Good afternoon! ;-) Coffee time.
In the fall I made a garage/workshop space-- there is a thread somewhere about it here, as I was asking some questions about concreting. By December everything was finished but the ceiling. There are joists over it, and OSB on top of the joists for a floor above, and all the gaps are sealed, but no insulation there all winter. The walls are insulated-- OSB - fiberglass - OSB. We've had a not so very cold winter, and its stayed above freezing there from the heat that gets out of the shared wall with the house, but still cold. I have a propane heater to warm it up some-- 10°C and I feel OK out there, the dog would be happier if it were warmer as well, but he isn't complaining so much, since other dogs here don't have dog doors in to garages at all.
I made a resolution for Lent to give up having a mess everywhere, so last night I was working toward that, putting together a shelf and sorting tools out, and it hit me, that I have a bunch of 2" polystyrene boards for insulating the walls of our house (which we didn't get to last year), and they've been sitting outside all winter. So for the last weeks of winter, I've spread them on the floor above the garage, which ought to help a bit. I sure wish that had "clicked" sooner.
My mom got the kids one of those cheaper RC helicopters for Christmas. It uses IR for remote control, and they just fly it inside. It is incredible how durable it is. My two year old gets it, and his method of flying is to jam the control forward and watch it fly straight up till it hits the ceiling, which causes it to loose stability and go careening across the room. One thing with it is that the transmitter is contanstantly transmitting, so I think for outside, if it would get out of range, it would just drop down.
I got another one from China on eBay, it has more advanced controls, though still IR. I tried flying it outside and it was trying to get away. I think the IR has at most a 30' range, and it seems like on that one it isn't transmitting continuously. I had to run after it to get back in range and bring it down.
A drone with camera would be really cool. I'd love to have aerial shots of the four seasons on our land, and capture the changes we are making over the years. Actually, what I'd love even more, would be a GPS programmable drone. Sometimes I stick the goats in an overgrown area quite a distance away-- it would be nice to send the drone up to photograph them and photograph the water trough. But anyway, our current plan is to get cattle this year and do intensive grazing with multiple moves for day, so this lazy approach of sticking goats on an acre and leaving them for several days is coming to an end.
