Seems that each year I empathize/sympathize with you who are in cold, dizzily, overcast northern climes. Things get slow around the ol’ potbellie stove gathering place of a website. I try to dream up solutions other than moving, extended vacations, snowbirding, or just sitting frustrated in it until things begin to thaw out. Is it any wonder that the ancients and even more recents made such a fuss of the winter solstice when winter reaches an apex and the sun is talked into coming back for longer days and even spring.
I have pondered all sorts of solutions and contraptions. I’m lately into creating this sauna thing for health and social nudity conveyance. One of my responses to Reuben got me going again. Ah ha! Sauna AND greenhouse. They require some sun, a lack of cloud some of the time, but, they can be healthy naked time vitamin D gathering opportunities.
The sauna has been helping me to thaw out, this last colder week. My wood burner, an old house wood burning stove that produces 102,000 BTU, cranks up the heat in a few minutes to 80F’s. A few more and it is at least a warm summer Tucson day. This continues to extreme temperatures. A few splashes from a bucket of water and I can be in the tropics, perspiration cleansing from everywhere. Spoiled as I am, it only takes a couple of days for me to truly miss warm and feel stiff and constricted. I notice how good that it feels to step inside after standing/working outside nude on a colder day. After a few minutes, I’m refreshed and can go outside and stand some more coldness. It IS SOMETHING.
There are all of the sauna health benefits, like making the pores and the cleaning system in the body more efficient, releasing toxins that can’t be relieved as well otherwise, AND especially bundled up in winter. There is better efficiency in the system that produces Vit D. It relaxes like laying in the sun on a lounge chair. When Casey Jones really c ranks it up, it puts the body through such a number that it is like exercising hard aerobics for a much longer time.
The compliment would be the greenhouse. A glass cage, insolating the cold and winds, but not sun rays. This can be taller, a place to stand and stretch. Combined in one room, just one wall, or roof needs to be ultraviolet to gather what the body needs. I’m suggesting two rooms, a sauna and a small green house, or one with a sky window or ceiling skylight, which ever suits your latitude. It could grow veggies, but maybe that is too much an energy expense.
DF and I have been finding more use for the 12x10 shed (it doesn’t need to be that big at all) than gathering with friends, prayer, making music and meditation, or sharing with friends. We use a picnic table bench for massage, we dance and do chi gong in the extra space. Once the benches are put in, we’ll be doing yoga and stretching in there in the heat. It is a healthy nude playground.
It isn’t supposed to be over 6 to 6 ½ feet tall inside, so it is easy and cheap to build. Here, that is the code limit for a fence. Fence posts can be used, scrap plywood, scrap corrugated metal, or the very cheap, but labor intensive ferrocement. Even the door is puny. It can be just a shack or a shed.
I’m using an old home heater that puts out 102,000 BTU efficiently. These can be picked up used for $50 to 300 bucks. I cleared a construction site of scrap 2x4 and 2x6 and have a ton of scrap wood to burn. I even made a spare building with the stuff and what I had on hand that needed to be used. Heating can be cheap, if you are resourceful. Wood is good exercise.
I’m saying that one could have a wonderful healthy nude reprieve from the winter in a cheap little shack in the backyard. Candle light works wonders for ambiance. It doesn’t have to be beautiful and complete, just functioning. The decor can be improved later, gradually. There is something very cozy about these things. I feel compelled to just hang out in mine. The little shack in town for nearly 40 years had the owner laying in there and falling asleep, waking up in the early morning chilly.
It can be a retreat.
The stove exhaust pipe can go out the side and across the green house and heating that room, before it raises out into the outside air. I was sitting outside the other day splitting wood with my small axe, five feet or more from the outside pipe. My nude body appreciated the heat on the breeze.
A small room of 80 square feet doesn’t need so much insulation when a 100thousand BTU stove designed to heat a 1700sq. ft. house is placed in it. Think about how a greenhouse gets heated.
Then, you walk outside, feel your body alive and maybe even spray off with the cold, or cool garden hose.
Jus’ thinkin’ in solidarity, “What would I do if….”
Jbee
