The accidental hermit

Daughter of a dog driving man

2011-08-15T20:25:00.004+02:00

I am occasionally asked if any of my experiences as a musher influences the way I act as a father.

"Sometimes," I answer.

Dog man walking

2011-08-14T00:44:00.006+02:00

Now that I have a borrowed dog I have a chance to participate in that odd, but in many ways charming, pastime of walking a dog in an urban area.

Above is a sign I have not seen before: "Use your head, or better yet, use a poop bag!" I use a bag in populated areas, of course. I am not an orc.

In the forest I would often come across small plastic bags with dog poop. So conditioned have dog owners become to this practice, they scoop up the poop even miles away from anyone. After a while some of them seem to have become disgusted with carrying it around without a garbage bin in sight, and have just left their bag on the ground. As if someone else would pick it up.

These people vote.

Here's a pleasant little sight. Someone (the one behind this) knitted cosies for these rails. How nice is that.

To sleep, perchance to dream: ay, there's the hub

2011-08-13T07:50:00.005+02:00

Hub brakes are like cinema projectionists. You know they're there, but don't know what they look like and don't give them much thought as long as they do what they're supposed to do. Above is the inside of one of my no-name hub brakes on my Christiania front-loading trike. That white stuff is anthrax spores. I held my breath and brushed it off.

Working on the Christiania is not like working on normal bikes. You don't need any hex keys. But you do need pipe wrenches.

Above are the two main parts of the hub.

And on the picture above here you can see Islay, on loan from a friend. I need a dog, at least intermittently. Islay is a quiet, careful dog, and an Iditarod veteran.

That part on the right hand side of the brake that looks like a cylinder is actually sort of flattish. When the brake lever is held in, the wire pulls an arm on the outside of the hub, which in turn makes that flattish cylinder turn, which then forces the two semi-circular arms outwards.

As you can see, there's not much play here. Problem is, I don't know how much there should be. I oiled the moving parts, which is a big drama as you do not want oil on the brake pads. I changed the cable and cable housing too. But the brake still doesn't work very well. Maybe opening it up again and giving it a good whack with a hammer will help.

A prairie trike companion

2011-08-13T07:30:00.003+02:00

This will clearly not do.

This is better. I ended up buying aluminum tent poles. I think I might have gone for glass fiber poles if I had a choice. The aluminum gives the canopy a slight gothic arch rather than a roman one. But we can live with that.

Those pex tubes I used on the top picture worked all right as long as we all stood still, but that just wasn't good enough. This contraption is for blistering speeds.

Beaten

2011-08-12T12:51:00.005+02:00

Having moved from my cabin in the forest to town, I now have different challenges than I did before. One challenge I faced before was how to transport propane bottles by bike off-season. ("Off-season" was "non-mushing time".) During winter I had no problem, I used the dogs and the sled.

Above is one guy who really puts me to shame. (Found on flickr, by Meanest Indian.)

Here are my former alternatives:

How to transport propane on a bicycle.

Return of how to transport propane on a bicycle.

Return of son of how to transport propane on a bicycle.

And here's one from Oldfool.

Hoopla about the hoops

2011-08-10T11:17:00.004+02:00

My Christiania trike has a prarie wagon-style canopy to protect cargo or passengers in the box from the elements. The canopy is supported by aluminum hoops. My hoops buckled horribly under a lot of snow one winter (above, hard to see how bad they actually are), and have since been almost useless, causing the canopy to sag.

I have certainly proven to the world that I can live happily unconcerned about appearances, but that sagging canopy collects rainwater and it all gets rather messy. Say what you wish about the good people who make the Christiania, but they do not really bust their asses off trying to sell their products or accessories. They have not even bothered updating their web page since 2001 and their closest representative can't be bothered replying to emails. The only way I can get new hoops is by travelling to Denmark or sourcing some aluminum retailer around here.

I decided to try improvising by using some plastic Pex tubes instead. This extremely competent bicycling family built some canopies for their kid's seats using Pex.

I straightened some parts of the original hoops in a vice, and filed them on one end (above). I then inserted them into the tubes. This way I can use the existing mounting hardware.

The new hoops (above) look much nicer. Not entirely unexpectedly, they are sort of flimsy. The canopy still sagged!

I managed to fix this somewhat by sewing velcro straps to fit on the hoops. This way the canopy itself functions as a brace, keeping the hoops in place.

All in all, it's ok. But I don't really recommend Pex tubes for projects of this size.

Commemoration

2011-07-26T12:50:00.004+02:00

On friday, a bomb went off not far from my office, killing eight people. Shortly afterwards the perpetrator massacred 68 people, mostly teenagers, at a youth camp close by. (Numbers may be adjusted.)

All is fine with me and my family. Thank you to readers who have inquired about our well-being. As this is a small country and the number of casualities was high, it is inevitable that there will be few degrees of seperation between us and the victims. The country is filled with dread as the names are gradually made public.

Above is a picture I took at the commemoration for the victims. Allegedly, 200 000 people showed up.

Give me a brake

2011-07-21T16:56:00.010+02:00

We are now two families in the same apartment building with front loading trikes, surely a national record.

Here's a close-up of the brakes of friend and neighbour Fred's trike. Anybody know anything about them? The rear brake is operated by a large lever on the seat tube, the front ones with a small lever on the handle bar.

This trike is not a Christiania, but I'm still guessing it's problably made for that bizzarrely large load-cycling demographic in Denmark. Doesn't look Dutch to me. The Danes have a fantastic number of front loading trike brands. This might be a Family Rider, but the current models don't have these brakes.

With near horizontal drop-outs I feel he should try to source a Nexus 7 or 8 speed hub with a coaster brake. But that might be just a lot of time adjusting derailleurs speaking.

Fred says the brakes don't work. So we now have a trike each with shitty brakes. We have to get this sorted out before our kids are too large to fit in the boxes, or we loose patience and start zipping around with them anyway.

About skulls

2011-07-19T20:48:00.006+02:00

Well, here I am, tripping on exhaust fumes while waiting to disembark from a ferry. Looking at this picture I realize why that cute German touring couple didn't want me to give them directions even though they were patently lost and I, at that glorious moment, actually knew were we were.

- Ach, get avay, long-haired, mittel-aged recument weirdo!

That's not really what they said. But they communicated it. And chose to push on in the opposite direction of where they said they were heading.

I use a helmet on longer trips mostly because I avoid having to talk about helmets this way. I don't mind the helmet that much, so it's fine. I can even imagine helmets actually do improve safety. But I am unsure why cyclists are expected to wear them, while people in cars aren't. Really, it's not as if cars were super duper safe. I discovered recently, to my undivided joy, that at one point somebody actually made motoring helmets.

Once my daughter can sit in a kid's seat on a bicycle, the world will burn me on a stake if I don't supply her with a helmet. But they won't consider lowering speed limits or banning cars in urban areas for the sake of the children (cue: "won't somebody think of the children"). Kids clearly aren't that important. So I will, in effect, have to tell her, every time we mount a bicycle, that "cycling is dangerous Honey, not like driving in a car".

I could, of course, insist everybody wear helmets when, and if, I ever get behind a steering wheel again, but I imagine that could send some wrong signals to her too.

Going the distance

2011-07-18T14:09:00.004+02:00

Above: My trike, unloaded and at it's destination last week.

When I had sled dogs, I was rarely expected to be anywhere but with them at my cabin or out on the trail. But things are different now.

Car-based culture being what it is, one is expected to travel considerable distances to maintain friendships and family connections. two aspects at which I have been pretty poor at, even without dogs.

I am not too wild about going to places that necessitate driving. If you need a car to get there, you're not supposed to be there in the first place, is how this Grumpy Ex-hermit reasons. Drivers are often happy to suggest they can pick me up, but I am touchy about the endless planning, repeated cell phone calls and the risk of at least one party running late.

I am the worst house guest in the world.

My first instinct, when invited somewhere far-beyond-arse, is to ask myself "can I go there by bicycle"? In hilly/moderately mountanous areas I have normally been able to cover maybe 120 k a day, my trike has expanded my radius to more than 160, though I realize I might have succumbed here to a case of New Aquisition Rationalisation Syndrome.

I traveled to my in-laws' cottage, 160 k away, last week by trike. Normally, when going far, I've plotted my route as if I were going by car. In my experience, non-motorists (along with tractors, mopeds etc.) are almost always offered an alternative route right before entering the really scary highways. This time I decided to try more bike-specific routes, partly out of delusions of taking Frog with me on this route in the future. Like any functioning male, I have become more safety-conscious after reproducing.

I was surprised at how extensive the network of bicycle paths has become since I abandoned bicycle touring for mushing in the 1990's. (Example, above.) Just to prove some people are never happy, though, I got pretty worked up about the signs. I ended up in several ridiculous Laurel & Hardy-type situations following a sign for an hour in one direction only to reach another sign telling me I was going the wrong way. Several times signs would lead the hapless cyclist into residential areas with endless amounts of unsigned roads. Bad signing is worse than no signing, as bad signs will trick you into not referring to a map.

But there was at least this sign (above), a cheerful reminder of how things can go awry even on a bike.

Another nuisance: Bicycle paths to nowhere. The road next to this one is the kind where bicyclists are free game. This is five k (three miles) from the last exit, I just had to turn back. Who designs this stuff? At this point, of course, one starts muttering to oneself that "car-drivers would never put up with this crap", which is the kind of rage-induced smugness that is the one really bad aspect of bicycling.

And that's my trike on the ferry. You need to take ferries to get anywhere around here. Bicycles go for free, and one doesn't have to wait in line when entering the ferry. So cyclists get perks, too.

All in all, this was a great trip and now that I know some of the booby-traps, I am looking forward to doing it again next week. Maybe take some decent pictures this time.

Simplicity

2011-07-18T11:26:00.007+02:00

Here's an elegant load-carrier I spotted outside a book store the other day. A common 1960's/70's bicycle with 20" wheels and, presumably, a two-speed "kickback" hub, the kind where the rider changes gear by pedalling slightly backwards. Pedalling further backwards activates the coaster brake. Front hub brake, bottle dynamo-powered headlight. An old milk crate with the logo of a local (and now almost certainly defunct) dairy has been fastened to the rack with twine. Eminently practical, yet not really attractive to the thieving vampire zombies.

TdF

2011-07-18T11:21:00.002+02:00

Tour de France, 1927.

Where the streets have no cars

2011-07-07T15:41:00.007+02:00

My squaw recently had some important business to do in southern France, of all wonderful places, so I tagged along to look after the papoose.

