Solar Work

December 13, 2022 2:41 pm

Pasquale wanted to add a new set of batteries to his solar setup. The higher capacity of the new batteries will allow him to utilise an unused solar panel array which was previously not necessary.

 

Pasquale has two sets of solar panels outside his workshop/garage, one set of ten panels were unused. He design and built the solar panel supports and frames. They allow the panels to be tilted and rotated for the sun. However, since he has never moved them the next frame he build will be fixed in direction (South) and the angle will be set at 20 degrees.

After the new batteries had been charging for a while with one set of panels they were charging at a rate of 25 Amps. The new panels were added in parallel to the original ones, giving twice the current at the same voltage. Look at the solar panel info under “M2” in the control panels below. The “M1” slot can be used for yet more panels.

Now Pasquale wants to add an entirely new set of solar panels that have just arrived. They are a massive 470 Watts each and measure over six feet in length. Pasquale has started welding together a frame for them and we will be installing them in the next few days.

 

New panels awaiting installation

 

About the stroke & its effects:Technical Details

August 31, 2021 2:02 pm

This is a draft that Ruth had not published, she intended to but did not get to do so.

On four-twenty 2017, I was taking a walk in a park with a friend. We were whining mightily about Trump [I blame him for all of this and for everything else, too] when suddenly I started slurring my words very badly. Then I collapsed onto the dirt trail. Millions? billions? of neurons in my brain were dying at that moment.

I awoke in the ER with doctors hovering over me asking me ad nauseum to perform tests like counting and asking if I felt a doc’s pokes all over with a cold pointy metal instrument, I did. I think I transitioned right there from always feeling too hot all the time feeling too cold.

Later, I read in my med recs that the doc pinched my left leg and I reacted but I didn’t react when he pinched my left arm. I am hemiplegic[half the body paralyzed] on my left side. I can “walk” now with a quad cane but it’s going to take a long time before I have a normal gait.I’m going to do it tho, I have to get back on hiking trails, my passion. My left arm and hand remain paralyzed, but I’m still working on them.

I had an ischemic stroke[resulting from a blood clot in the brain starving neurons of oxygen]  I had a blood clot in my middle cerebral artery][ischemic versus hemorrhagic stroke which result from a bleed in the brain, like,e. g. a burst aneurysm ], unleashing a blood flood drowning neurons but  in mycase the doctors couldn’t find the clot on my MRI or CAT scan, so they decided not to give me the miracle drug, tPA, which is a powerful clot buster and rescues all those dying neurons

That was because a small bleed showed up on the MRI where I have a brain anomaly called a cavernous malformation which is basically a cluster of veins. It is susceptible to bleeding. The doctors worried that the drug might cause another much more serious bleed there.

OK, Fair enough. tPA is a powerful blood thinner. I keep wondering tho what I’d be like now if I’d had the drug. The one benefit of the stroke was the gratitude I felt for and joy I felt from all my fantastic friends, feeling the love pour into me. I was in the ICU about two weeks then transferred to the IRU [In-patient Rehabilitation Unit] where I stayed a month and had the best therapists I’ve had on this recovery journey, my PT Physical Therapist[responsible for the leg and foot] had me up and walking right away, Even now I can hardly believe that. I felt my left leg was paralyzed. I couldn’t move it at all or wiggle my toes. I had 3 hrs of therapy a day there 5 days a week.

The first sign that my leg would recover is that after hours of trying, I managed to lift my left foot very slightly off the bed. Such euphoria!

Kevin hacked my room’s TV and put ROKU on it. At first, I thought great, I’ll catch up on House of Cards but I couldn’t understand it so I gave up on that. I think one of the cruelest parts of the stroke was how it affected my mind at first. Everything was unclear and confusing, loud sounds were unbearable. Life was like looking out a filthy windshield and trying to drive. Horrible.

And, of course, I was terrified at the dawning realization that I had completely lost the use of my left hand and arm, and had serious problems affecting the use of my leg, thus seriously affecting almost all the activities that make me me, first and foremost hiking, working on and  making my house and garden beautiful, and having dinner parties. I could no longer do English cryptic crossword puzzles. Which pre-stroke, I was doing on a daily basis. So frustrating. I couldn’t do my multiplication tables or remember my address or phone number. It was horrid and depressing and scary as hell.

