My Magic House

Darlin'Man checked the generator this weekend.  Last week, the generator ran for one hour.

One HOUR.

We used electricity at our normal rate.  It's a fairly low rate, but its not like we changed our behaviors last week, or went away or anything.  The heat tape (a main energy sink in the winter) isn't plugged it.

And it was sunny.  I swear, solar electricity is magic.

Energy from the SUN

All this week it has felt so much like winter is ending.  The temperature has been in the zero to fifteen ABOVE range, and the light is staying longer and longer everyday.

Last weekend, I spent all of Sunday at home.  It was lovely - roast chicken for dinner, laundry, vaccuming (courtesy of Darlin' Man), dishes (courtesy of me - if you know me you'll be shocked!).  But perhaps the best part was watching the electric system do its thing.  For a long time, the amp load on the battery hovered right around half of its normal usage, despite the vaccum and the washing machine.  Then, for a magic couple of hours, the meter showed that 0.00 amps were being drained from the batteries by the house.  Ocassionaly it would spike up to register that the batteries were recieving 0.01 amps of electricity. 
The generator never turned on.
So, where was this magic energy coming from?  From the sun, my friends, from the sun.  Yep.  That's right, mid February in Fairbanks, and we're making elecricity off the solar panels.
That is how I know that spring is really on the way, even if we have more 20 below in the future....

Keepin' Warm

The temperature is now back up in the zero to 5 below range, and it feels so warm!  We had a about a week where cars and generators froze, with temps of 35 to 55 below. 

Way to cold.

The house did pretty well, considering.  The woodstove kept the downstairs warm, and under covers even the upstairs was lovely.  The back rooms were freezing, and I didn't even attempt to sit still at the loom, but when its that cold, kitchen and hearth are all you really need.

The generator froze twice and wouldn't start, but each time, darlin' man was able to get it running again with help from the propane heater.

There was alot of this:

and of this:

going on!

Weeks like this with temperatures so cold really and really remind you just how dependant you are on energy, whether from wood burning, or the generator and monitor and cars that run on fossil fuels.

Weeks like this make me want to stay home with the fire, and not leave.

Last weekend, along with the ridculous cold, we had ice fog so intense you couldn't see headlights across an intersection.  The radio was giving periodic warnings about how air quality is not advised for the young, pregnant or elderly.  Ice fog is something that only happens at super cold temps, when the moisture in the air crystalizes into fog.  It is compounded by pollution - car exhaust, power plant emissions, woodstove and heater exhausts - it all gets trapped by the cold density of the air and the fog and gets worse.  It is like breathing soup.

Sometimes when I've driving the 40 minutes home from work, I wonder if we wouldn't have made a better choice by finding somewhere closer into town.  If the commuter gas makes up for the eventual food production.  But then a week of ice fog I would NEVER want my future children breathing reminds me that that is another, super potent reason why we live outside of the populated areas.  There was no ice fog at our house, only crystal clear air that burned with chill as you breathed it, and made the stars shine brighter and look both closer and farther away.



"An old-timer who operated a weather station north of the Brooks Range once told me that there's a digit somewhere between 40 and 50 below zero that marks the frontier where civilized life begins to shred. Dip even a little ways below that, and generators and combustion engines tend to bust. Belts grow brittle. Tires flatten. People stop bathing, or making small talk. Sanity fades with the light, and the air goes liquid and bitter on the tongue. Below that line, one blunder with bare hands can lead to frostbite or worse. Below that line, you can die due to mishaps. Better pay attention to small things."

So true, and so well put. 

It is difficult to describe the extreme cold.  What it does, how it feels.  I hear over and over that people's main impression is walking out the door and immediately having all moisture in the nose and eyes evaporate or freeze.  The river does odd things in the winter until it is thoroughly frozen over.  It steams in the cold.  If you have a complete grasp of physics, this has something to do about temperature transmuting water from form to form.  I prefer to see it as magical.

I always describe winter air as crystalline.  Focus and distance and dimensionality shift. 
 My mother, who lived through the 60's, says its like the atmosphere is on hallucinogens.

The snow covered branches of trees seem to stand out from the air that surrounds them, like they are both solid.  or are equally permeable.  When you breathe, the air sears your throat.


