push-button heat

    For the past 10 years or so, everybody we know has enjoyed some form of warmth during the winter months at the touch of a button. Many of our Italian neighbors are facing $1000 per month heating bills if they live in a house like ours and push the button, but then some people seem able to burn that kind of money. Especially for warmth.  After food and clothing it's shelter, after all. For the past 10 years we've been warm in winter only if we are prepared to cut, split, haul, and dress in lots of layers. With windows glazed in picture frame glass and casements with half inch tolerances, a cold and windy night requires some shivering upper lip. But after 9 years or so (one in England, one in South Umbria, and 7 here in West Umbria) we've actually hardened to the task: order in 35 quintale of lumberyard scraps, let it age for three years, get Bob Henry to saw and split it, and then keep warm hauling it up two flights of stairs to the one warm room in our quarters.
     Then, two winters ago, we noticed a wonderful change. Our kitchen was being heated by more than the occasional sunny day. It was Elda downstairs living in our finished guest apartment and keeping it toasty warm with her own wood fire. Our kitchen floor was her sitting room ceiling. This was a new level of luxury for us. So much so that we hardly noticed when our own fire began to ease to embers. All that survival instinct panic was slipping away and winter seemed not so serious.
      Well, this winter things have changed again. We still have the wood stove, and Bob Henry sawed and split a mountain of fuel; but Elda and her fire are gone. She, Martina and Marco moved into their own place on the other side of the estate and took their wood stove with them. I wanted to move into the apartment; but the cold, vacant rooms required us to wrestle our own wood stove into the apartment along with a new stove pipe. Tough decision since it would leave us stoveless upstairs and the apartment already has underfloor heating (that is, there are pipes buried under the paving stones, but there's still no heat source). Further, the clean and bare rooms are ready for a summer vacation rental or two if we could keep our greasy mitts off.
      We moved our stove in. We moved a few kitchen utensiles, but we decided to continue to sleep upstairs. And we committed a travesty. We bored holes in our lovely ancient walls and installed a modern heat pump to take advantage of our solar electricity. It looks like a big, white air-conditioner mounted on white, metal supports 10 feet up the back wall. It's decorated by white insulated pipes unsuccessfully hidden in white plastic conduits. When the sun shines, we push a button and it pumps hot air into the apartment. In summer it will pump cool air into the apartment. If we watch our meters, the heat is free and there's still some left over for the world. But it's the ugliest thing you've ever seen.

 

olive oil

    Unfinished stuff is the stuff of nightmares. I used to be much more comfortable with unfinished stuff, but now that school is long over and I'm no longer trying to understand biochemistry, unfinished projects can really bug me. Like this house.

    I have a pretty good idea of what we need to do to heat this house. I've modeled its heat loss on the computer at various proposed outdoor temperatures and I know how much heat we need. I also know where we can get this heat for the least expense and how to store and distribute it. When I hear our neighbors, builders, and friends discuss the subject I know now not to get involved. They just don't get it and I can't convince anyone I know what I'm talking about. I can only show them. And to show them, I need to get my underfloor heating system installed and get it fed by my solar panels and woodstove. I've been trying to do this for the past three winters, and in my rush, I have overlooked the actual challenge of making the ground floor air, water, and warmth tight as well as improving the strength of the structure and its foundations. It's a huge project.

    In November we got to the point where we could begin the final coat of plaster in the laundry room. The laundry room has been one of the big hurdles. It's deeply excavated below the existing foundations and its walls were never very good. It's also the site of the hot water tank where our precious heat will be stored as well as the entry point for electrical and water supplies. It's the room that must come first. It's taken a long time to work out all the problems and once the final coat of plaster began to go up, I found it almost impossible to stop working. I'd work right into the night. It's been my Moby Dick.

