Yearly Archives: 2012

Building a Makeshift Treadmill Desk

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Fitness
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In what I hope will be a regular feature, here’s the first in a series of interviews of other homesteaders about interesting low tech home tech projects they’ve taken on. In this interview we talk to writer and homesteader Charlotte McGuinn Freeman about her DIY treadmill desk–a project I’m considering at the Root Simple compound. Charlotte blogs at LivingSmall.com and lives in Livingston, Montana.

Why did you build a treadmill desk?

Because as I entered my late 40s, after working a steady day job for 10 years, I was gaining weight and having trouble getting it off. Also, was having incipient carpal tunnel issues which I thought standing might help (it did). Oh — and my dogs got too old and arthritic to walk twice a day — that was probably as much a precipitating event as anything — I’d been walking 3-5 miles a day with them, but it was no fun walking around town or out in the mountains without them. So, the treadmill desk solved a couple of problems — I could fit exercise in around my day job and during the winters, which typically blow 30-50 mph. I’d gotten lazy about going out for a walk. I hate gyms, walking has always been my exercise of choice, and usually marks the transition between my work day and my writing day . . . so, the treadmill desk has become quite useful for that. I’ll usually surf, answer emails, post a blog or do some other sort of light writing/reading while I’m on it.

You put the desk together in 2010. How has it worked for you since?

It’s worked out great — I’ve found I don’t use it while working as much as I now use it as a sort of ordinary treadmill with a nice desktop for my laptop — I surf, watch movies, get a workout. I’ve gone to a standing desk for my corporate day job computer though, and I like the combo a lot. It’s cleared up the issues I was having with my wrists and shoulders falling asleep, and I’ve dropped and kept off some weight. I’m glad I bought a used one, it wasn’t expensive and it works well enough for me.

Is it hard to type and walk at the same time?

If you run the treadmill slowly it’s not a problem at all. I’ll use the treadmill desk for work when I have an extensive publishing issue — publishing for my corporate job is largely a matter of keeping track of a lot of variables and clicking through a lot of screens. The treadmill desk works great for that. It’s a little noisy though, so I can’t really use it while on web meetings.

Do you have any suggestions? Anything you would do differently?

I like it a lot — in combination with going to a standing desk, I feel much better, and I can feel when hiking with my partner that my stamina is much better (hiking with Himself usually involves walking straight up some local ridge, off trail, for a couple of hours before wandering around on the way down searching for mushrooms or shed antlers). It’s convenient and since I hate gyms, it means I actually get some exercise on a regular basis.

Are you using it to type this?

Yes, although I’m standing on the side rails …

Say something about your blog/homestead/books . . .

I’m the author of the novel Place Last Seen (Picador USA, 2000), and have been blogging at Livingsmallblog.com since 2002. I’ve written for Culinate.com, Ethicurean.com and have a cookbook review column at Bookslut.com. I’ve been published in the Best Food Writing of 2010, and am currently working on a book proposal for a nonfiction book about finding and building a home saw me through and got me past some devastating personal losses.

Here’s Livingsmallblog.com’s first treadmill desk post. And an update here.

Thanks Christine! If you have a project you’d like to share in an interview, drop us a line at [email protected].

Hoshigaki Success!

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Food, Food Preservation, How-to
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I’d estimate that one out of ten new homesteading projects succeeds. Which is why I’m especially happy that the long process of drying persimmons the Japanese way (hoshigaki) has been a big success. The white powder that looks like mold is sugar in the fruit that has risen to the surface. The result is, incidentally, very different from drying persimmons in a dehydrator (which also tastes good but has a much firmer texture–hoshigaki has the texture of a gummy bear).

It took about a month. One observation is that the persimmons that got the most sun also developed the most “frosting”.

Hoshigaki sells for upwards of $35 a pound–I just saw some at a Japanese market and they did not look as good as the ones I made. This is definitely a project I’ll be repeating next year. They would make a great gift along with some green tea.

You can read our blog post on how to make Japanese dried persimmons (hoshigaki) here.

Note from Kelly:

I thought we should say something about flavor here. They are not as sweet as I thought they might be. Which is not to say they’re not sweet, they’re just not super-sweet. They have a sort of meaty richness to them–in a strange way, they remind me a little of Fig Newtons, minus that seedy texture. The sugar dusting (sucrose powder?) is very delicate and a bit floral. I can only taste it if I touch my tongue to it.

These are traditionally served with green tea, and I have to say that tradition nailed it–that’s a perfect combo of flavors. Other than eating them ceremonially with tea, they are a very nice dried fruit and can be used any way you usually use dried fruit.

