A shoddy week, and earthships in The Amalgamated Aggromulator

Not a week for eptness, so far.

A couple of inadequately considered decisions . . . not disastrous ones, but not the best. With one of them I had time for the penny to drop and to change course: my respite-taking had drifted into inconsiderateness and I hadn’t thought it out.
With another - no time for the penny to drop, a fast decision impulsively handled . . . and the arithmetic for it being within bounds wasn’t there. I didn’t look good.

A couple of things completely forgotten - I let someone down with one of those.

One case of inadvertent . . . not rudeness, but a relative of it, realized an instant too late. (I had brought one of our garden sale flyers for one of the nurses at the clinic I go to, who had been curious. I didn’t get the same nurse. I didn’t know her name, I tried to describe her for the nurse I saw - said she looked like an aging film star - good looking, “slightly desiccated”. Could have used a couple of extra circuits in on the composition process before I showed a certain heedless - whatever that was.)

I’d been feeling relaxed, but this week it’s more like drifting. Asleep at the switch. The sort of week where I wish there were a way to do a census on any marbles I don’t have in hand at the moment so that I could be certain they are still there.

I’d rather be writing about any number of lines of ADD-ish failings other than the one above. This is not how I (usually, theoretically) am, or think I am. This is specifically how I think (or assume) I’m not. It’s unpleasant. Very.

Bad week.

Meanwhile the inconsiderate schmo has at least had a chance to indulge his missionary instincts. That always makes bright spots.

I answered a friend’s call for good books for his 5-year-old grandson. (I hope I did well. I came up with about fifteen good books, and in a reading-to situation they may all be good, but I think most skew older than 5 years; I remember reading Peter Benchley’s Jaws at 6 myself, and also simply the memory eater-bots have been at work on books I read much earlier.)
And someone else asked for a good computer role-playing game to try, so I got to continue as one of the last happy advocates for a game which came out in 2001.

But the big thing was when a friend asked about building a house versus buying one . . . which gave me the excuse to urge her to look into earthships.

If there is any friend I have who I can see actually building an earthship, it would be this friend! :-)

I told her that if she gets interested I will instantly ship her my set of all three books. And I will. Certainly they’re not doing anything just sitting on my bookshelf.

. . . And of course there is only one chance in twenty that she will proceed to spark on it and consider it, and it will sort of break my heart. :-) But you have to be in it.

Earthships are homes built with walls made of old car tires filled with rammed earth, sealed with adobe, sometime bermed as well. Smaller internal walls are made out of other things like soda cans. Greenhouse walls face the sun. Earthships use graywater to grow food. Sewage is also used in “biological cells”, only outside the house. Earthships gather their own rainwater. The tremendous thermal mass regularizes the temperature. Solar panels make electricity. Earthships need no utilities, or even utility hookups.

Earthships have been an interest of mine for years. Why should you have a home that needs utilities that you have to pay for - or that doesn’t recycle your waste or feed you . . . or that will fall down in an earthquake, for that matter? (Earthships are the only house design that officials have ever called, not just “resistant”, but earthquake-proof. That massive structure of earth-packed rubber tires.)

After Hurricane Katrina smashed the Mississippi delta in 2005, I thought that the government’s recovery money should rebuild the destroyed homes with earthships - only with the cisterns above ground, with the high water table. I got very excited about it. The devastation left the area virtually helpless for weeks. The infrastructure was smashed. Hurricanes have historically roared in there now and then . . . future ones can be expected to do so, and would tear up the same area . . . why not plan for it? Why not have families come through the storm safe and with electricity regardless? This is existing technology that works.
A scornful uncle made me think there was no point in writing my congressman with my silly idea. (In my enthusiastic spells, encountering lack of interest can be a terrible shock.) Well, there might have been no point, it might not have been read - and how many old tires can there be, and so on? there might have been problems I wasn’t considering - but anyway I didn’t write . . . and Congress actually wasn’t deliberating about what to do at all, they just threw money with a snow shovel, and FEMA put lots of people in trailers that turned out to be toxic, and the rebuilding went on in slovenly fashion, and so on. I wish I had put my two cents in. It still rankles.

My friend is in Australia, so I found her a group in Melbourne that is into the idea, and I found a page by a guy who built an earthship near Adelaide.

Earthship Ironbank

Earthship Ironbank on TV

This fellow did have to deactivate the system that would let him use graywater to feed his plants/use his plants to process the graywater. The authorities wouldn’t approve it. I confess to a love-hate relationship with building codes and regulations in connections like this. They don’t have to heedlessly block good things, but for them not to do so the inspectors have to be very competent people who are willing to be interested and look into strange things and who are confident in their ability to make exception calls. Otherwise it’s easier just to say no.

My sense of the earthship as a Worldwide Grand Solution has had to be moderated, at least without customization. Houses should be self-reliant and eco-perfect (or whatever the phrasing), in just the way that the earthship manages to fulfill, but the exact designs don’t work the same way in colder, wetter climates closer to the poles with less sunlight. You have to be careful. But my friend in Australia wouldn’t have that problem.

And the idea is like a senselessly neglected jewel.

(And the actual houses themselves are jewels.)

I have a longtime allergy to good and working ideas being neglected or ghettoized because they have Silly on them. With earthships it is Hippie Silly. And with climate change . . . it would do me good to see Sense peep through in the form of “what is a house for?”

And so I make myself I hope not too much of a nuisance bombing a friend with links about earthships.

Last updated May 27, 2016