The Apes of Wrath

This week we were tipped off by my sister that there were apricots that were going to waste near her house. We asked the elderly couple about them, and were told that we should take as many as we could (they hated cleaning the things up off the ground, and had had all that they could use).

It was a short drive away, so we went early Saturday morning and picked a lot of apricots (I am estimating 75 lbs). It took 3 hrs and was pretty easy work. Apricots just want to be picked. They were small but beautiful. The kids ate and ate all of the apricots that they wanted, and we still didn't even clear off a quarter of the tree.

The apricots were very sweet, and had thin skins. We decided to blend them, flash freeze them, and to make smoothies out of them for the rest of the year. The first time that we tried to process so many apricots we ended up blending it up and using it for smoothies, and it worked well, so this time we decided to do the same. We also ate a lot, dehydrated a decent amount, and have a lot left over for more consumption.

Whenever we put a bag of apricot puree in the freezer, I like to label it 'Ape', and ask the Truelets "What puts the 'Ape' in Ape-ricot?"

We have tried apricot jam a few times, however it never turns out right for us, so we decided against it this year. Mrs True adds that she hates canning stuff in the dog days of summer and hearing up the kitchen to sweltering.

We also have two sad stories this week: the first is the Sunflower Fiasco. One of our sunflowers (the biggest one) finally lost all of the yellow off of its face, and I decided that it was time to harvest it. Apparently you don't just do that, because the seeds were all empty. It looked like it was going to be an amazing harvest, but it ended up being only a learning experience. In the future, we will harvest sunflowers only as directed to by the internet (which is to say when the back of the flower is brown).

We have one sunflower that is taller than the roof of our house right now. I really am beginning to wonder where these seeds came from.

The second sad story is a tale with a moral. We were sitting at home when out Bishop knocked on the door. He was holding something to his chest, and when I came out to talk to him he turned his back so that the kids couldn't see what he was holding as he asked me (showing me a glance of it as he turned) if I wanted to take care of a baby duck.

He said that he saw it on the side of the road, and it was lost, so he took it home, but didn't know what to do about it. He thought of us since we have goats and chickens. Now, Mrs. True loves all intelligent mammals, but I only love animals that are useful in a utilitarian way. If this duck were intelligent or useful (read edible) we would happily welcome it into our home, however a baby duck does nothing for either of us.

We took the duck more because it was polite than because we wanted it, but we have already posted an ad on a local bulletin board offering it to anyone that wants it. Worst case scenario it will be gone on Tuesday because someone already offered to take it on Tuesday if we still had it then.

The moral of this story is that when you are obviously taking care of a farm in a suburban setting, people can't help but notice and will assume that you know everything about all animals.

Finally, Mrs. True has been reading Anticancer: A New Way of Life recently. She isn't reading it because we have any cancer, just that she is very interested in eating healthy. If you read this book you will learn that my last statement is not actually true, apparently everyone has cancer in them all of the time, and most of our bodies fight it off all the time as well.

The book is written by a MD (in psychiatry) that got a brain tumor and decided to learn more about cancer so that he could prevent himself from getting it again. He recommends eating less sugar, more fruits and vegetables, less processed foods, and more turmeric, ginger, green tea, and garlic.

Aside from the green tea we do pretty good at following his diet already (His listed spices are some of my favorite spices anyway, and we love veggies and fruits and avoid most processed foods). The big change that we would have to make if we were to follow his eating recommendations would be to eat more small fish instead of large fish. Apparently anchovies are great for you. Who would have known?

Motorizing a Madsen Bucket Bike

We have just finished attaching an electric motor to Mrs. True's bucket bike.

Here are a few pictures of the bike as it currently stands:

The process that we went through to get it all put together was as follows:

Mrs. True researched what type of motor she wanted. We found really good reviews for a few types of electric motor kits, so we went with the cheapest one that looked like it would do the job.

