Two weeks ago I found something absolutely amazing at a yard sale a half block away. A very nice lady was selling her old gas range, because she had just remodeled her kitchen.

It's a 1950s era stove, with a big steel griddle in the middle. It's been recently inspected, gas-wise, but needs some electrical work to be fully up and functional. As it stands though, you could hook it up to a gas line and it would work.

Yesterday we installed a pretty thorough drip irrigation system in both the front and back yards.

The front yard has about 40 feet of soaker hose covering the flowers outside the fence (finally, watering those was quite a chore) and a dripper doohicky for each of the 10 three sisters mounds. The back yard, with its 60 feet of corn rows just has a soaker hose down the top of each row.

Watering is a lot easier now, and I this should also help with weeds because we won't have as much excess water all over the place.

Over the weekend I also got some seedlings started indoors. Rather than going out and buying a bunch of those recycled paper pulp mini seedling pots I decided to make my own. Not only are the store-bought ones kind of expensive for what they are - I've never had much luck with them. The roots grow out of them slightly, but they don't come apart well if you try to plant the seedlings in the pots, but the roots grow into the sides enough that you hurt them trying to peel the pot off. It's a mess I didn't care to repeat this year.

Here's the first look at that bike I've been going on about for a while now. It's powered by a Grubee Skyhawk 2-stroke engine. This one should produce a little over 2HP, and once the break in period is though could theoretically get me up to 30-odd miles per hour.

Over the last several months our house has been a hotbed of countercultural lifestyle ideas. We've been all over the map trying to break out of the mold and plan something for our future that is just for us, and not driven by any cultural expectations of what a pair of 20-somethings in love are supposed to do.

I added a section to our fire pit that's specially designed just for grilling. Instead of rock, it's made of bricks so it can have a nice level top, just the right size to hold a grill. It's also shallower than the main fire pit, to get the grill closer to the coals.

It's really nice because now we'll be able to have a proper fire you can see by and stay warm next to, but also have good smoldering coals for grilling over. You just shovel back and forth between them as need be. That's why I keep a flat shovel next to the fire pit.

In my latest DIY project, I've set out to build one of those fancy overhead kitchen racks you see in high-end kitchens. Except this one needs to fit in my tiny little rental kitchen, and do as little damage to the ceiling as possible.

Now it's about impossible to hang something this size from a ceiling without doing some damage, but I think my choice of 1/4" screw in hooks was a good choice.

Last weekend I finally got to work on fixing my gas bike, the Gila Monster's, intake manifold problems. The original kit's intake manifold was at an angle that led to a severely tilted carburetor because of the shape of the frame.

Being tilted about 15 degrees made the whole thing really prone to flooding, especially when going downhill.

I built a custom manifold out of some 45 degree copper elbows and sealed them together with JB Weld.

Today I started putting together some ideas I've been working on. I'm trying to take all the ideas and notions I've developed about how I'd like to build an earthbag house and start fitting them into a realistic plan.

The linchpin of my house idea is the way it is broken into two levels, one on top of a hill and one on the north side. Doing this allows the entire house to benefit from warmth of shallow winter sun, while at the same time shielding the living room and kitchen from the harsh but high summer sun.

Over the course of today and yesterday I've put about $130 and several hours into converting my old Miyata 1000 touring bike into a low maintenance single-speed commuter.

The whole process did not go as smoothly as I had hoped. The plan was to keep the original crank, replacing the chainrings with a single gear and spacers to keep the chainline.