| | Welcome to the GeoPathfinder homepage - Earth-Centered Resources for Sustainable Living (and beyond).
Simply put, we do things to make both our lives and yours more sustainable, durable, stable, and more survivable.
Just click one of the icons below that matches your area of interest:
 What is beyond sustainable? Look up the word "sustainable" and its synonyms are:
bearable
sufferable
tolerable
passable
endurable
livable
And "green hosting"? Well you'll have to check with 1and1.com on that one.
These synonyms are hardly a glowing endorsement of a lifestyle! Instead of a sustainable system that's just barely hanging on, why not aim for a thriving, flourishing, and robust local ecosystem, even though it might not create higher-paying jobs, keep current politicians in office, or make huge corporate profits for investors?
Instead of worrying about Peak Oil, Climate Change, The Next Big Extinction, Global Warming, 2012, The Giant Government Conspiracy, or Whatever Is Next, why not start learning something of what it takes to survive the end of what one writer (Dianne Dumanoski) calls "The End of the Long Summer" and try doing something sensible?
Or as Bill Mckibben writes in "Eaarth - Making a Life on a Tough New Planet", our concerns need to be less about growth than maintenance, less about total security and more about feeling your vulnerabilities and coping with them one step at a time. Smaller and less centralized resources, and those that are really necessary, not just frivolous "self-expression", will work better on a changed Earth. How to do this?
- Start with what you now have (despite what some sites and boards will tell you, you don't have to buy sustainability, but if you can't build it then....),
- Start with where you now are (whether in the "wilderness" or the urban extreme)
- Start with who you now are (anywhere on a continuum from full-blown corporate planet-rapist to ascetic eco-warrior),
- Ask this question: What's just one thing I can do right now to make my impact on this planet positive?
- Or put negatively, What's the one thing I can change right now that will lessen my negative impact on the planet?
- Begin doing it! Don't wait until you've gotten more money, more tools, more education, or more confidence. Nothing will happen! Gather the courage to adapt by making mistakes and learning from them. That's how Homo Sapiens ended up being the one homonim out of about 28 related species that survived. And, of course, you could possibly gather some ideas from our site!
Even if you are in total denial about the end of the GROWTH OF THE ECONOMY at any cost, MANIFEST DESTINY, the AMERICAN WAY, the bold new GREEN ECONOMY and all the other failed theories of limitless, endless, something-for-nothingness it just doesn't matter anymore. The Earth is trying to buck us off and it's time to learn how to manage a more appropriate, smaller, more local lifestyle that matches the situation at hand. We all need to find how to limit the nearly irreparable damage our parents did (and which we perpetuate) and learn about better choices for responding to the challenges, both from our more distant ancestors and from each other. And just maybe it's time to start acting like planetary citizens instead of jingoistic, xenophobic, provincial snobs. We owe it to the less "developed" countries to scale back on growth NOW, since they will never have much of a chance to achieve the lifestyle goals we pushed at them in our advertising-drenched media assaults.
What begins with a small step, if you take it seriously, will become a thought process. Done frequently, the process will become a habit. And the habit will lead to a lifestyle of learning and self-improvement that eventually helps everybody and everything! Whether you are a pessimist or an optimist about the fate of humankind and our shared little planet (and we don't hold any great hopes!), you can't change the world until you change your head. Positive, durable change happens one individual at a time, then sharing the outcome with others.
- GeoPathfinder, the website:
From the subtle nuances of Geobiology, (Geomancy, Geopathology, Dowsing, Feng Shui, and Geopathic Stress Research and Remediation), to the nuts and bolts of Low-Energy Food Preservation, Masonry Woodstove Construction, Strawbale Building Techniques, Renewable Electrical Systems, Rainwater Harvesting, Electromagnetic pollution (electrosmog), and Year-Round Garden Eating, our site offers books, LED lighting, stainless steel screens, lots of downloads, workshop literature, photos, and site links related to all aspects of 21st-Century Vegetarian Homesteading in the upper Midwest of the U.S. We also promote, and experiment with, lower-impact Transportation Alternatives and Ecological/Organic/Biological Farming and Gardening. IT'S ALL RELATED!
 Clicking the button at the left will not take you anywhere. It simply shows our address in physical space to assure you that we actually do exist!
 If you need to contact us for any reason you can be assured that we use the secured (HTTPS) e-mail services of Google's G-Mail. We hate spam and would never consider sending, renting, selling or trading your e-mail address to a third party, unless you ask us to do so.