We went on occasional day trips to an island called the Île Sainte-Marguerite. It was beautiful, of course, everything down there that has been left alone the last fifty years is heart-wrenchingly beautiful, but what interested me was the appearent absence of internal combustion engines. There were some electrical trucks. And a whole lot of these hand-pulled carts.

The design was pretty uniform, but the carts were obviously locally and individually made. They had different wheel sizes, slightly different proportions and so on.

Being the kind of horrid person who gets off on imagining what the world would be like without easy access to cheap oil, this seems like a whiff of the future. Hauling things by hand and using cottage industry-made idiot-proof technology by reusing materials lying around - the wheels were obviously front wheels of old bicycles.

But there will be no more quick trips to southern France, that's for sure.

Unbearable levels of awesomeness

2011-07-06T10:17:00.004+02:00

My friend Radar (yes! like in M*A*S*H!) is not only a nice guy and a pilot, but also sold me his Greenspeed GTE tadpole trike at an extremely reasonable price. No man can be better than this.

We biked together from his place to my place, a cool 300 k (186 miles). That's Radar in the picture above, next to his upright, and the trike in front.

Almost all pictures from this trip are of us eating or camping. Judging from the documentation, we seem to have munched and slept our way from his home to mine. I would have loved to film those 60 km/h (37 m/h) descents but the thought of removing my hands from the brake levers never entered my mind.

I have never even tried a recumbent before, and it was everything I had hoped it would be. Very comfortable, gives a great view and those three wheels do make sense in a country with hardly any flat areas, no danger of going slow enough to tip over.

An extremely odd thing about tadpole trikes is that while they look like incredidbly beautiful and sophisticated machines expertly crafted to maximise human power, most people on them look like absolute dorks. I am no exception, I am actually probably at the extreme end of dork-dom.

It can't be helped.

Speed pram-related issues

2011-07-05T12:18:00.006+02:00

The above picture is included here to prove that tinkering and bicycle-related stuff is not the main point about being a dad, even though I realize I might make it seem that way.

Projects are rarely really finished around here. That's me above, you can see part of Frog's forehead, she's inside the box. I may look smug but really, I'm obsessing about the brakes.

Even when I hooked up my dogs to this contraption in the forest I had a pretty relaxed attitude to the braking power at my disposal. Sooner or later, I knew, we would start going uphill and slow down. Freighting a baby in traffic is a different story.

I have a Shimano coaster brake on the rear wheel, and hub brakes on the front wheels. They look like Sturmey-Archers, but I'm not sure.

I am unhappy about the way the wires are connected to the brake arms on the hubs. Above is a picture taken from the underside of the Christiania's box. You can see the wire beeing fed out of a threaded tube at an awkward angle. Once I change the cables and the cable housing, the cable is still going to keep on scraping that tube. Something has to be done here, but I'm not quite sure what.

There's not a lot of information on drum brakes out there. For example, the wire tension on all drum brakes I've seen can be adjusted close to the hub (that's the point of the nut around the threaded tube in the picture above), but does it have to be that way? (My 1948 bike has the same system.) Are adjuster barrels on the handles completely out of the question?

I found some interesting information here, this guy even recommends opening up the hubs, something most books on bicycle maintenance strongly advise against. (Which in itself makes it tempting for me to try.)

I needed to change the gear cable and of course, of course, the new cable was of "normal" length, in other words far too short for all that weird cable routing a front-loading trike needs. So that's the thumb shifter down on the right hand side of the box (above), instead of on the handle bar. Not very practical, but it's not there for ever.

The pedal-powered speed pram

2011-07-04T12:43:00.003+02:00

Here's Frog in the Christiania trike. The car seat that she's in snaps into brackets I've fastened to the bike's box. She's not too wild about this yet, as can be seen, but not entirely opposed to the idea either.

Hard-boiled

2011-07-02T17:34:00.004+02:00

Wear a boilersuit and people will automatically presume you know what you're doing. By wearing this while fiddling with my bikes, and my neighbors' bikes (pictured), I am asked for advice on all kinds of interesting stuff. And by by realizing I have somehow become that guy with the tool box and the boiler suit, I need to solve the problems I am presented with in order not to loose face. So now those pumps that adjust how fast the doors close around here are all fixed. It just took some trial and error.

But those plumbing-related issues... . I just can't build up enough enthusiasm about them. Running water is the source of so many ills.

Distinguishing between work clothes and lounge wear became second nature those years out in the woods. Washing clothes was such a big, horrid drama, it had to be kept at a minimum. Being a smelly, unkempt hermit for so long made me really fussy about stuff like this. Now I dislike doing even the smallest physical chore unless I am properly dressed.

Everything about bikes has already been thought out

2011-05-27T15:39:00.004+02:00

This "cycle pram" from 1926 looks pretty much like my current project. And there are products on the market today that look more or less like it. But I'm going for a more multi-purpose kind of thing.

Cycling with baby

2011-05-04T14:48:00.011+02:00

Children can use designated seats for bicycles from when they're around one year old. (Or nine months, in Wacky Holland.) This means I can't go cycling with Frog until next spring. (Winter will get in the way.)

But there has to be a way around this. This very responsible-seeming gentleman has a convincing solution: Child seats for cars can be fastened in the box of a cargo bike. He does not recommend fastening them on the racks of normal bicycles.

I am one of maybe five people in this town with a front-loading cargo trike. So I almost owe it to the world to make good use of it.

I had some adaptors (below) which are meant to fasten the child's car seat to a stroller. (Stroller, check. Car, well, no. But car-less peope still nead the car seat, just in case.)

I built a frame inside the trike's box for stability. This also creates compartments which might be nice when carrying gear. One reason I want this to work is so we can all go to the beach, and the stroller, besides being slower than a bicycle, has almost no cargo capacity.

Bus? Sure, we can use the bus. But where's the challenge in that.

The seat now snaps nicely into the brackets. I want to fasten things properly before I actually go anywhere with this set-up.

This might not look too convincing, but the seat gets tightly wedged within the box, in addition to being clamped into the brackets.

I have just discovered that there is actually a gadget on the market designed specifically for fastening children's car seats to the box of a cargo bike. (It can also be used on a rack, for the more thrill-seeking parent.) I notice this thing provides some suspension, and this has led me to reconsider my design.

We'll see.

Desperation forgotten

2011-05-03T15:34:00.006+02:00

I have, perhaps, slightly too many bicycles. But they rarely all work at the same time. I am trying to fix this, so I can decide which ones to keep.

I keep discovering repairs I can only vaguely remember having performed. Like this brake arm on my Christiania front-loading trike. It's supposed to be fastened to the frame with a designated "brake arm clip" but I have obviously lost it, problably while changing the inner tube of the rear wheel. So I fastened the brake arm with one of my ubiquitions hose clamps.

I was probably desperate at the time, and proud when I found the solution. But I've forgotten about it completely. And it works so well, I haven't had to think about it while using it.

Fillet-brazed fellowship

2011-05-02T10:05:00.008+02:00

A pleasant aspect of driving a classic and reasonably well maintained bicycle is that one ends up talking to strangers with similar chariots. I met this very dapper gentleman on my way to work, we deduced we had the same 1940's frame. He had found a period-appropriate dynamo-powered head light with two bulbs, one for high beam and one for low beam and, when talking about hubs and rims, proved himself as a genuine bike wrench. Also note his helmet. Foppish to some, elegant and safety-conscious to others.

I talk to people with strollers and dogs, too. I need these kind of crutches or I'd hardly ever talk to anybody.

A good sign

2011-04-29T19:52:00.013+02:00

Here's a sign from a shop close to where I now live (above). The shop sells clothes for women who are not too young anymore and not, whatever the sign might say, actual humans.

It's still a good sign. It's art to me.

When I was fooling around on my bicycle in the US a long time ago I was pleased to see that there were some signs of the kind I had previously only seen in movies and on album covers (below). It's hard for foreigners to know what actually exists for real in that country, and what is mostly made up.

I stayed at that motel. And a lot others like it. It was exiting and wildly cinematic to me, but not to the people that ran them.

The Accidental Hermit Action Figure

2011-04-28T22:13:00.004+02:00

My nieces and nephew found some old toys that belonged to me and my brothers at their grandparents' place. Among other things, we found my "Old Shatterhand" action figure, based on a fictional hero by the German author of westerns, Karl May.

Westerns were big business in Germany. Karl May was one of Hitler's favourite authors. Role-playing cowboys and Indians was even a big pasttime in DDR.

Somehow, Karl May drifted into our little family orbit, and we played with these figures a lot.

At the site of old Old Shatterhand my youngest niece slided towards me and whispered, "He looks like you."

And she's right. The long, blond hair. The beard. The checked shirt and frayed trousers. The muscles... well, maybe not the muscles. And my foot isn't at that angle.

Brazen

2011-04-28T09:41:00.018+02:00

I have a lovely old bicycle from 1948 that I use around The Towns. Single speed, fillet-brazed, perfect geometry, maybe a little heavy by today's standards. I've added some marvelously cheap wire baskets on the rear rack. For use in civilization they make more sense than panniers. They're not worth stealing so I don't have to take them with me when I go inside, and I can just dump my grocery bags in them without bothering with straps and buckles. Together they also create a wide platform for carrying lager parcels that would be hard to balance on just a rack.

I bought a front rack to make the bicycle perfect but, and this is how things like this must be, the rack didn't fit.

For some reason I had imagined that the rack could be fastened on the front wheel axle. But the holes in the tangs (those strips at the bottom) were too small, and I couldn't make them larger without breaking the tangs. And if I had managed to pull it off, the rack would tilt forwards instead of being parallell to the bicycle's top tube.

If I had read the documentation properly, I would have known that the lower parts of the rack were supposed to be fastened to the fork's braze-ons. But a lot of bicycles don't have them. Newer bicycles often lack them due to some misguided idea about sacrificing usefulness for the sake of shaving off pennies and ounces. And other bicycles, like mine, were made in a time when stuff was fastened to the frame and fork using other methods.

So I had to make my own faux "braze-ons".

I found a truss mending plate I had lying around, and drilled appropriately large holes to fit on each side of front axle. The small holes that were there to start with were perfectly braze-on-sized.

I then used a hack saw to make the shapes sort of as I wanted them. I'm still amazed that one can actually saw metal with just a little bit of elbow grease. And a nice tool.

The pieces were really horribly sharp around the edges. Accident wating to happen.

Then I clamped them together and filed them around the edges to make them vaguely uniform in appearance.