It means being minutely conscious, focused on the tasks of living.  The fire in the woodstove has never been so important.  Wood must be brought in to thaw before it is burnt.  You start the car twenty minutes before you go anywhere to let it warm up.  We set the generator to a maximum run time of one hour, so that it never fully charges the batteries, so the house pulls the draw down to the level the generator kicks on more often, so the generator runs more frequently and keeps itself warm so it doesn't freeze. 
Darlin' man doesn't let me out the door to drive the 26 miles into town in the morning until he's assured I have my fur hat, down coat, snow pants, and bunny boots (the last two I keep in the car for emergencies and don't generally wear). 




The above quote is by Doug O'Harra from Anchorage and can be found in the article here:
http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/joys-skiing-alaska-20-below-zero?page=0,0

Winter Snowfall

Well, the temperature broke.  The forty below streak taught us about the fragility of our automatic generator/battery system, necessitating more time spent at home monitoring it.  A couple of times we had to put the propane heater in the generator conex to warm it up before it would start.  Deisel engines have to stay warmer than normal engines.

The extra time at home, while a little stress inducing as far as planning around it, with two vehicles between 3 peoples vastly different schedules, was absolutely lovely.  It only reaffirms the reality of my desire to craft a life that is based on and around our home(stead), rather than one in which it is merely a home base.

The last few days have seen zero degrees ranging upwards to 7.2 degrees in the morning when I leave.  On the 7.2 degree morning, driving into the blueberry flats just down the hill from us, the temperature was -1degree.  Amazing the difference a little bit of altitude can make when the inversion is in effect!

The last couple of days have seen light snowfall.  It doesn't snow when its bitterly cold.

My halloween pumpkins we never carved...  I should probably cook them, or compost them, as it is no longer by any stretch of the imagination seasonal to keep them on the porch.

These photos are actually from a while ago.  There's another 6 inches of snow or so above what these photos show.  But they still give a lovely sense of the winter wonderland we live in!

cold snap

Its a little known fact that the temperature sensors on new cars - you know, the ones that have the little digital display inside your car - only go down to 22degress (farenheit) below zero.  Subaru is known to test drive their pre-production models in Fairbanks for extreme conditions, but they don't alter their digital temperature technology to match.  Normally this 'limitation' wouldn't be even noticed.  But then there's the days when one has forgotten this fact, and is driving around blissfully thinking its only 22 below (and kind of considering oneself a wimp for minding the cold so much), only to find out that it is in fact 38 below zero. 

Yes, the winter cold has come.  We should be back up to 4 below by monday. 

Yesterday, we (and by "we" I mean my darlin' man) installed the weather station my in-laws gave us as a house warming present.  It is awesome, and monitors temp, humidity, pressure, and windspeed.  The wind sensor isn't up yet, but the thermometer is working great.  It showed 30 below at the homestead when it was 38 below in town.  That means I was wrong.  (and I'm admitting it - if you know me well, you'll be shocked) I was pretty sure the homestead would average colder in the winter than town.  But I guess even 20 miles north, being up on a hill counts for something.

Living even farther north

Our homestead is 15-20 miles north of town.  That may not seem like all that much on the face of it, but when you think that the arctic circle is only 60 miles north of town, it seems more significant.

I realized this fact a month or so ago, when I was driving home late at night and realized I was driving into the sunset.  Literally.  It was night time dark in town, but about half way home I started seeing pink sunset tinges on the tops of the hills, that gradually increased in brightness and saturation.  Shortly after arriving home, darkness fell there too. 

I don't know if its entirely due to latitude, or if it has more to do with the unique variations of our particular micro-climate (micro-climates here are dramatic things: in winter a micro-climate can be twenty to thirty degrees warmer or colder than the "official" temperature, which means forty to sixty degrees difference from eachother).  But after the flurries of yesterday, that were apparently more than flurries at home, we have a bout a half inch of snow covering the homestead.  Here in town there's nothing on the ground.

Morning snow on the side of the road

September full moon brings the first frost...

Yesterday morning, leaving the house, the grass was all kissed with silver, and the air was crisp.

Driving through the flats, the mist hung lower and heavier than usual, and

the birch trees were shot through with limbs of gold dripping like gold.