It is a mid drive kit from gng electric. Mid drive motors attach near the pedals and drive the chain, as opposed to hub drive motors, the other main affordable option, which replace a wheel with a battery-driven wheel. Mid drive motors allow different gears to have an effect while the motor is running and tend to be the more powerful option. For moving a heavily loaded cargo bike up hills, this seemed like a good idea. Also, with a front disc brakes and a bucket over the rear wheel, a hub motor would have been hard (and more expensive) to install.

The cheapest hub motor that Mrs. True found was $500 including the battery, so her goal was to get a mid drive and battery for that price. The name brand mid drives are at least $600 without the battery, but we found a cheap kit from China for $288 including shipping but not the battery.

Many people on the internet advise against the cheap Chinese kits. We will see in a year if we end up agreeing. There were certain penalties associated with it from the start, but they did not outweigh the price savings to us.

The main problem with the kit was the bottom bracket they sent. Despite the seller asking for the measurement of the bike's bottom bracket, the one they provided did not fit at all. We had to order a separate bottom bracket, and it had to be a very unusual shape to allow the motor to attach. We ended up finding one that would work at SickBikeParts.com. They have a variety of bottom brackets in odd sizes and fast shipping. This cost us another $23.

The plug the kit provided to attach the motor to your battery was very strange, so I bought new plugs from the Home Depot and wired them on. A more expensive kit may have used a more regular plug, and of course buying the battery and motor together would ensure that wiring was not a problem. It was worth the money to us to do it ourselves. We also had to buy longer bolts to hold the motor to the bike frame, but we can't really blame that on the cheap kit. The Madsen has a very large frame; the supplies they sent would have worked on any normal bike. Both of those together added another $5.

The last problem we ran into was the idler wheel in the motor. It's not in line with the path of the chain, so sometimes it derails. We have not yet resolved that issue, but we don't expect it to be an expensive fix; it will just take time.

We had to take the bike to the bike shop to get the bottom bracket removed and the new one put on, since we don't have the right wrench. Our local bike shop guys were very nice and did it for free. That was awesome. If you're near Salt Lake, check out Revolution Bicycles; we like them and will continue giving them our business.

The other major part was the battery. Mrs. True tried to argue that since we'd only paid $200 for the motor, we could afford $300 for the nice batteries. I argued that it would be easy to chain together three batteries made for power tools to get the correct specs (36V and 20 amp hours) and it would only cost $114. We went with the cheaper option, which will probably not surprised readers. Here are the batteries that we bought, as well as the charger.

Mrs. True had second thoughts on seeing the batteries, which were 3 times as big and 5 times as heavy as the expensive ones, but I was confident. And once they were attached to the bike, she agreed that the weight didn't make that much difference.

However, attaching them was an interesting problem. We engineered three different solutions before finding one that we think will work. The first try was too bulky to fit in the available space. The second looked like it worked, but pedaling became an art form to keep your shoes from hitting the box. This is our current solution:

We bought 4 L-shaped brackets and two mending plates and eight bolts and eight nuts and a slew of bungee cords, all at the Home Depot for about $20. First we formed shelves for two batteries with the mending plates and L brackets. It looks like this:

We then bolted the shelves together, straddling the bike frame behind the seat, as you can see above.

We drilled holes in the bucket and attached U-bolts as anchor points for the bungee cords and bungee corded the batteries in place. The third battery was laid on top of the other two and bungee corded to the mending plates below. The final arrangement looks like this:

The controller, a very small box, was zip tied to the frame in front of the batteries and all the wires were attached. We also had to cut off one handlebar grip to replace it with the twist controller for the motor. We still need to come up with a way to make it all waterproof, but in Utah that is less pressing.

All this took a couple of days of work, three trips to the Home Depot, and two trips to the bike shop. Most of the time was spent on the battery holder; the kit was simple to install with the exception of the bottom bracket. I enjoy this kind of project, so this was a good choice for us. We saved at least $200 over the cheapest simple install kit and got a more powerful motor.

