6FeetUnderTheStars

“Indian staff from the Indian Space Research Organisation celebrate after the Mars Orbiter Spacecraft entered Mars’s orbit.

On November 5, 2013, a rocket launched toward Mars. It was India’s first interplanetary mission, Mangalyaan, and a terrific gamble. Only 40 percent of missions sent to Mars by major space organizations—NASA, Russia’s, Japan’s, or China’s—had ever been a success. No space organization had succeeded on its first attempt. What’s more, India’s space organization, ISRO, had very little funding: while NASA’s Mars probe, Maven, cost $651 million, the budget for this mission was $74 million. 

This was not the only success of the mission. An image of the scientists celebrating in the mission control room went viral. Girls in India and beyond gained new heroes: the kind that wear sarees and tie flowers in their hair, and send rockets into space.”

FUCK YES. THIS IS THE TYPE OF REPRESENTATION I’VE BEEN HERE FOR!!

1) Desks to be six feet apart: there are 30+ kids in each class - how big do you thik these classrooms are? There’s no way. So we either have to decrease the class size (which we can’t do because then we’d need to hire teachers and they won’t pay for that) or just leave the desks where they are.

2) High-touch surfaces sanitized regularly: again. 30+ people per class. is there a full time teachers aid or nurse who’s going to be properly sanitizing the door, the chalkboard/whiteboard, the pencil sharpener, the toys, the bookshelves, the bathroom doors, the sinks, the water fountains? No, because they’d have to pay them. So now we have students being put in charge of this and - they’re kids. They’ll forget, get busy, not bother. Some of them are too little to be trusted with cleansers and sanitizers, so now it’s on the teacher to sanitize everything constantly all day in an unending cycle which means when the heck are they going to find the time to teach? It’s going to fall by the wayside and get done sporadically.

3) wearing masks: great. Some people don’t have masks because they can’t find them/afford them. You’re supposed to replace the mask every time you take it off, which means kids need multiple masks per day. This doesn’t cover the problem of people who will find the masks uncomfortable and fuss with them, the fact that little kids will get messy, touch their mask, take their masks off. Is the school supplying masks to teachers and students? No, because then they’d have to pay for it. And this doesn’t cover the fact that there are hard of hearing people who use lip reading, etc.

4) Go back to remote learning if there’s another flare up: bitch the first one hasn’t even stopped yet and you assholes want to open up the schools again? Are you prepared to give every student in your school a computer and reliable internet? No? Then your remote learning is BULLSHIT and you’re leaving poor kids behind. 

And what about the halls between classes? During lunch? Recess? Sure you can make adjustments, but are you letting the kids in the front door one at a time? How are the buses working? Are you adding more buses so the kids aren’t sitting on top of each other? Are you hiring extra nurses so they can do temperature checks? Are you supplying copious amounts of hand sanitizer so each kid can have it to use in between hand washings? No? You cutting budgets so there will be even less health and safety measures than there was to begin with?

what a fucking shock.

So even though it rarely kills kids, there’s nothing stopping kids from from bringing it home and killing their older or more vulnerable family members.

Crafts

quilting

embroidery

cross-stitch

knitting

crochet

sewing

Cooking and Baking

homemade bread

homemade butter

homemade extracts

dandelion jelly

Canning

26 canning recipes

canning jars 101

60 canning recipes

Gardening

edible trees to plant

what to plant to save the bees

cure and braid garlic

save seeds for next year

braid onions for long term storage

build a greenhouse

Animals

homemade chicken feed

raising mealworms for chickens

why to raise nigerian dwarf goats

Outdoors

starting a fire with sticks

trail signs

knotting

find true north without a compass

Medicine

homemade neosporin

Most people, when first approaching greenhouses, just build a generic shed that has clear walls and a roof. That’s what you see in the blog post above, while the author kept mentioning how incredibly hot it is. The author is located in central Washington state, USA.

Greenhouse with no ventilation/cooling or heating or electricity or gas, in a hot climate summer climate, cool winter. While conventionally attractive, it is not particularly functional, and is only useful for a relatively short period of the year.

How best to design a greenhouse can depend on factors like climate and latitude. 

If your greenhouse is located someplace very cold, you’re looking at issues with heating it, or else not using it at all during that time. There’s multiple ways to heat greenhouses, traditionally methane or propane gas, although in emergencies, and if it is wired for electricity, electrical heat may be used. Some people have even used wood furnaces (this is less than ideal) For any place with long winters this quickly becomes very expensive. Thermal mass is the clever trick to solve most, if not all, (depending on climate) heating issues in winter - no fossil fuels or deforestation required.

If your greenhouse is located someplace very hot, you’re looking at issues with cooling it, or else not using it all during that time. There’s multiple ways to cool greenhouses - fans/vents and shade cloth being the most common. Thermal mass can also help with this issue too.  

My favorite website on greenhouses (which longtime readers may recognize) is Penn and Cord. Heating and cooling greenhouses so you can use them for more than 6 weeks a year can be very expensive and very energy intensive - unless you start looking at passive solar greenhouse designs, such as those by Penn and Cord. You do sacrifice some space in the back greenhouse for the thermal mass aka giant barrels of water.

Can be built out of used or scrap material.

Above, barrels are on the left, hidden behind the plants. Below, this is what the wall of barrels looks like before plant beds are installed.

These 55 gallon drums filled with water and painted black, all along the north wall, are the “battery” that keeps these greenhouses usable year round. The roof angles are designed so that these receive direct sunlight (hence why they are painted black) in the winter, the sun heats the water, and they help keep the greenhouse warm all winter long. They’re working at high elevations in Colorado which means 1) wild temperature fluctuations 2) it’s pretty cold in winter there, down to -30F/-34C. The barrels also modulate the hot temperatures in summer. There are variations around this idea, but hopefully the concept makes sense. Sometimes people will create the northern wall out of concrete, and then put the barrels or bottles of water in front of it, for a similar “battery” or modulating effect. The interiors are painted bright white, to reflect as much light as possible to the plants.