Here Be Dragons

When I went on to water my greenhouses in the afternoon, this little fellow was on the wall just below the handrail.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I suspect she was just as surprised as I was and she did stay still while I was trying to snap a few pictures with my phone without spooking her. After I came back from watering the tomatoes, she was still there, just a few cm further.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

She eyed me suspiciously and after I snapped a few more pictures in a better light, she finally got fed up with the strange giant who kept putting a big black rectangular thing near her and she jumped straight down (about 140 cm) and scuttled near the wall. She kept watching me warily from there and I did not snap more pictures because I did not want to stress her. When I went by again a few minutes later, she was away.

I have always liked lizards, I consider them to be beautiful. It lightens my mood to meet one in my garden, I like to know they are around.

School starts tomorrow – and I’m nervous like a first grader

Back to school in colourful lettersTomorrow the new school years starts in my neck of the woods and hell I’m nervous. This year I finally got an unlimited contract (but not tenure because working for ages on limited contracts I’m now deemed too old and high risk for tenure, but that’s a different conversation), but it also meant that I have to change schools and I really didn’t want to, despite the new school having much nicer working conditions.

My old school was a hell of a commute, 90 to 120 minutes each day, and it had two different locations which meant that I often had to spend my rare breaks commuting as well. We were also a school next to a poor part of the state capital with all the challenges of working with underprivileged families, lots of refugee families with language barriers and also plainly neglected and abused kids. And while having the qualifications for teaching high school up to year 13, I usually only got to teach up to grade 9 and never Spanish, because that’s year 11.

My new school is pretty close, 10 minutes by car and I’m planning on getting an E-bike next year. The small town has less social problems (though of course they exist everywhere), more space and I get to teach high school and Spanish.

So why on earth did I not want to change? Well, people. I had amazing colleagues and I actually genuinely like kids. I am a notorious “Gutmensch”, a goodie two shoes, bleeding heart progressive person who wants to see kids thrive, regardless of where they’re from. But I’ve accepted the change and am looking forward to new colleagues and new kids and so the term starts tomorrow with my brand new 8th grade who mostly don’t want to be in my class, because they, same as me, had to change.

The German school system is horribly stratified with social background having a huge influence on kids’ school career. While I’m not opposed to our different school leaving certs and vocational training system, putting the kids in different schools after year 4 is bad. It used to be 3 different schools: for the kids of workers who should become workers, for the kids of employees and clerks who should become employees and clerks, and the kids of academics who should become academics. While there’s only two types now in most states, the Gymnasium (yes, that’s a very false friend) where you get the highest leaving cert and the comprehensive schools where you get all the others and often have the possibility to go for the highest cert as well (like in my new school), people still think the Gymnasium is the best and the comprehensive school is the rest. The Gymnasium considers itself an elite school and if you have problems you don’t belong there. Not a type of school where I want to work, despite having the formal qualifications. I much prefer working with all kids and getting some of them to the highest leaving cert despite all odds. Anyway, because of these structures, around year 7 and 8, we see a steady influx of former Gymnasium kids in comprehensive schools, as well as the overwhelming majority of refugees and migrant kids, which means it’s not uncommon for comprehensive schools to form a new class in year 7 or 8 and that’s my class. Now, schools hand it differently how they do that. My old school used to form a new class with the new kids and then put all new arrivals into that class. My new school put kids from the already existing classes as well as new kids into my class. Both ways have their pros and cons, the biggest con for me right now being that I’m going to have a class where a lot of kids don’t want to be in because they lost at the raffle. That’s going to be a challenge. But hey, I’m taking it on, it’s not like there’s an alternative anyway, I’m just here voicing my feelings of being very, very nervous.

So, wish me luck!

There and Back Again: Towing a caravan with an EV

View over the marshland towards the sea

©Giliell, all rights reserved

Some of you will remember that last year, our old diesel died several times on our way home from the holidays, until we had to have car and caravan shipped to us and get home by train. Fortunately we had already been looking into a suitable EV to replace it and were lucky to get a Kia EV6 with all the trimmings on short notice. In our daily lives, the car is just the best one I’ve ever had: I can charge at home, with my own energy in summer, but there is pretty little data on towing a caravan over long distances. There were two major issues: reach and charging and we were a bit anxious about the whole thing.

