Eugene Oregon

We’re spending a few days exploring the city of Eugene, Oregon.  It’s a potential new final resting place :) for us so we figured we would give it a look.  The city has about 200,000 people in the area and has the University of Oregon with around 25,000 students enrolled. It also is very bike friendly and has good fishing in the area, so its got a lot of what we are looking for in a new home.

We went to a lecture on campus last night for something to do so we could get out of the trailer. It was by a professor of physics, music and international relations.  An unlikely combination you’re thinking… you might be right.  The lecture included a very high level discussion of astral physics, Bach’s fugues and the social impacts of molecular biology.  We both found the experience a bit disjointed and also had a difficult time with the strong Hungarian accent. His overall point was that we have advanced our knowledge of science and technology at a radically faster rate than we have our ethics. This combined with the accessibility of things like molecular biology to everyday citizens can have negative impact on society. 

As I said the lecture wasn’t all that cohesive, but it was kind of fun, was free and is the kind of thing that we like about a college town. Always stuff like that going on.

The one complaint we have about the Northwest in general right now is the wetness. Its hard for things to dry out in a trailer when its like 95% humidity all of the time. It also makes for some very scary morning hair on Jessie’s part.

See what I have to wake up to every morning… 

We are going to be taking a campus tour today so we might have some pictures for tomorrow… assuming the rain holds off still.

 

--Tom

Seattle and the Northwest…

We just finished a nice weekend in Seattle hanging out with a friend of ours (Omri).  We found a nice RV park close to downtown that had a pool, hot tub and a sauna which was pretty nice to take advantage of.

We went out to some cool bars, ate at some nice restaurants, ate too much sushi and did an enjoyable hike on Cougar Mountain (insert your own joke here).

We’re in Portland now for a few days and then we are headed south into Northern California and perhaps back into Utah for a bit. Its amazing how fast time flies… it seems like we just left AZ last spring and now we are 6 weeks from heading back that direction for Christmas.

Its good to be back on the road again and hopefully our adventure will get more entertaining again shortly. Sorry that we don’t have any pictures from Seattle… we were slacking on the camera carrying.

--Tom

Don’t Come a Knockin’….

When we’re not camping at a campground, we have limited battery life to run lights for a long time.  We can generally watch a movie or a few TV shows on the laptop, but that gets boring.  There’s the obvious answer, but in the interest of preserving the suspension on our trailer, what else can we do now that it’s dark at night? 

So, we’re soliciting ideas from the peanut gallery.  In any random, generic town in the US, where can we go after dinner to entertain ourselves?  Bonus points to people who come up with ideas that are free or cheap (say, less than $15).  Let the creative juices start flowing!

-Jessie

Wrestlemania

When I was a kid, I routinely kicked my brothers ass in parent-sanctioned wrestling matches.

My Dad was our unofficial wrestling coach.  He taught us how to dig our chin into our opponents back, how to inflict maximum rug burn damage, full nelson’s, headlocks, etc. etc.

When puberty hit though – I was SCREWED.  Josh had to make up for years of torture where I’d pin him down and perform Chinese torture on him.  Sooooo, it’s possible, that I deserved this.

And this.

Here is Baby T playing with a balloon that just refuses to pop in Uncle Tom’s boots.  Of course, “Uncle Tom” actually sounds like “Uhn Om” and he pretty much refused to say anything resembling “Jessie” until yesterday.  We were trying to get him to say Aunt Jessie one night and something came out more like "Auntie Em” so my parents taught him to call me Toto instead which he can say perfectly.  So, fantastic – I’m Aunt Toto.  I’d love to hear any more stories on how bad nick names are born.

Ahhh, yeah, rockin’ out on the Wii.  The toddler decided to show us up by working the guitar and mic.  He just needs some sweet sunglasses to be totally bad ass.

Making some brownies with Grammy.

Babies have mad skills when it comes to eating messy foods.  He actually looks a little drunk on chocolate.

Josh found this lame-o t-shirt in his closet.  We made him impersonate Spiderman by pretending to swing from webs any time he moved around the house.

