KW-49 A light dusting of snow

And the first test of the progress of the loft.

It’s the first week of December, and the thermometers have been showing minus signs all week. Much of Central Europe saw its first snow of the year, and the barracks joined in, with the first icy white dusting. It’s beautiful, and it’s time to test the weather proofing in the loft.

it’s nice and all that, but it’s been overcast all week. When the snow falls and the skies go blue, The Barracks is at its most beautiful. Sooooon

Every year, I’ve done something to improve the separation between the inside and outside worlds. This year, the back wall, underneath the glass facade, has been adorned with three layers of expanded polystyrene, glass fibre and a wooden cladding. It looks great and it should stop quite a lot of heat from exiting the building that way, and hopefully doing something about the terrible floor-level draughts that make doing yoga so painful in the winter.

In the study, I’m doing the same, but the actual wood panelling needs replacing as well, making a far more interesting proposition.

I have replaced two of the panels here. Can you spot which ones?

Anyone who has spent any time at The Barracks will for certain tell you about the quietude of the place. Well, when the snow lays round about, the stillness, the calm and the absolute silence take on a whole new characteristic. It’s good for contemplation.

And, I can report, as with every year, it is considerably more pleasant in the loft than it was last year.

more snow

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Last week in this very newsletter, I asked if anyone was interested in doing some home-office-volunteer work for the barracks. I spent this week meeting people who said that they would. I think we have the makings of a nice little team going. I’ll hopefully be able to tell you more about it next week, and if you wanted to donate an hour or two to the mission weekly, and I didn’t get in touch with you, please drop me a quick reminder on any of the socials (thepirateben on all of them) or to info@thebarracks.de. It’s very possible that I missed someone. Sorry if that was you!

I spent a lot of this week watching videos on people thinking about climate change. Many of them are very interesting, some of them are dangerous. I was planning on having a go at one of them who I picked out as a particularly weird individual, but I don’t even have the energy for that. So, in better news, I did come across a website called Water Bear. They host climate-skewed documentaries for free streaming. I believe it’s quite new, and it has a couple of teething problems, lots of 404, page not found errors, but I’m sure that they will get that sorted, and there is plenty of interesting stuff on there.

you might not be able to see it here, but I think this was one of the mealtimes when the piggies got potatoes.

I was going to tell you about the fun of having to move the wood-burning stove in the kitchen, but I think I mentioned it last week. Fair to say, I moved it. It was a considerable job, and now it is in a far more physics-approved spot, it works like a dream. It catches immediately, gets really hot, and I’m just delighted to be cooking three or four things at a time, I have hot water whenever I need it, and I can finally cook potatoes for the pigs. They’ve had them twice already this week.

So, I shall bunker down a bit for the winter. This week, I am going to see how much wood I can bring inside. Now that I have got temperatures in here up at around 15 degrees, but most importantly, the humidity down to about 50%, it will do the last bit of drying spectacularly quickly. And it looks nice when it’s all piled up.

Until then, be excellent to each other

Your

Pirate Ben

xoxo

simultaneous cooking of potatoes, cabbage, water, something else in a pot I do not recall now AND the drying of shoes.

"Love is at the root of everything: all learning, all relationships. Love or the lack of it." Mister Fred Rogers

https://www.waterbear.com/