Then I fitted them around the axle, together with the fender stays. The bolts now don't go all the way in. There are all kinds of chemical thread-fastening substances people use to keep their nuts and bolts in place, I've usually used hair spray but I don't have any lying around at the moment. Using safety wire is another option, but nothing helps if there's insufficient contact between the threads of the nut and bolt. Maybe slimming down the fender stays would help.

But to be honest, I feel my fake braze-ons look sort of professional. Satisfied with self.

I the fitted the rack to it all. This involved som drilling into the fender and fastening it to the rack to avoid rattling etc.

I like front racks better than handle bar bags, as my handle bar bags always end up rattling and rolling around, being fastened only to one point and always overloaded. However, this rack doesn't really do anything except look good until I get some useful straps, a bag or a box.

Also, I have to stop looking at it while bicycling. Should pay attention to the traffic instead.

Update: This post got a mention on the VeloOrange blog, a site with plenty of interest for owners of classic bicycles.

Sauna to go

2011-04-27T09:17:00.014+02:00

Friend Trig is a keen outdoors swimmer. Once the sea hits 14 degrees C (57 F) he goes regularly for pretty long swims with some equally rugged amphibious friends.

For his birthday, his swimming buddies gave him a mobile sauna (above). They found an old camper, fitted it with paneling and a small sheet metal wood stove. No nails can be exposed in the interiors of saunas, you need to conceal them or use wooden pegs instead. (It's a comfort issue. Exposed nails would burn all that exposed flesh.) Together with all the curves and rounded corners, this makes for some pretty challenging carpentry.

I tried getting some decent pictures of the interior (below) but guests at Trig's birthday party kept running in and out in various states of undress. As a guy who's too touchy to publish people's real names I'm not going to start posting pictures of them in the nude.

The whole thing weighs around 300 kilos (660 lbs), so it can be dragged some distance by hand. In this case, three guys pulled it a kilometer (0.6 miles) along a restricted access road.

Allow me to recommend the Finnish movie Steam of Life, a documentary about Finnish men who talk about serious, personal stuff while in various saunas. The people in the film are entirely nude almost the whole time. This is a non-issue for Finns. But the directors started worrying when they came to the US to show it, and saw how a reality show on tv that involved milking a cow had blurred out the cow's udder. It all went well, however.

Steam of Life, trailer, above. Note the phone booth-sauna and the old thresher-sauna. Much like stoners see any container as a potential bong, Finns see any structure as a potential sauna.

You can call me dad

2011-04-26T10:36:00.006+02:00

I traded in eight sled dogs for a human child. Maybe I could have had it both ways, keeping the dogs while making babies, but I would have ended up with time for neither.

She came into the world with her ass first. As a result her legs were bent in a funny, frog-like way, so I call her "Frog".

The legs are ok now. She had to be checked for hip displasia, an expression any dog person will instantly recognize, but she's fine.

Being a dad is everything people say it is. Except for that part about not being able to sleep. We all sleep like babies in this home. I have learned to always be quick to point out that this may change any day. If you don't remember to say that, other parents will think you're telling them your kid is better than theirs.

I thought I would be more caught up in the "fruit of my loins"-bit, that I would be interested in the fact that I have given my genes a new lease on life. But that doesn't come in to it at all. I honestly believe that if someone on the street handed me a baby and said, there you go, mate, take care of this one, I would have felt pretty much the same as I do now. When step-parents and adoptive parents feel they love their children as much as if they were "real" parents, they are probably right.

How the wall got it's stripes

2010-11-17T15:41:00.011+01:00

Baby is coming. I have known this for some time, but only now have I really started to do anything about it. I decided baby needed a room with a fresh coat of paint and some pretty pictures.

I decided on painting zebras. My instinct was to go for sled dogs, but that would just be about me, zebras seemed more neutral. All of a sudden I became very ambitious and wanted a photographic-looking, Banksy-like effect. So I needed to build an opaque projector, a gadget that projects pictures from a non-transparent source.

I found some old instructions on how to build an opaque projector. The people who wrote that booklet really meant business.

Fortunately, I had a lens I could cannibalize (temporarily) from my old slide projector (below):

Then it was mostly a matter of cutting cardboard into two boxes, one slightly smaller than the other. Necessary equipment below:

Most opaque projectors use mirrors, otherwise your image gets flipped horizontally. I solved that by just printing out the picture I wanted projected the wrong way around.

I didn't need to make a super fancy projector, I thought. I just needed it for this one project. (And, typically, I didn't have time to take a picture on film and wait two weeks for processing so I could just use the slide projector.) Sliding the two boxes in and out adjusts the focus. A print of the picture I wanted on the wall was pasted upside down inside the rear box.

I added some battery-powered LED-lights into the box to see if I could make it work, theoretically, up at my off-grid cabin. And it does work, but it creates a very, very small image, just three or four inches across.

I added as much light as I could (below):

But in the end, I simply couldn't add enough light for the image to be projected intelligibly on the wall six feet away. If I had done this properly, and in wood, I might have been able to cram enough fixtures into into it. Also, the slanted mirror found in most conventional opaque projectors might help in directing the light towards the lens.

Invariably, people write mostly about projects that went really well. Maybe this will be my niche: documenting projects that don't pan out the way I hoped.

I ended up using a digital projector instead (sigh), but here's Big Zebra:

And Baby Zebra:

Speaking of African animals, take a look at Siissisoq:

"The lyrics are sung in Greenlandic and deal mainly with African animals."

If that's not a good idea for a rock band, I don't know what is.

Strange sounds from the cellar

2010-11-11T08:09:00.006+01:00

I am trying to turn myself into the local "guy who knows stuff about bicycles". My workshop above. A degree of fame for fixing stuff will give me an evolutionary edge once civilization as we know it crumples into nothing and we have to start bartering again.

Hopefully, by then the entire neighbourhood will have become interconnected, autonomous and resilient thanks to ever-increasing mutual dependency. Who knows.

Now is the time for changing to studded tires. When I bought my first set fifteen years ago I was met with much ridicule. "Ooh. So Mr. Special Person needs special tires." But now everybody has them and the price has gone way down, not that anybody seems greatful. Compared to how much we bitch when prices go up, we really don't seem to care much when they go down.

Above is the handlebar basket on a bicycle that belongs to Sil, my squaw. Those blobs cover up some nasty screws that would rip and tear her purses. They really wrecked those purses, putting protruding screws there really is not such a stroke of designer genius. The substance I've used is called Sugru, it is soft, squishy and remains sort of soft and eraser-like when cured. I am very satisfied, and considering I am almost never satisfied with anything invented in my lifetime this is saying something.

And here, above, is a trick I did to keep the trolls from nicking Sil's bicycle seat. I have only read about this safety measure, never seen anyone do it around here. It's a bicycle chain I've looped around the rear stays, with an old inner tube around it to keep it from rattling.

Seat theft is really a mystery to me. The chance of the thief ending up with a seat stem that fits his own bike isn't that big. And the seats themselves usually don't cost all that much, so there's no second-hand market I know of.

But this is not the only thing I don't understand.

Almost, though not quite

2010-11-03T14:52:00.005+01:00

Rather touchingly, the park I pass on my way to work each morning has a small replica of bog & pond life as found in the woodlands where I've been fooling around half my life.

There's a bench here too, where I can sit and inhale the smell of ferns, lichen and acidic soil. And there are small signs with information about the plants, their latin names and so on.

Embarassingly, but typically, I am learning names of a lot of these plants only now.

Unstable stable

2010-11-02T17:18:00.007+01:00

Here's my friend and city neighbour (as opposed to forest neighbour) E.d. He has a stable (behind him), which makes a lot of sense. Where else are you going to put your horse. But a) it's falling down and b) like me he suffers from chronic storage shortage, so he's tearing this one down and setting another one up.

Also, keeping horses in town is now possibly more complicated than not having one, while the stable was built when the reverse was true. The recent book Superfreakonomics has a whole chapter devoted to how filthy towns and cities became because of horses, but the reason they became filthy, of course, was because nothing was done about it. The people who built sewers and subways were obviously smart enough to find a way to deal with horse shit, but they started out with tolerating a little shit here, a little shit there and then it got out of hand and then they blamed the horses.

I have a lot of ideas for his new shed but I am keeping them to myself.

I look at this picture and I tell myself, maybe I haven't n moved that far.

You know those car keys are there somewhere

2010-11-02T17:07:00.005+01:00

Well, really now. Somebody finally removed the stove that was here, and now this. I would like to say that people who live in the woods would never do this to their surroundings. But maybe they do.

King Coal and yesterday's news

2010-10-29T17:08:00.006+02:00

Here's another picture from my man cave. That behemoth in the front is, I'm just guessing here, the old coal furnace. It's not connected to anything anymore. The new oil furnace is in the background. The coal furnace is right next to the garbage shoot, so I'm guessing people sendt combustibles down and the janitor stoked the fire with his neigbour's old newspapers.

The lids on the garbage shoots are now locked. A whole genre of urban legends told primarily by and to kids disappeared with the demise of garbage shoots. There was always some boy who had gone for a ride in one of them and had experienced something exciting or, to the listener, pleasingly horrid.

Garbage now, of course, is carted far away. I am not sure how this works out efficiency-wise, but I like the idea of processing waste right where you're at. And every level of complexity, usually, makes things more messy and useless. Theoretically, in an apartment building like this, you could burn your newspapers to heat up the water tanks a couple of degrees, have a worm bin for food scraps and a large compost bin for all the ca-ca.

I really get off thinking about stuff like this.

Take it away, take it away now

2010-10-28T07:49:00.007+02:00

Here's a question I ask myself each morning on my way to work:

Why is that stove out on the street?

I am pretty sure it's a car-related issue. The people who chucked this thing out either don't have a car, or they're too lazy/cheap to rent a trailer and take it to the landfill. So they've reasoned (correctly) that within only a couple of months someoene else will take care of this.

I'm not sure if this goes for kitchen appliances, but when it comes to furniture it can easily be cheaper to buy a new sofa and have it delivered, than it is to rent a car and a trailer to get rid of the old one. This is unsettling even for a native, and drives immigrants up the wall. In many countries getting rid of stuff is free: When you put something on the street, it will have vanished magically in a matter of minutes, often enriching somebody in the process. Put something on the street here, and it stays there.

Unless it's a bicycle, of course, which will be nicked in no time no matter how cruddy it looks and how securely locked it is.

Too much stuff, too much stuff.

But, it seems, not enough bicycles, not enough bicycles.