My speech wasn’t badly affected, thank you stroke deities in the ether. I can’t imagine what it would be like not to be able to communicate. A lot of stroke victims forget how to talk or everything they say comes out as mush, this is called aphasia. Apparently, friends had massive difficulty understanding me at first and I had an hour a day of speech therapy MtF. I couldn’t even hold my head up off the pillow.

I also had OT 5 times a week, Occupational Therapy, daily living skills, like dressing and showering, cooking and cleaning. I’ve learned how to put on my bra with only one hand! it involves the use of an essential tool, a plastic closure clip for say a bag of potato chips. OTs also focuses on rehabilitation of the arm and hand.

Another problem I had was that I couldn’t swallow food or liquids, at all, I had minor surgery for the installation of a feeding tube. The wretched experience of “eating” this way led me later when I got home to get a Physician’s Order ( A  POLST), an order for paramedics that if I’m unable to eat or breathe, I cannot be intubated for any reason. Not another tube pour moi, if I am dropping the body, let it drop. I do not want to go thru that again. I’m so grateful Kevin understands this and concurs.

My beloved son, Jake, and daughter-in-law, Logan, were living in Antigua, Guatemala, where Kevin and I had been visiting them just 3 days before the stroke. Jake and Logan decided to move back to the Monterey area where Kevin and I are so fortunate to live. Jake grew up in Carmel Valley. He got a very good job in nearby Aptos where he and Logan found their first home to buy.

Welcome to the world of mortgages and the Joys of Home Ownership!!! It’s a lovely little house in a mountainous Redwood area of Aptos. Jake and Logan drove from Antigua to Maine, with their one-eyed rescued kitty, Meowsers.

Then they drove from Sag Harbor, New York with kitty in tow again to Monterey. Ever the great raconteur, Jake keeps us laughing with all his stories, what great material he’s amassed from these international road trips, a lot of customs, animals, bizarre experiences.

Later.

BTW don’t credit me for saying I was stroked. I got that from Ram Dass in the wonderful film “Fierce Grace” in which he describes what it was and is like to have been stroked.

Le Champ en juillet, 2010

August 2, 2010 1:46 pm

Alain left for a week of vacation and Anna told me that her much younger friend Ferdinand – he’s 80 –  was going to take her to the field. When I finally figured out that he was only dropping her off to work all alone, I decided to drag my sorry ass out of bed early (6:00 a.m.) and go pick her up myself and work with her. Kevin was gone for the entire month, so it would be just us two gals. It was so much fun! I got to her house around 6:15 and first we had a big breakfast of tartines (bread and jam) et beaucoup de café. Then we hopped in their camionette – which I got to drive – and headed off to le champ.

P1050146As soon as we arrived, she started giving me orders, and I followed them. I was, in effect, her slave. She was like a general commanding an army: she surveils the field,  sees what needs to be done, and she just gets to it. As she says, “Le travail est le travail.”

Our first day together began with irrigation. They have an ever-changing web of plastic pipes that connect to a big water pump. You can connect, disconnect, and reconnect the pipes, to direct them into to troughs they’ve dug that parallel the long rows of plants. The water shoots out the pipe and flows alongside the row. You can regulate how far the water goes by damming the trough with a couple shovel-fulls of dirt, or releasing a previous dam.P1050151

If she doesn’t have a sure-fire way of doing something, she improvises.  Anna wanted to irrigate four rows of sunflowers from the top of the rows all at once, but it was set up to irrigate one row at a time. She instructed me to connect what she called “a peasant’s pipe” – a soft rubber tube – to the hard plastic tube. Then she had me cut four holes out of the soft tube as it ran along the top of the rows, et voila! The new system worked perfectly. She cried out, “C’est mon chef-d’oeuvre!” (my masterpiece). I have never seen her so happy as she was that day in the field.

And I was pretty heureuse myself because my next “task” was to pick raspberries. A lot of them didn’t make it to the basket. J’adore les framboises!

