Life in the Farmhouse

Firstly, I have a horrible cold with a hacking congested wheezing sort of cough that I really wish would go away. Anyway...


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Here is where we may be living until February!

The Farmhouse doesn't actually look like that anymore: Many plants are gone for the winter, and the grass/concrete sidewalk business has been replaced with an INFINITE AMOUNT OF WOOD CHIPS. Excess wood chips are still chilling out in the backyard. They are also just starting up their blog; you can tell from the single entry.

The Farmhouse consists of Sara, Ander, Dan, and now Patrick, Tomko, myself, and soon another person named Willow that no one has ever met before. The collective house has existed for five years or more. "We are here to garden this fucking place, not destroy it," a sign in the kitchen says. We make mostly-vegetarian/vegan meals, as much out of the garden as we can muster at this late stage. We're going to be putting winter seedlings out into the greenhouse soon. I've been painting and cleaning out the shed. Maybe we will make wine in the basement over the winter. We could do all sorts of things.

Our future plan, which doesn't have much solidity at this point, involves Mary Tully leaving Baltimore in February, Patience's poor little engine being rebuilt this winter, and Latin America. In preparation for this plan, Tomko and I are trying to find jobs in Vancouver to make some money over the winter. Tomorrow, everyone has the day off except Patrick and the household is going on an adventure to Pender Island to pick up Byzantium and hang out on the ferries.

Adventuring with Mary and Patience

Since Mary was with us and had her camera, we actually took a lot of pictures of these things that don't have the horrible resolution of my phone camera. You can see our pictures here.


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Our first mission for the day was to drive to Antelope Island. There isn't a lot to say about that that isn't contained in the pictures: We drove about, we saw buffalo and an antelope and various other wildlife and it was terribly exciting. The island is surprisingly large and we spent a few hours there.

When we left, we headed for a thrift store. (First we detoured to Chipotle and ate burritos. Mmmm.) In Utah, thrift stores means Deseret Industries, the Mormon version of the Salvation Army. It was actually an awesome thrift store. We got some cool stuff, like:

- Pillows! We left our pillows at my mother's house.
- A camp set of nesting cookware that screws together nicely including a pan, pot, and cup
- Books to read
- Bags to organize our things so that we can have easier time keeping track of where our stuff is
- Boots for Tomko!
- Small plastic bin to use for laundry and other washing-type uses

And then we went to Temple Square, just for fun. Mary started conversations with a number of missionaries, and they tried to explain Mormonism, although the placards on Mormonism are funny as anything. And Mary brought us back to Clay's, although Clay and Lisa are at some soccer game, so we are watching TV and hanging out for the rest of the night. Perhaps early sleep.

Fueling Patience

Patience had been running off of diesel since Mary had gotten to SLC. We needed to find a place to obtain waste vegetable oil and take it. Here are some complications in this, for those of you who aren't familiar with veggie oil cars:

- you want to use waste oil, but you don't want to use really awful oil like that at McDonalds. No fast food sorts of places at all. I think it's also the wrong kind of oil, hydrogenated, partially-hyd... I don't know, but you can look this stuff up if you're that interested.

- the best places to get this waste vegetable oil is at Asian restaurants. Ideally, you want to get oil that has been used with minimal meat products and that was not used to deep-fry or fry many things. Japanese restaurants are rumored to most often be a success.

- the oil is filtered when it's pumped into the tank, so you don't have to worry about some contamination, but if the oil is black or, uh, generally ucky, it will overwork the filters and require them to be replaced or maybe clog them. All of this is obviously bad.

- at restaurants, waste oil is placed in the back alley just like the dumpster. It's generally right next to said dumpster. They're large metal barrels with lids. You want one that doesn't have a grate on top (you can't stick your suction tube into it) and that doesn't have a lock.

- it is technically illegal to take this from most places because (a) even trash belongs to the restaurant and (b) many restaurants have an agreement with biodiesel-producing companies who buy the waste oil from them, and they are contractually obligated to not let us take it from them.

Anyway, Mary repeatedly told her GPS to find "Food -> Asian" and hitting any random thing that popped up. We would scope out the alleys. If we saw a barrel, we would jump out and inspect. Most didn't have enough oil in them. Two of them were actually bone-dry, which Mary found unusual. But eventually we found some sort of Thai Noodle House that had more than half a barrel full of oil that was definitely not ideal, but it wasn't quite black, so Mary was willing to change out the filters in exchange for actually having fuel again.

