- Sir Isaac Newton: he made a cat flap for his house-cougar; he fought against British forgers; he articulated physical interactions; he had epic long flowing hair.
- Albert Einstein: after reading his biography, I was able to understand the special theory of relativity… for a full 5 minutes! His articulation of photons still melts my brain (i.e., if light is composed of photons, is it a particle or a wave of energy? Answer = yes… what the phuck?!...). And then there’s space-time and the fabric of the universe.
- Niels Bohr: after his discoveries in atomic theory (and quantum mechanics), a grateful Danish brewery plumbed a beer tap into his home… and he had beer for the rest of his life.
- I’m going to be a contrarian and offer a mythical, biblical figure – Lilith. She was an independent, Semitic bad-ass and had no patience for Adam. I can respect demonic Lilith… from a safe, imaginary distance!
images from around the neighbourhood & lessons learned on forest-gardening.
- It’s nice and all collecting grass clippings from our rental home whenever I cut the grass. However, it’s best NOT to let them material ferment in black contractor bags… either on the parking lot (in the woods) or outside our rental home. Factors at play: Heat. Rainwater collection. Aerobic and anaerobic fermentation. Animal activity on the bags left unattended on the woodlot. A slew of cockroaches scurrying out of the bags of woe. Clouds of phat, meaty flies. Mould build-up. And a juicy effluent that covered both TS and PN (thus giving them both a pong that required them to drive home with the windows down).
- Carpenter ants can infest a shipping container, despite it having new rubber seals and rust-free (thus sheer) corten steel walls. We were trying to figure out how the (winged) queen ant managed to get into the sea-can and start up a ROBUST colony. And then we looked up at the covered air vents at the container’s ceiling. The queen can fly in, leave some pheromones to attract males, and then start a brood. The neatly layered cardboard (for sheet mulching) provided an ideal food source and dark living spaces. TS wisely noped out of the container and will return with a shop vacuum cleaner. PN will plug it into our CDN Tire inverter and a deep cycle battery… and suck them up. Whomever survives this ordeal will get emptied out into the surrounding forest. And the ants and cockroaches can compare notes! On our way home, we agreed to not store valuable books in the sea-can (insect damage)… while we wait for our home to be built.
- Use a pair of pliers to untie knotted contractor bags full of fermented grass-clippings (as the contents get dumped onto our soil-operation).
- Hummingbirds are awesome little birds on the woodlot. They appreciated the Lee Valley feeder — little evaporation, continuous perches, several fuel ports!
- Choose the correct trailer hitch for the job. Our bush buggy uses an inexpensive ball-hitch. These mechanisms gum up with dirt and can cause the anchor hasp to seize up. TS & PN worked together to figure out how to disassemble it, degrease the pieces, reassemble it, and adjust the anchor hasp. PN now understands why farm tractors use pintle hitches. They’re stronger and are less likely to gum up and fail.
BCB&B, neemtree, bdb, and blog 