Foghorns Blare

It will be very difficult to see the huge working barge with crane in the distance of this photo. A heavy fog (very common in coastal Maine) has rolled in this morning, it's a cool, misting rain kind of day. This barge was working round the cove for the last week or so, repairing a floating dock. It's a big rusty leviathan, and it looks much better for the fog. It is equipped with a fantastic foghorn, with a sound vaguely like a cross between guitar harmonics and a tuba. It might sound strange, but it's a pleasant sound and this is the best description I can come up with for it!

We are still waiting for our closing, which has been rescheduled for July 2nd, and if we can close up and get down to eagerly awaited business, we will feel SO excited! While the site work is being done (well, technically before), we're going to get right into chainsawing trees doomed by location (there aren't that many, and they'll have a good secondary life as firewood at some point), hopefully bucking them up and at least getting them on the way to seasoning. Our GC reports that we should be able to start the framing process in mid August. To say that we are eagerly anticipating this time would be a ludicrous understatement! We hope the weather is on our side as we approach the fall, without too much rain, and that we'll have the road rise to meet us on the project as a whole...

What else? We are in the midst of researching insulation possibilities, and it's been a complicated endeavor. We want to find something that insulates extremely well, and at the same time, we are trying to make a purchasing choice that is somewhat green in it's finished product and, much more difficult, in its processing. It seems to us that there is no such thing as an insulation product with a green history, start to finish. All of them require extraction, intense use of energy either in their primary production or often in both the primary manufacture and the later re-manufacturing (I'm thinking of cellulose and cotton here). We are also concerned about mold as an issue. We want to keep moisture OUT. A lot of this we can accomplish in our construction by doing it ourselves and doing it properly, but we do worry about things like burst pipes, or just the unknown possibilities that exisit, whether we like it or not...We are currently considering the following, and have reservations about all of them (that's just to let you know what a pickle we're in!) A)blown in cellulose B) Icynene (it's a foam, and plastic in origin. Reports say there is no detectable off gassing of this product in 30 days, but it's plastic (read: petroleum) origins are disturbing to us). Also under consideration, and our favorite so far is a product called AirKrete, which is a cementitious foam, derived from air water and cement. It's highly insulative and has pretty much no negative off gassing to deal with. In fact, none. It's an inert compound. The processing drawback is the highly energy intensive cement manufacturing origins, but since we are having a cement basement poured...ugh. It's hard to decide and it's hard to build a perfectly green home. In fact, it's probably impossible in any real sense. But it's a good thing to work toward! The other possibility for insulation would be wool batting. We still have a lot of research to do.

The last few days have been utterly glorious! Temps in the 70's with clear blue skies, and the air often smells heavily of the lupines which are currently in bloom all over the place. Fireflies have returned and their phosphorescent love trails are lighting up the evenings. I haven't seen these marvelous little critters since I was a girl in Maryland, and Shawn only remembers them from the time he lived in West Virginia as a boy, and they were one of the things we (me especially) looked forward to seeing again by moving back east. Sounds crazy, but it's true! We can stand in the screen door for quite a while without noticing the time going by smelling the night air, watching the hypnotizing trails of the lightning bugs, and listening to nature's chorus of bullfrogs, crickets, grasshoppers, owls and other nightly creatures chorusing in the now warmer nighttime air. It's a transporting sort of sound and vision experience. I don't remember how long of a season the fireflies have, and it will be interesting to monitor.

The garden is small, but producing mighty salads with mixed greens and radish every night. Yesterday we re-sowed lettuce and added some leftover kale seeds to the mix, and got some beans planted at last. We planted the last of our bush bean seeds, as we don't have too much space and have some nice cedar poles we took with us from the Point Roberts garden. The potatoes are two feet tall and about to blossom, and the peas are loaded with blossoms, now, both the shelling peas and the snaps. Potato and rosemary pizzas are nearly on the menu again and bowls of peas are almost tasteable. The tomato starts are gaining in size and really seem to love (as do all the other veggies) the amazing compost cooked up by Jim Crist of Friendship, Maine. I think we'll cart up a couple of pick up truck loads of his magic mix when we start establishing beds in Belfast...sometime SOON!

I think that's enough for today!