Back at Earthwise Valley

About 10 days ago now, Nico and I ended our road trip and made our way back to Earthwise Valley to help out with the winter program here.  The first day back we made a little glasshouse for the lettuce garden to help them grow during the winter.  See!?:

And then... we flooded the house!  See:

And in the process I learned a valuable lesson... about how to properly drain a water tank.  No, not call the plumber, I can do it.  Maybe... cause then I burned out the heating element in the hot water tank cause I left the power on when there was no water in it.  So due to that I completely took apart the hot water system here, got a replacement element and put it all back together and 4 days later.... we have hot water again!  Yay.  I guess I forgot to mention... the whole reason for this was that we were changing the wood burning stove here to a better one, but this new one is not connected to the hot water system like the previous one so I needed to take out those pipes and in the process.... flooded the house.

Now we are 6 total here.  There is Nico and me, Jon and Bexie, and then two 18 year old french Canadian girls named Mel and Kat.  They are young and full of energy and happy to plant loads of trees, so this is working out well, especially since there are 1200 trees to plant this month!  This is Nico's baby.  My big project for this month is to build two small cabins that will be used as an additional bedroom and an office.  I just got started today and got the bearers and floor joists all put together for one and its laid out for the second one and just needs to be nailed together.  Not bad for a days work all by my lonesome.

Oh, and what else I did today was move our tent back to the old location.  To explain... in the past couple weeks we have gotten multiple times more rain than we got for the entire summer here.  It's wet.  And we found out that our tent is not totally waterproof.  We got a lot of rain one night and in the morning there was a wet spot on the bed (nope, not pee) and then we went to elevate the mattress to let it dry out, but found the whole underside soaking wet.  It took 2 days to dry and then we put it in Jon's tent.  He doesn't actually need it since he's got a bedroom in the house and I do not.  But his tent is in the front yard right near the house and cars.  That location kinda works... but just isnt so nice to live there.... so today I moved the mattress and tent back down to our old tent site.  Yay.  I'm excited for a good nights sleep there tonight.