 The button at your left if found in numerous places on our site. If your computer is set up with a default e-mail connection in your internet settings this button will connect you to our Secure GMail.com account, listed as "bobdowser".
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NOTE: The underlined words you see throughout our
website are links to external sites and internal documents. If you
need a copy of Adobe Reader to open the many PDF (.pdf, Portable
Document Format) files that we link to, just Click Here for a free download.
Choose your area of interest from the list at the upper left, or from
the icon links above.
Products and Services:
Yes, we do offer some stuff for sale! The rationale? If something helps
you to save on energy use then it keeps more coal-fired or
garbage-burning electric generating stations from being built. Many
lower-income folks live in these high-pollution industrial areas. They
don't necessarily get to "vote with their dollars", as many
environmentalists urge us, to buy the energy-saving stuff that keeps
additional sources of pollution away. But maybe you do! We handle some
stuff that helps lower energy use and if that helps both the "haves" and
the "have-nots" it's a win-win situation.
Midwest Renewable Energy Fair:
You can scroll to the bottom of this page for the latest
MREF workshop handouts/supplements that we have generated.
And remember, YOU CAN DO THIS STUFF! Just sit back, relax, and read onward. Learn from our successes and failures. "Greening" does not happen overnight but by putting one step ahead of the previous. We have been working at this for a bunch of years and are still experimenting, so take what we say with a "grain of salt" as it may not fit either your location or your needs at this time. What is important is that you make an effort in a planet-friendlier direction, no matter how green you think you are at the moment. Failure to do so just brings us all a more dangerous future, more quickly, without preparing you for its challenges.
ABOUT OUR SITE:
We seek to educate and inspire without judgment or nonsense. For over 30 years we've worked to treat the Earth as a friend; someone to listen to, trust, and learn from. We are both students and full-time practitioners of the homesteading arts and the appropriate use of human-scale technology. We try new things to lighten our load on the Earth. Instead of trying to rationalize what we do, we work to make what we're doing more rational. But if you want to make the World a better place, you've got to do something about it!
If you would like to see a website that mirrors at least part of our work in the world, written by a retired G.E. engineer (John Howe) who has all the facts and figures, but is a bit more pessimistic about the future of humanity and the sacrifices necessary for sustainability, check out this link.
And we are not urban homesteaders but we have high regard for those who practice self reliance in the urban jungle. Check out the Dervaes family in California.
Homesteading doesn't require loads of land or tons of money,as you can see by their example. But if you can't live with the noise and the air pollution of a freeway in your backyard (among other things), read onward. And check out some other very successful rural homesteaders (Sue and Steve) at this link.
Truth or Dare time, maybe both:
You don't believe that human culture lacks sustainability? Click Here to see some timely graphics showing how global climate change is affecting the continental U.S. right now, an area predicted to have the LEAST amount of change!
Click Here if you dare to read a very recent U.N. report on why our planet would prefer that you eat less meat, or Click Here if you would prefer an article from the Washington Post on the same subject.
Click Here if you'd like to read a WorldWatch article by Sarah DeWeerdt about the greenhouse gas impacts of transportation, growing methods, and the foods we choose to eat.
And Click Here if you prefer entire tables of statistics, updated in real-time, on world population trends, deaths, illness & injury statistics, trends in the environment & natural resources, energy, U.S. crime & punishment, food production & animal slaughter, and the U.S. national debt. It's a Shockwave Flash file, so if you need a free player download, just Click Here.
Latest site news:
May 1, 2011: Larisa's latest book, "Feeding Ourselves - The Four-Season Pantry from Plant to Plate" has just been completed and is now available as either a 184-page hard copy or as a half-price PDF download, from our Products & Services page.
Beginning in February of 2011 we began to offer LED (light emitting diode) lighting as an affiliate site for Energy Efficient Products of Rome, New York. Available in grid-powered and low-voltage models, and in many types and sizes, the bulbs are found on our Products & Services page.
Starting in June, 2010, we finally relented and started stocking stainless steel dryer screens for sale. We have pre-cut, 2-by-2-foot screens available for immediate shipment. See them on our Products and Services page for more details, or go to our Food Preservation page.
A new page called Eat Local Year-Round has been added. It's a "how-to" page showing the ways we "garden" in a very wide sense, and ways that we prepare our meals using low-energy techniques. And the Transportation Options page has details about our latest big project. We have "greened" an old Porsche 924 into an electric vehicle. Also, finally, I'm done retyping the original Soil Management Information Packet that was available from our company, Underfoot Soil Consulting Service, back in the 1980's.