Extremely specific ethnic stereotyping

2010-10-27T16:09:00.008+02:00

I have written previously about old odds and ends I've found in the cabin, and how surprisingly often they featured some over-the-top ethnic stereotyping. Here's one which is pretty specific: Mosquito repellent with a brand that plays on preconceived, though in this case mildly benevolent, notions about sami, previously known in english as lapps.

Like "lapp" the term "finn" is considered derogatory today, so this bottle seems very odd. A non-sami will find it more quaint than maddeningly offensive.

Calling a finnish person "finn" is another matter. It's fine.

It's a polar thing.

I have decided I'm going to call people what they want to be called. This becomes sort of silly sometimes, some in Alaska prefer to be called Eskimo but would be called Inuit in Canada, so what's a qallunaaq to think. But in general, it seems like the thing to do.

The kind of pictures you end up taking when you no longer live with dogs

2010-10-27T15:59:00.005+02:00

For transport in The Towns, I use an American 1948 "The World"-bicycle. It has a heavy, fillet-brazed frame, no gears, rear coaster brake and front hub brake.

The front hub is almost certainly retrofitted.

It feels really wonderful, but getting spare parts is not always easy The cable to the front brake (top) isn't supposed to be fastened like that, but what are you going to do. It is also hard to find bike shops willing to open up those hubs and replace the brake shoes.

Town bicycling

2010-10-26T12:30:00.007+02:00

In The Towns, I need a shoulder bag for assorted work-related doo-dads. But when bicycling this slips down and invariably slaps into my knee on every rotation of crank.

The solution turned out to be pretty easy. Looking around at relevant bicycle porn and instructables.com I saw many "messenger bags" come with two straps, one goes around the shoulder and the other one around the waist.

My bag already had some wee leather straplets riveted to the sides, waiting to make good use of themselves. So it was just a matter of finding an adjustable strap with snaps in both ends. Not ever throwing anything away pays off once more. Note strap around waist below.

How to get laid if you're a filthy woodlands hermit

2010-10-25T10:28:00.012+02:00

The bunks in my cabin are 70 cm (27.5") wide. This is fine for one person but slightly too narrow for two, even if both are wild, wild things. The mattresses are made of foam rubber. Nothing fancy, one might say.

Some years ago, realizing I simply could not fend off guests who would arrive at the cabin to spend the night , the dogs and I freighted a two-person bed with a futon mattress up on the sled. It was flat-packed and reasonably easy to transport, but far too low on the ground when assembled. For years I have simply propped it up with assorted stumps and junk, resulting in a whole lot of creaking, tipping and broken bed boards.

Typically, I fixed it only now, now that I no longer live here permanently. It only took a couple of hours.

Below is the raw version of the new and improved bed, half perched on a bunk, and half propped up on custom built (by me) frame-like things. I've replaced half of the bed boards. The Swedish producers of semi-disposable furniture who made this originally never intended it to be used with much vigour, it seems.

I did not want to nail or screw the bed to anything, because there's the option of folding it into a sofa. Practical on occasions when I have daytime guests. The supports here are alle stacked under the sofa.

But how do I keep the supports in place under the bed? By doing some more sawing. Note smug expression of sawing person below.

My ryoba (below) came in handy here again. I cannot stop praising the superior saws of the Japanese.

Below are the spacer bars I made to slap onto the bed's supports to keep them in place.

Below is one of the spacers in place. Without these spacers the supports will wiggle in different directions. And as the bed can be folded, the supports need to be placed right under the various joints.

And below here is Sil, lying on what is now a rock-solid platform.

Contents under pressure

2010-10-19T15:43:00.004+02:00

Here's the gauge that tells me how much heating oil is left. You pump that lever at five o'clock like crazy until the dial stops moving. I'm trying to wrap my head around how it works. The more oil is in the tank, the longer I need to pump.

But the important thing is that it looks fantastically steam punk-y.

Belly of the beast

2010-10-18T21:47:00.007+02:00

Well, it's different. Different from my old wood stove. This is the cellar of the apartment building where I am currently being superficially domesticated. (I am being domesticated in the building, I hasten to add, not in this cellar, per se.)

I managed to fool everybody in the building into letting me take control of this space. This way, somebody keeps an eye on those gauges and orders heating oil, and I get a workshop. Everybody wins until the darn thing blows up.

Above is the 6000 litre (1585 gallon) oil tank. You can't really tell. It just looks like a large, squarish cement-kind of thing.

Heating with oil is horrid, horrid, horrid, of course, though seldom chosen for entirely psychopathic reasons. I will return to this subject.

Bellow is the furnace. It heats up both the hot water tanks and the water used for the radiators. I have had some problems in sorting out what pipes lead to what, but I think I'm getting the hang of it. That blue thing is a pump.

So much that can go wrong. City folks put up with so much.

I visited my former cat, the evil Felis, recently. As can be seen below, she now lives with civilized folk. She has put on some weight and seems enormously content. She was happy roaming the forest too, I imagine. But there is a time for everything. I thought I'd post a picture of her because hey, she's a cat.

She is, as always, thinking of murder.

Sign language

2010-10-14T18:43:00.005+02:00

The barrio surrounding my new digs sports some shops with hand-written signs. Though individual neon signs, or even normal plastic ones, can be seriously attractive, they are always foul in aggregate.

Visting Ireland in the early 1990s I was fascinated to see that signpainting was still a serious craft. I actually saw, on more than one occasion, people laying gold leaf on the inside of shop windows after first having written something in black, gaelic-looking letters.

I've also seen signpainters in action in America, not doing replicas of ye quaint ole style-stuff, but writing utilitarian, though to be honest not very lovely-looking messages about local furniture salesmen and the like.

I have no idea what EZLN means here. It's the acronym for Zapatistas in Mexico, sure. But I haven't seen many of those around here.

Lost Love Boat

2010-10-13T11:56:00.007+02:00

Some people just do not want to live like everybody else. This summer I would occasionally pass a gentleman who lived in this boat, very close to the center of The Towns. He had a nice view of the fjord in one direction, and a nightmarish knot of highways in all other directions. Strategically this meant that, even though he was in plain view, he wasn't really in anybody's way and it would also be hard to sneak up on him.

He's left now, it seems. He had problems all summer in supporting his tarps so they wouldn't sag. Maybe he got cold. Maybe the Port Authority started being a pain in his ass.

He certainly did not need to live like this. If he had filled out the proper forms and stayed sober six hours in a row on a couple of occasions so he could talk coherently to social workers, he would be rewarded with a standard of living that would make half the world ghasp. In stead he tried to do things his own way as long as the weather permitted. Living rough is often the result of pride, not shamelessness.

Cabinville

2010-10-12T12:14:00.008+02:00

There are cabins in The Towns, too. There are even small shed-based towns-within-the-town, allotment gardens ("community gardens" to some). I honestly can not say why not towns are entirely like this. The houses in the allotment gardens are small, but snug and beautiful. And they're sold and bought at fixed prices, to avoid speculation. There's no place for cars. The individual gardens range from being impressive to being "interesting". There is some peer pressure to keep things tidy, for sure, but this way everybody gets exercise in conflict solving. If just part of one generation lets that conflict solving muscle atrophy all hell breaks loose, but maybe that's already happened.

You're not supposed to live like this year round. There are many reasons for this, several of them concerning how to keep people like me from settling down permanently.

Wildlife in The Towns

2010-10-11T23:04:00.005+02:00

My new digs in the civilized world are pretty close to a museum of natural history, which has a rather odd library. It has, among several interesting books, one very intriguing specimen called "Man and the Termite". This seems to be a rather philosophical work, and who can deny that the relationship between the two species deserve some serious thought.

The library also has a rather exquisite piece of decoration, I find (above).

I will return here soon.

Lingon-pickin'

2010-10-11T10:53:00.006+02:00

Look! Some fox-shit.

This is that kind of blog.

Fox-shit is easy to recognize because Mr. Fox is very public about his bowels and leaves them in the middle of paths and on top of tree stubs. Also, he eats a lot of lingonberry. ("Cowberry" to some and "partridgeberry" to you Newfies. Lingon to Scandinavians and customers at IKEA.)

Above is Bella. Her big ears give her a kind of desert fox-like appearance, but she is a sesoned sled dog. She is my part-time dog, as my previous full-time dogs are now busy other places. She is a good girl.

Sweet cabin dreams

2010-10-08T17:07:00.007+02:00

As a thirteen og fourteen year old kid I read a story in an EC comic book about a guy who enters his cabin to find a half naked broad standing in front of his fire place. The story was called "Came the Dawn", written by Al Feldstein and drawn by Wallace Wood.

I remember looking at that girl with the bedsheet wrapped around her, and thinking man, I need to get a cabin when I grow up.

The story ends horribly, as stories in EC comics normally would. But that first part, with the pipe-smoking, manly hunter getting to know that cute, curvy girl way out in the forest played quite often in my hormone-powered inner cinema.

Turns out Frank Frazetta, the inspirer of legions of airbrush-weilding van decorators, did some sketches for a possible "re-make" of the story (a sample, above and below). A lot of what Frazetta did in his career was pretty awfully silly but the guy could draw.

The whole story by Feldstein/Wood, as well as Frazettas drawings, can be found here.

Apart from all that taxidermic stuff, I feel both Frazetta's and Woods' drawings actually do come pretty close to describing what it's like around my place.

Lucky me.

Neighbour has AC

2010-06-29T10:11:00.003+02:00

Friend, neigbour and incredibly competent cross country skier Mr. H lives five miles north of my place. There are two houses between him and me, so he almost qualifies as being next door. Mr H. has AC in his house. He is into stuff like refrigerators and freezers.

When I visited him recently there was a blackout. It lasted for quite a while and if it lasted really long a lot of his stored food would go bad. I cackled evilly and rubbed my hands.

Maybe it really is time I move to The Towns for a spell.

Book of Dreams and assorted racist merchandising

2010-06-28T10:03:00.013+02:00

This cabin of mine was built in 1964. When I bought it seven years ago, it seemed almost completely unused. There were two bunches of magazines there, one from 1966 and one from 1986. Maybe that was when the people who owned this before me had major marital crises.

There were also some wonderfully retro consumer goods here. Including three examples of what today seems like stunningly inappropriate "Aunt Jemima"-style branding. Here's some stove polish:

It could have been worse. It could have been like this.

Here's some ground pepper:

This company still exists, with the same name. Their eponymous symbol was redesigned and made more conventionally attractive, but in the end they gave up on this whole business with depicting a young gentleman from balmier climes and settled for plain lettering instead.

