…and in my tiny house, not a creature was stirring, though I found a dead mouse!
Actually, the dead mouse was in the W.O.G., the second of two mices I have seen there recently. The first I found in the bottom of a plastic tub a day ago, probably terrified and hungry, but at least alive. I escorted the mouse outside and presumably it found its way from there. The other mouse, also at the bottom of some kind of plastic vessel — I think this one a 5 gallon bucket — not so lucky. It was quite dead when I found it, poor thing.
It is, in fact, the night before Christmas (2021) as I write this. My company has a year-end shutdown which means I have a free 10 days to spend any way I wish. As Christmas isn’t my holiday, for me, it’s just a time of year when there are great sales, it’s hard to find good music on the radio, and there are a couple of days when things are inconveniently closed. So what am I doing this Christmas season? Trying to finish the office part of the W.O.G. so I can quit using the BeDiLia as office space, which is rather inconvenient for several reasons. It’s been slow going due to cold, working solo, as well as time and energy consumed by the day job and life more generally. This work-break is an excellent opportunity to focus daytime energy on getting the office done, so that’s what I’m doing.
Well, it’s most of what I’m doing. It’s also been really difficult to operate in the workshop with all these moving boxes in the way as well as 2/3 of my tools and all of my material stock still in moving boxes. The tricky bit about that is there’s no place to unpack it into since the workshop isn’t framed out yet. What to do? Unpacking boxes makes their contents smaller (no box, no packing materials) and that would surely help, but having all my stuff scattered on the floor would surely not help. Shelving units? Yes, shelving units! I have many of them! But they are holding up boxes and are also largely inaccessible because they are packed tightly in the corridor to the Tidy Room so it’s basically impossible to get at them without moving pretty much everything twice. And I don’t have room to even do that, since in the workshop there is also still a huge pile of 2x4s and insulation and a few machine tools that I am using for construction. What I have here is a big game of Parking Lot. But instead of little tiles or tokens, I have heavy boxes and machine tools.
Today it occurred to me that there’s another solution. I know that some shelving units would give me a place to unpack into, even if in a disorganized way, but most importantly to reduce the volume of things and furthermore to gain access to what’s in the boxes. My shelving units are inaccessible. However, I can just buy some more! My previous residence had some built-in shelving so I’m pretty sure that even after liberating the ones I already own, I’ll be short on shelf space. Okay, then, buying some additional shelving is both useful now AND later. No reason not to. That was today’s task: procuring said shelves (which is a non trivial task involving 80 miles driven on slushy backcountry roads and a trailer), assembling them, and attempting to find the boxes with the highest strategic value for unpacking, namely those with building materials/supplies or tools in them. I had previously instructed the movers to put the workshop/garage boxes in one area, the home goods in another, so while things weren’t necessarily labeled with their specific contents, I could at least be reasonably sure that I could identify boxes of interest simply by where they were stacked.
So while it is still a disorganized mess, it is now an accessible disorganized mess that takes far less volume out of my workspace than it did before. And that’s progress.
There’s a third unit behind the green tubs 
My original plan was to power the propane heater in the office with a pair of lantern batteries so I could get the place warm enough to do the wallboard work and install the real power system on top of the finished walls afterward. This seemed like a great idea, simplifying many things and letting me get the wall all sealed up and nice before mounting the power system (which, once installed, stays put).
What I didn’t have was any way to interface neatly to the lantern batteries, so I improvised 🙂
With the wires captured at the closed ends of the spring terminals and the clothes pins keeping them from coming loose, this janky contrivance actually did the job. The lantern batteries, on the other hand, did not. The propane furnace drew too much power such that the batteries couldn’t deliver. The blower fan was happy to run at 80% but the ignitor couldn’t ignite, so no fire. No fire, no heat. No heat, no bueno.
Okay, then, plan B. Plan B is to install the power system before the wall is really done, so I can run the propane furnace the way it is meant to be run. That also has the advantage of actually having the power system in service, which means I can start doing things like installing real lighting and actually use my solar array instead of my generator when I need power in the W.O.G. Excellent. Except that means the wall behind the power system isn’t nice. For the most part, I don’t care. The power system will never be removed from the wall unless some really major things are happening, in which case, if it becomes necessary to paint, so be it. However, a completely naked wallboard behind the power system is not desirable. It should at least get sealed, if not painted, so it doesn’t foster mold, etc. My plan for that is simple: use an electric heater (on generator) to warm up the room (and the bucket of primer), then coat the area of the wall that’s going to be behind the power center with PVA primer so it’s nicely sealed, then mount the power center over it. I don’t care if drywall screws or seams are visible there. They won’t be visible with the power center mounted.
In other news, winter has really settled in here. I’ve been getting to know my chainsaw very well, as it has been employed to both harvest firewood from deadfall as well as deal with trees which have lost their grip on the soil and are blocking or threatening my road.
You probably can’t tell from the picture, but those green earmuffs are actually quite high tech! Their first thing is simply to provide noise reduction, like any shop earmuffs would. Their second thing is they have bluetooth-connected speakers inside, so I can listen to music at a comfortable level, with the outside noise attenuated. The third thing is a pretty cool feature – they have an external microphone, too, which listens to the outside soundscape. When it’s not too loud, it passes sounds right through, so if someone just walks up to me and speaks, I can hear them clearly, or a timer or smoke alarm goes off, for example, I could hear it. However, when the outside sound level gets too high, the microphone either dials it back or cuts it out completely, letting the acoustic properties of the muffs take over and protect my ears. This is pretty neat – I don’t have to take off the muffs for situational awareness, yet they still protect me against loud noises. And their having a microphone also means they serve as a headset for phone calls, too. Lastly, they do a decent job of keeping my ears warm against the winter 🙂
The winter weather has brought some challenges, for sure, but also some beauty.
Click for full size 
Click for full size
And lastly, some addressing progress! As you know, my newly named road and more importantly my numbered address on that road, has not been showing up as a legit address as far as the world’s various databases are concerned. Recently, though, one bank with which I do business that had previously denied an address update let me enter my new address! This is very exciting and more to the point, while other systems still aren’t letting me use the address, it means that the address is actually slowly percolating through and gives me hope that it will actually resolve.
I also ordered a proper street sign for my road this week. They’re still being made, but the sign post it goes on came by UPS yesterday. The vendor had the clever idea to write “new road, opposite <ROAD NAME>” on the second address line so right there on the shipping label there are instructions on how to deliver it. This worked! I actually met the UPS driver making the delivery and he had said he’d seen my temporary plywood sign and had been expecting to eventually deliver on that road. Excellent. This was exactly why I put the sign out there, so people would see it and learn it, hopefully among them would be delivery drivers! My road is off a main thoroughfare, so it was quite reasonable to expect that delivery drivers would be passing my sign regularly. This also means I can start using my real address for deliveries rather than sending things to the PO, which is only open 4h a day and that tends to be problematic for non-USPS deliveries. They usually get to me eventually, though not always! Having things sent here directly is definitely preferred.
I have just updated my address on Amazon to have that “new road” line, as well… figured it could only help!