The introductory, 18-page synopsis, called "Soil Dynamics in a Nutshell" is a free PDF download. You can order the entire 10-topic, 50-page document (not including the free PDF synopsis) for $7.50 by Clicking Here or by reading more about it first near the bottom of our Veggie Homesteading page. And if you need help interpreting the results of a complicated soil test we now offer this as a service. Again, you can see more details on our Veggie Homesteading page or on our Products and Services page.
And for those of you who requested information on how we compost our human wastes, we have completed a free PDF file on this, available on the Veggie Homesteading Page or by Clicking Here. And for those of you who missed our Rainwater Harvesting workshop at the 2010 Midwest Renewable Energy Fair, we have a free PDF file of it available on the Harvesting Rainwater Page or by Clicking Here.
Attention Bloggers!
After reading some of the odd and often out-of-context comments about various pages of our site, it's clear that too many people are just reading about things online and not actually doing anything. We frankly don't care what's said about our site, positive or negative. Just like us, it is what it is, and we're proud of what we do without necessarily being proud of ourselves. That's pretty much what we ask of others. We're here to inspire, not lead you by the hand. Our friends do the same and are inspirational to us. The text and photos included in our site may not reveal every detail, but if you need more information you can contact us here (or at our Secure GMail.com account listed as "bobdowser"). Honestly, we don't bite!
But this site is mainly about actually living more lightly, knowledgeably, and sanely, not social networking, blogging, or sitting endlessly at a computer on some narrowly-focused web forum. Even so, the more that we hear from people who are trying and succeeding/failing at this stuff, the more we are encouraged to try new things ourselves. Let us know what you're up to!
WHAT WE DO AND WHY WE DO IT:
Since our primary focus is on living healthy, sane, balanced, happy, and productive lives, we prioritize our concerns based on what we think the overall impact of each area might be. If your life already suits you perfectly, feel free to skip ahead!
Health Priorities: what we think folks should work on in order of importance
1. Fix your attitude! Do less harm to yourself and others. Buy less stuff, and if you do buy, buy it durable, repairable, and preferably used. Polarization of issues is easy but other options always exist. Find them. Lower your expectations. If you are not proud of what you do, do something you are proud of. Learn to do more with less. Be thankful for what the universe provides for free. Empathy is an important social and spiritual goal, and taking care of yourself by taking better care of the Earth and your fellow inhabitants certainly doesn't hurt either.
2. Breathe pure fresh air, either from country living or from carbon air filtration (avoid adding anything, including scents, ions, etc.). You can do without food for weeks, water for days, but air for only a couple of minutes. Urban air is usually loaded with ultrafine particulate matter, full of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (mainly from cars), that contribute to greatly increased rates of asthma, stroke, atherosclerosis, diabetes, high blood pressure, and accelerated aging. This stuff is so small and so nasty that closing doors and windows won't help you!
3. Drink pure fresh water, preferably straight from the sky, but also (since now even rainwater is somewhat polluted) filtered through a carbon block filter. We've been relying almost exclusively on this free gift of Nature for over 25 years (check out this page). I won't even bother to tell you how polluted groundwater and surface aquifers can be, especially around here in our fractured limestone "Karst" topography.
4. Eat fresh, live-stored, or low-energy preserved, highly nutritious, fully mineralized, organically-grown foods,
preferably "without a face" if you're really serious about reducing your carbon footprint. Produce them yourself so you really know what you are eating and get the full flavor and nutritional value. Or buy them from a local grower you know and trust (so you don't burn more calories shipping the food than it actually contains). In other words, eat your health insurance!
5. Do at least 20 minutes of aerobic physical activity/day, preferably outside, getting some sunshine on you!
No, ultra-violet light won't kill you. Just a few minutes of mid-day UV-B/day supplies you with your daily vitamin D, a cancer preventer! The darker your skin, and the more polar your latitude, the more time you'll need. Just avoid lots of exposure in the morning and afternoon (UV-A) that doesn't supply vitamin D but ages your skin and eyes.
6. Avoid sources of chronic, cumulative stress. These include:
- Emotional stressors (you know who or what they are in your life!)