I siphoned while Mary operated the pump and nozzle.

We took 30 gallons: 14 gallons into Patience's veggie oil tank, and 16 gallons into three large red gas cans that Mary could use to refill later.

Mary regulates the flow of waste vegetable oil.

The green bin there contains the pump.  The pump is powered off the van battery, in the sense that you pull up the back panel to show the engine (at the back of the van) and hook on little clamps like miniature versions of jumper cables.  Then there is a tube flowing in and flowing out.  I'm holding the intake tube in the first picture:  All I have to do is make sure that the tube remains below the level of the oil in the barrel, and it sucks it up through a series of filters.  It passes through more filter in the pump, and then is pushed out into a dispenser nozzle just like a normal gas pump.

After this, we celebrated with a success lunch and went back to Clay and Lisa's house.

Chilling in SLC

Since arriving in Salt Lake, we have been hanging out at Clay and Lisa's house.  It is a cute house with internet access and beer, and we are tired and appreciative of such.  This was all going quite well.  Tomko was making some sort of dinner concoction of potatoes, fish, and seasoning, and I was arriving home from the pharmacy with the medicine that I hadn't been able to get when we were in Maryland, and Lisa was straightening up while Clay was in the shower.

Suddenly, I noticed that water was coming from near the water heater, where water shouldn't be, and I started shouting for Lisa and Clay and hung up my phone.  The sewage pipe had backed up and was leaking all over the laundry room floor.  Lisa and I found a wet-vac in the garage and mostly fixed the immediate problem, but we officially could no longer use any water in the house.  Clay had some technical discussion with his uncle and they determined that it could be fixed... but Lisa refused to stay in the house, so we all went over to Clay's parents' place, taking Tomko's dish of food with us.

They have the cutest new dog ever.  Shadow is small and black and sleek and partially spaniel and partially something black and sleek.  (I do not claim to be a dog expert.)

Shadow rolling around the backyard

One thing that is interesting about Salt Lake is that it is a DESERT.  This nice green grass that Shadow is rolling around in needs to be watered at least once or preferably twice a day.  People have built-in sprinklers or ones on timers.  Clay's neighbor had one of the ones that waaaaves baaack and fooorth, which is the only kind I remember from sprinklers to run through as a child.  Sprinklers.  Everywhere.

Clay's father, Jeff, works with water management and told us a lot about how Nevada was trying to take water from aquifers in Utah and how Nevada was screwed out of the Colorado River water from before Las Vegas existed and so on and so on.  I never think this much about water.  I usually think about "can I drink it?" and "will it make me ill?"

Tomorrow night, there's going to be a meteor shower, and we're going to go somewhere to watch it.  Maybe a mountain, maybe the salt flats.  Mary and Patience are supposed to arrive here tomorrow evening, so maybe we can camp out in Patience somewhere.  We'll find a good spot.

A Day in Omaha

We spent one full day just hanging around in Omaha.  J and C had to go to work, so Chris, Tomko and I were just hanging around and vegging out on the internet for a while.  Eventually, Tomko and I got hungry and we went on a walking expedition to Indian place with take-out that C had recommended.  The directions that C had left for us on the kitchen counter were probably entirely correct, but we somehow got lost several times and had to ask a wandering meth-head where we were going.

We ordered tasty food from an adorable south Asian girl who couldn't've been more than thirteen.  She warned Tomko that his meal would be spicy.  Tomko has epic spicy tolerance, so this was not concerning.  (Even I could eat the resultant meal without flinching, so it couldn't be that hot.

We hung around outside the restaurant, even though it was pretty hot, because it seemed to be pretty crowded inside.  Tomko brought me a mango lassi from inside the place for us to drink while we were waiting.  Sure enough, shortly after I had sucked the final dregs of mango, the girl appeared again for us to give her money so she could bring us our food.  We ate some food in the park, then went back to J and C's house and hung around until they got back.

We tried to watch some TV options.  Hell's Kitchen was regarded quite skeptically by C and Chris, and then we put on Jurassic Park - Rifftrax Version. This was more successful, except that J found World of Warcraft more interesting than us, then C went to bed, and then Mary Tully gave me a call with the disasterous news that Patience had broken down!

Mary and I talked until well after the movie was over. The boys went to bed, and then so did I, too. There is driving to be done!