First of all we, made the most important change beforehand: we changed our expectations. If you keep comparing it an measure it by the old diesel experience, you’ll end up unhappy. The EV will not have the same reach, you will be slower, you need to plan accordingly. Since this was the trial holiday, we were happy to go along when friends proposed to go to the North Sea together. It was only 600km and within Germany and we planned to go there in 2 days, since we had zero experience. Beforehand I said that I would be OK with a reach of 150km, I would be absolutely happy with 200, but less than 100 would mean looking into alternatives.

Normally we only charge the battery up to 80% to go gentle on its life cycle, for the first part we charged a full 100%. Generally, the last 20% charge slowly as fuck, again for the sake of the battery, but that’s no problem when you charge over night. Anyway, we started our journey at home and soon got a feeling for the energy consumption. I usually drive the car around 15 kw/h per 100 km  in summer, my beloved at around 18, but I’m sure there’s lots of people who regularly need 25kw/h. Towing the caravan got us between 30 and 40 kw/h. Energy consumption is much more direct with an EV, because it’s much more energy efficient. A combustion engine uses a hell lot of energy just standing there, so the increase is less steep. An EV doesn’t do that. The first leg of our journey took us through the medium mountain ranges of the Hochwald and the Eifel (Charly will know those) with lots of ups and downs. Once we were past Dortmund, everything became flat. We were pretty careful and always charged the car when we still had at least 30% left, so we made 4 stops in total each way, which gives you that 150km range. If we had very carefully planned the stops, we could have made it with three, but that would have left no margin for a non functioning charger or things like that.

We could have made it to our destination the first day, but since we only had booked for the next day, we called it a day early near Osnarbrück and enjoyed an evening of bathing in a lake and getting a good dinner. we arrived without any problems the next day and had some fun holidays. We made the way back in one day, again, with 4 charging stops and plan to make a longer voyage next year. On the way back we also planned our stops better, looking for fast chargers so charging actually didn’t take that much time. Two breaks for breakfast and lunch, and two for peeing and stretching your legs. A fast charger will go from 30% to 80% in 10 minutes, which is very reasonable.

But….

Nothing is that easy. The issue is that while there’s more and more charging stations and more fast chargers (though a Danish guy we chatted with assured us it was nowhere as bad as in Germany), they’re all made for cars only, so what about our caravan? We always had to detach it, move it somewhere we could park, sometimes do not quite legal driving manoeuvres and later hitch it again. It was annoying, but ok. The big disadvantage of all of this is that I got mostly banned from the driving seat. Not because I cannot drive, but because my beloved is really bad when it comes to all things digital, gets sick when he has to look at his phone to check out charging stations while driving and I am also really good at getting an overview quick, see where the chargers are and where we can put the caravan. This will have to change because if we really go to Spain it would be too much for him to drive alone.

Oh, and a final word on energy consumption: We needed about 180kw/h energy in total. Since one litre super fuel has 8.9 kw/h energy, this equals a bit more than 20l super or 19l diesel fuel for 600 km with car and caravan. No combustion engine is ever going to beat that.

Toe-May-Toe Saws

On Thursday, I harvested the first 5,5 kg tomatoes from the greenhouse.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

About 4 kg were ripe enough to be used straightaway and the rest we left in a bowl to ripen for now. And those already ripe had to be processed of course, so we made them into canned sauce.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

First I cut them all into eighths. This is a task where a big and scary sharp knife comes in handy because it is possible to cut multiple tomatoes with one cut. A small knife allows only work on single fruits and even a slightly dull one will do more squishing than cutting.

After cutting tomatoes, I also cut three big onions into quarter-crescents, two red bell peppers, and one small pattypan (optional) into small cubes (5-10 mm). I divided everything into halves because it was clear it wouldn’t fit into the pot all in one go.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

We have thrown the onions into hot oil to soften them. While they were bubbling we added spices – whole black pepper, allspice, and bay leaves (also homegrown, I have three Laurus nobilis plants) and let it all simmer together for a bit. BTW, that brown spot on the pot is a mystery – even when we wash it spotless with steel wool, which we do, it appears in the same spot once the pot is heated.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

When the onions were sufficiently glazy but not too soft, the tomatoes, peppers, and pattypan went into the pot too with a generous amount of salt and a bit of sugar. We let it simmer under a lid for twenty minutes and added one bouillon cube (also optional, soy sauce works well too) per 1 kg of tomatoes. These are ketchup tomatoes so they are not very juicy. This is a good thing because they make good thick sauce without the need to boil off too much water. They do contain just enough water to dissolve into a nice sauce.