-Jessie

Decorating on a Budget

My brother & his wife challenged us to decorate the outside of their house for Halloween on a $20 budget.  Easy-peasy – check out what we accomplished over the last few days:

I admit – Tom is the creative genius behind the entire concept.  Everyone else contributed but Tom was the mastermind.

The scarecrow head, witch head, and large spider were all made with 2 coats of paper mache over balloons.

Yeah, Tom, ummm, working the paper mache on the witch nose.  He had a really good technique.

The finished witch is AWESOME  and we made it practically for free.  We made the broom from some sticks & straw, the old graduation robe was in their “tag sale” box, and the hat was from a garage sale for a quarter.

Amanda painted the face of the witch and it is just so cool.

I painted the face of the scarecrow and it’s just a *tad* more simplistic.

But I stuffed the scarecrow in all the right places, if you know what I’m saying.

Here, we’re adding some finishing touches to the spiders.  Tom glued pieces from a metal pie tin to give the spider some bling. 

Bad ass spidey comin’ to get’cha.

Little baby spiders surround the momma spider.  These spiders are made from an egg crate pieces and strips from a cardboard paper towel roll.  The web is a metal pie tin with pieces cut out of it.

Ahhh!  Our creation revolts and we’re treated to a fang-tastic death.

This piece is all Tom.  He free-handed the skeleton bones to make a stencil.

And a few ghosts to round out our display.  The heads are held up with plastic milk jugs and the hands are golf balls.

They now have the most awesomely decorated house in the neighborhood.  We ended spending closer to $40 -- $14 on straw bales, $2.50 at a garage sale for a BUNCH of stuff, $15 on spray paint & urethane, $4 at Goodwill, and $5 on some miscellaneous things.  But who cares, right?  The decorations should be reusable next year and they ROCK.  Plus, we had a lot of fun building all this stuff.  Christmas ideas are already brewing…

We could probably have our own TV show on TLC or something.

-Jessie

Sustainability… what does it mean to you?

As most of you know part of Jessie’s and my reason for embarking on this trip was to expand our knowledge of how to live with less impact and more in harmony with the planet.   When we have conversations about this or when we are talking about it with other people the word sustainability gets thrown around a lot.  We often talk about wanting to live more sustainably, or how something is or isn’t very sustainable.

That got me thinking about what that word really means. Its a pretty good buzzword for the “green” movement, but I have a hard time really defining what the word means. Does it relate to being carbon neutral, energy efficient, locally sourced…etc? So I’ll put this out to all you blog readers out there, how would you define sustainability?

I’d like to solicit your thoughts in comments. If you read this through mail delivery please click on the posting and give us your thoughts.

One a somewhat related note there is an article about how straw bale housing fits into the UN’s 8 Millennium Development Goals as set out in 2000 at the following link. One of the main people referenced in the article, Laura Bartels, is a friend of ours who does amazing work with native American tribes around replacing FEMA trailers with straw bale homes. That pesky sustainable word shows up in the articles too as part of the “Achieving environmental sustainability” goal. Laura is an amazing person and her company Green Weavers Inc. does some very impactful work.

--Tom

We Can AlCan

This blog title came from my Dad who is still giggling with himself about all the blog titles he can come up with.  Tom is next to me rolling his eyes and saying, “seriously?  You’re going to use that?”  We are currently in Omaha, visiting my brother and my parents flew in from Connecticut for a little family reunion.

The fall colors through the mountains were spectacular.

But first, we had to drive down the AlCan and get ourselves into some warmer weather.  We drove 2100 miles in 5 days – that’s not a ton of mileage everyday, but our transportation is a little slow on the uptake.  They were still 10-12 hour days.

Wow.  Tom just pulled “Racing River” out of his butt.  I’m pretty sure he’s right though.  Color me impressed.

Oh geez.  Now my Dad is conniving on how he can get my 2 year old nephew into trouble so he can watch him have a time out.  He thinks it is very cute & funny to see a little kid standing in a corner and crying.  I’m gonna get in trouble for putting that in writing.  That sounds worse than it is – my Dad loves his grandson more than anything and plays with him more than anyone else.  But, it is funny to see a 2 year old get “disciplined.”

We have a series of pictures taken while driving over this mountain pass.  There are some blurry branches in the foreground.