Le Champ en Juin 2010

1:44 pm

Kevin and I popped down to the field aprés un petite absence and were startled to see how high les tournesols had grown. It seems like we had just planted them, but that was back en avril. Mon dieu! Growing in between les tournesols are courgettes – zucchinis to my American friends. Anna cut me a bouquet and also threw in a little branch of some delicious berries. I don’t know what they are and will have to faire un peu de recherche sur l’internet. Meanwhile, des photos – Les tournesols en juin 2010 From le jardin

Short Trip to Sardinia

May 23, 2010 4:59 pm

Near DorgaliLast week Kevin and I took advantage of a cheap fare from Marseille to Sardinia, and spent 5 days touring the island. In preparation for the trip, I looked up Sardinia on-line and came across this little bit of folklore: Sardinian Legend has it that after completing Her creation of the World [a little editing par moi], God dropped some leftover rocks into the Mediterranean. Then She looked over what She had already created, removed a little of the best from each place, and sprinkled it liberally over one of those dropped rocks which, of course, became the island of Sardinia. It is really really rocky there – a lot like the south of France – and the rock is beautiful, especially set against lots of pines and ink blue or turquoise water. See some of our photos here.P1040724

One of the highlights for us was a hike up to a huge cave – Tiscali – a place high up in a limestone mountain range where one of the mountaintops caved in forming a huge hole protected from the elements. Ancient peoples – the Nuragic – settled in the cave to hide from foreign invaders around 1500 B.C., and the remains of their stone structures are still visible. I had found a website for a hiking cooperative – www.ghivane.com – located in Dorgali (near the east coast) who arranged the hike. They lead lots of different tours to incredible beaches, caves accessible only by boat, and remote mountain hikes,  and going with them turned out to be a great thing to do. Our guide, Geon Paulo, explained lots about the trees and flowers, as well as the anthropology of the area, and fed us a great picnic of Sardinia cheeses, sausages, breads, and red wine. (BTW, the photo at right shows a little “window” that was created by a falling rock, not the top of the mountaintop that fell in. You can see remnants of the house people made in the rock in the photo.)

Lloc d'Or, B&B in AlgheroThen we moved on to the walled-city of Alghero where we stayed in a lovely B & B, its plain exterior concealing a little urban paradise. It’s run by an extremely genial couple, Gemma and Giovanni, who appear just to want to sit down with you and chat – all the while pouring local wine, setting out little gourmet treats, and telling us about their favorite restaurants and sights. (They can be found at www.llocdor.com At 50€ a night, the Lloc D’Or was definitely a Bonne Adresse.) One place they told us to visit was Neptune’s Grotto, a beautiful cave along the coast where you have to walk down 600 steps just to get to its mouth.Neptune's Grotto

Sardinian food was fabulous and very reasonable, especially compared to mainland Europe prices; the scenery was rugged but beautiful and filled with wildflowers this time of year; and where we were was authentic and unspoiled by tourism. Plus, you get to hear people chattering away in Italian! Dr. Ruth highly recommends.

Ruth

The Field in May, 2010 – Les Premières Fraises

May 2, 2010 9:21 pm

Alain called us yesterday to say he had a barquette of strawberries for us – the first of the season. I took a picture of what was left of them after breakfast today.First Fraises, 1 mai 2010

My son, Jake, gave me a book for Christmas last year – Bringing It to the Table, a compilation of essays by Wendall Berry. Berry has been writing fiction, poetry, and essays – as well as farming a hillside in his native Kentucky with his wife – for over forty years. I had never read his work before, but his ideas about food, its production, and its consumption seem to encapsulate everything I’ve been thinking and learning about food, especially since moving to France nearly five years ago. As I ate the delicious utterly fresh little strawberries this morning in a dish of yoghurt that Kevin had made, I thought of these words by Berry, “A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one’s accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes.”

Extolling the Virtues of the DandelionIt is so true. With each bite of these strawberries, we are fully conscious that they were planted by Anna and Alain in their nearby field, were grown with no pesticides, and that we even had the chance to help them along ourselves by weeding and cleaning up the row of little plants. And that consciousness has definitely deepened our appreciation, enjoyment, and confidence in this bounty.

