Cooling off
Friday, August 24th, 2007
It’s been hot–in the 90s–the last couple of days a mile away from the Oregon Coast. This is when I’m glad I installed a “Whole House Ceiling Fan” in the far bedroom at the other end of the house a few years ago. When the evening cools down, as it always does here, I turn on the Whole House Fan, which is an exhaust fan which sucks a large volume of air out of the house and empties it into the attic where vents transfer it outside.
It’s big enough (30 inches square) to create a nice draft through the house, sucking cool evening air in through open windows at the opposite end of the house, thus cooling the whole house with the evening air. Wonderfully simple device. My house never gets really hot, as I am well insulated and have an additional fan — an automatic attic vent fan — just below the main roof gable. When the air in the attic gets hot enough, the fan kicks on and sucks it through a vent in the roof. Get rid of the hot air that collects in your attic, and it makes cooling your house much easier. But some heat still builds up in the interior. This is just a stick house built on a foundation, with no thermal mass in it 
or design features that allow me to tap into the constant temperature of the ground. (For some BHM articles that discuss “thermal mass”, just type in “thermal mass” in the search window on our Home page.) But the Whole House Fan works pretty well. My three sons have other innovative ways to cool off. Jake, your typical teenager who will try just about anything, will take a dip in the 
horse trough if he’s hot enough. He doesn’t mind that there are mosquito fish in it. Sammy and Robby will wade in the little fish pond we’ve been creating for the last couple of years. There are lots of big — 6 to 8 inch — goldfish and salamanders in the pond, but the boys don’t care. A publishing tip We’re just shy of three weeks from deadline for the Christmas (Nov/Dec 2007) issue, so we’ve been working behind the scenes with various writers and examining submissions. If you submit something to us, whether via snail mail or email, you have to be patient. It can take a while for us to decide. Sometimes it’s just a quick read and a “yes” or “no,” but sometimes we have to think on it. We tend not to keep in touch with writers during this 
process; there’s just too much other stuff to do to keep people informed of every move we make. So if you are a writer, please be patient and we’ll get back to you eventually. Organization is one of the key talents a publisher must have. If you can’t keep track of vast amounts of information, you’ll have trouble being a publisher. As the years have gone by, I’ve been lucky enough to hire people who can organize and keep track, so I tend to delegate many of these tasks to my employees. I’ve already told you about Lisa in a previous post, who helps me organize the editorial side of the business. My wife, Lenie, takes care of the details of the business side of the business. It’s scary what she has to keep track of. One person cannot handle the organization of both the editorial and business sides of a publication like this; there is simply too much pulse to feel.
We left our campsite in the rain and came home to find the wind that had accompanied the rain had blown down our corn. My boys and I tied it back up today with some old parachute cord. Glad the rain held off until our last night of camping. I posted 
resume administration of the blogs again pretty soon. That will make Jackie’s blog go much smoother. There are a lot of technical considerations when administering multiple blogs, such as Jackie’s, 
computer. One of our camping neighbors, Lou and Dalene Daniel, of Cherry Valley, California, had a really nifty big wall tent they had bought from 
Lou had built a barrel stove for his tent out of a kit he had bought from an online outfit — 
swimming in the river kept us fairly clean. They also had a small Coleman oven in which his wife could cook bread. Lenie wants one so she can cook up apple and blackberry cobbler the next time we go to Quosatana. I’m always finding good ideas or helpful products from people I meet.
I think hard work is the key to success in all endeavors in life. Since we arrived home late Friday night, we’ve been doing house and yard chores: vacuuming, sweeping, and washing clothes inside, and mowing, weedwacking, gardening, and watering trees outside. My family likes a tidy place, inside and out, so we do this sort of family work project every time we come back from a trip. It took the five of us most of the day today. The boys each have a machine they like to operate: Jake the weed eater, Robby the power mower, and Sam the blower. Lenie likes to work in the garden, of course, and I like riding my big mower. As we were finishing up our many chores today, you could feel the family’s group satisfaction in a job well done. It occurred to me that these work projects, and the gratification my three boys, Jake, Rob, and Sam, get from them are probably the most valuable lessons Lenie and I could be giving them. They have seen us work very hard all their lives, and we have made comfortable lives and a good business with our hard work. Now we are showing them how to do the same. They recognize hard work as an essential ingredient of a successful life. I got my work ethic from my parents, as did Lenie. My parents were of Irish immigrant stock, but their hard work enabled them to meld into American society well. They never got rich, but their five kids never wanted for anything either. Their children–me and my siblings–applied the work ethic learned at home to their own lives, and now Lenie and I are passing on the same teaching to our children. I think it becomes a personal thing: I want my property and my business to reflect the view I have of myself as a hard working person, just like my father and mother did, and just as I hope my children will. What could be simpler. Hard work underlies success!