Once the sauce was done, we put it into pre-heated jam jars with twist-off lids. My mother pre-heats the jars with steam because it sterilizes them better than just washing and it reduces the risk of the glass breaking due to thermal shock too.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Once the lids created a vacuum seal, my mother labeled the jars and I took them into the cellar. These are circa 880 ml jars so this is about 7 l of tomato sauce prefabricate. In the cellar, it will keep for years (I think our record was five years). Essentially it only spoils if the lid is damaged and rusts through.

When preparing for eating, my mother adds cream and flour to thicken it into proper tomato sauce. One jar is enough for about 6-8 servings. It is great with pasta. It is one of my favourite foods so I do hope to harvest more tomatoes. In the greenhouse, it looks promising. Outside the greenhouse, it is a bust and I will run the tomatoes over with the lawnmower so they decompose quicker.

I got a break “Quod Subigo Farinam”

I took a few day’s break from working on the cutting boards and associated machinery because my car is in repair. Without it, I cannot buy the necessary materials, and it’s not worth ordering these online. I also cannot buy groceries until the car is repaired, so yesterday I baked bread, and today I baked pizza. It was under guidance from my mother who told me what to do and what ingredients to use etc. but I think I can claim most of the credit because I did most of the actual work and I did in fact knead the dough.

The bread looked kinda meh going in.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

But it looked splendid going out. I had it for dinner and it tasted absolutely fabulous. Not even the best bread bought at a supermarket can beat a home-baked loaf.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

The pizza looked as usual going in. I.E. a mess.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

And it did not look any better going out since pizza is one of those foods that looks like someone already ate it.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

But it tasted great too and after that lunch, I could not move for several hours and still have left over for dinner.

I also harvested about 45 kg of potatoes. The small patch near my greenhouse dried up about 90% already so I decided to dig them all up. 45 kg is a reasonable harvest considering that in this patch, I planted mainly leftover tiny/green potatoes from the previous year and about 5 kg of those that I could not fit into the main potato bed. Of these 45 kg about 34 kg were in good enough shape for storage and 11 kg need to be eaten or otherwise processed asap.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Thus after the very crapy start of the year it at least appears I might get my money’s and time’s worth out of the garden after all. I already harvested enough pumpkin to can them as canned fruit (ala pineapple), pickled (ala gherkin), and sauerkraut ersatz to last for two years. I am still not even on the money due to the huge amount of molluscicides I had to use at the beginning of the growing season, but I should get there easily now. It would be strange if I did not get at least 100 kg of potatoes from the main patch and I will definitively get more pattypans and pumpkins still.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Tomatoes outdoors got consumed by mold despite my best efforts. The weather was simply too wet and I could not spray them with fungicides all the time. At least the potatoes appear to have resisted it and the tomatoes in the greenhouse are shielded from rain and fog and thus so far resisted too. While annoying, it is not too big a loss. The weather was so cold and wet that the tomatoes outdoors did not grow above my knees anyway whereas those in the greenhouse are up to my shoulders, as shown in the picture. I hope those in the greenhouse do not catch it because if the weather stays reasonably warm, I could harvest tomatoes at least till the first frost. I would very much like to try my hand at homemade ketchup and dried tomatoes. It looks promising. The first tomato started to blush on August 2. and as these things usually go, others followed quickly after that. It takes about two weeks for a tomato to fully ripen therefore sometime toward the end of next week I should start harvesting.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Like every year for the past few years, I planted beans along the south wall of our house. Those appear to have thrived and I can look forward to at least a few kg of shelled beans and some canned bean pods. Although I hope most of them ripen and dry – we still have not eaten all the canned pods from last year.

Did you have any success this year in your gardens? From what I read in the news, most people around the world do not experience abnormally cold and wet summer this year, quite the opposite. I would not mind the wet, but the cold is bumming me out. One of the strangest things that happened due to the cold weather is that some of the corn I planted in the spring started to grow only about two weeks ago. It appears that wet and too cold or dry and too hot are the only two options we have now. We haven’t had what I’d call a “normal” summer for about a decade by now.

 

Making a Thicknesser – Part 2 – The Failure

Fuck it. I did not expect to have to write this.

Works were progressing nicely, I ran several tests and optimization rounds. I got the thicknesser remove material in parallel both across and lengthwise with several iterations that I won’t write about now because they are moot. It was working adequately. Also as I wrote, I did try to plane one board across the grain manually and it worked just fine. I really did not expect any significant problems. I was ronk.

