FACEBOOK … Over and Out

I know it’s been a long time since I posted the last entry on my blog, but now it’s the right time to break my silence.

I never was a huge fan of FACEBOOK, I never got into all those drinks, villagers and farmers. From the first time I opened an account there, something always kept me away from going deeper into this whole social network thing. All I did over the time that I was a part of this system, I posted some pictures and gave some general information about me. Every 3 or 4 months I looked into my account on FACEBOOK and deleted all the friends requests from people I hade no idea who there are or why they wanted to be friends with me. The next thing I did, was to delete all the invitations to what ever goes around on FACEBOOK, that took me always at least 20 minutes. At the beginning of this year I deleted everyone from my account who wasn’t family or a very important friend to me, from 50 people (or a little more) only 6 survived this cleaning action.

Also beginning of this year, my account started to write invitations on the walls of my friends to some kind of movie group I never heard of. My account did this all by itself. So I thought that someone had hacked into my account to write links on the Walls of my friends.
After this happened for the second time, I started to change my privacy settings, so only my friends could find my profile there and I thought everything would be fine from now on.

But I was wrong. A few weeks ago, my account started again writing on the walls of the few friends I still had there on FACEBOOK. So I found out I own a brand new iPad and as nice as I am, there was also a link included where you could get an iPad for free.

Hey, I haven’t talked to you on facebook in a while,
but I thought I would message you from my new iPad that I
just got for free. Don’t tell anyone but this site is
glitching and sending out free iPads to anyone that signs up, …

That was the time I deleted every bit of information about me. Even all the pics I posted there and set my birth date as January 1st 1900, because I had to give an answer for it.
I got in contact with FACEBOOK about this problem. Following is the answer I got a few minutes later after I sent them an email:

Hi,

Thank you for reporting this potential phishing link. Unfortunately, we are unable to respond to each of these reports individually, but we are reviewing them.

Please be cautious when clicking links on the site, even if they were sent by friends. Make sure that you always access the site from a legitimate Facebook page with the facebook.com domain. If something looks or feels suspicious, go directly to www.facebook.com to log in.

For more information on phishing and other security topics, please visit our Security page:

http://www.facebook.com/security

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

The Facebook Team

Today my account told my friends that I’m writing them a message on there wall from my new iPhone G4, which I don’t own,

OH MY GOSH! I know I shouldn’t talk about this here in facebook, but I
thought I would message you from my new APPLE IPHONE 4G that I just got for
free.
Don’t tell anyone but there is a website sending out free iPhone 4G
to anyone that signs up, …

Thats enough. No more FACEBOOK for me. I deactivated my account there.

FACEBOOK … OVER and OUT

Frohe Weihnachten

Merry Christmas to all.

(Silent Night, Holy Night)

(Lo How A Rose E’er Blooming)

Designing a Tiny House (Part 2)

Today, I want to talk about the design of the floor plans for my Tiny House. The main goal is to keep the square footage at the lowest level possible and it would still fit my need of space over the years to come.

First I had to think about what is absolutely essential for me and from what kind of luxuries I could abstain from in my living space. Essentials for me are a place to sleep, a place to eat, a place to relax and a place to work.

The next step is to find a way to combine some of the areas into one so that I wouldn’t need one room for each purpose. Combining the living room with the working space was the first step. On the main level will be the living room and on the second floor the work space, which could be converted into an area for guests/family to sleep when they come for a visit or a library if I don’t need the work space anymore. All this can be done without any kind of remodeling of the house. The only thing to do is to change the furniture.

I also added a small work station in the bedroom for times I have visitors for a sleep-over or I changed the work place upstairs into something else.

The small dining room in front of the kitchen will be used to store plants and put up a drying rack in the winter time, to grow own herbs year round and to catch passive solar heat when the sun is standing low in the winter, which will save me some dollars on my heating bill.

As I mentioned in Part 1, the main reason for the entrance/mudroom is to function as a cold trap. Also it would be used to store winter jackets and shoes to keep the rest of the house clean and dry. Therefore I added a closet and a small sitting space with some drawers.

In combining the deck and the porch as one space, it’s a perfect way to keep the maintenance of the outdoor space on a low level over the years and provides me with the necessary space for a sitting area, a barbeque and some plants. It also gives me a fast and easy access to my greenhouse/workshop year round. The partial covering of the porch/deck gives me some shady place to sit outside and keeps the entrance dry when it rains or snows.