There was also some food colouring here:

I pasted the guys from the oven polish and the food colouring in my "Book of dreams", basically just a notebook where I've scrawled plans for all the awesome stuff I've planned to do here (below).

Flipping through it now I see that some of my projects have indeed come to fruition. Most of them, of course, have not. What would be the point otherwise.

City slickers

2010-06-25T12:29:00.003+02:00

Solan and I, trying heroically to acclimatize ourselves to life in The Towns. Double latte and pain au chocolat at a curbside café. Note backpack and checked shirt.

Storing food

2010-06-25T09:51:00.016+02:00

Not my kitchen: Friend and neigbour K. has mains electricity, but no running water. He built this kitchen, including adding the window for natural light to feed his herbs throughout most of the year.

Reader "Spokes" commented: "I am moving off grid and wonder what you do for cold storage. Do you have a refrigerator and if you do what type?"

Six or seven months a year, I've stored perishables in the uninsulated shop I pass through to get to my living quarters, this way it stays frozen and close at hand. During the summer I occasionally use a 12v cooler of the kind people use in cars, but this is mostly for luxury purposes., i.e. cooling beer.

Cellars: What I really, really recommend is creating some kind of root cellar. My cabin is placed on poles so I'm at a disadvantage here. But in reasonably cool climates a normal cellar works fine, keeping stuff almost at fridge-like temperatures in the summer and frost-free in winter. If there is no cellar, an alternative, not-so-labour-intensive version is digging a deep hole, putting a barrel in it, and make some kind of system so you can hoist the contents up and down. The reason I haven't done this is that I only have some inches of soil above the bedrock, so I can't dig deep enough for this to work.

A handy guy, with time on his hands, could make a small, earth bermed cellar with cinder blocks and live very, very happily. Information about building root cellars abound, an alternative, and seemingly cost-effective option, is following the fascinating advice on underground building by Mike Oehler.

Food choices: I have gotten around the storage challenge mostly by avoiding food that goes bad quickly. And if I buy meat or fish or soft cheeses during summer I just binge.

Sometimes guests will opine that I must eat a "lot of canned food". Thank goodness, I don't. Canned food is really astonishingly vile stuff. I'm not a picky eater but while I've eaten some wonderful canned food in France, the rest of us seem not to have gotten the hang of this.

Some food tips: I bake all my own bread. Flour and dried yeast is easy to store. I always live in the hope that the smell of freshly baked bread slightly camouflages the reek of crazy guy in the forest. Dried beans and lentils store forever, and can be sprouted when you need fresh greens. I did this a lot for a while, those sprouts can be fried as an alternative to bacon to go with eggs, or eaten fresh as a salad. Fantastic stuff.

Dried and salted meat is good. Yoghurt and especially cottage cheese keeps way longer than those stamps on the containers claim. Nuts last pretty long, so does jam and honey lasts a lifetime.

If you can keep it a secret from your guests, go for baby formula which tastes more like milk than normal powdered milk. (Most people can't keep themselves from imagining baby formula somehow has been made from milked women.)

Peanut butter is not the gourmet's first choice, perhaps, but man, it doesn't go bad and you can still spread it in sub-zero temperatures.

I use quite a lot of fruit syrups, which keep for eons compared to normal fruit juice. Syrups tend to be pretty damn sweet, but there are some options which are ok.

Oats store pretty well and can be used for all kinds of foods.

Refrigerators, coolers and freezers: There are freezers and refrigerators that run on propane, and even some that run on kerosene. I really, really do not recommend using these. They are fine for the occasional weekend use. But they end up being horribly costly for someone who actually lives off-grid. It took me some time to get used to this: There's a fantastic amount of equipment out there geared towards people who just aren't going to use it very much.

Electric versions are better, provided you have a useful solar/wind-powered system. I do not, however, recommend the small car-type cooler I use. Counter-intuitively, the bigger the better. Lots of cold stuff stays cold longer than just a little bit of cold stuff. Chest-type is better than the vertical type, as cold air will spill quickly out of a vertical freezer. Fill the bugger up to the max, with water bottles or whatever. Frozen water stays cold longer than cold areas of air.

I have looked around, a lot, for electric freezers and by far the best one out there seems to be made by a company called Vestfrost. Once you have something this size, adding extra insulation makes sense, as opposed to insulating a small car-cooler. My solar system (panels at 180 w, 550ah battery bank) could probably keep a big Vestfrost running during summer. As the nights get longer, the air gets cooler, and I could shut the system off in the evenings, and simply turn it completely off during winter. Only the cost, and a degree of techno-skepticism, has kept me from getting hold of one.

Typically, I have wanted a freezer because I would have liked to feed the dogs something else rather than kibble during the summer. Personally, I manage pretty fine without one.

Low-tech: My drooling over electric freezers notwithstanding, the best solutions really are low-tech. An intriguing project would be the "ambient air refrigerator". I've seen "coolers" which are small houses built above a spring, and food stored in buckets hung inside wells. Mother Earth News has a pretty inspiring archive of all kinds of solutions.

Conclusion: That business with a refrigerator placed inside the kitchen, one whose door you can simply open up and grab what you want, is surprisingly hard to replicate in an off-grid situation. A typical attempt would be to use the kind of refrigerator made for boats, but remember that these are designed to work for people who are hooked up to the grid while on shore, and who have a generator (the motor) often turned on while at sea. You really need an enormous array of solar panels to make this work reliably off-grid.

I am pretty confident in claiming that all 12v refrigerators that promise on-grid style convenience will disappoint. If I had a chest freezer I would take bottles of frozen water out of it and put them in a normal, non-electric cooler to keep in the kitchen, that's the closest I can imagine to having a "normal" refrigerator.

The most likely solution is a combination of different systems, and one which involves going outdoors, dipping into the cellar etc. to retrieve what you need.

And... Though I am not old enough to remember the moon landing or the Beatles as an active band, I do remember when refrigerators were not entirely taken for granted. Outside the apartment block where I spent my first years, there were food-filled plastic bags hung from the sills of north-facing windows, including ours. Ambient cooling, indeed.

Update: More information in the comments section.

Update 2: Gas where I live is around five or six dollars a gallon. Propane prices are correspondingly high. Depending on location, propane might be a more attractive option than I claim here.

Right side of the tracks

2010-06-24T08:51:00.004+02:00

Last bikejoring trip with double dog-cylinder power assist, at least for a while.

The contract

2010-06-22T14:42:00.004+02:00

There is a contract between man and dog. I am not sure of the precise words. But apart from a few dogs that go Cujo, they all live up to it. With man, it's more hit and miss.

Once it's over, it's over. You can't say, as men have a tendency to say: "Tomorrow". There is no tomorrow.

There is only today and now. Dogs know this. Bibi, above, certainly does.

No country for small children

2010-06-22T00:26:00.006+02:00

Guests occasionally volunteer their opinion that the place I live might, perhaps, not be ideal for raising children.

I disagree, of course. For one thing, the overhead up here is low. A family could, with only modest sacrifices, live on half a wage while enjoying a standard of living vastly superior to even the wildest dreams of the majority of the world's population. A child could easily be kept blissfully ignorant of the trappings of the modern society and released into the wild, Nell-like, replete with speech impediments and finely honed survival skills at an appropriate age. I just don't see how this could go wrong.

Despite my prodigious debating skills, this seems to be one battle I am destined not to win. I will have to straddle two worlds for a while. Until that kid has been brainwashed to take my side.

When I moved to the forest, nobody had e-mail addresses or cell phones. Kurt Cobain was still alive. Basically, I've lived here all my adult life, first in assorted rented cabins, the last five years in my own off-grid hovel. I really like it.

Above is an example of how convenient this life is,. That's my front-loading trike braving a part of the road temporarily flooded by some heavy rain some years ago. How could life be easier.

Mazunte and me

2010-06-21T11:19:00.012+02:00

Very observant readers might have noticed how I have gradually reduced the number of dogs up here at the hermitage.

I am going to be a father, it seems. Obviously I have been rather cavalier about some of the more traditional aspects of hermitdom.

I can't run dogs and take care of a family while doing justice to all.

I have not gone into detail about distributing the dogs to better futures, because if I think about this too much I get hopelessly maudlin.

Mazunte, pictured above and below, is getting a human all to himself today. So far, giving away dogs used to living outdoors in a pack has been a success. They know how lucky they are to spend time indoors with amazing amounts of quality time with humans, and prove themselves very loyal to their new owners.

It doesn't work that well the other way around. A dog used to being somebody's only dog will get traumatized by joining a pack. Many mushers have stories about how their first dog went nuts once other dogs entered the picture. Better leave spoiling to the second part of life, when it will be appreciated.

I am going to try to not extrapolate too heavily from my mushing experience when it comes to child rearing. But once you got this stuff in your bones, it's hard to get rid of it.

A kind of sheep dog

2010-06-21T10:04:00.004+02:00

There's been a flurry of activity up here at Hermit's Beauty Parlor. Our model Mazunte poses next to the result of two minutes' worth of vigorous grooming.

This stuff can be used for spinning and knitting, you know. I've saved quite a bit over the years. Maybe there's a really, really warm scarf waiting somewhere in the future.

Emergency longbike repair

2010-06-21T09:18:00.009+02:00

Above is my longbike. It's an entirely normal bicycle with a part bolted on to it. That rear part, a so-called "Free Radical", is fastened to the bicycle frame at the rear dropouts, where the rear wheel would normally be, and right behind the crank, where the pedals are. That part behind the pedals is fastened with a long screw fastened into a flat aluminum plate.

That aluminum plate fell off while I was driving under influence of something, or at least not paying attention, leaving the "free radical" to pivot around the bolts fastened into the rear dropouts. This gave a weird kind of flexibility over small humps in the road, but it sapped a lot of the already very limited supply of energy available for propelling this contraption in the desired direction.

I needed to fix this, and I needed to fix this fast. I certainly didn't have time to order parts from the US.

I considered using a piece of plywood. But while scratching my head and looking for odds and ends, I found some of my old school Stanley knives (one of them below, against a backdrop of heavily pollinated plywood). Note the duct tape, placed to avoid accidental wrist slashing.

The handle (and container of extra blades) on this knife is made of aluminum, so it weighs nothing, and is shaped in a way that makes it stronger than if it was flat. Best of all, it already had a threaded hole where I needed it to be. (That part about the weight is actually neither here nor there. This is a single speed load bike and some extra ounces, seriously, will not make a difference.) So I bolted it into place, extremely satisfied with finding an appropriate nut and washer. I do not have my shit together but at least my workshop is halfway organized.

I then sawed off the part that would have interfered with the pedals (below).