- Drugs and other alterants, including caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, and other unnecessary chemical crutches
- Pesticides & altered genes found in "food" and "drink" (conventional industrial and genetically-modified "commodities")
- Pesticides & other chemicals used at home/work (from construction materials to carpeting to cleaning products)
- Excessive biological/physical allergens (mold, pollen, dust, radon, etc., but don't get compulsive about this; a lttle bit of these, other than radon, stimulates your immune response)
- Electromagnetic pollution (powerline or inverter-generated AC, its harmonics & transients, and radio/microwave)
- Geopathic Earth Energies (ubiquitous on most of our planet, but easy to avoid or redirect if you learn how)
7. Don't take yourself so seriously. If, like us, you live a voluntarily low-income lifestyle in a region of plenty, grow most of your food instead of buying it, use mainly sunshine instead of petroleum, store a good supply of food, water, and firewood, stay home instead of driving everywhere (home-insteading?), and wander around finding health-changing energies that most people can no longer consciously sense, you get really good at self-deprecation! And if you believe that making changes to your life will make lots of friendships, guess again. But at least the friends who remain will be people you can talk to, eat with, and rely upon.
GeoPathfinder - The Fruits of our Research ( and mistakes!) Available Online
Our primary business focus is a combination of geopathic energy research and remediation, and electropollution investigation, the final two on this list. If you read the book,"Survival of the Sickest" by Dr. Sharon Moelem, you'll get a good idea of how chronic stress can turn off your body's DNA proofreading mechanisms, cause DNA mutations to skyrocket, and alter both your body's expression of many genes, and their expression in your progeny. It's scary stuff, and we focus on geopathic and electromagnetic energy for a number of reasons:
- First, because of the results we've seen from working with them, even if the client doesn't believe in this stuff.
- Second, because the other stressors are well known and can be dealt with by the average label-reading human.
- Third, because their effects are cumulative, sneaking up on you like the frog in the slowly heating pot of water.
- And fourth, because their causes require some expertise, instrumentation, or special abilities to track down.
I (Bob) find pathways and formations of geopathic energy. Hence the website named GeoPathfinder. After over 20 years of experience in finding water, lost/buried objects, people, etc. I started to use my dowsing experience to help folks who suspected that their house, or more specifically, their house's location, was trying to harm them. This led to 8 years of on-going field research, and Earth Energy deflection and dissipation provided to over 150 homes and businesses. It also led to the writing of the book "Planetary Patterns", now in its second edition.
And both working and living with off-grid, solar/wind electricity installations since the mid-1980's has provided many useful insights into the options available for reducing exposure to electromagnetic fields. So when we work at geopathic stress abatement, we also locate any stressful areas related to EMF pollution, or "electrosmog", ranging from excessive electric/magnetic field exposures, to "dirty electricity" (harmonics and transients on the AC lines), to RFR (radio frequency radiation) exposure from any wireless sources, either inside or outside your residence.
GeoPathfinder, the business of helping people overcome problems related to their location and electrical climate:
 This is a photo of Bob's business card. The phone and e-mail data has been blurred slightly to foil auto-spammers, but if you contact us using this link (or at our Secure GMail.com account listed as "bobdowser") with a question you'll connect to our e-mail. Our primary focus is research, but helping people with this stuff has also led to many new discoveries. Thanks!
If you'd like more information about our books, the courses we teach at the Midwest Renewable Energy Association's annual Renewable Energy and Sustainable Living Fair, or any of the other topics mentioned above, check the categories on the upper left (and please stay tuned for more extensive website development), or contact our e-mail address (or at our Secure GMail.com account listed as "bobdowser"). And if you'd like to see many websites that cover similar topics to those you see here, Click Here to link to BuildItSolar.com.
