12/2/12

The weather today was unbelievable. We had a high temperature of 70 degrees, which is much warmer than normal for early December. I was able to comfortably work outside in short sleeves for much of the day.

I began my work out today by sorting, and relocating more of the brush pile that I've been working through. After hauling a few loads, I remembered that I had another small job planned for this weekend, so switched to that.

The planned job was to empty the water from a barrel over at the garden, and test the rain barrel I made at Field to Fork for leaks. I wanted to do the two tasks at the same time, so I could use the water from the one barrel to test the other. This gave me an opportunity to try out the Triple Seven Super Siphon that I bought a few months back. The siphon hose worked well, and I'll be doing a detailed post on that later. Since the barrel only contained 30 gallon of water, I had to haul quite a bit more up from the creek to fill the 55 gallon rain barrel. After filling the barrel to the overflow I added an additional 10 gallon to make sure the overflow itself didn't leak. Neither the faucet nor the overflow leaked during the test, which is a very welcome sign. Now I have confidence that using a similar process for my other rain barrels should work well.

While I was working on my projects, Andrea was working on projects of her own. She cleaned the bird feeders, and added some drainage holes to the platform of one of them, which is a very nice feeder, but was poorly designed. She also built a platform feeder, which we'll use for putting out old pieces of bread and/or fruit. We've not been able to just throw such items out into the yard because the dogs will eat it. Hopefully the platform feeder will keep it safe for the birds.

This evening Andrea also put plastic up on the windows in my bedroom/office. The windows have been needing plastic for a while, because the insulated window coverings cause condensation to form on the glass. This gets transferred to the window coverings, which caused the last set to mold. I want to tr to prevent that with the current ones, as they are much better, and much more expensive, not to mention harder to clean. Hopefully the plastic will prevent this problem, as well as help to prevent heat loss.