Dry Rot

I was called out to one of my job sites a couple days ago because one of the beams we were strengthening had some dry rot. It turned out to be some of the most extensive dry rot that I've seen in a structural beam. You can see in the picture where they carved all of it out for a length of over three feet and then halfway down the depth of a 6x12 beam. The beam had a span of nearly twenty feet and had deflected over three inches. It probably wouldn't have been much longer before the beam failed completely. Luckily they were doing some work for something else and discovered this.

It's not obvious from the name, but dry rot is the result of the intrusion of water. You can see in the photo the culprit that allowed the water in. The steel angle was used as a brace for some reason and was attached to the beam. This allowed the water to channel straight down through the roofing material and into the beam. The steel angle had also been eaten through completely. In this case, water=very bad.

Jamming

Last Tuesday I had my first experience of making jam. We have a couple apricot trees in our backyard and they produced a ton of apricots this year. Vero and our friend, Joy, had made strawberry jam a couple weeks ago so they knew what they were doing. Joy had also ordered a jamming kit, which had all the items necessary for making your own jam. So we spent the whole evening boiling apricots and putting them in jars. It was a lot of fun and the jam turned out great.


Joy and Vero enjoying the process.


Vero tending the apricots.


Our bounty. I think we ended up with fifteen pint jars and twelve half pints!

Dream Car

Have I mentioned what my ideal car would be? I want a plug-in, diesel, all-wheel drive hybrid with solar panels on top. I'm sitting here looking out the window at my car just sitting there in the sun doing absolutely nothing. Instead, it could be charging itself until I need it this afternoon. I bring this up because I just saw an article about a Toyota Prius converted to a plug-in hybrid with solar panels on top. The technology exists; they just need to combine it all into one multi-purpose package. Imagine the next generation of cars getting 100+ miles per gallon.