Un-Un-Cat — Episode 3. The House That Uncle Jack Built.
After the extraterrestrial Dog began repairs on the little stone cabin U.G.’s Uncle Jack had built, only the original foundation and most of the cobblestones of the front stoop remained the same. It was a good location, the footprint of the cabin, tucked near the top of one side of a forested rocky hill a stone’s throw from U.G’s grandparents' house.
Lee had restructured the cabin, it was now taller, more the size of a small house instead of a short Cat-person sized cabin. Lee was 6’3” so he had made sure that a tall human person wouldn’t bump their heads on any beams or have to stoop to go down into the new basement.
The bigger house was still off the grid, but now had multiple renewable and passive energy systems built in. It also had three times the roof space for solar panels. Actually, Lee had installed three different types of solar panels, one area above the new bathroom was passive solar water heating tubes, part of a dual tank/dual fuel water heating system that used the cobblestones and packed dirt of the floor and walls as thermal mass to heat the house so they would light a fire to cook and for heat only in the coldest nights of winter.
The lighting system was specially designed to gather only light not electricity nor heat via small flower-shaped solar panels that opened and closed in bad weather and followed the sun. From inside U.G. could open and close the mirrored shafts to focus or dim the sunlight during the day or a soft glow at night via bioluminescent organisms Lee had transplanted inside the roof to shine into the stems of the light tubes brighter than a full moon on a clear night. The third type of solar panels stored electricity into a battery bank wall for the homemade computer Lee had built special, for the Cat.
Lee had replaced more than just the roof surfaces and rebuilt all the structural beams, the entire house was well insulated now with deep arches, and plant boxes on all the side windows. The windows all angled out 20 degrees, the overhang to reflect the ground not sky to stay clean longer. The old front stoop was now a glazed in greenhouse front porch with ultra-violet-patterned-glass birds could see and not crash into. And the porch sun room was finished with adjustable vents in the top and bottom of the frames. Fans designed to circulate enough to air be able to dry laundry, even when it rained or snowed.
The outhouse was now replaced by a full sized bathroom equipped with a space-age digester-toilet that made fuel pellets out of garbage and poop. The solid fuel pellets from the toilet lit by collected natural gas heated the in-floor radiant heat and also heated the water for the Dog-simple water trough bathtub/laundry tub. The old feed trough metal tub set next to U.G.’s Uncle’s 1960's model, hand-crank-wringer clothes-washing-machine. There was no reason to upgrade the washer because U.G. and Lee had fur and mostly only washed towels and bedding. The Cat wanted nothing to do with tub bathing, so after Lee took a bath or they washed some laundry, water flowed out of the house via a grey water system via a little stone aqueduct, down to a pond outside of the garden wall. For a cabin once completely lacking in plumbing all of the above were great improvements.
The finishing touch to the house, Lee had hand-carved the new solid door adding a few inches to the top of the doorway with an arch. The round top door inside the glazed in greenhouse porch made it almost feel “like a Hobbit hole meets a spacecraft.” U.G. teased Lee about this until Lee read the books and then agreed with her.
U.G. also like to tease Lee that the mostly Dog poop fuel pellets were “warm-fusion”.
“Do you mean cold-fusion? Poop is not nuclear grade, over half of the organic solids in poop are bacterial biomass. The amount of fuel necessary for the chain reaction to sustain itself and produce energy is called critical mass, not fusion. Most of the energy is thermal and gas produced by mitochondria inside the bacteria. Living things transforming energy from matter and matter to energy is not called warm-fusion.” Lee never got U.G.’s toilet humor.
“Critical mass, my ass!” She chuckled more quietly to herself after a few years of Lee still not getting her jokes.
Healthy microbes are very important to the Dog people, healthy bacteria and algae are key to living well. If something smelled bad to the Dog he would adjust or rework that system from the rooftop to the stone wall that led down the hill to the garden pond, until it smelled good in his opinion. Cats sense of smell while better than humans was about a 1/3rd of the odors Dogs are able to detect, U.G. often had to have the AI-C translate the smells into data she could understand like: ammonia, ethanol, alcohol, carcinogen or rust.
In spite of the many differences between Cats and Dogs, they lived pretty happily, sharing food made for an instant friendship. Also, during those 17 years from 1977 to 1994 both staying very busy keeping house, never being too bored helped a lot to maintain civility for two people so incompatible as Lee and U.G.
Lee was a puppy raised in the sciences and trained as an engineer. U.G. taught him how to bow hunt and fly fish, and they both worked in the garden together. Like most any dog from Earth, Lee loved to dig.
But, the most important key factor that bonded them more than shared meals or any of the day-to-day stuff was being the only two people they could find who were not human. And as anyone alive on planet Earth knows, humans are a very strange and complex species. A person may wonder, if they lived as reclusive hermits hiding on U.G.’s very remote property in the hills of middle-of-nowhere Idaho, how or when did they have contact with human people? The short answer is. It took regular supply runs for the pair of non-humans to gather all the materials needed to up-cycle and maintain their off the grid homestead. The long answer is the rest of this story.
Un-Un-Cat — Episode 4. Nothing to fear, food and point of view.