It has worked on an unloaded test drive around the neighborhood and once we adjust the alignment of everything on the chain, we expect good results. Mrs.True plans to bike the kids to the library this week (3 miles with several hills). That will be the test. We'll report the results.

Cooling Your Home Using Box Fans

The average daily high temperature so far this summer has been 93 degrees where we live, and it has gotten as hot as 103 degrees one time, and broken 100 five times. That being said, we have an excellent central air conditioner which we have not yet turned on this summer. It's not that we're crazy or anything, it is just that we see the benefits of not using all of that electricity. Not only can we save the world, but we can also save our bank account.

Mrs. True wants me to make note of the fact that in the desert where we live, the night temperature is much lower than the daytime temperature. This is true, the night average temperature in our are has been 67 degrees - much cooler than the daytime temperature. This is also the linchpin of the entire scheme that I am going to present in this post, so it bears mentioning. If your night temperature doesn't seem significantly cooler than your daytime temperature (we're not sure how humidity affects this process), your results may vary.

If you visit Weather Underground, click "more," "historic weather," and type in your zip code you will see that it probably gets colder during the night than it does during the day. When cooling your house using box fans, you take advantage of this by opening up your windows at night and venting the warm air out of your house while pulling the colder outside air in.

Every evening we open up two or more windows on opposite sides of out house and vent the house by placing box fans in the windows. One window (the kitchen for us) has the box fan placed so that it blows air into the house, and the other window (the master bedroom) has the box fan placed so that it blows air out of the house. The rest of the house can have the windows open, and more air will exchange based on where they are in relation to the two master windows.

In the morning we just reverse the process by taking the fans out and closing the windows. It takes less than 1 minute a day to do this, so we spend less than 3 hours a year doing this. We have collected box fans from our local thrift store, for an initial investment of about $15, plus electricity costs, which we have not broken down but are certain total less than running an air conditioner.

Mrs. True notes that our house gets up to 80 during the hottest parts of the day, and it gets down to 70 during the night, so our house is still fluctuating in temperature, just not as much as the outside air. We did add extra insulation to our attic when we moved in, which probably helps and maybe makes up for the ancient windows in the bedrooms and not-well-fitting exterior doors that leak our our cool air. We also have a small one-story house; we believe the method would work in other layouts, but it might take some experimentation to find the correct windows.

And, of course, it is very important that we are comfortable at a higher temperature than many people keep their houses at. We think most people probably could be comfortable at 78 degrees, though, barring medical issues. Isn't that why Southern California is so popular? (Mrs. True adds that in past years, she has consistently turned on the air conditioning only during the time she is cleaning the house; other physical activities done in the home might also affect your perception of an acceptable temperature.)

Organized Simplicity: Step 2

This is a continuation of our series on Organized Simplicity.

After having cleaned the master bedroom, we set our eyes on the kids' bedroom, which also serves as their play room. This room is one of the rooms that is hardest to keep picked up in the house because the kids have so many toys and things that they like to get out every single day. Sometimes, when an attempt to keep the floor clean by reducing the number of toys available has failed yet again, we wonder if kids just have some psychological need to cover the floor with something, whether it be toys, clean laundry out of the drawers, torn-up bits of paper, dishes from the kitchen... whatever they can find. It's a frustrating room. We're hoping this process will do some good.

We took everything out of the room first and placed it in the carport. We did this while Mr. True was at work, so we didn't move the two pieces of furniture: the monkey bars and the bookshelf.

Mr. True and I made the monkey bars when the oldest Truelet was a toddler. I have never been confident in my upper arm strength, and I would like our kids to be better than I am. I enjoyed the ideas about the potential of babies in the book Fit Baby, Smart Baby, Your Baby and, although we don't follow the procedure exactly, I like having the monkey bars and other resources available to us. The monkey bars also provide the structure for hanging the kids' sleeping hammocks (see our hammock post here).

