Yesterday the directors hosted a potluck in their cabin. I made some rather pathetic potatoes. I tried as hard as I could to get the centers soft, but no matter what I did, they were al dente. Edible, but not the best. Matt (the guy that lived across the hall from me in Chancellors, just graduated, and is here for a month) said that last year they tried potatoes twice and they never worked out. It's the altitude. Bummer. At least they must have tasted alright, or at least people were interested in them. Most of them were gone by the time I took them home, and there's one serving left.
Sonja - and yes, she's German, from Munich - and I went on the quest yesterday for firewood and were successful in finding some pretty damp stuff. The most useful stuff we found was some dead, dry grass. It must have taken us an hour or two last night to get a good fire started, with the help of the wood that's been sitting around for a year which is dry. And then the fire alarm went off because there must have been something blocking the flu, or it wasn't venting properly. So as soon as we got that calmed down, and the fire had totally choked itself out even though the flu was open, I went next door to get Zach to see if he knew any tricks. Zach is a grad student who's been here about five years researching the effects of global warming on plants. He's a nice guy. Anyway, he came over, and said he didn't know much, but he ran back to his house to get a head lamp to check the flu, some newspaper since we didn't have any, and some fire starters. I guess we burned out whatever was in the flu because it started working and he said when he looked over earlier he could see smoke coming out, so it wasn't totally blocked. It took two fire starters to really get it going, but once we did, we went to sleep warm. And the fire alarm went off once more from our attempts to start a semi-wet fire, so that was an adventure.
Sometime in the middle of the night, the fire burned itself out and we woke up cold. But at least the sun is out and the cabin should warm up a little along with the earth, and then we can *hopefully* start another fire tonight. I don't know. I placed some of the wet-ish logs near the stove to see if they'd dry out (a good suggestion from my boyfriend), but they don't look like they budged much because the bark is so corky and damp and full of fungus.
Chris will be here shortly to pick me up. Yesterday he showed me around the lab and took me to Judd Falls and back. Today he's going to show me some research methods and see if we can't figure out how we're going to approach the question. I'll update again eventually. Take it easy, all.
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When you build a fire, you should collect enough for 2, and keep the 2nd fire's logs near the lit fire to dry them out some. Then next time you light a fire, you can just go get logs for the next day and dry those out with the first from the logs dried out the day before.
ReplyDeleteIf you can get atleast the outside of them dryish, the inside will dry fast enough once they're on fire....