underground lair

UNDERGROUND LAIR
Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon graphics above and to the right of each article. Or, visit
http://bisonpress.com/affiliatebooks.html
You can purchase anything, not just the linked item. Enter Amazon through my item link and then go to whatever other item you desire. As long as you don’t leave Amazon until after the order is placed, I get credit for your purchase. Thank you.
*
A guest article posted earlier.  Scroll down.
*
Usually on Saturday I get up, have two to four cups of coffee, go out to dig on the New And Improved Bison Secret Underground Lair and while doing that I conceive of the next great article. After digging, I actually have generated enough blood flow to my brain that I can sit at the keyboard and vomit up some kind of half decent drivel. Well, here at the Future Bisonia World Headquarters ( known to you foreigners and future enemies as Elko ), we are back to our normal Winter Starting In October ( and, as you might be able to tell, our writing is back to its normal Everything Slightly New Or Interesting Is Capitalized To Underline How Profound It Is ) after taking last year off to actually include a friggin Fall in there somewhere ( as a lifetime resident of the Great Cold Scrubland has been known to observe, Elko has two seasons- Fire and Christmas ). Our lows in the teens started in October and yesterday we had the delightful surprise of warming up to a low of 15. Then, the day got up to a toasty 40 as a high. But without a lick of sunshine. Needless to say, the wife was about as far from happy as you can get. We rely on the sun for our morning and if possible early afternoon heat, before we turn on the heater in the afternoon.

*

When I got home yesterday ( I had a whopping three hours off from work for the holiday, the loads of donations were so numerous- I come in for pick-ups at the regular time then get to leave on completion for a holiday ), I was told in no uncertain terms that we needed to move underground, NOW. Wife was pissed, cold, grouchy and she shared in a spirit of generosity. So the underground lair was at the top of my “to ponder” list. And this morning on Saturday we talked about the lair over coffee. So that is all that occupied my brain for the morning. Nothing profound about European bankers meltdown, no insights on future bad behavior. No rude comments about other bloggers or other genders or age groups. Just the Future Bison Home. This is what you get to hear about today. Congratulations. Okay, my new pit I was digging is about fifteen feet away from the trailer towards one corner of the acre. It was ten by twenty and was going to be ten foot deep. So far, since the beginning of July, I’ve dug ten by ten down to four feet, and the other half is about two or three feet deep in different sections. I also dug out a ramp from the pit to use for my wheelbarrow ( the one that cost me $80 in car rental to buy the $40 tool- but remember, we also did #4’s birthday celebration then, so the car rental was a two-fer ). The digging has only slowed down because it is now dark when I get home. With the wheelbarrow I can dig twice as fast ( as opposed to the old “moving dirt two or three times one shovelful at a time” ), but with the decreased daylight my productivity is still down a bit.

*

We have decided to abandon this hole. It didn’t go to waste, as it will be a project I resume some time in the future. It can become a home office ( bookshelves, plus solar panels dedicated just to computer use ), or a underground workshop ( to perhaps once again take up on the bicycle self repair ), or even as a buried fuel depot. I was thinking that perhaps I could buy a few pallets of bagged wood pellets for a back-up heating and cooking fuel and use them in a rocket stove. Once they ran out I could go to scrub brush fuel in the same stove ( which would only cost a few masonry bricks and some mortar and a length of PVC pipe for an oxygen intake- once I go to scrub I can hook up a real chimney ). I could even turn it into a guest house if I get really fancy. After next summer, if the world hasn’t ended, I’ll have cash for these kinds of non-essential but nice projects. I doubt it will happen, but who knows. Anyway, we are definitely going underground still, preferably before next summer, but we’ve changed focus. Instead of having a separate structure we are going to build an add on to the trailer.

*

The old plan was for a six by sixteen cabin or a trailer, either buried in the pit. The new plan is for a underground eight by eight which is connected to the trailer door by a hallway and a enclosed porch. The hallway will basically be a descending staircase, the enclosed porch an eight by eight. Because I really hate bugs, I’ll have to have the hallway completely walled in with plywood. I don’t want to be going down an arachnid attack nightmare several times a day. The underground room will serve as a bedroom with a Hide-A-Bed and everything else will be in miniature. A small stall for bathing, a fold down counter to lay over the sink, etc. This space is not something you want to be stuck in for days at a time, but at will you can climb up and into the trailer ( without exposing yourself to outside eyes or the elements ) and have space to move and windows to look out of. But if there is no sun and the outside high is in the teens ( not an uncommon occurrence here in the winter ) you can stay down in the underground room as long as you like. I think this will give us the best of both worlds. Windows, constant underground temperature stability, no cabin fever.

*

This plan involves no extra digging. It would be about the same either way. My cost, even with the aboveground enclosed porch, will still be lower or the same ( of course, there goes my property tax upwards, but still nothing compared to how expensive propane is going to get real soon ). As an added bonus, my digging is going to utilize the old “earth pipe tube” trench. I get about thirty feet of free digging to four foot deep. Lifting out the still loose dirt from the old trench is a lot easier than picking the hard dirt. This gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling because now I don’t have to write off that digging project as a total waste. I can get about five percent free digging, and I can reuse the pipe for air intake and electrical wiring/TV cable use ( I trash picked a few hundred feet of cable wire from the dumpster last week, so I can use the existing trailer TV antenna ). All in all, another damn fine plan from a truly wonderful mind.

END

The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
*
My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
*
Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
*
By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.