Tuesday, July 19, 2011

this is gonna suck...

Slept in till 8:30 this morning - 10 hours of sleep.  By the time I was ready to get moving, my girls had settled down in the work zone shade. (this photo from a couple of days ago...but it was the same deal today)  Just didn't have the heart to roust my 3 favorite longhorns out of the way.  Had the rest of the morning to come up with a plan. 

Can't finish hole 4 yet - need to seal the rest of the west end - will have to vent the high hot air in the greenhouse - some visitors brought me some louvered vents over a year ago....it suddenly added up.  Nice cloud cover during the afternoon and I rigged up a large vent to work around for the rest of the west side.  This will help suck the hot air out.  It's been so long, I forgot who brought me the vents...but THANKS!  Send a comment and take credit.  95,104,71,0,B

10 comments:

Unknown said...

John is your pond holding any water

SHARON said...

Just found your blog this past weekend. Have spent the past two days catching up. Love the adventure you're on. Give Benita a pat on the head for me.

Chris said...

I love it when a plan comes together.

Rita B. said...

those gals know they have you wrapped around their little horns....lucky you.

John Wells said...

found the blog entry from over 2 years ago when the louvered vents arrived! June 27, 2009

Mr. Casey said...

We all get by with a little help from our friends! Love it!

Sammy P said...

Hello from San Diego!

Anonymous said...

posted by jack Hennessy in 2006, see if things have changed ?
-----------------------------------
Driving in West texas and Terlingua

When we first came to this area we asked someone how to get to a certain place. The reply was, "go to the middle of nowhere and take a right, then go even more to the middle of nowhere - you’ll be within a few miles from there".

That was a pretty fair statement at the time. Now, things are closing in a bit. It doesn’t feel so isolated and the distances seem more manageable. That’s one thing about West Texas - the distances. It’s 1.25 hours to get to the nearest hospital (if you can call it that), 3.5 hours to the nearest commercial airport (5 hours to the next nearest), 3.25 hours to reasonable groceries and a real hospital, 7-8 hours to a real city, and only 30 minutes to a bank branch and a post office. All of this is on good straight roads with speed limits of 70-75 miles per hour.

Every so often I’ll drive the 3-3.5 hours to go shopping, spend maybe 3 hours hitting the butcher shop, grocery store, liquor store, pet shop, home center and wholesale grocery and drive back the same day. You need to be very organized to do that run.

Our neighbor who is building a house has to make the trip about once a week and it doesn’t seem to phase him. Texans are used to distance and they usually talk in terms of hours instead of miles, it’s easier because some places aren’t far but they are hard to get to. When we came down to look for a place to buy the realtor put on 250 miles one day just showing us around - pretty usual for her but we were exhausted. Some days that 250 miles yields no sale.

A drive across Texas from El Paso in the northwest to Brownsville in the southeast is a hard two day trip and I’m not talking backroads but interstate highways most of the way. Personally, I’d do it in three days just to get in some quality scenery time.

Texas backroads are a treat. You can drive for miles without seeing a soul on the road. You can pass through very small towns without seeing anyone on the street. Yet you can stop at a farm stall out in absolute nowhere and they’ll have sold out the melons for the day.

It’s interesting. In all this open, deserted country, people are far more observant of speed laws than around cities. You can be driving down a stretch of road that is absolutely straight for 15 miles and no one is doing more than 3-5 miles over the limit and most are right on the limit. Texans don’t seem to mind driving.

So, being so far from anywhere, what do you do in an emergency? Well, you mostly hope that there isn’t one. If there is, the ambulance is 30 miles away or more but usually a Sheriff’s Deputy is only 10-15 miles down or up the road. And, they’re all good at what they do.

They loaded me up in the ambulance one day and trucked me up to our non-hospital. We had to go through a Border Patrol checkpoint on the way and some windy mountainous country. From call-in to delivery was about two hours including a pretty thorough exam at our house prior to leaving. Of course, if I’d been very bad off they’d have transferred me to the real hospital another two hours away. If you have a really serious problem your chances are poor.

If you choose to live out in the boondocks you need a couple of things: good health and a real appreciation for the inside of a motor vehicle, because here you’re "going nowhere in a hurry, fast".
posted by Jack Hennessy 2006

Michael said...

Love your blog, dude. Your ventilation plan for the green house requires more thought. Look up passive cooling on the internet and you can get some ideas.

John Wells said...

thanks PhD...what you see is what I've done....what I'm thinking about doing you won't see until it's been done.