    But in November, everything must stop when the olives begin to ripen, even the final plaster.  It's a crop. It's farming. It depends on the weather and it's tough to predict. Further, harvesting is dangerous and is best done in good weather. Climbing trees in the rain doesn't make sense and wet olives rot before they can be pressed. The whole thing demands a lot of attention and all of one's time. Last year we housed a small army of workaway volunteers and it rained. Rained and rained. I put them to work as best I could throwing mortar at holes in the cantina walls, but the whole month was not our best. Alex had to house and feed a ton of people who had to work in not-so-nice conditions. We got our oil, and it was sensational as usual; but too costly. This year we didn't bother bringing in a single volunteer besides Giles. I was still a sort of one-armed man, scared of being hurt again, and sore from plastering. Giles didn't like climbing trees much and Alex... well, she was just fine, but she's running a household with two children in school, and... well, there's never enough of her to go around. But the weather held and we turned our attention to picking. And the weather got better and better and we picked and picked, and borrowed more and more baskets, and sawed off great limbs in an effort to catch up with forgotten pruning. Thomasina and Isolde got enthusiastic and the five of us spent 10 days or so in the most lovely weather, enjoying the outdoors which we might have missed if we didn't have to harvest the crop. The region was having a poor harvest with some yields down 50%. Our trees didn't look too promising either, but we kept on moving, picking and picking. We even picked Dan and Miranda's trees, and in the end we filled every basket we could borrow. We took two full van loads (mini-van, anyway) to the mill and set a record for quantity. I'm looking at the mill receipt right now and it shows 745 kilograms delivered yielding 109 litres of olive oil.

    One the most delightful things on our calendar is the moment of dipping a garlicky, salty piece of hot toast into freshly pressed olive oil and tasting that oddly pugent, full, outdoorsy flavor of our own oil. It's a taste that doesn't last. As the oil ages, it mellows and becomes less a flavor of its own and more a component to food. We first experienced this with Tom and Ruth after joining a local harvest. A blind tasting was put before us and we all choose the wrong oil with our naive palates. Now we are wiser and look for the elusive flavor elements.

   Olive oil is available in every food store, but the free-run, fresh oil is a completely different thing. Now I'm beginning to wonder if I can air-freight this to America or England in small quantities immediately after the harvest to offer the experience to those who might be interested... hmmm.

My Moon

    October is my birth month. As usual for this unusual year, the weather was sensational. My moon huge and clear as a bell. Thankfully, my birthday was celebrated very low key and almost slipped by unnoticed.
     One would expect that such perfect conditions would set the stage for a tranquil setting where one could write peacefully, reflecting on all one's good fortune and using the creative time to improve conditions in the greater world.  But disruptions always have a way of shadowing bright plans, and that most valuable commodity, time, is the first casualty.

