Winter Camping in September! Whoo hoo!!!

Yesterday was the clearest most beautiful day. I heard the drops about 3 am when I was working on the Rebuilding America post. By 5am I finally went to sleep trying to ignore my panic about not being ready for snow yet. It really came early this year. This was the worst summer on record (our summer was a Seattle winter) and now we get dumped on before October. Man I wish global warming would get here soon. But I do love the snow, I forget how much until I get out in it and just start doing whatever it is i have to do. Yesterday I got to dig in a big burn pile and dragged out enough to keep the fire going until my wood guy gets a permit to cut it. We're surrounded by millions of square miles of trees and we're scrambling for firewood; crazy.

Waking up to the first snowfall of 2008-9!

Can the twenty footer stand up to winter?

Bbq and firepit ready for winter guests!

Materials for Freddies recycled slippers:
1. wall tent rain cover canvass soles
2. Radiant Guard
3. Army's ironing board felt covers
4. velour scrap from a t-shirt

Leather top from cut up coat.
Felt hat string added to the back.

Perfect fit, too bad there's only one!

Artic entryway under construction

Chainsaws aren't made just for boys anymore.
I love my Husquvarna!!!! Too bad it runs on gas.

Gertee's canvass walls bear the "Girl Scouts of America" logo

GERTEE means "at home" in Mongolian!

For months Nordica has been looking for a "formal" translation of the word gertee. She's seen it used to imply it meant "at home." But she couldn't locate it in a dictionary for me, and so, being the picky researcher that I am, I wouldn't use it. But now I can! This is really an amazing discovery for me. I combined construction concepts for a ger and a teepee to create a "gertee." A ger uses a roofring-poles-lattice walls=tension, a teepee/tipi uses leaning long poles and an inside liner that creates an upward draft/smoke flow allowing for an open, interior fire. In my first gertee design I considered making a short teepee and putting it on top of ger's lattice walls because I didn't know how to make a roofring. I still think it would work in an emergency.

Many thanks to author Radigan Neuhalfen, www.TheSteppe.com:

In Mongolian, "ger" means "home."

"Gert" is "ger" declined to mean "at home." The concluding doubled vowel simply adds emphasis: "gert" and "gertee" both mean "at home."

So, "gertee" is not really a thing in Mongolian, but a grammatical construction. Incidentally, this Mongolian "e" (in Cyrillic, a very different letter) is pronounced like a Scottish long clipped "a," such as in "nae." Doubled vowels are pronounced the same as the single vowel, but sounded longer in speech. The pronunciation of "gertee" is approximately "gaer-taeae."

Photos of standard models from Mongol Yurt
http://www.mongolyurt.mn/en/yourtegb.html#yurt

Just the frame.

The Mongolians make beautiful doors, don't they?

These kids are from Nomin2007's photo blog.

Mongolian interiors are usually very colorful.

Mongol Yurt's roofrings are way larger than mine.