olympia
A snowy day at the Hobbit Hole
I could see flakes by the earliest dawn light, resolving into the scenes revealed here by mid-day.
The snow is wet and heavy: with fat flakes feathery from the aching cold aloft.
Making the most of heat
I wanted to say a little something about making the most of the heat you generate in your wood stove, complete with a crappy cell-phone photo to illustrate.
I store all of my cooking iron on top of the wood stove. Every time the wood stove gets hot all of my iron: a flat-iron, a massive dutch oven (the much beloved Aunt Itsy’s Skillet), and three smaller iron skillets 8”, 6”, and 4” in size respectively. The last is a single-egger. All that cast iron –itself not entirely easy to heat through and through– re-releases all the heat it absorbs as the stove & cabin air cools down. Kept well-oiled and lovingly-used the deep and healthy cure of each piece is renewed every time it’s heated without the loss of substance attendant on most types of dutch oven cooking. This extends the life of each piece in a damp climate and keeps each more or less sterile and ready for use at any time, especially the sealed dutch oven.
You’ll see all that iron being put to use in different ways in this picture. I’ve got a big-ass and damned cheery fire blazing in the wood stove below, so here you see my flat-iron being used to keep the bottom of a pot of rice from scorching, the dutch oven doing what it does second-best (sit there & look pretty), and the trio of omelet pans supporting a saute pan full of dinner in conditions so stable and sustaining it’d make a chef look twice at his/her expensive food warmer.
You’ll also see a big-ass stock pot with a steamy lid here. There’s three gallons of water in the act of being brought to a quiescent boil. The little bit of steam that escapes the snug lid keeps things vaguely humid in a sinus-friendly (but not mold-pleasing) way. All of the clean, hot water that doesn’t get used for washing up after dinner will sit there cheerily re-releasing warmth into the cabin all night; even after the fire has gone out.
There’s plenty of thermal mass in a giant iron wood stove already, but finding ways to enhance that mass allows me to heat the same space for longer with less fuel.
PS: Dinner was delicious.
Interior shots of the Hobbit Hole
I’ve been holding off taking pictures of the interior of the place because there were a few details I wanted to take care of first; to make the place more of a home with an aesthetic than a shack in the woods nobody loves or cares for anymore.
Big photo dump. I apologize in advance for your bandwidth if on mobile:
Life on rechargeables
This is what it looks like some mornings when I arrive at the coffee shop. Plugged in to this single outlet are my laptop, phone, my ‘big light’ power brick, and the battery for my cordless shop vac.
Interestingly enough the shop vac battery charges fully in roughly the same time as it takes to discharge it in operation: 20-25 minutes.
Interior lighting plans for post-solar era
For as many windows and skylights as this cabin has, the sleeping loft puts the small living space beside the front door under a permanent umbra. It’s not that it makes this part of the cabin uninviting but rather illuminates (pun intended) what could become a serious problem once the shortest days of winter are here. Olympia sits at 47 degrees north in latitude so our weather is only half as crazy as it is in Alaska, the land of the midnight sun. Light becomes as important as warmth in certain seasons.
Seasonal Affective Disorder is a thing. The lack of daylight in general and our modern human predisposition to expose ourselves to less daylight than our bodies evolved to expect creates a depressive psychological effect in some people not to mention the various imbalances resulting in a lack of vitamin D, which requires direct exposure of skin to sunlight to metabolize in the body. Some people purchase light boxes for therapy. Others make subtle changes like using full-spectrum light bulbs or basking more frequently in the glow of a warm fire. The wood stove is warming but built tight as a drum, without even so much as a window. I’m going to need a source of light as well if I’m to maintain my cheery disposition all winter, in the season my German sister in law refers to as Die Eishöhle, or the ice cave.
Right now of the five circuits I’m going to need to build three of them are for lighting. The other two will power the 12v pump in the water system and eventually an interior pure-sine power inverter to charge computers, phones, and occasionally my juicer. Luckily in the age of LED I’m able to positively flood the cabin with light without drawing bupkis from the (prospective) battery.
The three lighting circuits will consist of:
- Four or five paper lanterns stretched across the cooking/dining area, with bright warm white LED bulbs wired in. This circuit will run through a wall switch (I’m leaning toward old-school brass marine switches) and feature a dimmer knob.
- One bright hanging fixture in the living area, casting a bright light up and down but shading all eyes from bright direct light. This circuit will run through a wall switch (I’m leaning toward old-school brass marine switches) and feature a dimmer knob.
- One gooseneck switched reading lamp at the head of the bed in the sleeping loft. This circuit will run straight to the distribution panel and not through the switch/dimmer box.
Once I’ve got these in and get a sense of how my battery life holds up to regular use I might add an outdoor light outside the front door and another over the back deck.