     My good fortune includes Bob Henry. He is a subject all of his own and one day I'll have the time to devote a proper description. Bob belongs to my remote past in Hartland, Wisconsin where I grew up in my High school years. He was classmate to and friends with my brother Matt. He has been staying with us here in Italy since the middle of September. He arrived on the same day that his daughter was being sentenced due to a drug related mishap in her apartment. Bob's got 'issues' most of us can't imagine, and he doesn't deserve them. He asked to be excused from Workaway obligations and, in fact booked himself with Dan and Miranda up the hill as a bed and breakfast customer. Nevertheless, he devoted countless hours to our welfare and showed up at evening meals bearing wine, flowers, enthusiasm, conversation, and dishwashing. He drove us everywhere in his spanking clean rental car and took our other workaway refugees under his wing. We are big fans of Bob Henry. Luckily, Bob's stay overlapped that of Bryn and Lisa tying in two diverse portions of my history.
     A new Workaway volunteer arrived hot on the heels of Bryn and Lisa. Giles got his room back and Tom, the new guy, moved into the camping trailer. This always requires a flurry of bed making, room cleaning and laundry service; but luckily Bryn and Lisa didn't have enough time to get a good mess going. New volunteers always need some adjusting to with their needs for food, comfort, computer access, electricity adapters, physical space, conversation and a job description. Giles, who fits in easily, has a seemingly endless capacity to exhaust all tasks placed before him. It takes a keen mind to organize the jobs to keep ahead of him; but with the added manpower of Tom, management became my main task. I'm not a good manager. Ask anyone. Further, Giles works best by himself. Our best manager, Alex, when faced with a full house, becomes a galley slave, imprisoned partly by our own idiosyncratic kitchen methods. The water rules are so staggeringly complicated that only those fully brainwashed by the underlying philosophy can possibly understand how to flush the loo. Helping out in the kitchen, with it's added layer of food resource complexity, just isn't possible for the average volunteer. So, rather than helping with the goal of constructing the underfloor heating system on the ground floor (which is the main goal at the moment), Tom got put to work moving the growing mountain of firewood that Bob Henry was producing. On the 15th, Tom moved on to another workaway host which happened to be on the next hillside.
    A week later, Bob went on a solitary bike ride to nearby Panicale, where, guess what? he broke his shoulder falling on a downhill corner. At my familiar hospital, he opted out of surgery in order to make his flight back to the states bound up like a mummy! Poor guy!
   October finished with a visit from some of our most encouraging friends, Robin and Steve Cavagnolo. Last time they were here it snowed in the night and we had a very crude woodstove to keep things going. This time we were at least able to provide a finished room and a warm supper, but the highlight was a day at the rustic public baths below San Casciano dei Bagni, a little spa town overlooking the Val d'Orca to cure Robin's hangover!
      Below surface of the diary of vacationers and visitations another story was brewing. Since Alex and the girls returned from their visit to the US, a disruption in our household slowly became more inevitable. Perhaps it was the experience with the luxuries of American life colliding with the lack of progress in our work here, but we began to discuss our arrangements with Marco, our "resident builder," until it came time to announce it's termination. A difficult moment because Marco, Elda and ourselves had developed a close relationship; but it was clear that Marco, Elda, and Martina had established themselves as a family and that Marco's time was no longer ours alone. Luckily they found a vacancy in another apartment on the leCoste Estate so their disruption was minimized and a moving date was set for the first of November. We were getting our first floor back along with our dear apartment, it's bathroom, shower, kitchen, modern windows, and insulation - three years after its completion. And I was getting my old job back as principle builder.

Good Ex

A quick note to say Bryn Gabriel just left after spending the night with us. Wonderful moment for me. She looks very fine and happy. We got the opportunity to meet her partner Lisa as well. More info and perhaps a photo to follow.

energy independent

   If you invested a great deal of time, effort, emotion and money into something that depended on the sun, what would be the most ironic bit of weather you might expect on the eve of its implementation? Yes, a force five thunderstorm complete with its own source of mega electricity. At 2:30am the whole house awoke with a light burst more white and brilliant than a summer's day and a deafening, simultaneous, instantaneous crash. I think the dog downstairs threw up on Elda's carpet. And that wasn't nearly enough. Lightning and thunder continued without pause keeping every one in expectation of the next explosion that would surely carry us all away. Remember, this all came by surprise after bedtime and after roughly four months of NO clouds, rain or certainly thunder. Crash! Luckily, I had unplugged the sensitive stuff at bedtime and the only real damage was a defunct internet modem (yet again).
   When the sleepy kids went off to school before dawn, it was still raining but the tempest had passed. The wind was stilled, and the land quiet. We had accumulated some four inches of rain in any open bucket, yet the sky opened peacefully to a beautiful, partly cloudy day.
    The electrical utility was scheduled to arrive that morning to install their meters and allow our photovoltaic panels to begin benefiting mankind, but damage to local equipment during the night caused them to arrive in the afternoon with only one worker. He did what he was supposed to do and by four pm we were watching our electric meter register kilowatt hours positive. A much anticipated moment. Murphy's Law demanded that clouds would form and of course a light rain broke out at the precise moment, but that didn't keep us from gathering a lawn chair to watch the meter creep off the zero peg during a break in the clouds.

    We are finally producing our own energy. We should be producing enough to allow us to look at a new electric toaster-oven going on sale tomorrow, but we may have to wait until spring. The dry summer has overnight turned into the cool, damp winter.