Ruth

The Field in April, 2010

April 25, 2010 6:31 pm

Planting TournesolsMy plan is to document a year’s cultivation of Anna’s Field, starting with our participation this year in March, and continuing on through the year. As is obvious, I suppose, every time we visit the field the changes are many and obvious. Last Friday and Saturday (23 et 24 avril), Kevin and I planted twelve rows of tournesols – sunflowers – with Alain, while Anna stayed at home and prepared lunch feasts for us hungry field workers. I don’t know the actual length of the rows but they felt really long as we were planting them. A field full of tournesols is one of the many symbols of life in Provence and to actually participate in its life cycle is a such a joy. I can’t resist showing a photo of the pinnacle of that cycle from last year’s crop.Tournesol Juin 2009

There are vast stretches of the field still to be planted, but already various fruits and vegetables are well on their way. Alain showed us different varieties of potatoes, fava beans, peas, artichokes, strawberries, raspberries, kiwis, pears, borage – with beautiful blue flowers which Anna’s bees love. Herewith some photos. Boys and Borage and Bees

Ruth

Les Calanques

April 16, 2010 5:09 pm

Les Calanques“A calanque (from the Corsican word of preindoeuropean origin calanca (plural calanche) meaning ‘inlet’) is a geologic formation in the form of a deep valley with steep sides, typically of limestone, in part submerged by the sea. It can be considered a Mediterranean fjord … The best known examples of this formation can be found in the Massif des Calanques in the Bouche de Rhone département of France.”  Woohoo! The “Mouth of the Rhone” is the department we just happen to live in!

KevinWe went to Les Calanques a week ago today, and it is the perfect time of year to visit there – before the tourist mobs and the too-hot-for-hiking weather arrive. Last Friday was a magnificent Spring day – warm but not too warm, with a lovely breeze, clear blue skies, and wild flowers blooming wherever they could grab hold. You can think of Les Calanques as fingers outstretched from the “palm” of the mainland between Marseille and Cassis. When I was standing on one finger, I couldn’t wait to get to the next, but the hiking wasn’t easy. The entire area is extremely rocky, and you have to climb up then down each Calanque to reach the next. The views make the hiking easier, though, with the rock and the pines and, when you add the clear ink blue and turquoise water into your viewscape, well, it’s just one of the most beautiful places in the world. Plus, the hiking and rock climbing opportunities are boundless. We hiked there with our friends, Larry (American) and Martine (French), their niece Iris (French), and Karil (American). We picnicked at a refuge we reached on one of Les Calanques, and Larry told us that he had stayed there for a month in 1967. He had to hike out to Cassis once a week to get food and drinking water, and to shower in a local hotel, and during the days he would free climb the sheer rock cliffs. This, he said, was before it – and Cassis – became hot tourist spots. It must’ve been so wonderful back then, because it’s still pretty sweet now. (More photos here.)Les Calanques

Ruth

Spring’s Sprung, the Grass is Rizz …

April 15, 2010 3:01 pm

… I wonder where dem boidies is. Dem boids is on dem wings. Ain’t that absoid? Dem wings is on dem boids!  (Alas, just missed The Beat Generation.)

Anna's Field 27 mars 2010I’m a little slow, comme d’hab, with keeping up with the blog, but here goes. We went to work in Anna’s field – for the first time this year – on March 27th. I wanted to record a photo of the field with the date, to keep track of its changes over the growing season. We met Alain in the field – while Anna stayed at home and prepared a big lunch for her hungry laborers (Kevin, Alain, and me) – and we weeded and generally cleaned up a big long row of strawberries (fraises). After a long cold wet winter, it was nice to get back outside and, especially, on to the farm. Extolling the Virtues of the Dandelion

Ruth

Avignon in Winter

March 7, 2010 7:02 pm

Avignon AngelAs I type this post, it is snowing furiously outside and I can see gusts of giant snowflakes blowing past the window. It has been such a cold winter and this is already the third time it has snowed here this year. While we were in San Francisco for our second annual end of December to end of January visit, there was a big snowstorm in this area that left deep snow on the ground for days – very rare for Provence. My wonderful student Alex Niot gave me a memory stick full of gorgeous photos he took while wandering around Avignon after that storm. With his kind permission, I’ve created an album of them here.

Palais des PapesBeautiful as the snow is, the effects of the January storm have been disastrous to the trees in our region. The pines and olive trees are used to being pummeled by the Mistral, but not used to heaps of wet heavy snow weighing them down. When we came home from the States, we were so shocked and saddened to see how many trees either had huge branches broken off or were completely uprooted by the snow. Wood-cutting crews are still working to clean up the damage after more than a month. I’m hoping today’s snow is gone by tomorrow morning without any more loss of trees.

The sights of Avignon in the snow are lovely and show the beauty of this exquisite city in views most tourists never see. Thank you so much, Alex, for sharing them.

Ruth