February 18, 2008

02-16-08

Today was different, quite fun actually. The weather has been fairly quiet the last few days, sunny, calm, a little wind now and again, warm days (in the 40s & 50s), cool nights (30s-40s) but for the most part, uneventful. The humidity is generally pretty low, in the 20-30% range, higher at night, lower in the day.

Last night the humidity got up to 91%! I looked out the window and could see low clouds coming across the mountain tops, obscuring them. Today, it snowed, not much accumulation though, a couple of times it looked like we were in a snow globe and someone shook it up. :) I really enjoyed the snow falling and blowing, the snow fell for a short time, and as soon as the sun peeked out from the clouds, the snow that had accumulated, immediately began to melt. A couple of times, during the snow fall, there was so much snow falling and blowing, I couldn’t see the mountains around me, it was so pretty to see. Sorry I didn’t get any pix, but my cell phone takes terrible pix and with all the snow blowing, all it would have shown was white to light gray on white/light gray…

The snow is gone, but the wind stayed, it’s not that cold outside, but with the wind blowing and gusting, the heat that is generated by the wood stove is pulled out almost faster than we can make it. It also messed up movie night, it’s nearly impossible to hear the little computer speakers on the laptop, that is something that I overlooked before I left Best Buy, I wished I had known, I would have gotten a small set of powered speakers, but live and learn.

Power

We have been doing very well with the power, we have learned how much we can use and still have power left over, ie we don’t run out of battery power any more! We have a total of 4 deep cycle batteries, 2 are hooked up to one set of solar panels and 2 are hooked up to another set of solar panels, we use one set for the water pump on the sink and one light, the other set is for the rest of the lights, computer, fan (rarely used), cell phone and occasionally a small electric blanket. Oh, I almost forgot, we are now running a small cube refrigerator, right now we are leaving it outside, covered with a piece of plastic to keep it dry (just in case). It is in the shade (it’s on the north side of the cabin, so it never gets any sun), and for the most part, the outside temp stays cool to cold so the fridge doesn’t run very much, even so, I unplug it at night, and sometimes even leave it unplugged during the day, just depends …