On the Grid

      For a time I wondered why I seemed to be suffering from such an assortment of unrelated ailments. My headache never seemed to go away. Sure, I'd had plenty to drink with supper so that could have been it. But my stomach never settled down. The pains in my shoulder seemed to get worse, or was it more arthritis? Sleep? Forget it. One day I swear I had a fever. I stayed in bed and proved it with a thermometer. Then a sore throat. I convinced myself I was coming down with something. Then my teeth started aching. Haemorrhoids. And that damned tinitus never went away.
      On the morning of the 7th, everything went away. At the end of one of the last posts, I said if everything goes right on the 7th, it will be a miracle. I was right. And the debate about miracles can continue.
      First of all, a delivery truck had to brave London morning rush-hour to get our new wood stove to Eileen's house by 10am after a five hour drive across southern England. Miraculously, they did it; but the transit van we hired with Eileen didn't consider London morning rush-hour and the delivery man found himself waiting, and waiting. When time ran out, the 250kilo (550lbs) package was lowered to the top of a nearby dumpster where it had to wait before being manhandled down to our transit van. I'm glad I wasn't there. I'm also glad I didn't know about it.
     But the reason I didn't know about it was because our Italian electrical utility company somehow managed to plunge us into radio silence that very morning. They decided to replace the feed line to our neighborhood with a four conductor, three-phase wire. This in an attempt to more efficiently transport electricity from our new solar panels to the grid. Well, somebody crossed one of the wires and when the power came on, a lot of things went off. Like the washing machine. And the water heater. TV. CD players. Microwave oven. The computer battery chargers, in fact ANY battery charger and ANY transformer. The internet modem. And, oh yes, the telephones.
      So there we were. Off the grid.

      And there we remained until I remembered an old fax machine in the attic that had a handset attached to it. Our first call was to the electrical utility company, and so were our second and third calls. We've got power all right, expensive power at that.
      Normal electricity was quickly restored and our meter continues to run, running up the bill; but the foot-dragging and the paperwork required to claim for damages could go on for a year or more. All four houses in the Borgo are effected and all are facing heavy replacement costs. Our water heater alone will require a $500 control panel.
      I can't wait to start making my own electricity. It's going to be the next miracle medical cure.

Quick notes on the flour-fight video

This was taken on Giles's camera and comes from his Youtube channel. You can spot Alex standing on the handrail, hiding behind the pedestrian crossing sign. Giles rushes off for a pot-shot and returns unscathed. Quite an event. If you look further on the internet, you'll learn that the archery contest which defines the whole week-long shenanigans, ended in controversy and real fighting due to bad judging. A real hoot!

Wood heat

    On Wednesday the electric utility Enel will disconnect the electrical supply to our neighborhood of four houses. They must pull about 30 meters of supply cable from out of an underground conduit and replace it with a much heavier conductor in order to receive the 15 kilowatts we should be producing. I'm worried because I remember a roughneck builder breaking this conduit shortly before we fired him from our septic tank job. That defined the moment when we took this project on ourselves some six years ago. I repaired that conduit as best I could and it has survived one line replacement since then, but this is a heavier wire. We will be without power until they get it replaced and we've got a couple of freezers full of food at risk. Wednesday is the day.

     Solar panels, inverters and three phase conductors are all signs of a new and better age of power production, but alongside all this modern trickery is another energy project of ours. Ironically, also on Wednesday, a delivery truck from south west England is supposed to arrive in London where it will meet another delivery van we've hired to transport a newly built wood burning stove/fireplace to us here in Italy. The wood burner will incorporate two internal water heaters which will feed our hot water tank and power our underfloor heating system. This will be used to supplement our three existing hot water solar panels during the winter months. We are just beginning to prepare the cavity which will accept the stove.
     If all these things go as planned on Wednesday, well... it will be a small miracle.