The greenhouse/workshop provides me with a space to start my own vegetable plants earlier in the year. Right now I can plant the tomatoes as early as May, when the last cold nights are history. I get lots of tomatoes, but they rarely get ripe because the growing time here, next to the Atlantic, is very short.
For necessary repair work or doing some woodwork there is a workshop integrated in the greenhouse with enough space for a table saw and a workbench. I chose 4-inch thick exterior walls fort his small building because it didn’t need to be very warm in the winter. It hast to be only a few degrees above the freezing point and in day time the sun will heat up the place through the huge windows on the south side. At this time of the year it would be mostly used as a storage place for the gardening tools and the deck furniture.

At last, the most interesting part is the number crunching.

Main floor:

Second floor:

Living space: 660 sq ft

Main floor:

Living Room: 191 sq ft (ca. 13’3’’ x 12’4’’)
Bedroom: 94 sq ft (ca. 8’11’’ x 9’6’’)
Bathroom: 35 sq ft (ca. 5’5’’ x 6’6’’)
Kitchen: 79 sq ft (ca. 7’6’’ x10’6’’)
Eating Area: 41 sq ft (ca. 7’6’’ x 5’6’’)
Entrance: 26 sq ft (ca. 3’9’’ x 5’6’’)

Second Floor: (all measures are taken at floor level)

Office: 194 sq ft (ca. 9’9’’ x 21’5’’)

Other space:

Main floor:

Pantry: 17 sq ft (ca. 3’9’’ x 4’6’’)
Greenhouse: 107 sq ft (ca. 13’7’’ x 7’11’’)
Deck: 148 sq ft (ca. 13’5’’ x 11’)

Second Floor: (all measures are taken at floor level)

Storage: 105 sq ft (ca. 8’9’’ x 13’)
Utility: 24 sq ft ( ca. 4’3’’ x 5’7’’)

In Part 3 I will talk about heating, air exchange and appliances.

Designing a Tiny House (Part 1)

Designing a tiny house isn’t easy at all. You have to think two or three times about every square inch and how you can get the best usage out of it. But at first I have to think about my goals I want to accomplish for the tiny house.

For me, the most important goal would be a highly energy efficient house. There are some important rules you have to follow:

1.) Reduce the windows on the north side of the building to the lowest level possible. Because there will be the highest energy loss through the windows.

2.) Try to get the most and biggest windows on the south side, the gain of passive solar heat in the winter time will be huge, because of the low standing sun in this time period.

3.) Avoid as many power outlets and light switches as possible in the exterior walls, because each one of them will be a possible risk for a leakage and therefore a possibility for energy loss.

4.) Try to get the floor plan as square as possible; each corner you add to the house will add another risk of a leakage to the shell of the house. That’s the most difficult part for me, because I love Victorian houses.

5.) Another important point in my eyes is dividing the house into different climate zones, which I made in different colors in the plan below.

Zone one would be the entrance. Try to place a mudroom between your front door and your living area to avoid getting all the cold air into your living room which has to be heated up again and again each time you open the door. You can see on the plan below that the interior walls surrounding the mudroom are all insulated, so you can keep the temperature on a lower level than in the living area.

The second zone would be the bathroom. When you are taking a shower or a bath or getting ready in the morning you like the room warmer than the rest of the house. To keep the bathroom warmer and not heat up the rest of the house too, all of the bathroom walls should be insulated; as you can see in the following plan.

The last zone is the bedroom. To have a good and restorative sleep, the bedroom should be cooler than the rest of the home. Here again, all the walls around the bedroom are insulated, so you can even sleep with an open window without cooling down the rest of the house.

6.) And last the insulation of the shell of the house. A highly efficient house doesn’t need only exterior walls with a high R-value, also the roof and the main floor (because I don’t want to add a basement) need very strong insulation. There are many different options available to insulate the house. Most of them don’t impress me at all. All the loose insulations have one common problem. They try to settle down and a gap will appear at the top part over time; same with batt insulation if it isn’t installed right.
My choice would be spray foam insulation; it has so many advantages against all the other kinds of insulation on the market. It will fill the smallest gap and after drying out will not settle and guarantees a tight shell with a high R-value.

Part 2 will follow in a few days. Then I will talk about the floor plan design.

Dear Sanctimonious Pope Benedikt XVI,

After all this trouble we have here with one of your higher ground personnel, the former bishop of Antigonish, Raymond Lahey, I would say it’s time for a short trip to Nova Scotia to tell us how sorry you are for all this trouble he caused here.

