Last week I waged full war on the flies. I started with a fly strip.
Me and my flyswatter had fun too. This was all in one night.
The following morning I found the source of the flies. I am not sure how they were getting inside, since it isn't like I was seeing clouds of them coming in every time I opened the door. Perhaps my screens suck a lot more than I thought. Needless to say, I made a dump run immediately to get rid of the bag in there causing this (that had been in there since July sometime...). The can also got a Pine Sol bath, which funny enough the maggots didn't seem to enjoy. Shame. That all said, perhaps I should put a two week maximum on trash bags sitting in the can outside, at least in the summer.
I also finally found the keys to my e-bike. You need the key to remove the battery (so it doesn't randomly get stolen), but the charger I have is not rated for outdoors, so I have to remove the battery to charge it. meaning it hasn't been charged since last year.
When I ordered the new carport, I also ordered a portable disc golf thingy. It is just a cheap one, but still gives me something I can put outside and use to practice. See if I can improve the accuracy of newt. I might get better.
Friday I went up and visited Matt. He was bikepacking up into Vermont. He did 90 miles the first day.
The reason he went so far the first day was to avoid all the storms on Saturday. We got a lot of much needed rain on Saturday, so I stayed inside most of the day. They started earlier than anticipated, so I didn't get the mowing done that I wanted to. I wanted to start the final mow for the year, since at the moment it is looking like I will be doing it with the pushmower in the rough areas. The first couple boxes for the new carport came in as well, so I got those put away.
After that, I watched some movies, and started working on a floorplan for a truck conversion. I did a rough sketch of one a while ago, this is a more detailed one that took into account the sizes of utilities and stuff. As part of that, I started to look at electrification of it. I am intending to carry a generator anyways for electric backup, so this would remove the need to also carry two propane tanks. Most of them were simple; finding a small tanked electric water heater instead of a propane tankless, space heaters can replace the furnace (which itself was the backup for the heat pump). That only left the stove. I despise cooking on conventional electric ranges, but induction cooktops supposedly offer the instant control and instant on/off like gas stoves. The only problem is that higher power ones are seemingly hard to find. So I ran a test Saturday evening. Note that the numbers I mention in this video are wrong; the kettle is only 1500W, and the stove is 14,200 BTU which I looked up after I took it.
The results were eye opening. What I read online is that induction cooktops were vastly more efficient, but I didn't expect this. Efficiency isn't a big deal with gas since propane doesn't cost per BTU really, but I didn't expect the efficiency to come in at 23.6% Despite the massive BTU advantage, it still took my gas stove longer to boil water. There are still downsides to induction; they still do the modulation that regular electric does at the minimum setting, so you have to be careful of burning when simmering, the 1800W units share that power amongst all burners, so it isn't every burner has that power (unless I installed two independent units instead of a single dual burner unit), and it means I will have to buy all new cookware since I am pretty sure none of my pots and pans will work with induction (it has to be magnetic). But this is a manageable hurdle; I was worried I would be going back to how things were in the tiny home with the cheapo crappy stove I had that took a half hour to boil water for spaghetti which is why I bought the kettle in the first place.
Sunday was also rainy to start, though it stopped midday. I did some chores. I decided to finally try to clean the shower. I tried using a toilet bowl cleaner in the shower bin that was effective at removing rust stains. It worked so good that I am worried if it dissolved the shower, but everything looks and feels fine. It just uses a lot. You can see where the gel was and where I didn't spread it very effectively.
I also put the final touches on the floorplan after researching water tanks to make sure I could fit them under the bed. It means building my own futon essentially, but I think this is workable.
I noted last weekend that there were a few trees that had started to change. This weekend there were a ton more. My lot is well into changing at this point.
I was feeling a little cooped up, so I decided to go out in the afternoon. I am not sure what was going on, but Otter Brook was surprisingly busy, so I went to the rail trail. Both of those were closed for debris and trees down. The storms on Saturday were vicious. So I went to the other end of Otter Brook.
That waaay down there is the sad abandoned beach from my pictures the other day.
I got to see a pretty sunset on the drive home.
The weather for this coming weekend is still looking decent so I am planning my trip to Acadia this weekend. I have a couple of candidates for campgrounds lined up, so hopefully they still have availability.
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