PeakEngineer's blog

We're going on a trip to Seattle, Iowa, Minnesota, and D.C. over the next 4 weeks, so there won't be much posting. Have a good July...

Last night we attended a mini-workshop presented by students from Oberlin College participating in the One Big Bike Movement. These students are biking from Oberlin, OH to San Francisco this summer, stopping along the way to present strategies for living more sustainably.

Their first stop happened to be here in Yellow Springs, hosted by Living Green (a store about which I’ll be talking quite a bit here in the future) which provided wine, cheese, and fruit for refreshments. They spoke about techniques for using passive solar and cooling, including placement of vegetation, windows, and heatsinks. The students also gave an overview of vermicomposting, including a display of a working bin full of red wrigglers. They even left the bin with C.J. of Living Green to use in the store!

I encourage you to check out their site (onebigbike.blogspot.com) and see if they are heading your way.

Having a non-boring job that doesn’t allow my mind to wander during the day has significantly cut into the time I have to think of items about which to post. I’m still searching for balance (aren’t we all!), but rest assured I fully intend to restore this blog to its former glory...or at least, to the quality it was before the move.

The events in the world of energy over the last few months deserve some comment, as the situation has gone wildly out of control since I last wrote about it. You all know the numbers -- oil at record highs, gas at record highs -- and the boundless rhetoric as to the causes. Is it speculators, OPEC, the oil companies, supply constraints (i.e. Peak Oil), or something else? Honestly, we don’t know, but that’s the whole damn point -- we just don’t know if we hit production limits yet.

I spent some of the last few weeks breaking ground on a garden here in Yellow Spring. Since we’re in a rental, I can’t make the garden quite as big as we would like, but I’m grateful that the owner is flexible enough to let us dig one at all. It should be a great learning experience for gardening in Ohio and prepare us for larger-scale operations when we find a permanent farmstead.

It will also be an experience in growing in soggy soil, the exact opposite issue from what I faced in Florida. It turns out that our yard is not a swamp merely due to the recent heavy rains, but our neighbors informed us that there is a natural spring under our area. It is one of the many springs that gives our village its name, and is already proving to be a bit of a gardening headache.

Wow, moving is hard enough as it is, but for the sustainably-minded it can be torture! The past three months were very fortunate for us -- I got a new job, we moved back to the Midwest, and we sold our house -- yet extremely stressful.

I know I’ve lost quite a few regular readers and I hope to earn them back now that we’re getting settled. So, I’ll get right back into sustainability topics starting with the one at hand, which is the eco-crappy process of moving states! In October, I learned that I was selected for a job with the Air Force at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio -- a dream job for me both in terms of the working environment and the location. But first the big news -- the house we found to rent is in the village of Yellow Springs, Ohio, which many of you may know from the Community Solutions Conference held every year on Peak Oil! The village is by far the closest thing I’ve seen to a sustainable community, and is far better able to weather some of the challenges ahead than anywhere we’ve ever seen. I’ll have much, much more on Yellow Springs as time goes on, but for now I’ll get back to our moving story.

We have arrived in Ohio and are in the midst of finding a place to live. I'll get back to regular posting and updates on our adventures once we don't have to steal wireless from Panera Bread anymore.

There is a lull in the moving craziness on the Florida end at the moment, so I was able to discipline myself enough to post. We still need to figure out where we're going to live in Ohio, and we'll likely be renting for a year or so up there, which could present some challenges in trying to continue our development of a sustainable homestead. For instance, we need to figure out a way to keep gardening if our landlord doesn't want us to alter the landscaping. We also need to sort out what sustainable solutions we could carry with us to a permanent homestead.

In Florida, we're enjoying the winter gardening season. I pickled 8 jars of hot peppers out of the garden for Christmas presents (and for our own use) and I'm waiting for tomatoes to fruit.

If you have noticed a slowdown in activity in this site recently, it's due to a couple things: our rascally 5-month old and preparing to pack up and move states! I just got the word recently that I was selected for a job with the Air Force in Ohio, and I start in January. So, please bear with me as we uproot and resettle -- hopefully I'll be able to re-energize the blog with projects and pictures from our new farmstead :)

Systems Engineering is a poorly-named field -- it's not so much an engineering discipline as a structured process for producing a design. Just as we can design a homestead , we can apply the Systems Engineering process to develop lasting documents.

The experiment I propose is this: can we apply the elements of the Systems Engineering process to create a constitution that ensures a sustainable and open community?

On a recent trip home to Iowa, a minor basement flood at my parents’ in-town house presented the opportunity to stay at their newly completed off-grid home out in the country. As living on a self-sufficient acreage is of course our dream, we took this as a chance for a taste of sustainable living (well, minus the homesteading aspect).

This picture shows the solar array, wind tower, propane tank, and top of the septic system. If you look in the background you’ll see the line of semis waiting to accept their load of industry-intensive corn being harvested that day. I felt it was a nice contrast between viable sustainable practices…and modern farming techniques.