But I would like to ask you one important question for me. When did the Roman Catholic Church start going in the wrong direction?

I started Google on my MacBook to find out more about the history of your nearly two millennia old guys club. And I have to tell you I am really shocked about the things I found out about it.

In the beginnings of your so called church, it was really a church back then, the people died for there beliefs. It was a revolutionary underground organization with true believers. But as soon as the church was public and recognized as a religion, it started to get greedy and messy.

The first huge sign of the greed taking over the church was the time of the crusades. Your predecessor, Pope Urban II, could get only enough willing peers to fight for him after he told them they would get lots of gold and land. Where was there the honest idea to free the holy land? The only interest of the avaricious knights was the wealth they could get out of it, and the guarantee of a place in heaven. Also they normally had to go to hell because of the way they lived their lives. There was also one of the first signs of the never ending trouble with children. Why had so many innocent children to die from the bloody hands of the crusaders?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusade

Then a few hundreds of years later your church started to show its real, sadistic and satanic face. You guys started to torture people, to convert them to the only true religion, so you said and you say it till today. You called this evil practices inquisition. I would call it satanic rituals. Because at the end of the day, the only thing you wanted from the people you tortured was the money and the land they owned. Maybe some of the common inquisitors believed it was only for the best interest of the people they tortured to death, but your elite saw only the money they would get out of all these innocent people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisition

The really greedy period of your church started with the selling of indulgences. That must have been a real cash cow for you guys. You told your believers that they can do any kind of bad things, like killing your rival, anything they have to do is buying one of your papers and the sin they did would be assigned. You even could buy a whole bunch of them in advance. This shows only one time more how creative you are when it comes to making money.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgences

What’s behind the story about Pope Pius VI and his daughter? Doesn’t history tell us that they were a couple? That’s all I want to say about this. I am feeling sick enough already.

In my opinion, it started back around 306 AD. At this time celibacy became law in your church at the Synod of Elvira and got even stronger when Pope Benedikt VIII (Isn’t it funny that he has your name?) and the emperor Heinrich II made it law that a priest isn’t allowed to be married anymore; this had happened at the Synod of Pavia in 1022 AD. Since then, it was a secure place for guys interested in young children because the Roman Catholic Church is trying to keep everything under a blanket of silence. But that isn’t working well every time. From time to time a new story about a priest having sex with a minor finds its way into the news. I don’t know, but I am not surprised that 99.99% of the time it is a catholic priest who has destroyed a lot of young people’s lives.

Before you open your mouth the next time to tell your believers how they have to live their lives close it right away and shut up and start cleaning up your own house first. Maybe there will be no one left to keep the business running, but who cares as long as our children are safe.

I have to stop now, because after all this reading about your unholy association I’m feeling very sick.

Sincerely

Tiny Voice from Nova Scotia

My Road Trip 2006

After I spent a few months down in Athens, TN at Tennessee Log Homes to learn everything about Log Homes and how to assemble them, the time has arrived to drive back to Nova Scotia.

But first I have to go some weeks back in time to start the story I want to tell you.

A few weeks after I arrived in Athens, TN my Ford Windstar, which I bought in Nova Scotia, broke down on me.

From one day to another, it started to need a lot of oil. The repair shop we brought the car to get a closer look at the problem told me I would need a new engine. There was no used engine available, because this special motor was only used for one year in the Windstar model, I would have to buy a new one for 3.800$ (US), for a car I spent only 3.000$ (CAN) when I bought it in 2005. I made the decision not to spend all this money and look instead for a cheap car which would bring me back to Nova Scotia.

Two weeks into the search, we found a 1991 Chevrolet Lumina. Till today I am not sure if it was a car or a kind of wreck. But get a look at the pics and make a decision on your own.

The next problem I had to go through was getting a number plate for Lulu, that’s the name I gave her, because she was a very obstinate car. As a non-American citizen, it is impossible to get a car registered in the US because you could have some kind of dark thoughts against the US of A in your mind. But some weeks and many phone calls later, I got a temporary paper tag for the car to drive back to Nova Scotia.

Now it was time to say “good bye“ to all my friends at Tennessee Log Homes. By the way, I think not one of them believed I would make it out of the state of Tennessee with Lulu.
It took me a whole day to get all of my belongings into Lulu. Remember, I started my adventure with a Ford Windstar. Finally everything was packed; the only free space inside the car was the driver’s seat and a little peephole for the back view mirror.

