more normal than not

Here’s a nice cob house built by a professional snowboarder from Canada.

It’s another great video from Exploring Alternatives.

Here’s their description (I’m tired…lazy…after a day of mail delivery) :

This is a full tour of a cozy cob micro cabin built by Marie France Roy, a professional snowboarder from Canada. She wanted to build a home with natural and reclaimed materials so the main floor is built with cob – a mix of sand, clay, and straw – and the upper floor is built with reclaimed cedar siding. She also used secondhand windows and other materials that were used or on their way to the landfill to reduce the impact of her project.

For heat, she uses a sealed woodstove and has backup electric heat if she’s leaving the house for an extended period of time. For water and waste, she’s hooked up to a well and septic.

She is currently using propane for her stove and hot water heater but has bought and activated a system to produce and collect methane using food waste. She hopes to eventually transition to using homemade gas instead of propane.

The tiny cob house is plugged onto the grid but she also has a small solar panel array to feed renewable energy onto the grid.

I pulled off the highway the other night when I saw a guy next to his car….hood up…trying to wave down some assistance.

It’s hard to stop and pull over when you’re going 65…but after I got to the side of the road and backed up to where the guy was, I rolled down my window and asked him if he needed help.

He held up a new wiper blade and asked me if I knew how to install it on his car.

That was weird.

It was a bad place to change wiper blades.

There was a lot of traffic….fast moving traffic…but I figured that I was already stopped so I went back to help him.

It smelled like he’d been smoking a lot of pot.

That might explain his choice of wiper blade changing locations.

He had a Walking Dead belt buckle.

He had a giant watch.

He had a paracord wrapped handle sheath knife on his Walking Dead buckled belt.

I watched that knife out of the corner of my eye while I helped him.

He was so stoned.

It’s good to help people.

I always like it when people help me.

It’s strange to plop down into someone else’s weird non-emergency, though.

Wiper blades? Really?!

I left him on the side of the road after I changed the one side he’d been struggling with.

He dropped a part that he didn’t need down into the bottom of the engine compartment and was on the ground, head pointed towards traffic, obsessed with getting the little plastic piece he’d lost (but didn’t need) out of the unreachable part of his new car when I left to get home to my family.

I told him that it would still be there when he got home…that it might be better to try and fish it out where it was safer…. before I left him….but I don’t think that he listened.

I should have done both sides for him….but he was obsessed with getting the black plastic thing out of the engine compartment….so I left while he was distracted.

Did I mention that he was really stoned?

I wonder if that guy made it home?

At least it wasn’t raining…..

The school of mechanic-ing that I sometimes adhere to is the “replace parts until you fix the problem”.

That’s a bad way to do it.

It’s like a physician removing potential problems until he hits on the issue and fixes it.

Sometimes you do more harm than good if you just remove and replace stuff.

That’s not the way to do it.

The minivan is running hot in car line at the kid’s school.

That can’t be.

That’s bad.

We’re going to buy another minivan soon…but until we do, I need to make sure that the one we have is “up to snuff”….so I’ll be trying to figure out why the fans aren’t kicking on like they should soon.

Maybe it’s the relay?

Maybe I’ll go down to LKQ and buy some parts….and pick up a relay while I’m down there?

LKQ is super cheap if you don’t mind crawling around in the mud to get the parts off the donor vehicles.

It’s always interesting with these cars.

It’s a big puzzle.

But….that’s life….a big puzzle.

Puzzling me all the time.