Got 2.25 inches(about 5.75cm) of rain on Saturday morning. Lots of lightning too, but no problems with power. Pretty much flattened all my potatoes in the garden, but I presume they will spring back. Surprisingly nothing else looked like it took much of a beating, even the spindly little tomato plants looked good. Now comes the humidity and the mosquitoes
Cheers

Hope everyone is having a good Independence Day. (Yes, I know it is USA specific.)
Currently about 88F(31C) here. Sunny and humid. All of my potatoes are blooming, so by the end of July I can start digging new potatoes of the Yukon Gold variety. The squash and pumpkins are finally taking off and starting to set fruit. The tomatoes are coming along nicely with the early varieties setting fruit. The older varieties are slower, but they will have meatier fruit. I am trying sweet potatoes this year, but so far they do not look like much. The broccoli should start setting heads pretty soon. This is the best year I have ever had for rhubarb. Last year with the high water, I had some drown out which were located close to the swamp, but most of them seem to have recovered nicely this year. The couple of plants on the higher ground are very healthy. I have one sunflower growing, it was a volunteer. So far the deer have not eaten it. I gave up planting sunflowers a couple of years ago because the deer would eat all the leaves off the plant when they were about 2 feet(.6m) high. So far so good, but (mixed metaphor alert) I am not counting any chickens before they are hatched.

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Cheers

On the night of July 11-12 we did get the storms predicted with lots of wind and lightning. Had to shut down systems temporarily. Had a brief power outage, but no damage. Got a little more than 2 in(5 cm) of rain. Tropical weather continues for a while.



It has put me a little behind on the painting project, but I did finish scraping and painting the black part. The black part consists of cedar shakes and it is real putzy work getting the paint in all the spaces between the shakes. If it is nice tomorrow I will tackle the white parts around the black area and maybe get that finished so I can move the scaffolding. I had to get rid of the wasp nests before I could start anything, but I think I got all of the holes foamed shut and most of the wasps killed off. After I move the scaffolding I will have to take out the windows and re-caulk in there before painting. I am no big fan of scraping and painting, but if you have an old house, it is one of those necessities.

I cancelled my Clearwire account today as I now have been up and running on Century Link DSL. No problems for two weeks so I don't need the redundancy any longer. The DSL is quite a bit snappier with 7 Mbits down and 1 Mbit up compared to the 1.5Mbits down and 250kbits up I had before. So far so good.

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Cheers

Ou dear Joe, you did again.

Please, that chimney on left hand side upper corner.
I think (so do not know) that originally there has been that brick construction most visible?
Then there seems to be something that looks like solid metal inter-tube, which I would guess is upgrade with that high tech heating system you mentioned some mails ago?

But really, with your rainfall (2 inch on day) how on earth you do not have indoor pool or anything without pipehat?
Secondly wondering can you keep water out between these two constructions, so that water when it get frozen, does not separate metal pipe from bricks?

Some local stuff, we have this bird called Naakka here, which most joy seems to be place nest to chimney with open view to blue sky.
This bird does not create anything lightly hammerpoofed that could be removed with broomstick or anything, it they get they nest on flue, it is not so rare that it takes mason to open pipe from inside house, to get nest to removed.
But for some reason, these bird will not nest if they cannot see sky, so pipehat will save gallon of napalm

Ah, thank you Joe.

With that metal tube, I was wondering more like are you using same repair method as here, but obviously not.
Here one way to fix old flue is inject metal tube made out of acid-resistant steel, like on pic.
From that pic, is also easy to pick why flues on old houses are called as walls here. They have several fireplaces and every one need own pipe, so flues just become pretty wide even on very small houses.
Actually very nice idea, since those are placed alway on middle of house, and will catch rest of heat escaping fireplace, usyally temperature of escaping gas on end of flue can be low as +100'C (80 °Ré).
So that construction create warm inner walls to house.

About effiency, local ancient stoves have 80% effiency.
They have M-shape innertubing, a.k.a. gases are first lead up, then those are turned back down via outer side canals and exit to wall is on very bottom of stove.
There is some pretty cool looking modern versions available.