Beginnings of summer

Well, summer is about to begin. We are incredibly busy with many aspects of our life. First of all, getting everything together for the new house we are building. It is very exciting but at the same time very very stressful. We should be closing on Tuesday on the construction loan and ground will break on the new lot on Tuesday as well. Today we visited the lot with our builder and dirtwork guy to select what trees we want to keep. We are planning on building a very energy efficient house, with 12 inch walls (REMOTE technique which is a 2x6 wall with insulation, then a vapor barrier, and then 6 inches of rigid foam on the outside). Hopefully we can stop the heat loss and save money on heating fuel, which is very very expensive up here. 90% of the windows on our house are on the south side to maximize solar heat gain and 0% of the windows are on the north side so we minimize heat loss out the north side (a yearly net heat loss on north windows). We have only 1 small window on the east side, and 2 windows on the west side, in order to capture the western afternoon sun (and enjoy views of Mount McKinley on a clear day). We are nervous about the cost of dirt work though because our lot is very steep and could be very close to bedrock and getting our driveway in off the main road is going to be a challenge. Well, more on the house in future posts I am sure.

Then we are getting our current house on the market and we are selling For Sale By Owner to start. Here is a link to our house for sale if you know of anyone who is interested 1287arctictern.blogspot.com , hopefully in the next few days I will be able to get it posted on Craigslist, but first we want to put the final touches like painting the deck and finishing up some cleaning.

To top if off, Emily leaves on Wednesday for the field again, for a 3 week trip up north to measure runoff in the arctic streams. So, now it is the excitement of the beginning of summer, the birch pollen is everywhere, It is 11:30pm at night as I write this and finally just getting dark, perennials coming up, my annuals are nearly planted, I am trying to harden off these sensitive tomatoes, and now I get to escape back to winter for a few weeks........ What a crazy life. I am sure I will be having some updates on the facebook page from up north.

We need to visit the pigs tomorrow. We have about 5 pounds of food scraps to bring them, which is probably enough for just one pig, for 1 day worth of food. We really need to collect more food scraps for the piggies.