Installing HOMEMADE SHIPLAP in Our Off Grid Cabin
I really love shiplap, so much more then awful drywall. I get the later is cheaper and looks more suburbanite, but I hate suburbanite and white walls and the marble countertops but what do I know.
Made it to a Friday 
Passed my teeth cleaning with shining stripes, and got some groceries. Working from home, actually the library, struggling a bit with the VPN being slow and not wanting to pull emails over IMAP via R. I so rarely use the Windows side of my laptop that I don’t really know what I’m doing and the Windows hard drive is installed in the CD bay so it’s so slow. I really need a new laptop, but my old one still works and I hate running Windows. Get me back into Linux ASAP.
This morning, as I was working from home I had some downtime and spend some of it putting things away, 
and decompressing after much too busy of a week. I mean I spent the weekend and first two days of the week in the Adirondacks, but then when I came home it was too late, too busy, and just impossible to get things put away. I’ve just been struggling to keep my head above water with everything happening this week, really haven’t had much time for blogging.
Dental visit went well, but the VPN issues were so frustrating like many things in life. Dental hygentist, the guy I like was dealing with issues of a house renovation so he was running late and had to run out during the middle of my cleaning to take an emergency call. 
I guess shit like that happens. Windows wanted to preform a million updates, and grind along slowly. The VPN didn’t want to let me pull both the R script I was running plus query the IMAP server at the same time. But eventually it cranked out the spreadsheet and dumped the outputs back out to the buddha server like it should have done. Maybe I need to get R running on the Linux server at work rather then my local laptop. That’s always an option but it would be a pain to compile from source, as R has surprising large number of dependencies to run.
Went to grocery store at lunch time, 
threw some stuff in my cart and had a quick lunch of cornmeal and onion 
pancakes. It was good enough and I finally now have milk 
so I can have coffee even though my teeth were pretty badly stained from all the coffee I’ve been drinking lately. 
Okay, all week when I was in the office I would have one cup of coffee, but for the most part I’ve been good and cut way back in part because I didn’t have milk at home.
The Heat and Just So Busy
I was totally going to write a blog post yesterday morning and then today, but then I got home late on Tuesday evening, so I was running late on Wednesday morning and had to drive in, Wednesday evening was a work function that involved finishing off the night with a really good Irish cofffee and lemon drizzle cake which left me wide awake in the heat during the middle of the night.
It’s been a fun few days getting back in the routine, in the heat 
but work has been intense and a lot more things going on then I would have ever expected. Working remotely tomorrow, I have my dental cleaning, 
and then Saturday will be a rainy, quiet day hopefully. 
Let’s be honest, I need to get to Rensselaer County to stock up on NY legal fireworks at Walmart. 
Might take off all of next Thursday to do a four day weekend, possibly back once again to Piseco-Powley and Potholers and the House Pond Swimming Hole if I can get the campsite.
Bluetooth Speaker stopped working last night 
which I was like, dang it yet another thing to replace. But I was looking on the internet and maybe I can force it to reboot and get it working again. It turns out with a bit of playing with the buttons I was able to get it working again. I got the replacement hammock in the mail, and tomorrow I might get a waterproof case and waterproof pouch for my phone. 
Then with all that money gone, maybe I’ll get some food 
and head up north for a long Independence Day Weekend, assuming it doesn’t rain.
MAIDs Got Cancer
I was a bit horrified the other day when I started playing a podcast and got a targeted advertisement saying, “at our hospital, we understand the struggles you are going through with breast cancer”. While I don’t think I have breasts much less cancer, I was immediately concerned about the targeted ad, wondering if mom has some health issues she hasn’t told me about. I often get targeted ads for mom and dad as I don’t have internet at home but I do connect on their Wi-Fi from time to time. Her internet address is linked to one of my Mobile Advertising IDs, aka MAIDs.
Then I remembered I’ve been getting a lot of ads lately from trial lawyers and medical professionals hawking cancer treatment and litigation. I was trolling an advertisement that popped up on my social media feed with a stupid nonsense comment along the lines of, “I am NOT CANCER, I am AQUARIUS”. Suddenly in the minds of the algorithms I must be dying from cancer. Must be from those PFOAs or drinking the water at Camp Lejune. You show even the least amount of interest in an advertisement – you slow your scrolling to glance on an ad, you hover over it or less you click on the link or make a comment and you get treated as customer number one, somebody soon to need a good trial lawyers to get compensation for your breast cancer.