| ABOUT US: | | | | | | In brief, you should know the following: We are Larisa Walk and Robert A. (Bob) Dahse . We have been together since 1982. We live in the rolling hills and temperate, humid climate of southeastern Minnesota in the U.S.'s "upper midwest". We work for wages as little as possible, maintaining a "poverty-level" income. We prefer to work for our subsistence instead of paying for a bloated federal deficit. Needless to say, we are both the "black sheep" of our families! We have been living with off-grid, solar electricity (and sometimes with wind electricity) for over 25 years, using rainwater collection for all of our water needs. We compost all of our kitchen and bodily "wastes", along with those of our two pet sheep. We grow most of our food and use organic methods learned from childhood (along with plenty of reading along the way) and honed through over 5 years of soil consultation and testing that we provided nationally through our former business, "Underfoot Soil Consulting Service". | | | Our home is owner-built using strawbale construction and it's heated by both direct passive solar techniques and by using a masonry woodstove of our own design (burning about a "cord", 128 cu.ft., of fallen "soft maple" per year). Although we live in frigid Minnesota, we grow lettuces and other greens in our solar-heated greenhouse year-round. We steam-can, steam-juice, root cellar, "live-store", or solar-dry all of our garden's bounty. Much of our spring/summer/fall cooking is done using a parabolic solar oven. And since we don't like senseless suffering or death, we've been successful and healthy Vegans for over 30 years (each). Our diet is whole-food, chemical-free, gluten-free, lactose-free, casein-free, and primarily home-grown, wild, or shipped-in Certified Organic as a last resort. And our transportation, when we need it, is primarily by recycled 2001 Toyota Prius, obtained from a scrapyard in 2002, our recumbent Catrike, "tadpole-style" tricycles, now converted to solar-charged, human/electric hybrid vehicles, and (as of the summer of 2009), a solar-charged electric car, converted from a gasoline-powered, 1979 Porsche 924. | | | You'll note, as you read the various subjects we cover, that many of our efforts involve "hybrid synergy" (except our seed supply; we save open-pollinated varieties for planting) and robust back-up systems. Our former Prius and bikes were/are gasoline/electric and human/electric hybrids. Our woodstove is a masonry/steel hybrid that heats our hot water and includes an active solar, air-to-air heat exchanger. Our house is a hybrid of strawbale infill, "stick-frame", and mechanically-connected post-and-beam building techniques. Our sauna is also used as a "summer kitchen" and as a foul-weather food dehydrator. Our photovoltaic solar electric system doubles as a supplier of hot water for 3/4 of the year, and also uses excess sunny-day input to charge our newly-built electric car, hybrid electric trikes, electric tractor, electric mower, etc. The electric vehicles can be directly charged from our solar panels or we can use AC chargers and our inverters (or the Grid, if need be). You get the idea. We like things that do multiple tasks or use various inputs. | | | Having read all of the above I'll assume that you think we are purists, tree-huggers, and neo-Luddites. That's far from accurate. We use technology where we feel that it is appropriate, from an environmental, economic, and sociological perspective. We aren't creating or raising children, and we consider this choice to be the basis of an of an ecological life. Human life means more than being a DNA copy-machine. There are too many humans on the planet as-is, with plenty more on the way! The few things we buy we view as tools, to be used for accomplishing specific tasks, and we don't skimp on tools. We typically don't follow directions or dogmas, but stay within the confines of the Law. We've read, and continue to read a lot, and make decisions based on sorting out as much information as we can handle, balancing the rational, logical results with well-honed intuition. We encourage others to do the same. Our choice of lifestyle is political, in that we don't wish to support the Earth-killing decisions made either by those in power in Washington D.C. or more locally. If the only legal way to do that is by living pretty close to the land in a low-impact, low-income, atypically self-sufficient mode, then so be it. | |
 And in case you think we're too serious, we both play the accordion! The only thing serious about it is the volume. For two former childhood organists, playing the right hand sideways, hugging it to produce sound, and using 120 buttons for chords, all without being able to see what you're doing, is a definite re-learning experience! If you'd like to hear a REAL homestead musician, check out our friend Bryce Black's website for numerous humorous recordings about "bailer twine", mad cow disease, water-pumping windmills, and prehistoric chickens, among other insights.
Latest updates: Fall 2007
The 2007 Energy Fair is now over and "Catch the Wave - Forces, Fields, and Frequencies" seemed to catch people's attention, especially on Saturday, with a packed house. Friday's session was extremely hot and humid, and being the first run at this workshop, I felt terribly disjointed. There was seemingly so much to cover in just 50 minutes and I didn't feel like I was focused or linear enough to reallly get to the point. Saturday was the complete reverse. It's amazing what 20 degrees less heat and a day's reflection can do. So for those who were there on Saturday but didn't get a handout, just Click Here for a 179 kB download (requires Adobe Reader). And if you were disappointed on Friday, the last three pages of this downloaded version are new, added to really summarize and put the topic in perspective.
