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."