Just relaxing at the 29 Palms Inn. We’ve gotten a break with the weather for most of this stay, with temperatures mainly in the 90s, occasional clouds that hide the scorching sun, and even some brief rain sprinkles. The combination of clouds and the extra humidity they bring to the desert gave us a spectacular sunset the other night. We all pitched in at Annie and Erik’s house to help them get ready for their cross-country move. There were bookshelves to unscrew, nail holes to spackle, boxes to pack, cleaning to do, and a dump run to make. They’ve had a good landlord during the past three years, and they want to leave the place in good shape. Otherwise, this has been a kickback vacation, with lots of swimming at the pool and a nightly reading of the new Harry Potter book by Lenie. (I’m not a Harry Potter guy so I listen to oldies on my laptop.) Plenty of coyotes and rabbits around this desert oasis. The rabbits are mainly cottontails, and judging by the slowness with which they hop away from us, the coyotes use this place as a fast food restaurant. For the bunnies, it’s reproduce fast or become extinct. 
We’ll be home Friday night, just in time to review the new issue’s proofs and FedEx them back to our Wisconsin printer Monday. The issue will go on the presses a few days after that. This is that period after deadline when publishing a magazine becomes a real nice business.
There’s not a lot worse than waking up in the morning and finding out you have no water. My 15-year-old son, Jake, had forgotten to turn the hose off in his garden last night. He likes to build big long deep rows and flood them so the roots go deep. His garden is always a good producer, but that was no consolation to me and Sam, 12, as we walked the 300 yards up a hill in a drizzle through tall wet grass to make sure there were no other problems with our spring-fed system. We confirmed that the tank was merely empty and was slowly filling from the spring. Jake, who also stayed up half the night reading Harry Potter, slept til the afternoon so missed the trips to the horse trough to refill the toilet bowl tanks after flushing. We had considered taking a bucket of the horse trough water and dumping it on him as he slept. 
Lenie took the day off in spite of deadline to plant squash in the garden, which is her passion. We had one raised bed that had not been planted, so in a light drizzle she put in crookneck, acorn, and patty pan squash from starts her friend, Alison, of Coquille, Oregon, started for her while we were on our three-week Midwest trip. Very nice of Alison to do that, knowing Lenie needed a head start with the squash because of the lateness of the planting. Lenie, of course, got pretty dirty in the muddy soil but had no water with which to take a shower. 
Jake slept til 2:30. By that time the 3,000-gallon water tank had partly filled, so it was no particular inconvenience to him. We got even with him later by telling him a really nasty joke: “Hey Jake, it’s mid July. You know what that means?” “No, what?” he asked. “It means summer vacation is three quarters over!” 
Just as my other boys did when I told them, Jake, who really hates school, went into shock and disbelief. We let the horror of it sink in before we told him we were only kidding. Mean joke, but deserved.
I couldn’t sit still and edit and lay out articles at the kitchen table all day, so I had to go out and cut our acre of grass on my riding mower to calm me down. I’m restless that way. It’s not the grass that’s important to me; it’s the sense of mental order cutting the grass gives me. It used to be that prior to deadline I’d reorganize all the office furniture. Employees thought it was a bit peculiar. But I knew that if I rearranged all the office furniture I’d somehow get the mental order I needed so I could relax and do deadline. Weird huh? Most people think I’m sane, but it’s possible I have a screw loose. 
I find that a sense of order in my life frees up my mind. I cannot think well among disarray. I also don’t like crowds, or giving talks in front of more than a few people. In fact, in the few times I have had to give a talk in front of more than a handful of people, my mind just about short circuited and my body did it’s version of hyperventilation. It’s probably all connected somehow. Now that the grass is cut after two hours of riding my mower, I can sit down and proceed with deadline. 
