Freakishly Happy

I have a latest obsession as of ten minutes ago.

I just found this great miniature lemon tree, that you can grow indoors, that produces full sized fruit twice a year! It is supposedly easy to grow, which leads me to wonder why everyone doesn't have a lemon tree!

http://www.emmitsburg.net/gardens/articles/adams/2006/lemon_tree.htm

Now if only keeping goats on the bus were this easy! 

On Saturday night/Sunday morning we had the first rain we’ve had in a long while. I don’t remember another cloudy day that in all of April. This was unbelievably good for the plants that were beginning to look a little woebegone from lack of water, but was a mixed blessing for us.

We’ve spent the last two or so months trying to remove all traces of rust from our floor and sidewalls. We finally accomplished this aim last week, when we finished auto-painting the entire interior of our space. We’ve also spent a lot of time trying to prevent any new moisture from getting in. The bad news is even after the minor rainfall we had (way less than an inch), we still have rivulets of water on our floor and full fledged puddles near the wheel wells. The good news is that the POR-15 auto paint that we used held up, and that all of the water was beaded up on the surface, not soaking into our metal floors. Luckily, we found out about the leaks before we'd installed anything that could be damaged.

We sucked up all the water with our Shop-Vac, and started trying to come up with a plan. We decided that we should continue the caulking job that we’d started on Saturday, not being sure whether that meant caulking EVERY seam, window and crevice. Unfortunately, we were nearly out of caulk and as it was a Sunday afternoon, and we live in a sleepy Vermont town, nothing was open (we did call around to all the local places first, I swear). We ended up taking a lovely Sunday afternoon drive up to Rutland- I will spare you any more jubilations about spring in Vermont. After finding one of our favorite hardware stores closed we went to *gasp* Home Depot. Jorgi (our little white dog) was most excited to accompany us. We’ve found that nearly all Hardware/Lumber yard type places allow dogs if you just ask first.

We found the caulk that we needed (alongside about 25 different types that we didn’t need). We also talked to several nice employees who helped us with our flooring and appliance questions.

When we returned home, we took the advice of someone on one of our ‘skoolie’ sites, and took a hose to the bus to simulate rain so we could find where the water was coming in. Fortunately, the roof seams and sidewall seams were solid. Unfortunately, the water was coming in through the windows in torrents.

We decided that instead of just caulking around the base of the window like we'd done the day before, we needed to seal around the entire thing. It took two windows before we finally got the hang of things, and it took us a good long time to do each window. We worked out a system where John applied the caulk and I smoothed it out with my finger or a paint scraper and removed the excess. By the time we were experts. We were only able to do about one-third of the bus before it got too dark. Just as we were finishing up, our friend Rich stopped by to check on our progress. It’s so fun to have guests!

After we ate a late dinner, we decided to put the tarp back on, as there was a 100% chance of rain today, and neither of us felt like doing any more vacuuming than needed.

Today, as promised it’s raining. You can almost hear the grass and flowers squealing with delight (not to mention watch them grow before your very eyes). John is currently working on two contracts, and has been staying up most nights working on them, so we decided that since it’s raining, we’d take another day off and recoup and plan out our next move.

I think I'll spend the rest of the day on the sun porch, looking at the green green trees and watching the rain fall. Happy spring all!

Hey!
Our subflooring and insulation was delivered today! Very exciting!

We finished up with the auto paint/rust protector on the inside last night around 9pm. It looks all slick and black in there, sort of the like an inverted beetle. It looks really nice, but even so, I am looking very much forward to covering it up.

We got all of the windows back in a few days ago, complete with new weather stripping. We spent about an hour this afternoon, enjoying the bright azure sky and sunshine while caulking the bottoms of the windows on the outside of the bus.

Spring has come to Vermont. There are daffodils everywhere, like little bursts of sunshine popping up from the ground. The trees have gone from completely barren last week, to that wonderful state of misty-green buds early this week, to tiny dark green leaves by weeks end. It’s been quite a week!

We scavenged two steel air conditioner covers from A/Cs that were bound for the dump, and are planning on cutting sections out of them to patch the holes in our floor. The covers also have vents in them, which will be useful later on when we build battery and propane bays.

Things are very exciting and are moving right along! I skipped out to meet the delivery guy today when he brought our plywood, etc. As we were unloading the truck he asked if this was my first building project, and I told him that indeed it was. He chuckled and said he could tell.

Unfortunately the bus cam is still not working. Well, let me re-phrase, it’s working but it’s not uploading to the site. Also, the site hasn’t been allowing me to update photos either! It’s quite a catastrophe of minimal proportions! Hopefully soon we will be able to link our flickr.com site with our site so that you can actually see some photos. They’re worth a thousand words I hear. …

Tonight we went and hobnobbed with some members of the Progressive Party of Vermont. A store-friend of ours (when you live at a store you have two classifications of friends… strange but true) had a gathering to meet Anthony Pollina, (http://www.anthonypollina.com/) who is running to be the next governor of Vermont. Vermont is such a unique state in that the government is so accessible to the people. There were no TV crews, no secret service guys, and no fanfare of any kind; he was just a an average guy talking about his ideas. It was really refreshing; especially after the Obama rally we went to last year. I know that those are not on the same scale: one running for small state office, one running for president of the United States, but in some sense it seems like it should be similar. Why does the presidential race have to be so convoluted and well… political? Anyway, enough of that tangent…

So, tomorrow is going to be a work day, so I best get to bed.
Good night!