Back to Work

     The parts arrived. People, too. I had the design and its problems in my head. And the experience of the ground, the tools, the parts, the electrical cord, the phone numbers. The excavator hired and Marco set Saturday aside to drive it.
     We also had hot summer sunshine. And it had the potential of being VERY hot. My shoulder limited my ability to work late hours to sort details left over from the day and to prepare for the next.
     And after all the cement had set, the structure constructed and aligned and the panels on their way, I discovered that the supporting structure was short one set of legs and is about 2 meters too short to support the 64 panels that were about to arrive. Luckily, Marco had drilled two extra holes in the clay. Giles filled these with a mix of concrete while I requested a correction to the shipment. When the panels arrived, we were ready.

    By this time Jenny and Dan had arrived. They pitched in and in two days we had the entire array assembled. A couple more days of work with drills and screwdrivers and I had mounted the utility box and the current inverter. If it weren't for Marco, Giles and Dan, we would still be working on the mounting structure.
 

    The next big job was to feed the heavy cable underground from the utility connection at the house to the panel array. We had previous buried an empty conduit in anticipation but both ends needed big manholes to feed and receive the cable. Alex worked at one end and Isolde the other, Giles in the middle and all fell into place.
    Now we worry about whether the Italian electricity utility and the government will live up to their promises. I wrote this to my mother: "Our government incentive scheme to help finance solar panel installations declines in a step-wise fashion into the future. I presume this is to anticipate a maturing market where technology, manufacturing techniques, and competition drive the prices down.
  31 August is the deadline for the latest incentive level, and we're going to miss it. Not because we haven't done the work on time or paid the fees, but because the damn utility won't come out to provide a wire sufficient to carry our power back to them. It will take possibly two hours work and they've know about this since their boss inspected last April. And there's nothing we can do about it. That's life in Italy. VERY frustrating at times.
  I suppose the 100 degree heat hasn't improved our tolerance; but there is some relief in knowing that our part in the big job is more or less over."

Jiggety Jig

     Home Again, Home Again.
     I'm so relieved to have the girls back at home. I put a lot of emphasis on this occasion. At home alone, I felt isolated and vulnerable, but with their arrival I felt as if the cavalry had arrived. I would survive after all. I knew I could count on my family to support my recovery. I looked forward to their interest in my physical therapy and the gruesome massages of my surgical scar that only a dedicated spouse can administer. Immediately after the accident I imagined my injury as something merely physical. Something I would heal from quickly and in the nature of a fit, young man. A flesh wound. I'd be back in action as soon as they put in a staple or two.
     But no. My hand shakes. I still can't take a full breath. I still can't sleep. And the arrival of the girls hasn't changed any of that.
     Before Alex began her drive home from Britain, "Did you test the car's air conditioning? How can you be sure it's working? Did you know the tires were crap? And why has is got only one set of keys? Jeff says it's in far worse shape than our old car. Did you know there is no owner's manual or service history? And where is the MOT certificate?"
     All this would have been OK considering we'd just lost £6k on a used car internet scam and we were buying near the bottom of the market. But now we were face-to-face with the prospect of Alex driving it across Europe with me vaguely commenting from the comfort of my hospital bed. free food, fresh sheets and all.
     In an endless traffic jam on the 40 degree circular freeway around Milano, they warmed, wilted and baked. My stock began to plummet. In another traffic jam around Firenze, my stock fell again. They arrived wiped out, well after dark, tired and hungry. I had managed to get the house reasonably clean and clear for all their stuff, but this went largely unnoticed against the backdrop of a landscape largely abandoned for the month of June. My stock? A firesale.

Skinny Me

    This morning I weigh 53.4 kg. To Americans that's under 118 lbs or 8 stone 6 lbs to Britons. I've never weighed less than 120. I'm not anorexic, my self image is not distorted. I'm happy with who I am, but right now I don't look that beautiful. Two months after crashing my bike I've lost 8 percent of my body weight.

