Postcard from South Africa

Sorry again for the long break in writing. What has happened is this: J went on a business trip to Johannesburg, South Africa, for a week. When he got back, he got a cold from the airplane and was coughing for a week. Then, he recovered but now L has the cold.

Anyway, I thought I would put up some pictures of South Africa. It was on business, so basically I shuttled between meetings, field tests, and the airport hotel where I was staying. But what an airport hotel! I mean, have you ever stayed in a hotel with a food court done up in classical/rustic Italian style? (To be fair, the hotel was in a complex with a casino, so this is actually the casino food court).
 

Apparently an exact replica of Michelangelo's David, at this point tastefully advertising St Patrick's Day. 

A passageway in the food court

Beautiful trompe-l'oeil artwork in the lobby for the auditorium where Deepak Chopra spoke. Also, apparently people will shell out $70 to hear Deepak Chopra. 

I'm halfway sure these are actually copies of Pompeiian artwork

In case you're now craving to find out where you may find this magical mixture of graceful design and tacky vulgarity, it is the "Emperor's Palace", or as its airport mini-shuttles proclaim, "The Palace of Dreams". Yes, dreams...but of what sort?

In the food court, there was an African-themed restaurant. This was surprising as I figured that this wouldn't be possible here, since everything would automatically be African-themed, since we were in, you know, South Africa. But my host here talked several times about "going to Africa" to visit mines - clearly there's a distinction between the country of South Africa and the Rest of Africa. Anyway I visited the restaurant and found I had a choice between steak, kudu steak, impala steak, and ostrich. I'd never heard of kudu before and asked the waiter what it was. He helpfully came back with a page giving pictures and descriptions of kudus, impalas, and ostriches. The kudu looks like a large gazelle. I found that the kudu tastes like venison, or very lean beefsteak.

Johannesburg more or less exists because of the gold mines, which surround the city. In fact the city is now encroaching on old tailings piles. Apart from the usual nasty aspects of tailings piles, it turns out that some of the tailings in the area are mildly radioactive due to the presence of uranium in the ores. Several of the historical tailings (ie from 1800s or early 1900s) are now being reprocessed to scavenge more gold out of them.

A tailings impoundment

At the left, there is a tailings impoundment. To the right, a new development of low-income housing is going up. In between, there isn't much. 

Driving into downtown Johannesburg

Well, a week goes by fast in South Africa and soon it was time to head back home. For the next posts we will return you to your regular programming of chicken updates and home maintenance shenanigans. A few last pictures:

Picture quality isn't great, but it's an ibis poking around in the roses outside my hotel room.

The Afrikaans language is alive and well it seems. This is an ad for a stage version of Cinderella. 

In Which We Repair Our Electricity Using a Pickle Jar

We were in the kitchen a few days ago when I heard a strange noise by the wall. It sounded like perhaps rainwater leaking through the ceiling and coming down. Or perhaps a mouse or some small animal scurrying through the wall. Or a termite chewing wood? Are termites even active this time of year? 

It sounded almost like crackling. Almost like two electric wires sparking against each other. That must be it. The antiquated wiring in this house finally gave in, and our wires were sparking together. Soon, the electrical fire would begin and our house would be engulfed by flames. 

We sprang into action. L went to the electrical panel and started throwing switches one by one, while I stood by the wall and listened for the  crackling noise to stop. As she took out circuit after circuit, the noise continued. Could they have wired this house so that this circuit came from the other electrical panel? Was it somehow hardwired in? 

Then I looked down at the pickle jar. The pickle jar that I had taken out of the hacked chest fridge not long before and placed on the counter. The pickle jar that, as it warmed up, was slowly releasing gas from a small gap between the jar and the lid, making a distinctive crackling sound.

The offending pickle jar.
Also featured: greens from Priapi Gardens, kefir, "Lucky Duck" wine, and a bunch of eggshells.

It actually turned out to be for the best, because a few weeks ago we tried to install a new dining room light switch (the old one was a dimmer switch, which wouldn't work with the ultra-efficient LED light we were also installing).  We shut off the circuit, took out the old switch, and after much cursing and fighting with the wires (which were actually old) managed to get the new one installed. Which promptly did not work. Furthermore, half the ceiling lights in our house did not work either. We couldn't find a solution to this problem, and so we just got some lamps at the second-hand emporium and plugged them in where we needed them.