All in all, it worked OK. But i should add some pieces of bicycle tube to it, after a couple of miles it does slide around a bit, there being no real friction between the plate and the frame.

Say yes to litter

2010-06-18T11:19:00.007+02:00

The first summer up here, five years ago, Bibi had a litter of nine puppies. They spent their first weeks indoors, gradually I let them run loose outside. One of those white ones is Solan, who I kept.

Puppies at this stage sound like sea gulls and smell like nothing I've ever smelled before.

My old solar panel can be seen in the background.

When we met

2010-06-17T16:49:00.006+02:00

Above is Mazunte (the small one) and Solan, when they first met, three years ago. I walked slowly to the cabin with Mazunte, letting him get to know the area, letting him get to know me. And once we came to my place I let him run around as much as possible among the grown-up dogs. Most dogs will put a puppy in it's place, but not hurt it. This way, the new arrival learns the ropes.

But despite this attempt at creating social cohesion and stability: Mazunte and Solan had a real brawl the other day. (They're the same size now.) If I hadn't hooked Solan's collar to a chain and whacked him on the head with a club until he let go so I could drag Mazunte away they would still have been at it. Unacceptable as this is: If you surround yourself with life you are going to surround yourself with problems, too.

Mellow yellow level

2010-06-15T09:26:00.004+02:00

Staying inside the cabin does give a slight woozy feeling, a little bit like being drunk for free and without the hangover afterwards.

Despite much time having been spent beneath the cabin, engaged in furious jacking, this is what the floor is like. As I am planning to build and add-on greenhouse, maybe before the robots take over the planet, the manor proper had better be plumb and level. But jack up one part and the other parts seems to go the opposite direction.

Tipis and yurts. They got a lot going for them, you know.

DIY LongLoader

2010-06-14T15:30:00.003+02:00

Look. I'm not saying this is a stroke of genius.

Just to recap: I have extended one of my bicycles and turned it into a load-carrying "longbike", and have added a flatbed to it, as it were. But what to do when transporting something really long is called for?

Those wacky folks at xtracycle make something called a "LongLoader", which is an excellent thing but it was not available at the precise moment I felt the need to transport a roll of plastic netting that friends in the towns wanted for making trellises in their garden.

The problem with long stuff on a longbike is that the cargo will interfere with the pedaling, thus the "LongLoader": to make sure the long stuff, whatever it is, is placed at an angle.

A really easy way to achieve more or less the same is to jam a backpack down at the appropriate place. In the picture below it's easy to see how much room my there is for my feet.

I didn't say it was extremely clever.

The very observant will notice this is still a single speed contraption. I ended up spending so much time fiddling with the gears I decided doing without them would save me time. There's a lot to be said against single speed load bikes though, I really must say.

Ax sheath

2010-06-11T18:53:00.003+02:00

Here's another one of Ms. H's homemade things, an ax tote. Modern people forget how incredibly dangerous it has always been to suffer what today are considered minor accidents. A classic green-horn mistake out in the woods is letting saws and axes and other tools lie around, waiting for you to fall on them. Thus the ax-tote. Don't let that thing lie on the ground.

There's a Turkish saying about the forest being cut down, and the trees thinking to themselves, well, at least the shaft of the ax is one of us. A saying to remember, I'm afraid and sorry to say, whenever somebody insists on being ruled and lorded over by "their own".

Log Lady has got some cool stuff

2010-06-10T18:29:00.003+02:00

Ms H, who I sometimes call my own local Log Lady after the character in "Twin Peaks", has sailed the Pacific, mushed dogs in Alaska and raised a child in a sod hut in the Arctic.

For someone who styles himself a "hermit" I sure blab on a lot about my neighbours, but that's what hermit life is like.

Below are ulus, Inuit knives she's made out of old saw blades. The handle on one is made of wood, the other of bone.

And here's a basket made entirely out of bark and split roots.

Time for change

2010-06-02T18:14:00.001+02:00

Here is neighbour, friend and prize-winning musher M. changing diapers on her heiress. Puma, a Short-haired German Pointer, shares the baby blanket.

I have friends in the towns, too. They do things differently there.

La playa

2010-05-31T11:34:00.006+02:00

My neck of the woods has got it all, including this world-class five foot long pebbled beach. I must admit I use this more for campfires and solving global problems than for swimming. I spend so much of my life avoiding freezing to death, I have lost the inclination to actively induce freezing during summer.

Mazunte's not much of a swimmer either. But he approves of the spot.

Bikejoring

2010-05-31T11:26:00.007+02:00

Here's a rather nervously executed video of me and Mazunte out "bikejoring". Bikejoring means simply hooking up one or more dogs to a bicycle and let it rip.

The biggest challenge in bikejoring is surviving those few seconds between hooking up the dogs and mounting the bicycle. I normally keep one foot on the gangline up until the last second.

Below is my setup, I use an old bicycle tube to add some suspension.

Swede saw time

2010-05-27T08:34:00.008+02:00

I have some rules up here that some might feel makes life here even more labour-intensive than necessary. Not using a chain saw is one of them. Felling, limbing and splitting is only marginally slower when done by hand compared to using infernal and complicated machines, but all that bucking (slicing trees into pieces, as it were) by human power can be a daunting task.

Sil, above, demonstrating some serious Swede saw bucking. Let me count my blessings.

As I might have mentioned here before, the blades for Swede (or "bow") saws come in different flavours, there's one specifically for green wood. Claiming it cuts through wood like butter would be an exaggeration, but compared to any other saw for this purpose I've tried it is very impressive.

There are 36" saws and blades out there, but few hardware stores stock anything larger than 30". Almost nobody needs 36" Swede saws any more. Hey, there are chain saws out there! Once again I find myself in the crazy people and stealthy serial killer-segment, one few choose to cater for.

The possibility of an orchard

2010-05-26T16:33:00.006+02:00

I have inadvertently created optimal conditions for an orchard of rowan trees. I did this by chopping down the forest to the south of the cabin, and by keeping dogs whose scent make the moose and deer steer clear of my immediate surroundings. Moose and deer like to nibble on fresh rowan shoots.

Rowan is one of the few naturally occurring deciduous trees here, along with birch and aspen. There are oak trees fifteen km (ten miles) from here and I pass both maple and elm on my daily commute. But at this height above sea level the selection of trees is drastically lowered.

Rowan berries can be used not only for decoration but for food, though there must certainly be a limit to how much rowan jelly a guy needs. Maybe rowans can be pruned to pleasing shapes or coppiced for walking sticks.

I will keep the ones that do not threaten to block out the sun that's supposed to reach the solar panels.

Traffic was bitches and a musher today

2010-05-26T13:31:00.007+02:00

Passed friend, neighbour and musher Thor on my way to work today. He's upgraded his rig from a motorless crossbike to a motorless ATV. That white dog is his new puppy. Seven months old but pulling good.

I have started to notice that the sound track on the videos I post here is almost always the same. This might either be attributed to coherence of vision or an absurd narrow-mindedness.

Great Cabin Lake

2010-05-25T19:06:00.004+02:00

A couple of miles from my place is Great Cabin Lake. It's not a big lake, and there's only one small cabin there. Said cabin is little more than a shack, really, around 100 square feet (10 m2). The lake is too acidic to have any fish in it.

But the location still is wonderful. And this cabin is much further away from the logging road than mine, and thus more isolated. I can't help myself thinking man, this is a cool place, imagine living here.

Below is the view on the way from my place to Great Cabin Lake.

Fair-weather electric cooler

2010-05-25T09:33:00.004+02:00

My electric cooler is noisy and power-hungry, but I do rather enjoy being able to offer cooled beer to visitors. And offering a cool beer while outdoors seems even more suave than having to trot indoors every time it's time to replenish.

I have an old solar panel which I have been saving for some as of yet undecided project, I hooked it up to a solar charger and a 7,2 ah battery, and thus made myself a stand-alone outdoors solar powered electrical cooler.

Hooking the panels directly to the cooler does not work. Enough volts, not enough amperage, I'm guessing.

This system only works with lots of sun. Either that, or a much larger (and charged) battery.

Greenhouse building 1

2010-05-25T09:30:00.002+02:00

Few blessings are as great as friends with strong backs and a willingness to give some of their time. Here's Iv, helping me dig down to the bedrock where the greenhouse, at least in my fevered fantasies, will be placed.

Greenhouse dreaming

2010-05-21T10:09:00.004+02:00

I have fantasized about a greenhouse for a long time. And last year I did manage to drag up most of the materials I need.

I keep my eyes peeled for inspiration. Here's one, thirty miles south of my place and just a couple of feet above sea level, that obviously hadn't been used in a long while. It's interesting because it was, though it's hard to tell now, quite carefully made but, somewhat more obviously, at low cost. The roof and some of the walls were corrugated fiberglass of some sort. Greenhouse roofs here don't really need to be transparent, as the sun is up all day in the summer and very low on the horizon in spring and autumn.

Change of perspective

2010-05-20T15:47:00.005+02:00

Stitching together pictures creates a warped perspective, in real life the roofline of the pen looks tolerably straight.

This dog pen system works well for me, as I logistics demand that I am often away for a while. Mushers usually keep their dogs on chains mounted on a swivel bar. This is OK if the dogs get exercise every single day and people are usually around. But in my situation I wanted a system where, if I had some misfortune or unforeseen business to attend to, the dogs would be totally comfortable on their own for a while.

Dog pens

2010-05-19T15:24:00.005+02:00

I am easily flattered, and when asked to post a picture of my dogpen I do as told. It is astonishingly hard to photograph, though, as trees and the cabin itself gets in the way. This is 1/3 of the whole construction, I have since improved the doggy kitchen (to the left) somewhat.

The whole contruction process is documented here. And it's still not finished.

And while on the subject of dog pens, below is a picture of a part of the dogyard at M & Øs, who are neighbours and prizewinning mushers. A wonderful detail here is the sandbox, complete with a pissing log. That guy in the foreground is Crom, a strong, happy and very, very noisy boy.

Hermit's guide to roofing

2010-05-18T21:24:00.012+02:00

I have been asked about the roof of my dog pen. (That's me in front of the pen, above, looking very smug because I am celebrating exactly five continuous years of off-grid cabin living. ) There are several reasons to put a roof on a dog pen. It keeps the more adventurous mutts out of trouble, and it gives the dogs shade.

An essential aspect of the roof is that it slopes in order to shed rain and snow. In my case, it slopes 7 degrees, which is mostly a result of circumstance but is also the minimum according to construction code in this area. Not that any inspector is coming here soon.