The current lineup of the ‘big light’ and an array of oil lamps, candles, kerosene lanterns, and a couple of battery-powered string lights are about all I have for lighting right now. Even in sum they’re not entirely suitable for all but the most intimate types of entertaining, let alone entertaining or anything other than spot-work the ‘big light’ can cover.
Solid Waste, or The Ravenous Slugs of Eld Inlet
Q: How do you handle your household waste like trash, food scraps, and wash water?
A; This is where the ‘reduce’ part of ‘reduce-reuse-recycle’ comes into play. Sometimes packaging is unavoidable but buying bulk and cooking with fresh ingredients (remember, there is no refrigerator here at the moment) reduces so, so much of the sheer volume of unburnable, unrecyclable waste I generate. Paper packaging gets chucked in the wood stove and periodically burned on a cold morning. Non-recyclable packaging goes into a kitchen bin liner hanging in a mouse-inaccessible spot in a reusable (and washable) shopping bag. At the end of the week when I head into town to work I carry the trash with and add it to the first garbage can I can find. Recyclables go with me to Seattle and get added to the appropriate streams at my Mom’s condo building.
Food waste is where the forest floor shines. The sheer biological activity of this land –the countless thousands of banana slugs, snails, and crows let alone billions of hungry bacteria, yeasts, and molds– almost instantly reduces organic waste to a healthy combination of slug poo and fuzzy green bits on the forest floor. I eat most of what I purchase and the forest eats the rest. It’s uncanny. I asked my landlord Alban what he does and this has been his answer for 20+ years.
I live in the midst of a massive, powerful, vibrant ecosystem. This represents the sum of Alban’s aim for this place as I understand it: the husbanding and preservation of all this resurgent natural power. I get it. Wilco.
Amenities and shortcuts
The only current built-in amenity at the cabin is a Magic Chef RV stove/oven (with the oven inoperable). Some online investigation has shown me that this specific model of stove/oven often has problems with oven lighting but I haven’t been able to devote the time and resources I need to sussing out the solution. Come winter I’ll wish I had an oven for all manner of warming foods, but come winter I’ll be able to use the wood stove & Aunt Itsy’s skillet (really a dutch oven) in combination to handle a lot of these tasks. Getting the oven operational isn’t near the top of my list. I’ve even considered the wisdom of switching to a cooktop only situation to claw back some shelf space in the kitchen.
I bought a radiant propane shop heater to provide spot heat on the coldest mornings and was the proud recipient of a rechargeable handheld DeWalt shop vacuum for my birthday this year so we’re able to add significant points to the comfort and cleanliness gauges.
The radiant heater has been useful in drying out the floors after my initial bout of hot soap scrubbing, and will be an especially welcome addition for newcomers who might not be used to the chill of a Northwest morning.
The little shop vac allowed me to vacuum surfaces that had never been vacuumed before: floors yes but also walls, joints, concealed surfaces, and all those little nooks & crannies full of two decades-worth of dead spiders and the hair of long-departed tenants. Dust mites, surreptitious mouse turds, sand, and cobwebs all sucked up and neatly containerized. It might be psychosomatic but the house just felt cleaner after a week of daily vacuuming projects.
One major additional benefit of the rechargeable shop vac (and the reason I never let it run all the way down if I can avoid it) is its perfect utility as a collector of ginormous spiders of the sort that wander in from the forest if I leave the place open to the breeze. Having dealt with forest spiders in Virginia during grad school my general rule of thumb is if the spread of its legs is bigger than a quarter it has to go. Too many mornings with spider bites…to many times awakened to feel some bold arachnid scurrying across my face. There’s a chance being sucked out of your web and hurled at high velocity down a tunnel into a hard plastic container will kill the spider but absent this solution there’s a 100% chance the spider dies via a rolled up New York Times magazine or something. The use of vacuum technology as a way to avoid having to get close to them and/or killing them makes me feel a little better…a little less eek-y.
But how do you recharge the battery? you might ask. Every day I come into town to conduct my affairs, usually involving a stop at a favorite coffee shop for an hour or two to get my connected work done (e.g., emails sent, online shopping done, research projects, professional tasks). On arrival while I’m plugging in my laptop I also plug in the cable of whichever recharger(s) I brought with me that day. Sometimes it’s the vacuum. Sometimes it’s the drill. Sometimes it’s the 18650 battery charger that reliably powers so many of my household items (e.g., high-intensity LED flashlights, holiday light strings, a wireless clip fan &c). All but the 18650 batteries charge in less than an hour and two hours of charging those, even if it doesn’t show me the green ‘charged’ lamp before I leave, is going to be sufficient to get me through the night at least.
Timelapse of the well at Mirkwood
With a guest appearance from my backside.
I love how the color of the light changes throughout the dance.
A Biscuit In The Sun 