Latest updates: June 2008
At this year's Midwest Renewable Energy Fair Larisa did 3 sustainable food workshops (Eating Year-Round from the Garden, Solar Dehydration/Steam Canning/Steam Juicing, and Root Cellaring). I was displaying and demonstrating the "Lithium Lounger", solar self-fueling, electric/human hybrid trike at the Clean Energy "Car" Show. Larisa's workshops were packed, as usual. And my position right near the entrance gate ensured a continuous stream of interested onlookers and a barrage of questions. Of course the high-speed, hard-turning, gravel-ripping, 3-wheeled power slides I did to demonstrate the torque and acceleration of the trike's hub motor didn't hurt either! The only downside was that I never had a free moment to go to one of the many workshops or visit any exhibits. More details on the Transportation Options Page.
Latest updates: July 2009
This year's Energy Fair was inspiring as usual, with the two of us doing workshops and a display again. The 20th anniversary of the Fair was planned to be extremely well attended, but with more exhibitors and more space, it didn't seem as crowded. The Porsche 924 electric vehicle conversion is complete, but we didn't bring it to the Fair. Besides the 140-mile trip, making a one-day drive impossible at anything over 10 mph, it just seemed counter-productive to burn the petroleum needed to haul a non-petrol car that far on a trailer! On a recent trip we discovered, by running low on power, that two of our brakes (one disc, and to a lesser extent, one drum) were sticking and hot to the touch. It's still just a car after all. And you don't get far in an electric car with the brakes on! It's OK now, driving to Winona (26 miles round-trip, climbing some monster hills) at least once each week, and charging happily from our solar panels, reducing our carbon footprint one trip at a time.
Latest Updates: Spring 2010
The soil management documents that I promised to get online are now available (see above under Products and Services or check the Living Soil Dynamics page for details). It was hard to put all of this into PDF files, since Larisa originally typed it on a 1922 Underwood typewriter and the drawings were done via paper and pen. Time and formats march onward, but the facts of biological soil dynamics remain as a stubborn thorn in the side of the latest greed-driven trends in bio-agriculture, synthetic everything, and the corporate takeover of the entire universe.
Meanwhile, here on the homestead, seeds are planted in trays, apple scions are collected for grafting, plans are laid for enclosing our open porch while adding another root cellar pit, and we wait patiently for the snow to melt in the increasingly intense sun.
Latest Updates, Late Spring 2010:
The porch enclosure and new root cellar are complete and the gardens are now entirely planted and weeded. We did some rebuilding of our old solar food dehydrator, giving it new glazing, a fresh coat of black paint on the collectors, and a new base. We still need to mulch a few things and then it's back to weeding again. Meanwhile we plan ahead for teaching workshops at the upcoming Midwest Renewable Energy Fair in Custer, Wisconsin on June 18th and 19th.
Latest updates: July 2010
The Midwest Renewable Energy Fair was well attended as usual. The weather was mild and the workshops Larisa and I did were again packed. Now it's back to work weeding and taking a break from the early morning and late evening "slug patrol" I had to do during the cool, very wet weather preceding the MREF. This involved loading a "Dustin' Mizer" (a hand-cranked powder blower) with finely sifted wood ashes and blowing it onto several bean varieties, the broccoli, and all of the corn. The fine layer of ash is a severe irritant to slugs, killing them in short order, but doesn't seem to bother plant leaves at all. And, applied as a thin film, it does little to change the calcium or potassium levels in those beds. Still, I'm glad the warm weather has arrived and things are outgrowing the slug damage.
Latest Updates, Winter 2010:
Larisa and I are working on the latest edition of "A Pantry Full of Sunshine". This updated, revised, and expanded version will now include more information about how and why we grow certain foods, and new sections about gluten-free grains, legumes, nuts & seeds. We hope to be finished editing by March and in print by June.
Snowfall here has reached a new record for December. The scientists say that things will get warmer and wetter here in the middle latitudes and so far that trend is holding. This summer we had twice our "normal" rainfall and we've had record snowfalls in several recent years.
Latest Updates, Spring 2011:
Things are really warming up here now. Highs in the 40s and snow dropping daily. The sunshine is a lot more intense making time outdoors much nicer. We are planning to begin selling LED lighting on the website now that we have finally found a reliable, low-cost source of BRIGHT 12-volt LEDs with standard screw-in bases. Too bad we didn't find them until the days started getting longer! Our 2001 Prius is no longer with us. It stopped running December 31st. The horrible screeching noises, computer codes, and engine shutdown indicated that maybe it was time to move on. We sold it to someone who, after only a few hundred dollars and plenty of time in a heated shop (which we lack) was able to get it up and running again. We now are enjoying a 1996 Geo Metro when we need long-distance transport.
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