A lot has happened during the last month and I enjoy documenting it here, so let's take it back to Halloween, that fun but slightly odd time of year when adults sacrifice pumpkins, children eat too many sweets and we all dress up like nutters.
In previous years I would draw a moustache on my face in an attempt to look different but this isn't scary at all, so this year I decided to try something different.
I had seen this effect online which looked amazing.
But after creating the same set-up I realised it only looks good from one position. Anyone standing behind or even to the side of you will not see the cool effect shown above.
And so, it was quickly decided this was good for a magic show situation (where your audience is seated in front of you) but not so good for a halloween walk around the village with 30 sugar-charged children.
No worries I said, let's just make a half person and leave him sitting around somewhere!
Everyone was a bit confused at first what I was up to.
Toilet paper & red paint for the intestines!
Stuffed full of clothes and there he is ;)
We put him on the bench outside the office of our village mayor. Our courtyard is just under that walkway so we were perfectly placed to listen to all the people getting freaked out as they walked past.
On the morning of halloween Sabrina's mum put one of my garden grown sweet potatoes peeping out of his trousers for a laugh.
Looks pretty funny I think you will agree, but not quite right for children, so we didn't leave it this way for long.
Here's Esteban in his Dracula outfit.
With his best friend Axel.
Instead of goodie bags this year Esteban & Luna had long plastic hands with bags built in! This way they can reach to the front and get those sweets before the others. Bit ridiculous I know, but their grandmother bought these for them, so we had to use them ;)
Here are the children of our village, getting ready to do their candy walk-about.
I like the way the people of this village go to extra lengths with their decorations to make the walk a bit scary for the children.
Ordinarily I would have found it difficult to sacrifice a perfectly good pumpkin from our garden for the sake of decoration, but I was able to grow a total of 16 this year (thanks to my pumpkin house), which leaves a few spare for wine making & halloween.
I struggle a bit with pumpkin faces but did my best here.
This one didn't work out so great in fact because there wasn't enough pumpkin left to hold the forehead in place without careful placement.
Still looked pretty scary at night ;)
Advent calendar
One advantage of having halloween just prior to advent calendar making time is the sudden excess of sweets in the house. These sweets ultimately end up in the calendar and are consumed at the very reasonable rate of one each per day throughout December.
My idea this year was to make a giant calendar which resembled a big box of presents. I did this with a wooden base (old swing) and shoe boxes. And my trusty glue gun of course.
Luna was working on a new dress for her doll at the time. Far too busy to help me she said ;)
The finished dress seen here on her doll.
Continuing Esteban's tradition from last year he created an important Christmas drawing.
The drawing is then stuck to a piece of card and cut up into 24 pieces.
Each piece goes into one of the calendar boxes along with two halloween sweets.
Here they are demonstrating how they are NOT going to eat them before December ;)
Lastly we needed to cover the boxes.
There was some debate about how this should be done but in the end we went for this simple system.
24th December will be the box at the top.
And there it is!
We decided not to kill any trees this year so the tree on the left is plastic. I did chop a branch from a local pine tree though, just so we can smell that lovely pine needle scent.
We had fun building a little nativity scene at the bottom.
A pretty cool looking Christmas zone in the end, all ready now for the 1st Dec.
Unfortunately not everyone got the memo that we make our own advent calendars around here, so we ended up with two extra Lindt teddy calendars from the French granny!
These, I have informed my children, are for the adults ;)
Energy exchange experiments
My research on the free energy post I wrote a few weeks ago actually began here, with this simple device on our courtyard table.
I had seen this video some weeks earlier in which I observed how the vacuum created by a mass of water could be used as a pump.
Some of the comments under the film indicate this simply isn't possible, stating that the man must have a hidden electrical pump somewhere, so naturally I wanted to check it out for myself! If indeed this device is real, technically it should be possible to just feed the water back into the well and create perpetual motion.
Here is Esteban filling the main vessel to create the vacuum.
The lid is attached, the stopper is released from the bottom straw and the pump begins sucking the water from the bottle.
In this situation there is no question about it, the water is pulled up the straw by the vacuum and the water level in the tube stays the same while the water empties into the saucepan below.
But when we tried to replicate the youtube man's experiment by moving the bottle of water lower, it didn't work.
In fact, as soon as the input level goes lower than the output level, the pump stops working, meaning that perpetual motion is not possible in this situation.
Though this does still appear to be a useful trick for moving water around when it is all at the same level and I can see its potential application in a community situation where a bunch of houses rely on a central water source like a well. A single electrical pump could be used to move the water from the well to a central tank from which the water is pumped automatically into each home connected to it by the pressure created when they turn their taps on. This means that instead of using multiple pumps to distribute your fresh water around a community, you now only need one.
Despite being unable to prove perpetual motion here I've not given up on the search by any means! Would like to see what happens with a bigger volume of water. Surely a bigger volume creates a bigger vacuum and can therefore pull harder?
Will post results when I have them.
Here are the children this morning (Dec 2nd) in the Christmas zone.
All they have to do is point at the correct number and push.
The material rips easily and the goodies can be removed.
Sweets & jigsaw puzzle!
Love Esteban's toothless grin ;)
Okay, think that's it for now.
Plenty of other things I want to tell you about but will save them for next time. I leave you with a shot of our courtyard as it gears up for winter.
Love & Light everyone 🎇
