December 3rd, 4th, and 5th

It’s amazing how comfortable you can be off grid with a little preparation. The wind howled, the thermometer dropped down toward the single digits, and yet Chris Karma and I sat warm as clams in a stewpot inside of the propane heated ranch house. Actually, it got so warm that at one point we had to turn the thermostat down. I’m not certain how well the central heating will perform if it is run off of the battery bank for months at a time, but at least for brief periods of time it performs extremely well. I’m hoping that with the additional 12,000 amp hours of battery pour I’m going to add in the next few months will go a long way toward making winter long central heating a reality, though.

Chris and I basically spent three days lugging 178-pound deep cycle batteries around. We lifted them with wenches, we hauled them on the back of the new quad, and we loaded them into the beds of pickup trucks. When all was said and done we had moved literally a pallet of the damn things from the Dog Ranch to Midian, with one bank of six at the top and the remainder still at the bottom. Until recently I was pretty certain that most of them were junk and that we were doing all this work simply to salvage a half dozen of the best from the rest, but a quick conversation with my former neighbor Kevin Brittner and a trip to the Fiamm website has convinced me that all of them are salvageable with proper charging. I’m extremely optimistic that I will be able to power both the upper and lower portions of the property using them until about 2010.

We also emptied out my workshop in preparation for receiving a massive load of books from the Consolidated warehouse in Berkeley; a move I hope is temporary, as I wish to hold Hero Game’s books entirely in my warehouse. Still, it’s probably going to require a purchase of industrial shelving and a shipping container before the entire set up is ready for Tina to conduct day-to-day business from the Ranch.

There’s an awful of work to do before Midian can even begin to reach the state I need it to be in, but with the help of my wife and my friends we are slowly moving it in that direction. God bless you and merry Christmas!