#4 The Most Beautiful Day in Fall.

So it's the first time I'm here that it rains so it's kind of good to see where the leaks are in the roof. I can feel that the wood is soft so it's been leaking here for a while. That's what's causing the spot on the floor so it's good to have a bucket here when I'm not here. You can see it goes in here. I put the sponge here so I could locate where the wet spot was. So in the middle of the roof here you need a few layers of stone so the water goes both ways. I'm gonna add some layers here. I thought with the forecast that they gave us that this might not be happening though. The sea, the Tyrrhenian sea is still warm so it still fills the air with moisture and then it meets the cooler air and so you get this you get a vortex of rain coming our direction. It doesn't happen every year but happens frequently and when it happens it happens usually in the fall when the sea is still warm. I thought rockets were a cool option because I looked at how people were building them and said even I as not a builder I can do that. And then in the research I came across a guy from Ireland who basically did a hybrid of a masonry heater which is I think typically what you would call the stove like this. We have in Austria in most of the living rooms or not. Traditionally we have masonry heaters and you heat it once and that's the problem with the cooking sometimes. If you want a stove for cooking and you maybe cook in the noon and in the evening then you would fire twice a day. The traditional ones in our place you can't open. You actually close it. When it's now at this stage where there's no more flame, if there's no more flame, you actually lock it off completely. There's no more air going in and so you don't have any air that still moves through the thing because there is no pressure. So you have the air moving through the fire. That's why it's sort of a rocket stove. It has a system and then goes into flues. It goes through the thing and heats up this stuff. I use the cheapest material inside also like fire bricks. And this is adobe. It first goes down and then the last time it goes up. Actually this is the whole top part. It's just a bell meaning there's an opening and hot air can go in and there's just no other way out. It sort of heats up. I thought it was an easy way to extend the surface. So actually the flue goes in from the back side here. Yeah. Then it goes down, down, back, over there and then goes up. So it sort of goes around and then it goes to the chimney. And then it goes to the chimney. Sometimes people when they hear that I called it St. Onofrio and if they know something about St. Onofrio they go like ah I see you want to have a beard like St. Onofrio. But the reason really is that the first hermitage that I really fell in love with where I sort of I said in front of it thinking of maybe this would be an awesome life. This was 15 years ago so in the Abruzzi region in Italy. There was just this old rock overhang with a grotto and run-down buildings. There was no tourism, nothing there. And there was a little brook and I sort of saw the garden and it was a sunny day and I was like wow this would be a life. And I was serving in a parish at the time so a completely different life. But I fell in love with the idea as a romantic even though it's not always romantic. But so St. Onofrio became the namesake and of course it's depicted here. So this would be Thursday. Friday is obviously the death of Christ. You have the seven last words of Christ depicted here. It's a different place. There was a storm yesterday. A lot of wind. And it sweeped all the leaves from the trees. All the brown leaves. I mean I photographed it yesterday. It was like a fairytale landscape with all the red. Like the brown red leaves. They're all gone. It's winter now. So strange. So beautiful too. It was a southern wind so I'm still here. So it's a little bit warm. I was afraid the the solar panels would be swept away because it was storming. But luckily it was a southern wind so the wind came from the top of the hill. And it sweeps over the panels. If it would come from the other side it would be a problem. The first snow on the peak. Beautiful. It's like it's like a painting that's changed. Someone, the painter has worked a bit on it. Put some snow here. Take off the leaves. Change the colors. It's really beautiful to witness. There's been so much change in this month. I've been a month here. It started green and then it changed all the colors. And now like a day before I'm leaving it just did a final change. Okay this is the introduction of winter.