May 18 at CoolTop

It's Monday morning at CoolTop, just a bit after 6AM. With the exception of half a day mid last week, I have been here full-time for almost two weeks. This note is inspired by a change in the weather.

While it rained during two days about two weeks ago, it has then been sunny ever since. It was actually great as it showed us that we needed to seal our dome followed by sunny weather to do it. Well, rained one millimeter during the night. Not a lot but enough to make sure everything is green and clean. It stopped around dawn (about 5AM) and is absolutely calm and quiet. So quiet that for the first time in owning this laptop (over three years now) I can actually hear the internal fan. The silence is only broken by the sound of the keyboard as I type and by an assortment of birds chirping.

I am in my garage which is "my temporary home" as an albañil is putting in our floor of piedra zopalote in the dome. Within an hour there will be people here working and talking.

If I didn't have to "contractor-sit" (that is, be here as they have tools and cement in the garage and I have, well, half the stuff I own) I would go out for a long walk. It is pretty amazing that we have owned the 150 manzana chunk of land for 18 months and I have yet to explore over half of it. Hopefully when the house construction is done I will get a day like this to explore.

Being here makes me think of the play Idioglossia. While it is what the movie Nell is based on, the Hollywood conversion destroyed the message. In the play Nell elects to stay in the country explaining to the shrink all the things (such as the grain in the wood in the walls of the cabin) that "city folk" just don't see.

For most of my adult life I have either lived in a city or lived such that I had to travel to the city to support myself. The closest I got to rural was a 7-acre farm in Benton City, Washington in 1974. Unfortunately, a daily trip to a "day job" was necessary to make the mortgage payments.

When I lived in Western Washington, an escape meant a camping trip to the Olympics for a few days. It was well worth freezing my ass off to spend a day where all you would see would be pine trees and all you would hear would be birds. Well, finally, I have found the equivalent of an escape to the Olympics that can both be permanent and doesn't require silk underwear, down sleeping bags and freezing my ass off. In fact, the temperature is 18C, or for the Celsius-handicapped, about 65F.

Actually, to give you a bit more of the weather statistics, the minimum temperature has been 14.8C (58F) and the maximum has been 30.6C (87F). That includes the hottest month (April) but not the coldest so I would expect the annual minimum to be around 10C (50F). Soon, this weather station will be on-line so you can check whenever your are either freezing or sweating.

I still have my silk underwear, wool socks, Gor-Tex jacket, and hiking boots that I bought at REI all so long ago. They are optional but useful here. Yeah, I think I will be staying a while.

P.S. I am adding this update at 3:30PM. The weather remained clear or with scattered clouds for most of the morning. Then, about mid-day, we got a serious thunderstorm. It is still overcast but starting to lighten up. We got a bit over 100 mm of rain in that time or about an inch per hour.

The solar panels is clearly clean now. They delivered 1.5KWh of electricity before the storm (they were capable of more but demand was low and the batteries quickly filled up). As it clears, they will probably be able to replace the energy used in the last four hours before sunset.