The hens laid 10 eggs today. There are only 13 hens so they are in a groove, which, of course, adds to my sense of order that things are going well around here. One egg was a little tiny thing, which happens rarely. Our chickens typically lay AA eggs. I’m going to enlarge their enclosed yard shortly after deadline. They are free-range chickens when we don’t have a garden, and it doesn’t seem fair to coop them up in a small yard for the growing season. What a softy I am, in addition to having a screw loose. 
The issue looks strong, has the right “mix,” but there’s still a lot left to do by Thursday the 19th. Lenie, my superhuman wife, goes into overdrive during this deadline week. She does the final detailed layout of the entire magazine, right down to filling in left-over white spaces with small ads or articles so we don’t have any “holes’ in the issue. She also does final read-thrus of the articles. It’s 68 degrees today. The ocean is probably flat, although I can’t tell due to the cloud cover between my sunny deck and the ocean a mile or so away. But I know there are fish down there.
Lenie cooks 95 percent of the meals at our house, but I’m the main weekend breakfast cook. I have one specialty: fried potatoes, which are sliced thin and cooked in hot olive oil so they get nice and crusty. In a separate pan I cook up sliced onions, green peppers, mushrooms, and carrots in Canola oil. At the end of cooking, I marry them together in one pan, then drop in some scrambled eggs that our chickens probably layed the day before. 
This morning Lenie made up a nice fruit salad of grapes, melons, bananas, cantaloupes, nectarines, and plums. With three different types of hot sauce and ketchup, it was delicious. We eat good at our house, often barbecuing off one of the decks. Eating is one of life’s great pleasures, and Lenie loves to cook. The only rule at meals for the boys is you can’t eat, then bolt from the table. You have to stay awhile and have conversation. We typically eat off our large front deck, which is one of three Trex decks I’ve built onto the house. I chose Trex because I was tired of scraping and refinishing a wood deck every few years. The price was comparable to good grade redwood. I built the underpinning of the decks with twice as much wood and fasteners as most people use, so
they will outlive me, my kids, their kids, and the house. When you jump up and down on them, there is not the slightest movement. “Built like a tank,” is my motto. We’ve got an acre of lawn off this deck, and I actually enjoy cutting it with my ride-along if it’s not too hot. It’s too hot today at 90 degrees plus, so I’ll do some indoor jobs and read and write. Beyond the lawn we have a nice conifer forest that is now home to about a thousand golf
balls my boys and I have hit into it from a pad on the deck. I really like this place. Five acres is just about the right size piece of land for us because we’re so busy putting out the magazine. We have a large garden and 14 chickens. We’re surrounded by forests, with our nearest neighbor on one side a half mile, and on the other three quarters of a mile. We have no neighbors looking out about a mile to the ocean, and our back door has forests clear to the Kalmiopsis Wilderness. There are lots of locations like this in America, believe it or not. Our 6373-mile trip just completed a week ago revealed many of them, just looking from the highway. Can you imagine what’s out of sight of the highway!
I don’t mean to criticize the rest of the country, but my area in Oregon is a better place to live than anywhere else. I don’t even have to wear my sunglasses anymore because the cedar and pines absorb enough light so you don’t have to squint in the direct sunlight. The water out of my spring tastes better than any I’ve drunk in the 
last three weeks. The temperature is a humidity-free 75 degrees. My garden soil is thick, rich loam that will grow anything. The air I’m breathing, which comes off hundreds of miles of Pacific Ocean, is probably the cleanest on earth. Even my neighbors are nice, and the nearest is at least a half-mile away. Dorothy was right. 
But I guess I’m just bragging, as people are wont to do of their own country neighborhood. We stopped in the redwoods, at the Richardson Grove in northern California, 70 miles south of Gold Beach for our final relaxation spot. Hundreds of different types of wildflowers seemed to line the highways leading to our home. When we did 
get home, about 11 pm, we unloaded quickly and slept for about 10 hours. One of our cats, a black one named Blackie, died while we were gone, but the other four and Molly, our black lab, were well cared for by Silveira. The chickens were fine too, even Larry Bird, out rooster, who Silveira said he would have liked to have killed at 4 each 
morning. But there was lots of work to do today after three weeks away from home. The garden beds were overgrown and the grass was high, so we all spent the day outside cutting grass and pulling weeds. We even had a couple of cords of wood that a neighbor had dropped to stack. Jet lag began to set in about 5 in the evening, and I realized the best thing for this Irishman to do was write a blog entry and have a beer.
