Johnny is faltering

Yesterday after loading a full chest of drawers, and other tonnage from our Dragonfly beach house into our little Honda Fit, we stopped at the bank to make a deposit. What?! No check book. It was supposed to be in our big FedEx envelope with our passports, birth certificates, and SS cards that we had used to register our car and lives in SC. We unloaded everything out in the parking lot and searched every drawer of the chest of drawers. No FedEx envelope. Then I decided it had to be under the back seats that were folded down. But, I couldn't lift the left seat because the head rest was under the drivers seat and somehow the drivers seat wouldn't slide forward. After a cursing fit in the parking lot, my first crush (Ginger from when I was 8) wandered up to enjoy some comic relief. It turns out that I had dropped one of the screws from removing my front license plate (not used in SC) and or course it had bounced into the seat adjustment track and jammed it. Finally dug it out. Still no FedEx envelope. Then in an epiphany moment I sort of remembered that I had stuck the envelope in a plastic box for safe keeping when we left the department of motor vehicle office (60 miles behind us). Where was the box? Oh yes! That was one of the boxes we had just stashed in our 150 degree Edisto house attic. Back to the house and up into the attic we found it. Yee Haa! We celebrated by a good long swim in the ocean, now 86.7 degrees according to the NOAA sea surface temperature web site. Life is good...intermittently.

We're Selling Our Olympia, WA Home!

Yes! We're pulling up stakes and moving to Asheville. We signed a purchase agreement so barring any unforeseen hitches before closing, it's sold.

What we have to kiss goodbye are our memories in our 4-bdrm, 2 bath, 1960 square foot beach view & beach access on Eld Inlet of Puget Sound. One acre lot exactly. Very quiet forested site. One of the bedrooms opens into the living room through French doors and can be used as a Den. Large activity room with plenty of storage space. One car attached garage and plenty of room on the lot to add a giant detached garage. Hot tub (dead but wiring and deck surround still intact) and H&C outdoor shower. Large private sun deck. The home was built in 1983 as a Model Conservation Standards house. It has super insulation and a whole house dehumidifier that can keep the house at a nice balanced 50% RH in this damp maritime climate. There are four secluded outbuildings ranging from a 12 square foot rabbit hutch turned tool shed to a one-cord wood drying shed, to a 144 square foot open-sided shed, and finally a 120 square foot climate-controlled storage building.

This is a great place to live as long as you are not a thermophile like me. You can swim, windsurf, kayak, dig clams or raise oysters right on your beach access easement on private land. It's only 16 minutes to downtown Olympia, 13 minutes to I-5, 11 minutes to Westfield Mall and walking or biking distance to The Evergreen State College (TESC). There are miles of trails and hundreds of feet of publicly accessible, yet virtually deserted, beach beginning just a block away in the 1,008 acres of mostly forested TESC campus. The few neighbors within shouting range are fabulous.

Found Mastodon Tooth at Edisto Island

I found a sizeable mastodon tooth fragment yesterday on the beach at Edisto. That was a thrill. There are lots of Pleistocene bone and tooth fragments here. This was the biggest and most thrilling fossil find for me.

There are lots of interesting things to find on Edisto Island. On an earlier occasion I found a really nice projectile point.

Kiting at Edisto Beach

The whole family gathered at Edisto for Christmas. It was damp outside but cozy inside. We enjoyed my mother, sister, son, daughter, granddaughter, and all extant spouses. You can click any of these little pictures to enlarge them. At risk of sounding sappy religious, I felt blessed by the good loving family fellowship.


Today, the day after, it was sunny with a nice moderate breeze on the beach for kite recreation. Son James gave his Uncle Tom and Aunt Mary Garland a kite. It's a trainer kite at about a quarter scale of the type that people use to go kite boarding across the water. By practicing first with a trainer kite you can avoid those silly beginner errors with the full size version that we enjoy on You Tube where people slam into jetties or hard objects on the beach. What a hoot! Actually nobody thinks Tom and Mary will eventually start launching themselves into the sky over the water with the big kind. It just happens that the trainers are lots of fun just for dry land kite flying. James put a video of the kiting festivities on his blog.

Christmas Eve fun at Edisto Beach

We had a rather stormy Christmas Eve afternoon at the beach down the block from our Edisto house today. That was a delight to son James the windsurfer dude and granddaughter Ayla. She now stands on her little plastic boat, holds her hands out, and says, "Sheew sheew sheew".


Landing in the surf looked a little tense...at least to me it did.


I took some video. James edited it, replaced the wind noise, and put it on his blog.

Electric Radiant Slab Heated Cat House

We recently rescued a cold stray cat that was hanging around our home at Edisto Island. I wont go into the ugly details of that story but it reminded me of one of my most clever and successful inventions, the electric radiant-slab-heated cat house. This should be shared with all humankind for the benefit of our animal friends, or at least the ones we keep as pets but don't let into the house. The illustration above shows how you can build this home for your animal companion. You can of course modify this with your own ideas to fit the size of your pet. Here's what I did:

Start with a cheap plastic round garbage can of about 35 gallon capacity.
Cut the bottom off straight and square.
Cut out a circle from rigid foam insulation like you use for foundation insulation.
Sit the bottomless top half of the garbage can on it.
Cut out a circle of hardware wire and place it on the surface of the foam insulation to act as concrete reinforcing.
Stick a bunch of little galvanized finishing nails at diagonals through the hardware wire into the foam to help ensure that it is held on after the concrete is poured.
Stick a bunch of roofing nails laterally into the sides of the can an inch from the bottom to help ensure that the concrete slab attaches securely to the plastic of the can sides.
Weave in an electric bedding plant heater cable such as a six foot Gro-Quik Soil Warming Cable with integral 74 degree thermostat. Tie it to the hardware wire so it doesn't pucker up above the concrete that you are about to pour.
Mix up a bag of Redi-mix concrete, pour it in the can to about 1.5 inches deep, and let it set up for a day.
Cut a barely cat-sized hole in the side of the garbage can a couple of inches above the slab surface.

Plug it in and keep it plugged in. It is low wattage and even begins to cycle off and on after the slab warms and the thermostat starts regulating to 74 degrees. I added a thin towel for the cat to have something soft to snuggle onto but you shouldn't add a big wad that insulates the cat from the heat below.

Kite-boarding at Edisto

My son came into Edisto Island for the Christmas vacation last night. There wasn't quite enough wind for good windsurfing so he decided on his 2nd favorite water distraction, kite boarding. This is in the sound where the south fork of the Edisto river approaches the ocean. You can also see a video that I took and he edited on his blog.