Anywho, we drove and drove and drove and finally reached our destination – Salmon Arm, British Columbia where we stayed at a friend’s cabin for a few days.  It was an extraordinarily nice respite after all that time sitting on our asses, listening to audio books.

This is an old homestead (circa 1890’s) at 108 Mile House in British Columbia where we spent a night.

The homestead is still open to the public as a park and museum with a bunch of old farm equipment & tools.  Who could pass up a shot of this giant chainsaw?

Our plan after the cabin was to drive for 2 more days to get to Portland, Oregon where we had a flight scheduled to get to Omaha.  BUT, we were thwarted by – you guessed it – our truck.  Im-pa-see-blay!!!  We were getting everything ready to go the day before we were supposed to leave, and the engine started whining like a little bitch.  And the brakes were acting up too.  We absolutely did not want to drive 600 miles with unreliable brakes.

This rest stop is across the street from the homestead and was a very pleasant spot to spend the night.  We watched the sun set eating our dinner of black beans & rice at a picnic table.

SooOOOO, we got on the phone with United and rearranged our tickets to fly out of Kamloops, BC and dropped our truck off at Toyota.  We fly back to BC on Oct. 19 and then will have to drive into the U.S. – hopefully not on snowy roads.

We shall see……

-Jessie

Brrrrr

Before we left good ole Squarebanks, we visited the Cold Climate Housing Research Center (CCHRC) to check out their state-of-the-art facility that opened in 2006.  Built as a living laboratory, over 1000 sensors throughout the building monitor temperature, humidity, indoor air quality, foundation movement, and other important data-type stuff. 

Along the driveway is a large solar array with several different types of solar panels.  Although solar panels operate more efficiently at cold temperatures, there is hardly any sunlight in the winter to produce power.  They produce quite well during the long summer days, but with a reduced demand for power, much of their output is wasted. 

Large battery bank for the solar array.

If Alaska had a net-metering law, solar would make more sense, but you have to be really dedicated to the cause to spring for solar panels (most states have some form of a net-metering law – it basically requires electric utilities to roll back your electric meter while you’re producing excess solar power, effectively using the power grid as a battery bank).

Much of their research has gone into finding a cost-effective, energy efficient way to build houses for the cold climate.  Most Alaskan houses have just been built the way they are in warmer climates and they simply don’t work well.  This detail is what they are recommending for this climate – most of the insulation is rigid insulation on the exterior of the house and is outside the vapor barrier. 

I realize this photo doesn’t look like much, but this is a small sewage treatment plant for the building.  This building has about 25 staff and is not hooked up to the city sewer system and does not have a septic tank & leach field.  The tank, from Lifewater Engineering, can be plopped on a concrete pad outside and works all winter long in HARSH climates (up to –60 F).  A system for a small household (1-3 people) costs $14,000.

The building has 2 separate living roofs.  This one, oddly on the north side of the building, has a ton of vegetables and flowers growing around the perimeter.  The staff has lunches & harvest parties up here.  Seems like a cool place to work -- “hey Bob, I’m gonna take a break and go thin the carrots.”

Just because it’s a research center, doesn’t mean there can’t be some artistic flourishes.  This is just one of many decorative stair railings in the building.

There were many, many other innovative features to the building, but I didn’t take very good pictures that day.  They are going for platinum LEED certification (which is the highest level) and the facility is just top-notch.  If you live in Fairbanks, they give tours every Thursday at 2 pm for free and it was well worth the time.  Their website also has a ton of information on the building and the research they’re doing.

Jessie

A Walk In The Park…

So we are still doing some catch up on what we did while we were visiting in Anchorage. We took off one afternoon and went and walked around in the Bicentennial Park around Anchorage. The park is pretty big and has a ton of hiking trails in it. There was a section of trails that were closed due to bear activity in the park, but we didn’t see anything that didn’t go on two legs. The trail we walked was pretty amazing with the fall colors.

There were a ton of mushrooms out since it has been pretty rainy and I got some good detail pictures that I think came out pretty cool.

Terry and I had a good time playing with the GPS functions on his iPhone and google maps. It was amazing how accurate the locations were. We could literally watch ourselves walk along the trail as the GPS updated our position. Very geeky, but very cool.

--Tom