Saturday January 8, 2022 Guerneville CA.
No Power
The power went out about midnight last night and it wasn’t storming and it didn’t come back on, not even this morning when I got it going.
Barry shows up
When I did get it going this morning and fed the chickens my brother Barry pulled into the yard with is truck with his dirt bike in the back.
He unloaded his bike and I got my bike out to go for a ride up in the forest.
Cousin visiting
We rode around for a bit then went over to my Cousin’s place and shot the bull with her and her husband for about an hour or so. They live up on a ridge top where we ride our dirt bikes.
Top of the World
After that we rode around some more and made it up to the Top of the world but didn’t stay long as we had a good break at my Cousin’s place.
Top of the World view today.
We rode around some more and eventually worked our way back down the hill to my house where Barry loaded up his dirt bike and headed for his home.
Moving chicken poo/fertilizer
After a break I got the wheelbarrow out and a shovel and loaded up some chicken manure from under the young one’s roost.
The plan
The plan was to spread some of this fresh manure around some trees and let the rains wash it into the ground.
I started out spreading some lightly around my citrus trees and avocado tree here. I spread it fairly thin hoping it won’t burn stuff as chicken manure is fairly hot stuff and if one uses too much of it, it can be hard on the trees.
I also spread some of it around this mulberry tree.
And I put some around my cherry trees and apricot trees too.
Woodchips
Now that I had all the manure out from under the young chicken’s roost, I got a load of woodchips to put under the roost where I removed the manure to help absorb any new chicken manure.
Loading up woodchips.
Mulched
The woodchips got dumped under the roost to help absorb more fresh manure. This also helps keep smells down.
What Tom said
I asked my brother Tom what he knew about the power outage and I think he said there was a big slide that came down and the whole town was out of power but I’m not sure of what he said, older age short term memory loss. :O)
What I figured
He said they at first said it would be back on about noon then changed the time, not knowing when for sure. I figured around dark as they’d been working since last night and would want to go home. :O)
Mail lady goes by and doesn’t stop
I heard the mail lady go by in her mail truck just before dark so I thought maybe she’d knew something.
She had to go up to the park and turn around and come back to deliver our mall so I went out and waited for her to come back.
Here comes the mail lady,……but.
I had no mail so she didn’t stop. Oh well. :O)
Warm fire
I figured they’d get the power back on around dark, but just in case I got my woodstove fired up with a fire using this wood I keep just for this purpose as usually I use a fuel oil stove but that takes power to run it.
We do have a generator but it’s starting to get too hard for us older guys to start it with the rope we have to pull so I wasn’t looking forward to that and really hoped the power would come back on soon.
Emergency light
It got dark so I got my emergency light out which is now just a light that one straps on the head that I set on the counter as that’s all I need.
Power’s back on
About a half hour after it got dark the lights flickered on so all is good and I can now do my blog and see what the rest of the world is up to which maybe I’ll go look to see what they say about the power outage.
I was wrong about the power
Now that I can check the local paper I see I was wrong about what caused the power outage. A car plowed into a main power distribution pole in a neighboring town and sheared it off and then crashed into someone’s house.
All is back to normal now, at least here.
Nice day playing in the woods.
Hi Bob. I found your video and blog about putting in a sanitary, simple spring head. We are heading into our third winter with no running water, so I’m trying to figure out how to remedy our situation! (Our spring system washed out in floods a few years ago, and now our jerry-rigged system freezes every winter.) For building the sink at the spring source, and for making the dam in front of the sink, if I can’t find any natural clay in our woods, is there a type of clay you could recommend that I buy? I saw that the ceramic clay you used at first did not work, and I was hoping that there might be another type I could buy. Thanks! And thank you for your very informative and helpful videos and blog
Hi Elisa,
If you have spring coming out of dirt in your area you can find the clay. Clay is made when water goes through dirt for a number of years, so look for the blue or brown clays in any wet area or where a spring used to be. I haven’t found that the bought clays are sticky enough and won’t break down and go to pieces.
This type of setup won’t freeze as water is always running. Running water does not freeze easily.
Also another nice thing about using this method is if it washes out, it’s super easy to redo compared to most other systems.
This all means if what you install doesn’t work out, it’s easy to fix it up another way.
Also, this video is just a method to show the way and you can substatude other stuff. Like for instance, you could make your little sink out of something metal or plastic or anything else you might imagine that will do the job.
One of the biggest advantages of this method is how easy it is to do any repairs. Most of the other methods take a long time and are very hard to do repairs. Some of the other methods are so complicated repairs are very difficult to do.
Look around any spring areas for that clay or figure out another way to do the same thing, just keep it small. Small means it’s easy to do and easy to repair and it’s much more sanitary.
Have fun,
Bob