. IT was very cloudy, rarely over 5amps coming down from the roof. I decided not to get into the welding projects until tomorrow as we will have two days of cloudiness and I don't want to flatten the batteries and not get them charged right back up.
I had coffee in the morning with Phil and Ed, climbed Q mountain the harder way, picking up the pace. I had plenty of time to do a little weight work at my job, but it was all at my desk upper body and my legs suffered. Between all the bicycling and moto-bicycling, and now steep walking, I'm getting my lungs and legs back. It feels great.
It also felt wonderful to take the bicycle and trailer to town to get groceries and get everything back still in the same shape as it left the store. The french bread still looked like french bread and the eggs weren't broken. I worked on the intial straightening of about 20 willow sticks tonight, which after three weeks seasoning will become my first arrow shafts (just for fun, not for anything else). I used to be a bare bow archer when I was 16 years old and was pretty bad at it but had a lot of fun. I would like to build a bow based on juniper similar to the Pima Indians who lived here (before the LTVA). They used willow, mulage and arrow wood for arrow shafts, and I have access to willow, so that is where I'll start.
More tomorrow. Nite!

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