On most dog pens, the walls are all the same height, so some ingenuity will have to be applied to create a slope.

Also, the weight of snow might, in the end, buckle walls made only out of fences and normal fence posts. A roof in a snowy area probably will have to be supported by additional posts outside of the pen and, if the pen is large, inside. Round timber on cinder blocks should work, and will keep expenses down.

Milled lumber should be used for the rafters, though, to ensure some degree of uniformity. An irregular roof will result in puddles and the collection of abrasive material such as pine cones etc.

On one part of the pen, I used round timber poles for purlins (below). This is certainly cheap and very sturdy. Supposedly round timber is 40% stronger, on average, than milled lumber of the same dimension.

I placed plastic fencing/poultry netting on top of the poles to prevent the tarp from sagging between the cracks.

On the rest of the pen, I placed rebar mats (or weldmesh) between the rafters and the tarp. This has proven adequate, even with quite a lot of snow. The distance between the rafters is 55 cm or 21 3/4".

A real disadvantage of the rebar mat-system is that it makes walking on the roof really unpleasant, you have to stand right on the rafters and not between them. While fastening the mats I used a lot of boards placed between the rafters to sit and work on.

The distance of the rafters, which are 2x4s, from one wall to another, is 3.6 m or approx 12'. If the span is longer, I would recommend 2x6. At my place, the rafters do bend slightly downwards when there is a lot of wet snow on top of them. The tarp, however, does not bulge at all between them, so that rebar mat /pole-and-fencing system works pretty well.

What's the frequency, Kenneth

2010-05-18T18:48:00.009+02:00

The mindless drivel of standard FM stations can drive good men bad and bad men, well... they can become even worse men. To stay up to date with the assorted horrors and wonders of our time I rely, to some extent, on the BBC World Service, which is broadcast locally on FM between ten at night and six in the morning. I am, however, sometimes in the mood for some different fare at more Christian times of the day. Enter the Barlow Wadley Short Wave radio (above).

Barlow Wadley is the kind of radio that does strange things to people. It has it's own fansite.

For ease of information and entertainment access this beats podcasting paws down. Turn it on, and you're good to go. You have to twist those dials a lot, of course, but firing up my computer and waiting for bits and bytes seep through the air takes forever. The radio is much more immediate and actually much less capricious. The radio always works.

And you don't know what "retro" is until you've listened diligently to the German-language programmes on Radio Romania International, complete with atmospheric static and some vaguely oriental marching band in the background.

My unit has been lovingly restored by neigbour Olav, note his handwritten khz dial in the circuit porn pic below.

My friend Arild gave me my survivalists radio (below). It comes not only with integrated solar panels, but also a crank. And indeed, instruction in both Pashto and Dari, perhaps slight overkill for my use, but you never know.

This radio has surprisingly good reception, but the dials are hopelessly imprecise and it lacks all those doo-dads on the Barlow Wadley that let you do the fine tuning.

Like almost everything else I seem to own, these things demand some user commitment. And once the devices are turned on, I have little idea of what is going to come out of them, though statistically speaking the chances of news from Eastern Europe or the Middle East is pretty high.

A very odd side effect of listening quite faithfully to high quality radio broadcasting, is that I often find myself better informed, and more up to date, than friends who rely more on national newspapers or profit driven broadcasting outlets. If I could curb my internet addiction I would perhaps know even more.

The BBC has, maddeningly, cancelled it's short wave broadcasts in Europe, as only the old and very, very strange here now no longer have access to satellite TV or broadband. Depending on sun spots and somesuch, there is, however, the possibility of eavesdropping on BBC programmes that are broadcast to the Middle East.

Woodland mystery

2010-05-14T13:26:00.006+02:00

Here's a sofa I passed on my way to work today. It's not that far into the woods. It's pretty close to the train tracks. But still. Somebody had to drag it half a mile along a narrow, muddy path. There were remnants of a camp fire right next to it.

Would be bitchin' for an album cover.

This is going to get ugly real soon, once it gets soggy and the filling starts flying every which way. I could drag it to the closest tarmac. Maybe even hitch my dogs to it. But then what?

I am a relentless and sometimes extremely boring advocate for cycling, but this kind of situation is a fine example of why people like to have cars.

Solar update

2010-05-12T22:06:00.005+02:00

If something claims it's "solar" and doesn't cost much, chances are pretty high that I'm going to buy it. No environmental points are scored this way, I'm afraid, as is convincingly explained in a piece in lowtechmagazine.com.

I bought a couple of lights some time ago, they came with a small solar panel each. This does seem like a slightly more convenient way of getting light in my doggy kitchen than using lots of expensive 12 v wiring from the cabin. But the irony of using solar in northern latitudes - the fact that your lights work best at the same time that you get midnight sun - gets greater the smaller the system. The teeny weeny panels (above) work fine in the middle of summer, when I don't really need any artificial lightning. The two 600 mah cells in each light can easily be replaced by more substantial ones, though.

The workmanship is as sloppy as one might expect. There is no way for the jack to stay plugged unless fastened somehow. I used a rubber band.

I can keep my electric cooler (seen in the background, above) going most days now if I want, as long as the weather is not horribly cloudy the batteries are kept at maximum charge anyway.

Felis, the evil cat, can be seen enjoying some solar power herself in the foreground.

Dirty rain's gonna fall

2010-05-05T16:04:00.004+02:00

Yet another thing I really should get around to doing. From "Popular Mechanics" v. 54, No. 2, 1930. All back issues of this splendid publication available at Google Books. Printing out what you see is a mild pain, but it can be done with some screen shot editing software.

The fine art of beer transport

2010-05-04T16:02:00.005+02:00

A lot of guys pretend they can tell the difference between various types of beer. Mostly, they're just making this up. I enjoy beer as much as the next man, and there are certainly some beers that are better than others out there, but a lot of male beer talk is plain nonsense.

So I am not plugging a specific kind of beer here. But I do endorse this kind of can. The profile of the aluminum here creates a much stronger, more durable container than your normal, straight-sided version. Which is pretty important if you're going to drag it over rocky roads and have no running water at your destination.

Sometimes people tell me that I must have learned a lot by living up here.

"A little bit," I say.

Come on baby, light my fire

2010-05-04T15:57:00.002+02:00

Here's Sil, in a pleasingly apocalyptic landscape created by some degree of thaw combined with burning wet branches from felled spruce and pine.

Levantine bicycles

2010-04-29T17:55:00.007+02:00

Just back from some time spent in Lebanon and Syria.

Beirut is quite possibly the least bicycle-friendly place I have ever seen, with steep hills, incredible numbers of road blocks and seemingly no enforcement of parking rules, or maybe there just aren't any parking rules. Garbage from public trash cans, however, is collected by customized trikes (below).

Damascus in Syria, which on the whole seems much poorer than Beirut and where transport infrastructure shows evidence of more stringent planning, has far more bicyclists. (Number of bicyclists is not an indicator of what the political system is like, I hasten to add. In this respect, Syria is Mordor.) While the few heroic pedal pushers in Beirut mostly used Taiwan-made MTBs, the Syrians mostly go for Chinese "Phoenix"-brand classic bikes (below).

In both Beirut and Damascus, I saw load-carrying bicycles with a sturdy front basket (below). These were mostly used by bread vendors.

The old town of Damascus boasts a stunning mosque and a of course a whole slew of jewelry shops. Being who I am, I was naturally far more intrigued by the amount of blacksmiths making tools and equipment on the spot, and found great pleasure in browsing the most fascinating hardware stores I have ever seen. Your humble correspondent below, trying to remember dimensions of some elusive screws he will surely regret not buying once he arrives home.

Pulka madness

2010-03-22T10:24:00.005+01:00

Here's Trig, hooking the draft poles of his child-carrying pulka to his harness. His son is behind that nifty windshield. Just like on kiddie seats on bicycles, children easily fall asleep in pulkas, hypnotized by the parent's rhythmical movements and all that fresh air.

Somebody, somewhere, has surely cobbled together some dreary flat-screen centered entertainment options for kids in these situations, but so far the idea has not gained traction. All is not lost.

Treehugger

2010-03-11T09:16:00.005+01:00

Felis, the evil cat, stages a protest against being stuck in a tree.

From what I've been told, running up a tree is something cats are hardwired to do, but running down a tree has be learned at the University of Mom. Provided mom knows how to go down a tree herself. The counter-intuitive trick is going head first, supposedly. Kittens are often taken away from their mother slightly too early, so there's an epidemic of tree-related ignorance in the feline community.

Felis' mom did not know, it seems. And no fire department is ever going to show up around here. But Felis got down on her own after a while.

Snowshoes with sled dogs

2010-03-10T15:53:00.006+01:00

Theoretically, I go snowshoeing in the mornings to prepare trails for the coming weeks, when increased temperatures will make it hard to use the logging roads for sledding. But letting the dogs loose and pottering around in the woods is its own reward.

This seems to be good exercise for the dogs, a full body workout. They seem roughly as exhausted after half an hour of this, as after an hour of pulling.

Photogenic as mushing may be, and check out my friend Kristines pictures for verification, it's impossible to take any interesting pictures in the dark while on the sled. You're either mushing or you're taking pictures. Snowshoeing, it's a lot easier to snap away.

Transportable electricity

2010-03-10T15:18:00.004+01:00

Here's my system for emergency electricity during winter, when the sun is too low to give the solar panels any oomph. I carry some largish, rechargeable 12 v 7,2 ah batteries to the office, and charge them there (above). At the cabin, I hook them up to whatever needs some power, like a lamp (below). Most everything I have is fitted with a cigarette lighter-type outlet.

Below is another option, the "BattPak". Stick some AA-cells into it, and a cigarette lighter-style plug, and you're good to go. Works fine with that spawn of Satan, the cell phone, not so good for a laptop.

Pulkin'

2010-03-09T09:46:00.006+01:00

A "pulka" is a small toboggan that can be dragged by either a human or a dog. I have two, both around 4 feet long (1.30 m). Above is one I use mostly around the cabin, to transport firewood and, when cleaning the dog houses, hay. It looks like just an oversized kid's toy, but this very make has been used on expeditions to the South Pole so it can't be too bad. I just use some rope to drag this one around.

Below is the one I use for trips and my low-scale expeditions, kitted out in this case to accommodate a man-harness. (More about hooking this up to a dog in a later post.) With this I can easily transport three times as much as I could carry in a backpack.