Today I glued sacrificial sides to all my kitchen boards and decided to try to flatten those. The first one I tried to push under the thicknesser, removing barely 1 mm of material – BOOM. And the planer was broken. When I disassembled it I found out that for some reason the wood bent the steel knife of the planer, thus it bit into the housing. Subsequently, the propulsion shaft broke off and the aluminium cylinder for the knives got deformed too.

Apparently, planing hardwood across the grain is even more pernicious than I expected. Now I don’t have an electric planer anymore. That would not be a problem since I do not really need one. However, I still do not have a thicknesser, which I do need. And I have several glued-up boards which I cannot finish with a reasonable amount of work. This is a huge setback and I am at a loss about how to proceed.

I can buy a new hand planer but it won’t fit in the stand I built. I can’t buy the same one because it is no longer on sale and it is no longer possible to get replacement parts to fix it. Not to mention that when I removed the cover, so many metal parts were bent out of shape or broken that repair is probably not feasible. Now  I am even afraid to run these boards through any kind of thicknesser whatsoever. If I bought a thicknesser for 500,-€, and found a way to fit it into my workshop somehow and this happened, saying that I would not be happy would be an understatement of the year, I would be ruined.

Making a Thicknesser – Part 1 – The Dread

I glued up seven boards and I tried to flatten them with the drum sander. At first, it always appears to progress reasonably quickly but as the boards get flatter, the abraded surface gets bigger and thus I have to slow down to not burn the wood. And when I get to an almost flat board with a few deeper spots it slows to a crawl. I was aware that this might happen and I hoped to avoid it by being diligent when gluing the boards. It did not work. One part of the problem was that I cut these with my old slightly blunt and wobbly table saw blade so they were not very precise. The other part of the problem was that no matter what I did the boards shifted while the glue was curing. Even when I tried to insert dowel rods to prevent it.

So I tried to flatten one board with my electric hand planer. It worked, just so-so. It did reduce the time needed on the drum sander later on but the surface was still way too wavy for that to be the solution. I am not very good with the hand planer, I rarely need it so I lack the experience to use it properly. I also hate it, it is heavy and the gyroscopic precession makes it unwieldy.

So, the drum sander works splendidly for perfectly flattening surfaces but I need something else to remove material more aggressively first. In other words, I need a thicknesser. I really hoped I could avoid this.

As with the drum sander, there are two obstacles to simply buying one. I am broke and none of those that I could find on the internet would fit into my shop anyways. I toyed with the idea of attempting to make a second drum for my drum sander, but I rejected it – I would need really high rpm and there’s no way I can make this thing so precise to not be dangerous when spinning really fast. My electric planer came with a jointer adapter that I never use because, despite appearances, I like having all ten fingers. However, that adapter means one thing – the planer has anchor points for fixing it somewhere permanently. So I decided to try and use those.

First I spent a few days being grumpy and thinking about how to do it. I rejected at least three ideas of my own and three that I found on the internet. There were some good solutions to be found but they all required something that I lack, usually space and versatility. I need something compact that can be set up relatively quickly and easily, I cannot store a dozen or so shims and spacers or have huge skids and guidance rod protruding on sides. I was constantly going through my scrap piles and thinking about what could be useful and how. And two days ago I finally arrived at an idea that I thought is worth trying to realize and I made a very rough sketch of the various parts that I will need.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

The materials I initially gathered were: 4 pieces of angled iron, 6 black locust boards, 2 offcuts of 22 mm galvanized piping, an old spigot handle, two hammer-in M10 nuts, an M10 threaded rod, and a handful of woodscrews. I still dreaded the start of the work because I am constitutionally incapable of precise work and this does require precision.

I started by cutting all the black locust boards to size and shape and smoothing the surfaces on my belt sander.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I also flattened two boards on my drum sander to get perfectly flat and parallel surfaces and I glued them into a bigger block. I would use one piece of wood but I could not find one of sufficient size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

This has shown that whilst for my sloppy work most of the blame goes on my two left hands, part of the blame was on my tools too. With a new, sharp, and thick blade suddenly my table saw was capable of cutting black locust wood to precise dimensions and at really right angles. The use of a drum sander made making two surfaces mate perfectly positively easy. After three days of work, I got to this.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I managed to fix the planer to the scaffolds and run a small board under it. That is a very tentative sign that this might actually work.

I will write more in detail about all the individual parts and the whole thing when it is finished. If it fails, I will write about it too. I won’t progress much in the next two days, however. Tomorrow I must take my father to the hospital because he injured his knee and what I will do next depends on what the diagnosis is going to be. We might need to buy new crutches, with underarm support.