Now the time came to start my 2808 kilometer trip back to Canada. My goal for the first day was to make it to Maryland. But Lulu didn’t have the same goal for the first day of our journey. Somewhere in Virginia I heard a loud noise, it sounded like a shot, and suddenly the whole car was shaking. I stopped and saw the front left tire had a blow out, and luckily, I was standing between an exit ramp and a drive-up ramp. I had no idea what to do; but 30 minutes later a state trooper stopped. At first I was scared after all the stuff I saw on TV about police in the USA. But he was a nice guy, even smaller than I am, so I had to bend down to see his face, under his huge trooper hat, to explain to him what had happened. After securing the scene, he called a tow truck; which brought me to a motel for the night. The next morning I got two lovely new black tires for Lulu so I could go on the ride again. Everything went well for the rest of Virginia, Maryland and a huge part of Pennsylvania.

But 40 miles before I would arrive the outskirts of New York, the traffic stopped and in a sudden I had a kind of a burned rubber smell in the car. First I thought someone around me had used his brakes too strongly, but then I heard this peep noise and I saw a red light going on. The rubber smell came from Lulu; she was overheating. This time I was a lucky guy, a truck scale was just ahead of me. But it was closed. So I had to wait for a few hours till a state trooper found me there, stranded. Silly as I was, I thought I would use the warning lights, but I totally forgot that the battery will break down when I use something electrical while the engine wasn’t running. The state troopers called a tow truck which brought lots of water for Lulu. After she was filled up, I tried to start her, but I knew she wouldn’t start, I explained to the trooper that I had to use the flashing light for a long time so the battery went empty. The guy from the tow truck used the jumper cables and Lulu started right away. The trooper told me that I had to go to the next truck stop to get her fixed and told me the way. And damn, he followed me till I was there. So I went in bought some cigarettes and waited until he left to go and get on the road again. I wanted to have New York behind me before the morning rush hours started. I had to save each dollar I had with me since I didn’t know what else would happen on my way. After I passed New York, I stopped at a rest stop in Connecticut and spent the night in the car.

The next morning, it was a beautiful dawn; I filled Lulu up with gas and water and went on with my trip. I left Connecticut behind me, also Massachusetts and New Hampshire, but I had to stop at each rest stop to get new water for Lulu. Didn’t know a car could be that thirsty. At one fill-up stop in Maine, I recognized that one of my back tires was loosing air. So before I would need another tow truck, I left the interstate at the next exit to get new tires for the back.
At the tire place the mechanic told me there was nothing left on my back brakes. “Shit” was all what came in my mind. I didn’t want to waste the money for the repair of the brakes. The car wasn’t worth this at all, and I didn’t want to drive Lulu any longer than I had to, back to Bridgewater. She never, ever would pass the road test. From then on, I kept a very long distance from the cars in front of me.

At 8 pm that day I arrived at the Canadian border in Houlton. What a salvation to be so close to Canada. The guy at the border was very nice, but I think he thought I’m crazy, when he saw Lulu and all the stuff inside. After a short explanation and answering his questions he let me pass the border and go on with my trip to Nova Scotia. After 10 minutes in Canada it started to rain and it went really bad. The windshield wiper worked as good as the rest of Lulu, so when I arrived in Moncton I was so tired that I stopped at the nearest motel I found and spent the rest of the night there.
After a I had a nice breakfast and filled up all my canisters with more water for Lulu, I went on the road for the last few 100 kilometers. It was still raining, but not as bad as it was in the night before.

Next stop Halifax, Nova Scotia, for gas and more water. On the last 100 kilometers or so, I had to stop at each lake on the road to get more water; the water situation with Lulu went really bad. But I made it in 4 hours from Halifax to Bridgewater.

Back in Bridgewater, in my apartment, I pumped up my air mattress and went to sleep for the next day and a half.

You can call me crazy, stubborn or whatever you want, but I only wanted to be happily back in Canada, but also very sad to leave all my friends at Tennessee Log Homes.

Brenda’s Little Paradise.

A few years back, Brenda, her husband Rob and son Luke moved to Marvin’s Island, they bought a nice house in the center of the island. At that time, it wasn’t something special; it was a house with a back yard and some chickens on it.

Today it’s a total different story, the house is still structurally the same, but the property around has undergone a major overhaul. Where once chicken pawed for worms there is today a beautiful vegetable and flower garden.