    I've discovered one can lose weight by crashing your bike, breaking a few bones, and trying to feed yourself for a month. Believe me, the left-overs of lasagna and soup from the neighbors won't make any difference. I'm being fed every evening by my Italian neighbors. It's great food, cooked carefully mainly by Gogo from Verona who, besides being a powerful and practical muratore (house builder), has been a restaurant owner in South America. The menu is eclectic but based solidly on pasta, pomodori, cipolle, alio, and olive oil (tomato, onion, and garlic). Fish on fridays, and lots of seasonal zucchini. Lots! Salads are not served every night, nor is there any ban on vino, pane, olive oil dressings or batter-fried tid-bits. But I'm losing weight, something I thought impossible for a man who has weighed 125lbs all his adult life.

      The secret is that I don't eat three big meals every day. I don't have the energy or the ability to shop, store, and prepare enough food for that kind of consumption. I make my own bread and every morning I have several cups of tea with as much toast and marmalade as I want. Sometimes I have a bowl of sweet, fruity muesli; and sometimes I'll make myself a brunch of toast, bacon and eggs. Lunch? Almost never. Snacks? Peanut butter and honey sandwiches; bruschetta with prosciutto, formaggio, pomodori, and alio; fagioli cannellini with tuna, cipolla and olive oil. Lots of hot tea with milk and a dash of sugar. Fizzy water and often a couple of tablets of aspirin or paracetamol. That's my proven diet for those who want to get seriously skinny.

       It's like insomnia. To cure insomnia, get up at six, get busy, don't nap, do stuff, get good and tired, and go to bed at your regular time: ten o'clock or whatever. Force yourself. To cure overeating, get up at six, get busy, don't nap, do stuff, get good and tired, have supper and go to bed at your regular time. Summer is a good time, and a natural time, to lose lots of weight. Who wants to sit around, sweating, at a big table full of food? Give me a bottle of fizzy water, a couple of crackers, maybe a sweet carrot, a sloppy tomato, mozzarella with real basil; and I'm outa here. To the swimming pool with a book or the lawn mower under a hot sun.

     But don't listen to me. I've crashed a bike and I've skipped a lot of meals. I'm too skinny to be credible.

Man Down

     May 12th, I fell off a bicycle and broke my scapula, four ribs, fractured a cheek bone, and partially collapsed a lung. After 20 days in the hospital, I've been fending for myself, waiting for Alex, Thomasina, and Isolde to return from America. I cant't drive. I don't sleep well. I can't lift heavy objects. And it hurts.

     Normally during July I'm hard at work; but this month, being injured, I can treat myself to live Tour de France coverage. Which I normally love. I love the moving landscapes, the aerial photography, the grace of the peloton, and the drama of effort.

    On stage 9 of this year's Tour de France, five break-away riders flew down a wet mountain road. The camera motorbike caught Jonny Hoogerland wobbling on a blind corner, un-clipping his foot to help stabilize himself. A couple minutes later the fast pursuing front group arrived. A couple of riders hit the deck. Trying to avoid men down, Alexandre Vinokourov veered to the outside, hit a low brick guardrail post and plummeted into the trees below breaking his femur. Jurgen Van den Broeck slammed the pavement breaking his scapula, three ribs and collapsed a lung.

   Up front, young Jonny Hoogerland, now going hell for leather in the break-away, found himself tumbling through the air into a barbed wire fence when side-swiped by a television car. At the finished he collapsed in tears. Three days later he races on, leading the mountain climber's competition by five points. He will not retire wearing this jersey despite carrying some 30 stitches on his legs and back. Two days earlier a serious crash ended the race for three other favorites. Chris Horner suffered a severe concussion, riding the last 25 kilometers not knowing where he was.

      I've always enjoyed the movement and freedom of cycling. I can fly free with my bicycle, leveraging my power with chain and gear to gallop over the hills and fall through the wind on the other side. But these old passions are tempered now. My imagination embellishes the pleasures, but it has also magnified the nightmares. I'm haunted by memories of impact, disabling injury, and enduring pain. I have suffered three of the injuries I've watched in this year's Tour and they have spoiled my live Tour treat. But I'm still watching.