Repairing the solar system, finally; also spring planting begins!

I used to have a solar panel system (as well as a hot water tank) on the top of my van. It, and the days of design work that went into it, were wrecked in a Nevada windstorm. I decided to keep things simpler this time.

I went to the stores here in Omaha trying to find those metal bars that people put on the top of their cars. You see them out in the wild all the time - the ones that make it hard to tell what vehicle's a civilian and what vehicle's a cop when you peer through your rearview. They're all over the place, but apparently no merchandiser in this town has ever heard of such arcane wizardry. So I improvised with ratchet straps, galvanized fencing wire, and some bungee cords on top for good measure. After a couple trial runs through the interstates of the Omaha metro on relatively windy days, I'm comfortable with their performance. They slid around and sailboated a bit up there before I added the bungee cords, but the straps held them firmly to some piece or another of the roof, because they're wired to the straps.

I'm pretty comfortable with the idea that further bungee cords, and possibly more wire for them to grab, will correct any further issues that arise. Having lost a hundred-and-change investment to the wind once already, I don't plan on losing it again.

But happily, after that was all rigged up, I did the internal work. The electrical system works again, as this lightbulb to your right demonstrates. They include two of these with every four solar panels, which means I have two more to work with. I might wire one back into the van, by the bed on top of the cupboard where it used to go, and then have two for the house. I could wire however many lights I like through normal cords, but these are high-efficiency LED lights that plug right into the charge controller, and I like them a bunch. They're powerful enough to extend twilight hours for growing houseplants or to let you read or do complicated work in the night.

As for the hot water tank idea, it was just impractical in the end. Having a tube spraypainted black running down the middle of my roof like an automohawk as a means for generating and conveying hot water to both an attachable outdoor showerhead and the inside sink was possible and worked roughly as planned in the summer. But I wasn't often in a situation where I could use it; I was either travelling and in places where privacy wasn't guaranteed, or it was too cold for the pipe to be very effective in retaining heat, or I'd just forget to load the damn thing, which was a lot more complicated than I'd anticipated. In the end, a camp shower hanging in the kitchen window does the same jobs ten times better for a fraction of the price and hassle. So I just forewent the bother and it's not included in this buildout.

While I was outside yesterday fussing with the van, I did some gardening. There is a little creek running behind my parents' house, banks rich with organic soil and decomposing things. I grabbed a bunch of old Burger King coffee cups and filled them all with this dirt, and then put them in boxes for easy handling. The boxes in turn got placed inside white trash bags, to limit moisture evaporation, increase the greenhouse effect (we're not quite out of freezing weather, but it's on the edge and being inside a box-shaped greenhouse inside a van-shaped greenhouse should help), and to keep my cat out. Sakaki doesn't need to start kneading mud into every nook and cranny of the van. Even though plastic anything fascinates her, she seems to leave it alone now. Considering those boxes are in her favorite spot to lie, that's remarkable restraint and intelligence on her part. Good girl.

She's also showing off for the camera, little diva. She's such a good girl; I'm lucky to have her as a travelling companion. She isn't always so curious when I do things, but she was just in a precocious mood yesterday, and had to investigate all the important human things. My good girl is wise enough to do so from the relative safety of the dashboard, staying out of the way. When we're parked, the dashboard is a favorite place of hers. (It's also a favorite place when we're driving, but I can usually grab her down off there at a red light or something.)

In any case, I then planted a small early garden, and in two weeks I'll know if I'm growing anything. They'll germinate in the mud and I'll have spinach, mustard leaf, radishes, and turnips, or they won't and I'll just try again in two weeks with slightly more crops available to me as the weather creeps towards warm.

I'm off Facebook so my supply of dank memes has begun to dry up; I don't know what this means for Saturday shitposting. I don't have any cued up, I don't think. But I mostly don't care; the Saturday shitposting is a way to grab viewers from Google Image Search who can't search Leftbook for fire memes more than anything else. But I'm thinking I've been going about my praxis all wrong on that front anyway. Facebook is full of petty bourgeois synthetic leftist posers who are intrinsically hostile to my Marxist-Lincolnist project, and working with them has been an uphill battle all the way.

Meanwhile, my forays onto 4chan all seem to go well. I may be expanding my presence on there, where the fash can't lawyer a censorship system that doesn't exist and actual workers post things, instead of Leftbook where I'm screaming into a void of space between middle class ears that neither heeds nor cares. If I do that, my memes will reflect it. Or maybe I'll just make my own dank memes. I've made a couple already and they're fire in the right audience.

In any case, that's all the news from out here. Me and my good girl signing out, for now.