You only can imagine how many hours of sweat and blisters went into this work of art and beauty.

I can tell you first hand that the vegetables growing there are very tasty and have a perfect shape and coloring. Many of them I even didn’t know existed, like Swiss chard, kale and pattypan squash.

Each time when I visit her garden, I have to go in every corner to discover which of her flowers are in blossom right now. There are irises, lilies, turtle heads, daisies, poppies, different kind of grasses and many, many more. I can’t even remember their names.

The colors are going from a clean white, all kinds of yellows and reds to a huge diversity of blues and purples all arranged to make you feel relaxed and satisfied only looking at them.

My favorite place is the deck on the backside of the house. It gives you the possibility to overlook the whole back yard while you are enjoying a cold beer, if there is one in the fridge. Right Brenda, ?

You can see birds taking a bath. The bird bath is the centerpiece of the vegetable garden, which you enter through a wooden rose bower, handmade by Rob.

Brenda really has a big heart for all her feathered little friends. You not only find a huge variety of different bird feeders and plants. She also provides a bird bath for the winter time, so they find a drink or a bath when everything else is covered in ice and snow.

Another place I love in her garden is her summer house. But I call it “the garden villa”. Rob built it last summer on the site where the last owner had his henhouse. The most parts are reused/recycled from old buildings from our area.. You can see the knowledge and love Rob put into this project. (Rob, I need one too. The plans are drawn. When did you have time?) Just last Saturday, after a long day at work, I was happy to be sitting in there after Brenda and I got surprised by a little rain squall while having a garden tour.

Acadian Forest, a myth on Marvin’s Island!

Walking through the center of our beloved island makes me very sad. Seeing all the old trees dying at the same time are a very disturbing experience, it looks like a whole generation of trees will be gone in a few years time.


The next generation of trees, in many areas of the island, are mostly fast growing spruce and fir trees stealing all the nutrients and light from the slow growing pine and deciduous trees they need for a healthy life.

If we want to have an “Acadian” forest with a rich variety on different kind of trees we can’t put our hands in the pockets of our pants, stand by and watch what is happening over time.
Our biggest problem is the very thin layer of nutrition rich topsoil on Marvin’s Island, it goes from a few inches to maybe one or two feet of thickness; following that are only sand and rocks. For this kind of circumstance there are too many trees on one square meter of land. As soon as deer and rabbits are no longer a hazard for the trees, it’s time to take care of the over growth and most of them need to be cut down so each tree gets the nutrients it needs to become a strong tree. It also gives a new generation of trees the possibility to start growing, and surviving. Right now they only will survive for a few years and then die off, because they don’t get any light. It will take much more time for the forest to renew itself because we mostly have only 2 generations of growth in the center of the island. All the trees cut down need to get chipped and the chips need to be brought back to the center of the island.

Why chip the trees we cut down? Because the process of rotting will be much faster, the nutrients will be back in the soil much earlier. If you only spread the branches on the ground it will take much longer for the bark to start rotting and for the nutrients to go back and start a new circle of life.

You are welcome to give a comment to my thoughts.

Marvin’s Island goes Pizza Hut?

Is well known world traveler and gourmet David K. changing to the dark side of the food experience?

Over the past few weeks a new building is emerging on Marvin’s Island, the first thought was, it will be a garage with an apartment on top, but as the time passed by, the shape of the building went more and more in the direction of a Pizza Hut. Now that the framing of the roof is nearly completed I’m sure I will live next to a fast-food chain. I don’t know now if I’m happy with that.

My last experience with Pizza Hut wasn’t the best one. Down in Athens Tennessee, I went one night to one of their restaurant and wasn’t impressed at all.

The guestroom was so messed up, also not one of the tables was occupied, I had to wait for at least 15 minutes till one of the employees found the time to clean up the tables of the trash the last guests left behind. This went on all the time a new and hungry customer arrived, but he wasn’t worried about all the garbage, so it must be a normal procedure at a Pizza Hut restaurant.

The thoughts inside my worried head were spinning around. Would the kitchen be clean at least and will I survive my first and last Pizza Hut experience? How about using the washroom, would it be safe? Or would it be better for my health to use the area filled with bushes behind the building? But as you can see, I survived and used the washroom when I was back at my hotel.

I know the owner of the new Pizza Hut is a highly fastidious person, so my hope is, that it will be a very well run and clean restaurant.

The future will show just how happy I am with that. And maybe I will try a pizza from Pizza Hut for a second time in my life.