There is a blurry distinction between pulkas and dog sleds. Some larger pulkas are equipped with a brake and I've seen them hooked up to as many as four dogs. When mushing came to Scandinavia in the wake of polar exploration in the early 20th century most dog drivers chose to combine sledding with skiing, leading to the so-called "Nordic style". Even the largest sleds were constructed without runners to stand on, instead the musher would use skis and be attached to the sled with a rope. Doing anything in the snow without skis was considered just too weird, "Nome-style" sledding didn't catch on until the 1980's. There is even a style of competitive mushing called "Nordic" with skis, one or two dogs, usually German short-haired pointers, and a futuristic-looking pulka entirely useless for any serious transport.

I used a pulka today while walking to the train stop, the gravel has started to stick out of the snow on the logging road so I'm not skiing there unless it snows more. Using a pulka while walking is considered real village idiot material but my neighbours are used to my experiments in transportation by now.

Pictures of dogs uploaded for no damn reason

2010-03-08T15:07:00.001+01:00

Here are my boys. Solan (top) and Mazunte (above). They don't really know what they're doing here, but they're doing it well.

The music-blaring tuque

2010-03-08T14:45:00.011+01:00

Sil likes to listen to music while she skis, but those ear buds keep falling out. Not a big deal in most circumstances, but a pain when you have to deal with gloves, ski poles and the loss of all sensation in your fingertips.

Personally I like to keep my ears peeled for signs of being ambushed by trolls, but I thought I might be able to cobble together a music-playing beanie. I used: a beanie (has to be lined) and some speakers (below).

You're supposed to use old speakers "that were just lying around" for these type of projects but I just bought some instead.

I then let Sil model the cap so I could use magic marker to see where her ears would be relative to the brim.

Then I cut slits on the inside of the cap and slid the speakers in. I cut two small holes on the inside on the back to route the cable through.

At this point the holes and slits are sort of elastic, but you need to sew along the edges to prevent unraveling. After that the size of the holes are no longer negotiable. This is good to know as you might want to take out the speakers if you're ever going to wash the cap.

The sewing business will also make the holes larger.

The beanie was then tested (above) and the music was deemed as sounding "rather woolly". I could have done this testing myself except my skull is so large it would impair the elasticity of the cap. And this kind of headgear really should fit rather tight and snug on the intended user.

I cut extra holes, centered on the speakers, to improve sound quality, and sewed around all the edges. I had some Velcro lying around which I thought I was going to have to use in some way, but it proved to be unnecessary.

Here's the tuque in the field. You can see the speakers jutting out, slightly, but not much.

The 50 pound charger or: An entirely typical endeavour up at the hermitage and beyond

2010-03-05T16:14:00.024+01:00

I get my electricity from a shitload of batteries that are charged by my solar panels. Being at 60 degrees North, however, I don't get all that much sun in the winter. So I've schlepped my gas generator up here to charge the batteries every now and then in winter. But I need some piece of technical wizardry between that infernal internal combustion engine and the batteries. There is a charger on the market that is both compact and fulfills my needs, but it is prohibitively expensive so I opted instead for a cheaper, larger model.

Getting hold of this object involved getting myself to the strip mall outside town, a voyage never intended by God or planners to be undertaken by anyone without a car. But I took the bus with my friend and neighbour Iv, who also needed some stuff there, so at least we could bitch about how civilization must surely come to an end while taking in all that unbridled consumerism at display. That's me below, with the charger strapped to my backpack. I had to fend young, nubile girls off with a stick, so attracted were they by this exhibition of purpose and physical prowess.

We managed to get back to town, and I took the train which fortunately stops right next door to prizewinning mushers M & Ø. I dumped the charger there (interesting picture below), and was invited inside for a cup of coffee where I bored Ø. to death with pretty much the same stories I tell him every time I see him, I'm afraid.

I could have packed the charger all the way home strapped to my backpack. I've carried heavier loads longer. But it's boring and unstylish if there's an option. If there's no option, of course, it's ball-bustingly cool.

After coffee I trotted up to the cabin, fed the dogs, and took a short nap. The next morning I hitched up the gang, and this is what they sound like before we set off:

I really cannot believe I had eight dogs for many years. I can vaguely remember the drama being incredible at times, I must have been very cool or incredibly stupid.

I am a bit wary about driving the dogs in daytime, as there are invariably horses and poodles behind some bend. My dogs normally run with their ears folded back in an aerodynamic tuck, but when they smell something interesting they usually prick them up. I pay real close attention to those ears.

By now they know the drill of picking up goods, and segue into a slow pace once we arrive at M & Øs place before stopping. I fasten a snow anchor into the drifts behind the sled, and clip a small front anchor to the lead dogs (below) while loading the sled.

Then we turned around and headed home. True to form, we did meet a horse. As that wily trapper I would like to be, I knew we were going to meet one because there had been soft horse shit on the road. I wasn't going to fool around with a camera when it passed as I needed both hands to keep the dogs from inspecting it closer than it would like. But here are the dogs hauling me. the 50 pound charger and assorted other stuff:

Once home I emptied the sled, fed the dogs, scooped the poop, and unpacked that clever contraption, marveling at the approximate workmanship. Here it is, placed next to that nefarious generator:

Once done, it was time to go to work. By skis. For someone who skis so much I am still surprisingly poor at it.

I keep fretting about if I've done the right thing. In theory, I will now be more independent in the sense that with a reliable source of electricity I can work from the cabin. But will this entail a lot of time spent getting gas, transporting jerry cans, worrying about fickle machinery which is inhabited, as we all know, by leprechauns?

All in all, another day.

Coward's loop

2010-03-05T13:53:00.005+01:00

Lose the sled and you quickly lose your mind. Almost anything that can happen on the trail is better than seeing the sphincters of your dogs under happily wagging tails disappear in the distance and with an empty sled behind them.

I've got a piece of rope fastened into a loop on the handle of both my sleds. I twist one hand into the loop and that way, if I fall off, I'm still connected to the darn thing.

An even safter method is to connect the coward's loop to the gang line instead of the sled. In some orally transmitted mushing horror stories the sled falls apart while the dogs keep on running.

My other sled's... also a sled

2010-03-04T12:45:00.004+01:00

Above are my sleds. A toboggan with an aluminum frame (left) and a conventional basket sled made of birch.

The flat-bottomed toboggan is by far the better one in most circumstances, especially when there's any amount of loose snow. I'm not really sure what the ideal circumstances would be for the basket sled.

As with my bicycles, my sleds rarely have all the parts they need, as I often cannibalize one to feed the other. Right now, though, they actually both work fine. But now I no longer have enough dogs for two teams.

Fredrik's Place

2010-03-04T12:15:00.008+01:00

Above is "Fredrik's Place", originally a woodsman's cabin, situated halfway between my hovel and where I jump on the train. Whoever Fredrik was, he's not around any more. Instead the place is inhabited by my friend Herm.

Herm seems to have done most thing right. He's sailed around the world, bicycled everywhere, climbed mountains, skied in extreme places and read an enormous amount of books.

This forest is about 500 square kilometres (200 square miles) and has 47 registered year-round inhabitants. I'm guessing there might be as many living in small cabins and under large roots here with official addresses elsewhere. Neighbours are few and far between but I still haven't met one I didn't like.

Below are pictures of Fredrik's Place from the 1890's.

Reverse mushing

2010-03-02T18:11:00.003+01:00

Ca. 1910. Not too far from where I'm at.

Li'l fellers

2010-03-01T14:14:00.005+01:00

Here are some oddly named fellows, a great tit (to the left) and a willow tit (to the right). There have been less birds this winter than usual. This might be related to the fact that there are many foxes this year, but not a whole lot of mice. Or maybe it's due to some unspeakable tipping point finally having been reached in the global eco-system. I never count that one out.

The pictured feeding station is placed in front of a window, giving Felis, the evil cat, access to what amounts in her view as the best television programming ever.

Update: I got one of the birds wrong. See comments.

Minimalist sledding

2010-02-22T17:39:00.003+01:00

Here's Sil, Isi and me going at full throttle with Solan, Mazunte and Bibi supplying thrust and gravity contributing to speed.

This is called "skijoring", and is just one never-ending bungee jump. Hook dogs up to a bike and it's called "bikejoring". "

The main challenge, when doing this, is to remember to stand far apart while starting up or while resting, otherwise the dogs tangle those lines something awful.

Looking for spiders from Mars

2010-02-10T11:31:00.002+01:00

This is E & W's dog Ziggy. She is as prudent and careful as she looks. She's a good girl.

Indianuity III

2010-02-10T11:25:00.007+01:00

Everybody within 10 km (6,5 miles) is a neighbour of mine. If I can get to you on skis, you''re next door.

Friends and neighbours W & E live in a former forester's home, and they have just contributed to that never ending global population increase. They have fastened this rather elegant diaper changing table in their bathroom. It's fastened to old skis screwed to the window sill. A system of ropes and knots lets the table fold down in a one-handed maneuver.

Though W & E are not native Americans, this still merits as indianuity.

The cat inside

2010-02-09T10:56:00.002+01:00

Felis spends most of her time indoors now, zipping out only for the shortest of errands. But she still thinks of nothing but murder all day.

Alcohol heat

2010-02-09T10:35:00.005+01:00

My goodness, turns out I have yet another heater lying around. This is the "HeatPal 5100". It's basically an oversized alcohol burner. 1.2. litres of spirit (0.3 US gallons) last about five hours (5 US hours), and gives off approx 1500 watts (enough for a largish tent or small yurt).

Denatured alcohol is not cheaper than kerosene, but this little thing does have some things going for it. Made of aluminum, it weighs almost nothing and as opposed to my kerosene heater, is not equipped with a silly battery powered igniter or other unnecessary parts. I bought this for use in my Sami-style lavvu (a tipi, for all practical purposes) for use above/ north of the tree line or in festivals. I don't know what I was thinking, it's not as if I ever go such places.

That "5100" in the name is typical branding nonsense. The company that made this, now defunct, certainly never made 5100 different models. But they liked the way the number looked.

Three paint cans, some rock wool and an old tuna fish can for the regulator and a similar contraption could be made by a handy fellow. And mushers do make similar types of heaters for the dog feed. In competitions dog drivers often are allowed caches at check points, where they stock up with fuel for kibble & melted snow-soup.

Hermit's verdict: Perfect for groups on mushing/paddling/bicycling expeditions who share a large tent. Also handy for kotasu-style heating. But for roadless, off-grid purposes wood, as always, makes more sense.

There are more interesting ways to use alcohol to increase the feeling of comfort.

Evening light

2010-02-08T17:14:00.004+01:00

My cabin yesterday night. The light! The light!