The kids' room consists of a 10' x 10.5' area with a 10' x 2.5' closet. The majority of this closet opens on the room and has a hung sliding door that can only cover one half of the closet at a time. Half of the closet is floor to ceiling shelves (usually open) and the other half is storage space (usually closed). A small portion of the closet space actually opens onto the hallway instead of the kids' room and is intended to be used as a coat closet. We hang a few coats there, but we have put a locking knob on it and most of it is the kids' toy library. They can ask for a toy (or a group of toys - stuffed animals and toy food, for instance) anytime that they have returned the last toy they had out. This is one of those attempts to keep their floor clean that I mentioned above. As I also mentioned, it's not terribly effective. But it does reduce the amount of stuff on the floor, so we stick with it.

The pile of stuff that we removed from the kids' bedroom made a pile about 11.5' long by 8' wide by 2' high, for a total of 184 cubic feet. This was surprisingly less than in the master bedroom, but then, I do go through this room and throw things out on a fairly regular basis. Despite these efforts, we added a decent amount of toys and clothing to the throw away pile.

Once the room was empty, we scrubbed all the crayon off of the walls (which was a bit of a Herculean effort by itself, because it is so difficult to scrub crayon off as it happens). The older two Truelets helped a lot. Though we usually use homemade cleaning products, it was worth it to break out the Magic Erasers to get the kids' walls clean. 

Next we moved all of the useful or beautiful stuff back into the room and placed it back where it belonged. There was a significant amount of stuff in the storage part of the closet that we hadn't thought about in years, but it mostly went back in (baby supplies and canning jars). We pared down our VHS collection, but we didn't get rid of all of it. (I inherited most of the Disney movies on VHS from my grandma and have no intention of paying money to get them on DVD.) In front of that, there is room for a large bookcase full of the kids' books. I like kids' books, but they always end up covering the floor (see above). So the books are in small boxes by first letter of the title (A-C, D-E, etc) and I take out one basket each week and put it where the kids can read the books, then put them back on the shelf and get out a different basket. The alphabetizing means that I can find a particular book when I'm looking for it, while alphabetizing by title means I don't have one box of Dr Seuss and one of Beatrix Potter; the books are spread out so you can find something in each box to match your mood.

The toy library was pared down to Duplos, stuffed animals, dress up clothes, toy food (the toy kitchen belongs in their room but is currently in the kitchen to redirect the youngest Truelet, who loves to "help" cook), dollhouse furniture and dolls (the dollhouse itself also belongs in their room, but they hauled it outside and it hasn't made it back in yet), and my Breyer horses (Mr. True's Legos are stored in another room until the Truelets are a little older). The shelves in the open half of their closet hold clothes in baskets (8 outfits each, plus pajamas, underwear, and church clothes), crayons and a roll of pink builder's paper (a thrift store find that has been wonderful for allowing them to do art without feeling annoyed by how much paper they go through - $5 and it's lasted a year),  and a treasure chest where they can keep a few always-available small toys (matchbox cars and My Little Pony toys at the moment). Some out-of-season clothes are stored on the top shelves. (The clothes were apparently all being washed in the pictures below).

Out in the room, they have the monkey bars with hammocks, a rocking horse, a bucket of books (rotated with the ones in storage), and someday the dollhouse and toy kitchen.

This was an impressive purge and we're happy to have less stuff. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem quite finished. In the master bedroom, walking in makes me happy and relaxed and filled with a desire to keep it so nice, which makes cleaning up easier. The kids' room just looks bare. Boring. Uninspiring. But I don't want to add stuff, because I like them having as much space as possible to play in. Besides, stuff means that we have to clean under it, and apple cores get stuck and rot, and they pee on it, and... yuck. So what do I do?