Garden Amendments as Placebos

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Gardening, Soil, Thoughtstylings
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I just finished writing an article for Urban Farm Magazine on the subject of aerated compost tea (ACT for short). It proved to be one of the most contentious subjects on which I’ve ever tried to, as Mark Twain liked to say, “corral the truth.”

It got me thinking about other controversial soil additives popular in organic gardening and farming circles right now such as rock dust, mycorrhizae additives, and biochar.

Now I prefer not to touch these topics with a hundred foot pole. But let me go out on a limb with a thoughtstyling outside of the usual debate about the benefits or worthlessness of these soil potions. I’ve started wondering if the strong anecdotal evidence supporting things like ACT, biochar etc., might indicate a kind of ecological placebo effect at work.

Note: I’m not saying that placebos have no value or that, “It’s all in your head.” Quite to the contrary: the placebo effect is powerful and causes real changes in the physical world. Even hardcore skeptics agree with me on this (note also the downside to placebos in that article). As the fifteenth century alchemist Paracelsus said, “You must know that the will is a powerful adjuvant of medicine.”

So could working with these soil additives be a way of focusing human will, of changing human consciousness towards the goal of healing the damage to nature that we’ve caused? And what about biodynamics? I suspect a consciousnesses shift within human hearts and minds is what Rudolf Steiner was really trying to do with his, admittedly bizarre, preparations.

On the opposite, non-interventionist side of the gardening spectrum, I’ve been re-reading Masanobu Fukuoka’s books. Fukuoka advocates a radical, almost (but not entirely) hands-off approach to natural systems. Paradoxically, Fukuoka was striving for the very same shift in consciousnesses, though by entirely different (Eastern) means. As he put it, “The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.”

I think we would do well to spend more time investigating the intersection of human consciousness and ecology in the years ahead. Our survival may depend on it.

Now, as Marshall McLuhan was fond of saying, “If you don’t like that idea, I’ve got others.” So let me know what you think in the comments . . .

Using a Whirley-Pop to Roast Coffee

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Food, Mistakes
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Maybe not such a good idea to use an electric popcorn popper . . .

One of the perils of creating how-to books and blog posts is when one of your bits of advice blows up in your face after writing about it. Such is the case with my suggestion of roasting coffee in a hot air popcorn popper. Yesterday, my West Bend Air Crazy popcorn popper made good on the crazy in its name, started smoking and stopped working in the midst of coffee roasting.

In my guilt ridden imagination I can already see dolphins choking on the remains of my now useless West Bend Air Crazy. I can also imagine the letter from the West Bend legal team reminding me that I was using the air popper for something it was never designed to do. And then there’s the ire of West Bend’s Chinese factory workers cursing my privileged lifestyle. But worst of all is the wailing of wives and husbands angry that their partners had been suckered into the idea of roasting coffee at home with an air popper on the advice of some dumb blogger.

Let me make amends. My coffee geek friends use a manual, hand cranked stove top popcorn popper called the Whirley-Pop. Here’s why:

  • You can roast a much bigger batch.
  • You have more control over the roasting process (by regulating the heat on the stove).
  • No electronic parts, thus nothing to break down.
  • You can roast over a fire if your utilities go out. Having caffeine (if you’re the addicted sort) during a hurricane/earthquake/Mayan apocalypse is really important.
  • Root Simple is supposedly about “Low Tech Home Tech.” There ain’t nothing low tech about a plastic hot air popper.

There are a few disadvantages to the Whirley-Pop:

  • Not plug and play. You have to stand over the stove, regulate the heat and turn the crank.
  • Smoke can set off fire alarms–harder to take outside than the air popper.

My air popper might have lasted longer had I roasted coffee in it without the top on as one reader suggested. I could also have just ended up with a bad popper. Apologies to anyone who rushed out to get an air popper. Maybe it will work better than mine did.

At least with our high tech blog I can correct mistakes. It would be harder if Root Simple was a mimeographed newsletter–the Whirley-Pop of information delivery methods. But we’ll see what format the blog is in after this week’s Mayan apocalypse . . .

Picture Sundays: A Native Bee Hotel

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Animals, Bees, Picture Sundays
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Don’t know much about this native bee house other than that it’s near Paris.

For more info on native bee habitats, see our post from earlier this year.

Update: reader Drew left a comment to say that this habitat is in the Jardin des Plantas in Paris which is attached to the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle (http://www.mnhn.fr/le-museum/).

Thanks to David Dalzel for the tip.