I often find myself getting into these advertising rabbit holes. Sometimes I’m actually quite interested initially but then the algorithm takes it beyond any logical extreme? Maybe it’s my fault for being attracted to targeted advertising like moth to a light bulb. But some of it is so click worthy, even if it’s crap. And sometimes there is an issue that people are interesting in selling a product regarding, such as asbestos lawyers. As kind of an environmentalist who drives a big jacked up truck and burns his trash, you know things like asbestos is fascinating. Plus I worked in an asbestos testing lab back when I was college as a secretary, so I got exposed to all that kind of bull shit.
Heat Pumps ♨️
I used to not buy into all the hype over heat pumps as a climate solution. Mostly because heat pumps aren’t a new technology – they’re simply air conditioners with a reversing valve – and widely used in warmer climates for both heating and cooling. And they’re part of the air conditioning industry that revolves around windows that are impossible to open like in commercial buildings or rarely opened like modern suburban houses.
Heat pumps long struck me as just woke virtue signaling that is so common and troubling on the American left. Install a heat pump, keep the heat and cooling at 72 degrees year round, with windows that don’t open. Feel good even though you’re detached from nature and are consuming gobs of electricity to keep your indoors the perfect temperature year round. No discomfort for you! No cold in the winter indoors and no hot in summer indoors. But also no bird sounds, no sense of nature outdoors. And so much electricity consumed.
Yet somethings have changed my mind about heat pumps. For one, with modern split phase inverters, lithium ion phosphate batteries and solar panels even off-grid cabins can use and often use heat pumps. It is totally possible to use a heat pump with electricity produced on site and not essentially just be importing coal or natural gas via utility lines to your home. Indeed, cooling can be a good use of excess electricity produced during bright sunny days. Heat pumps also use a lot less electricity than one might expect compared to the size of solar array needed to power them. Modern large sized panels are remarkably efficient, much more then I used to think was the case. And lithium ion phosphate batteries connected to integrated solar controllers and inverters are amazingly powerful and able to power such equipment.
Growing up in rural but cold Upstate NY with growing forests in recent decades, I always thought the primary alternative to heating with coal, oil or natural gas was wood. Never considered electric heat to be anything but a fossil fuel brought in over a wire with all the heat losses built in by conversion of fossil fuels into electricity. Don’t want to heat with fossil fuels, install a woodstove. Want more of a suburban, automatic way of heating and own a large farm wood lot you can burn up? Get an wood furnace that keeps all the chunks of wood, mud and smoke outside the house and transports the suburban style heat to the building much like electric heaters do – with similar energy losses but at least not the nuisances of the woodstove indoors.
But things are different now. Heat pumps while still not very efficient or warm on the coldest of nights are much better at colder temperatures than they once were. Their drain on your battery bank and solar is quite moderate at moderate temperatures. They can keep a building relatively warm without having to stoke and add wood to the woodstove all of the time. Still there is something to say about a woodstove in real cold weather. It’s that nice dry, warm heat radiating off and it doesn’t become weaker in warmth like heat pumps do. And you aren’t required necessarily to run a heat pump on moderate temperature days – windows can be kept open except for really cold or hot days. And having a cool bed room in the most sultry of summer days is most certainly nice.
I don’t like ever having the windows closed. I get it’s necessary in winter when I turn the heat on in my apartment but the idea of having the windows closed most of the summer to stay cool just strikes me as wrong. But you don’t have to operate heat pumps in the summer or keep things perfectly cool. And for that off-grid cabin even in the winter, you probably wouldn’t even want to keep the temperature cranked up on the heat pump all winter long, lest you put too much demand on your battery bank when sunshine is limited in the winter. But if you have excess or sufficient capacity, why burn and waste wood when the heat pump can be keeping things reasonably comfortable without the heat being excessive or decadent? I’m really okay with heat pumps even if I’m not rushing to get out an air conditioner for my apartment in the hot weather, preferring a bit of discomfort and fresh air over mechanical and fake cool.