I'm still working on this question. I'm not a decorator and this is extremely difficult for me. So far I've bought some vinyl wall stickers to decorate the walls, hoping that will cheer up the room without requiring floor space. I'm also considering rearranging, possibly allowing the hammocks to hang from the monkey bars to the wall instead of along the monkey bars so that one can be left up during the day to use as a seat (our monkey bars are too short and low to allow the hammocks to fully extend, so an adult sitting in one ends up on the ground). I'm still toying with other ideas to make the room more appealing.

Writing these posts is apparently harder than cleaning the house, since it has been a few days since this all happened. Maybe we'll be quicker to report on the next room we finished: the front room.

The Top 10 Reasons to Sleep in a Hammock

Mrs. True just mentioned in a post about the fact that we sleep in a hammock. I came up with the Top 10 reasons why you should have a hammock instead of a bed awhile ago. I thought it would be good to revisit the idea here.

As a bit of a back story, we started sleeping in a hammock a little over a year ago when Mrs. True was researching the out-gassing of mattresses (in conjunction with having baby mattresses and being told to let them out-gas for a while so that the baby doesn't breathe toxic fume). Hammocks were only tangentially mentioned - they are, oddly enough, not much blogged about - but the few resources she could find always mentioned that they were excellent for your back.

Since I have had recurring neck pain for years (after I got in a bike accident), this interested her. It was also significantly cheaper (by at least an order of magnitude) and/or easier than non-outgassing mattress options, so we decided to try it out. We ordered a family-sized Brazilian cotton hammock and built a hammock stand out of 1" galvanized steel pipe from Home Depot, for a grand total of about $200. 

It took us less than a week to get used to sleeping in it, and we have never looked back. In fact, when we spend the night in a bed (on vacation or such), we are sore and unhappy. We have since bought smaller hammocks for each of the Truelets, freeing up tons of space in their shared bedroom/playroom (three kids' beds, even bunk beds, would make the room claustrophobic; three hammocks barely register), so everyone in our house sleeps in a hammock.

So, without further ado, here are the top ten reasons to choose a hammock instead of a bed:

1. When was the last time that you laundered your bed? That's gross! I heard from a reliable source (a stand up comedian) that there a 10 million dust mites in the average bed. Your bed might be super-average. The Truelets would invariably (when they were sick) come over to my bed and throw up on it. How do you clean that off? With a hammock you just put it in the washing machine.
2. Your back will thank you. I once got attacked by a car while biking to work. My neck was never the same since then... until we got a hammock. I now only have neck problems when I want them (which is to say when I sleep in a bed.)
3. You love your spouse and want to cuddle with them. A hammock enables (and even enforces) that cuddling. If you don't love your spouse (or cuddling (like that is even possible)) you can get two hammocks - one for yourself and one for your spouse. Just make sure that one of them is big enough so that if you want to cuddle sometimes then you can still cuddle.
4. Your bed is trying to kill you. What I mean to say is that hammocks do not have to be fire retardant like the government has mandated that all bed mattresses are. The out-gassing of fire retardant materials into your room from a mattress is guaranteed to kill you (unless something else does it first). Every person who has ever slept on a bed is either dead right now or is in the process of dying.
5. You can take your hammock and you can hang it up against one wall and reclaim your entire room whenever you are not sleeping in it. This allows you to have a smaller bedroom and still get a larger amount of use out of it than a normal size bedroom. Japanese people have been doing this for years by sleeping on small mats and putting them away during the day. The only problem with the Japanese method is that it is impossible that those little mats are comfortable (Unless you are Japanese, I guess). I played a game once called Sushi Go! which almost makes me Japanese but not quite Japanese enough to enjoy sleeping on a mat on the ground.
6. Hammocks allow you to sleep in a much cooler condition in the summer. They allow heat to radiate in all of the directions instead of just up so you can get cool from the bottom as well as from the top. This allows you to save money on cooling bills.
7. You can have multiple hammocks in trendy colors so that you can show off your fashion sense and style (the extra hammocks will easily fit in a closet or something. They don't take up that much room)
8. Hammocks are portable, so if you want to take your hammock with you to sleep on the road or something like that (not literally on the road, that's dangerous. Sleep in the gutter.) you can totally carry your hammock around with you. If you want to carry around your mattress you probably have to have a really big truck. Good luck with using a mattress on a camp out (or in the gutter for that matter). We have actually taken our hammock on camping trips. It is great. My sister's tent blew over and our hammock was wonderful.
9. Hammocks are far less expensive than mattresses and they're more comfortable anyway. You could buy 4 or 5 hammocks for the price of one bed and then you can change out your hammocks every season or however often you want to.
10. Unless you like sweeping out the underside of your bed regularly, underneath your bed is a really gross place (a breeding ground of filth to quote Mrs. True). Every so often if you move your bed you'll find that there is a desiccated apple core, or a dried up piece of pizza. You will never find such nonsense underneath your hammock because you move your hammock every single day when you get out of it.
11. If your kids decide to climb in your bed and have a cracker party it is difficult to clean it out. With a hammock, you just dump it over and all the crumbs are ready to be swept/vacuumed off of the floor.