The exercise with the pickle jar taught us the valuable lesson that when you turn a circuit off at the electrical panel, and subsequently forget to turn it back on, it will remain off and your electrical appliances will not work.

Therefore, pickles are delicious. Q.E.D. 

Too much excitement in Cecil County

We were biking on the road this afternoon, enjoying the beautiful spring weather, when we encountered a fantastic line of cars - stretching for about a mile from our house all the way to to the stop sign where a policeman was directing traffic. This doesn't happen on the street, and one of the drivers told us (everyone was at a standstill at the time) that the police had shut down part of Route 213 and all the rush hour traffic was being detoured. It was kind of funny seeing the drivers segregate into either those taking a detour in stride, and those with major road rage.

Anyway the cause of the police shutting down the road turned out to be a police shooting:
http://www.cecildaily.com/news/local_news/article_f6607755-b3c3-5f87-9160-de0fd88488ee.html
(the location would be about a mile from our house).

Nobody has any of the details yet, but I know I will follow this case...




Incidentally, in other news from the Cecil Whig, "Loose Turkey Fowls Elkton Traffic". Yes, "fowls".

Triangles versus Semicircles

We spent the last few weeks experimenting with structures. We found that we needed a greenhouse that could also maybe double as a chicken tractor. So we needed to build a light and sturdy frame on which we could put netting or plastic.

We'd made a first attempt at a chicken tractor using some of the leftover wood from the house. Apparently the previous owner delighted in building cabinets out of plywood, and then painting the cabinets, once completed, in thick layers of brown paint. Thus all unwittingly he provided us with building materials for chicken shelters. 

The result was a beast. Parts of the wood were halfway disintegrated with rotted ends that had to be sawed off before they could be worked with. Some of the boards split when they were nailed and had to be shored up with other pieces of wood. And all the wood had many, many nails which we had to pull out. At the end, we had a chicken tractor, but it is heavy, looks like Frankenstein, and can fit maybe four chicken.

The second attempt was using CPVC piping - the plastic water pipes you can get at the hardware store. L saw that the pipes can be flexed into half-circles, and so we got several 8-foot lengths of half-inch CPVC and a few fittings and put them together into a hoop house. Total cost: around $20, with a few hours to saw the piping to size and glue it all together. 

Our Frankenstein chicken tractor in the foreground, and the hoop house we made out of PVC piping in the background (before being covered). 

The hoop house wobbled around somewhat, and one of the pieces of piping kept popping out of the fitting, but it was quite light. We covered it in plastic and positioned it overtop of a pile of chicken manure that we wanted to compost faster, keeping it in place with a few bricks. 

Then disaster struck. The cold came, and the wind blast, and the snow fell. We woke up to find our hoop house at the other end of the property, ripped apart. 

The remains of the hoop house, once we'd found them at the other end of the yard. 

On to attempt number 3. This time, we built in wood. The design came to me in a daydream - I wanted to find a shape that would minimize the amount of building material and cuts to be made, but would also be sturdy and reasonably easy to put together. The answer was to build two equilateral triangles and connect them to form a prism. The wood was 2-by-3 inch studs to form the triangles, with 1-by-3 lumber connecting them to form the longitudinal sides of the prism. All the lumber was sold in eight foot lengths, so we kept that as the length of each side. 

The Prism, attempt number 3 for a greenhouse/chicken tractor. 

To form an equilateral triangle, the ends of each stud had to be cut at a 30-degree angle, which is tricky to do with hand tools. Fortunately, a friend with a table saw helped us out. Total cost: also around $20, surprisingly - those eight-foot studs were only $2.15 apiece at the Home Depot. The carpentry took rather longer than the work for the hoophouse design, though. It feels sturdy, and while it's not light, two people can easily carry it around. 

We just finished putting the plastic on to turn it into a greenhouse. We have freezing rain here tonight, so we'll see if it survives until morning! 

The Prism, standing in glory in a field of ice. 

See what happened:
http://soggybottomhomestead.blogspot.com/2015/04/strong-fences-make-sane-farmers.html