Happy Boxing Day to all you email subscribers out there from Ted here at Dancing Rabbit! We’ve had a good week here, including everything from a dance party at La Casa, to a Solstice gathering at the Common House, to a Christmas Eve gathering with mulled cider, cookies and games hosted by Kurt and Alline at the Milkweed Mercantile. Now moving on toward the new year with expectation of another celebration at the end of the week, we seem to be taking a collective break from the intensity one often experiences here.
On the 25th we took advantage of the decent weather to proclaim our first annual Christmas Ultimate Frisbee game here, and managed to gather a solid field of players to come out for a great match. Sadly I turned my ankle after a few points, and had to leave the game, but play continued and I’m hoping to be back in the game by week’s end, when we have tentatively planned another game. We loosely aspire to play at least once a month through the winter to keep our game up. December has happily provided several opportunities, and once we played on snow.
Recent former Ironweed work exchangers Craig and Kim arrived last week for a welcome long weekend visit with Kate and Kristen, likewise recent veterans, so if you heard “dance party” and thought of Craig’s many 2011 event-organizing feats, you were spot-on. 2011 was the most abundant season we’ve had for work exchangers at DR, and I loved a little belated flare-up of their energy. Craig has in fact decided to stay on with us for a couple weeks, and is anchoring the New Year’s Eve festivities. We’re happy to be hosting him again down our way and enjoyed Christmas breakfast with him complete with some presents sent from his family.
You may have heard lately of the new power coop, BEDR (Better Energy for Dancing Rabbit), which went online last week here. With a 25 kilowatt solar array installed, BEDR is now pumping renewable energy into the public power grid, with an agreement to put in at least twice as much as it draws from the grid to supply the buildings connected to it. That shouldn’t be hard for now, though as our population continues to grow, we expect BEDR will add more production capacity, including hopefully a large wind turbine, to offset our use.
Not everybody is joining the new grid yet, though. For the time being we’ve decided to keep Ironweed and its several power-dependent buildings off-grid. With our original bank of 16 batteries showing their age of seven-plus years (I had to take a quarter of the bank offline last week when one of the batteries failed), we had been looking tentatively at replacing them soon. Since Skyhouse joined the buildings connecting to the grid, they had decided to let go half of their bank of 32 (maintaining 16 as a backup for any times the grid may go down), so we agreed to buy the 16 they no longer needed.
Craig helped me the other day with the laborious task of pulling 16 100+ pound batteries out of Skyhouse and downhill to Ironweed four at a time in a cart, and then pulling Ironweed’s old 16 out. Just as dusk settled on the land I managed to get our new bank re-wired and our mini-grid back online, which means we have a robust system again and won’t be so prone to extended low-power periods. Now if we can get the anchors poured for our wind turbine before winter’s frozen ground sets in, and put the turbine back up, we’ll be almost as dependable as the new local grid.
The lack of weather-related demands to reduce energy consumption in the buildings now on the grid means we will soon engage in some discussion of cultural means to keep power use minimized. We had an evening gathering last week to celebrate power by watching some movies and bringing out some previously verboten power hogs like a curling iron and made smoothies in the blender, but I’ve since had more than one conversation with members realizing that doing such things at night (when our large solar arrays aren’t producing) means we’re drawing coal and nuclear power. Even if the use is offset in daylight hours, that is still a hard equation for an ecovillager.
I’ve heard some concern that we’ll have trouble with conservation now that flipping a switch won’t be so closely regulated, but so far I’ve seen the same attention to conservation in the Common House as before. I have confidence that the reasons we all came here will combat the possibility of falling off the wagon… and there’s always the locally-higher cost of power (upwards of $.30/kW for those on BEDR power) as a reminder to turn off lights when they’re not in use, buy power-sipping appliances, insulate our homes well, and so on. Meanwhile, there will remain the unconnected houses in the village as a gauge of what’s appropriate in the evenings as related to current weather.
Undaunted by the shortest days of the year and the accumulating cold weather, our 12 hens have been steadily increasing their daily production. From the first egg in mid-November, we’ve seen more and more, and Christmas Day we got seven eggs in a day for the first time. One hen is going above and beyond, producing three goose-egg-size double-yolkers recently. It is a pleasure to add this element to our food scene again, and those deep orange yolks of a hen on a strong diet are a surprise every time. Once the last of our spent brassicas from the garden are brought to the chickens for fresh food, we’ll turn to some dried kale we’ve accumulated, and of course they’ll keep getting our kitchen scraps. We get to know their character a little better each day, including one, named Rose, who likes to live on the edge, snatching food out of our dog Isis’s bowl while she’s eating.
Thanks for keeping up with us in 2011, and we hope you’ll keep reading the highlights in 2012. May your own 2012 bring good things and more peace in our world!