There are a couple of downsides to a hammock, though these are easily outweighed by all the advantages. One is that it is very difficult to get out of a shared hammock without disturbing the other sleeper(s). If you cuddle kids down for a nap in your hammock and then want to get up, it takes a lot of skill and a dollop of luck to get away without them crying. And if you're not used to sleeping cuddled up to your spouse, do get two hammocks.

Finally, in the winter you will need to attach an underquilt to your hammock or else you will get an amazing amount of cooling (at a time when it is not desired). You could buy an underquilt like this (make sure to get the right size), but we just tied blankets to the bottom of our hammock, and it works great.

Organized Simplicity: Step One

This post is continuing our series about Organized Simplicity.

Cleaning the master bedroom was a monumental task. Though we did the whole house three years ago, Mrs. True has gone through every other room and removed the excess at least once in the intervening time. Not the master bedroom. It became where stuff went to die, crammed in closets and corners and out of the way. Dealing with that took a solid 12 hours of work for two adults, with the "help" of the Truelets.

We took everything out of the room and placed it in the driveway. We then wiped the walls and floor of the entire room and began to sort through the pile that we made. When we started to sort it, we had extracted a pile of stuff from the room that measured 17'x5'x3' on average. Considering the room is 13'x10', and that it has a 2'x10' closet, we could spread the stuff out over the entire floor to a depth of 1.7 feet. Looking at the room beforehand I would not have guessed that. Mrs. True kept moaning, "So much stuff! How do we even have so much stuff?" as we carried out load after load.

Here is the stuff pile:

Here is the empty room (except for a cheese fridge in the closet):

We were asking ourselves continuously: "Is this beautiful/awesome or useful?" If we couldn't honestly answer yes we did not bring it back inside. Things that made the cut: about half the books, most of the clothes (we did pretty well on having a minimal wardrobe, if nothing else), suitcases and bags, a trunk of mementos each for Mrs. True and I, a small set of drawers with craft supplies, a bag of fabric and a sewing machine, basic furniture. Things that didn't: the other half of the books, a ton of craft supplies (Mrs. True explains that somehow some part of her brain keeps believing she's crafty when she's at the store, but never when she's at home), and random junk that had been pushed into this room for lack of anywhere else to keep it.

Here is the room after the clean up (yes, the hammock is our bed; there should be a post about that someday):

And here is the pile of stuff that we removed.

A rough estimate says we put back about 150 cubic feet of stuff. It would pack much smaller than that in a U-Haul, with proper boxes and all, but that works as the first number. Given that we estimated pulling about 255 cubic feet of stuff out, we did very well; we got rid of almost half! Well done us!

The room looks amazingly better (Mrs. True accidentally-on-purpose forgot to take "before" pictures because it was so bad) and we are very pleased. It also is much more motivating to keep such a lovely-looking space picked up. We hope to find the same results with the rest of the house.