The Nerd Lifestyle

I have taken the playhouse off the grid.  This weekend I installed a series of 15W PV Panels.  The panels feed 60W into a 7amp charge controller which at this time charges a 55AH deep cycle battery which allows a 110v 200watt inverter to pull power from it.

60W from the sun feeding a 55AH battery

Currently I am using this to power on the coop lights at night to lure the chickens into the coop.  I’ll also wire up a switch in the playhouse for the kids to turn on/off the lights, a fan to exhaust some of the heat in the playhouse and a series of garden lights.

If you are like me you ran to your computer and had someone google “How to unstick a martini shaker”.  Atleast I did.  The information was underwhelming.  With most ending in “OMG Get a Boston style you noob”.  that is all good but I already poured some tasty gin into this and it is subject to melting ice.

I ended up salvaging it by running some warm water over the top.  Leave a comment with your tips for getting these things unstuck!

I was visiting with a neighbor last night and we got on the topic of cycling. Actually we talked about the fact that the STP (Seattle to Portland) ride was this weekend. I talked about my one experience riding the STP. So he told me the bridge pedal was coming up and we should do it. All he had to say was that I could ride my bike across the marquam bridge (My arch traffic nemsis).

So today I dusted off my bike, gave it a quick tune up and went for a Ride. I have until August 18th to get ready. I’ll put it this way, I may have road 210 miles for the STP, but that was 8 years ago!

I got some work to do.

This is hard for me.  This is hard for me to let go.  This is hard for me to embrace something like wordpress with all its widgets and web 2.0 goodness.  This is hard for me to embrace something that I didn’t code myself.