I live about as close to the middle of nowhere as is reasonable for most people. You cannot escape any of that stuff, only reduce your exposure.
Especially people. It’s not “city people” who are annoying, but people in general. I don’t care who you are or where you live, you will always find someone annoying. Also, there is no city person so annoying as the one transplanting themselves to the middle of nowhere. :)
Looks crocheted. I came across a crochet community somewhere in my browsing. It might be worth tracking down and posting there, too.
… and then there is drainage.
Our lot is positioned to collect all the runoff across a few acres. In itself, that’s manageable, but the septic holding tank is sitting under the trailer with insufficient height above the ground. Even that wouldn’t be a problem, but a new neighbour did some perfectly legitimate landscaping that causes a pool to form where runoff used to make its way directly to the creek behind our lot.
So now, every spring, I have to take a shovel and do drainage management to try to get the water running down the road instead of into our yards. It’s kind of fun in its own way, except that I cannot get people to understand that they have to stay to one side of the road, even if that means taking turns. Every time someone drives in the wrong place, it creates ruts that direct water to the wrong side of the road.
I just got in from trying to break up an ice dam that is causing water to run into our septic tank.
Thanks for tagging. I would have missed it.
It sounds like you’re on the right track. Unsurprisingly, we have some substantial differences, some based on the fact that we live in a park.
We are not allowed to have a septic field, so we just have septic storage tank. Getting an off-season (winter) pump-out is very expensive, so we do a lot to keep pump-outs to once a year.
We are not allowed to have a well, so we put in a freshwater cistern. I haul water from a very good well. Our household use is about 180 litres a week. I pump from the cistern into jugs that I bring inside. Most gets poured into a highly rated gravity filter. Laundry and showers use unfiltered water.
We got used to living out of jugs before we had a cistern, so giving up on plumbing after the 3rd freeze-up was a no brainer.
Laundry water gets warmed up either by the pellet stove or sitting in the sun, depending on season. All other hot water comes from a kettle on our propane range.
Depending on the season, our laundry either gets hung outside to dry or hung on drying racks in front of the hot air blowing from our pellet stove.
Irrigation water comes from the season water distribution system that the park has. It’s just raw lake water.
Our power used to be just 30 amp service, so we’re quite accustomed to low power living. Up until the last couple of years, our grid was so unreliable that our standby generator ran about 100 hours a year (probably closer to 400 hours if we didn’t ration how long it ran). Grid upgrades mean that we’ve only used it about 4 hours in the last 2 years, and mostly during planned outages as they continue to work on the lines.
My plans for this year are:
Install an interior water tank against the ceiling, filling it manually via a permanently plumbed, self-draining line. No more jugs! Then I’ll hook up our hot water heater and bathroom/laundry plumbing to make showers and laundry easier.a
Crawl under the trailer (a mobile home) and remove the axles. This means it’ll no longer be classified as a mobile home so we can take advantage of subsidies for energy efficiency, heat pumps, etc.
People have been trying for several decades to get unpaid but necessary labour classified as work. Largely unsuccessfully, because that brings in a lot of other things like how to calculate pensions. (In Canada, we have a government run pension plan that pays out based on contributions. Homemakers can’t contribute, because they’re not earning any money.)
Then you have workplace injury compensation, access to supplementary health insurance, and a myriad of other things.
The author seems to focus a lot on the idea Marx was a degrowther, which yeah probably isn’t true but just starts to sound more like ecclesiastical arguments on what Jesus really meant as opposed to talking about the actual issue at hand.
I’ve read Marx and various commentary on his ideas. My conclusion is that he had some interesting things to say, maybe even the seeds of a better future, but we’ve learned a hell of a lot since then. It’s past time to leave the study of Marx to historical context, not advice for today.
We should instead focus on the positives of de-growth, that is less work. Yeah, you may not be able to buy that new pair of shoes every other month, but you’ll only work 10 hours a week.
This is the big one. Unless there is some kind of trigger to force a revolutionary change against our will, we are still at least a few generations away from leaving behind the moral imperative to devote our lives to labour.
I mean, it’s not my morality and never has been, but I know very few people of any age who don’t view work as necessary to fulfillment, even shitty work. In fact, I would argue that the preponderance of work being shitty is why work has become a moral imperative. “Growth through suffering” and similar nonsense.
Until that changes, degrowth will be either impossible or disastrous, because the systems and the very manners of thinking we need in a steady-state (or shrinking) economy are so radically different from those needed by a growth economy.
Also former ditch digger…
Work on those systems. Think about what they need to be for someone less agile or just less physically capable in general. Think about what it takes to train someone new on those systems.
We went with pellet stove over traditional wood stove because of the ease of use and the lack of local wood supply. Three trips to the city with our pickup gets us all the pellets we need for winter. I think that the combination of improved technology and government subsidies will see us with a heat pump and electric baseboard heaters for backup this year. Easier yet.
We scrapped our indoor plumbing because keeping it from freezing was a full time job. Now I fill 7-9 20 litre jugs once a week and top up our gravity filter system a couple of times a day. Next step is to route some self-draining lines to an interior tank in the unused space above our filter system to get rid of the jug hauling.
We bought a snowblower, because shovelling a 300 metre access road by hand was getting old. Next step is to go electric so that we don’t have to deal with fuel and small engine repair and maintenance.
Our yard is being converted from lawn to fruits and vegetables. A bit more each year as we figure out what grows, what we like, and what keeps or can be preserved.
We’ve made connections in the community, both personal and commercial, so that assistance is a phone call or cheque book away.
Those and other things have brought the time and effort difference between current life and our city life down dramatically. We now have plenty of time for a variety of hobbies. I retired last year and now I can’t say I really even notice the impact of chores on my freedom to do as I will. Keeping in mind of course, that some of those “do as I will” activities might be seen as chores by others.
And prisoners? My understanding is that slavery is permitted in US prisons. (Assuming that is relevant to the discussion.)
Absolutely! I don’t even have any bowel related health issues and occasionally find myself in trouble.
The worst was when I used to go running along the river the city I lived in. For years, the public toilet I occasionally used was open 24 hours. Then one day, for no reason and with no notice, they started locking it between 9 pm and 9 am. The day I discovered that was not a good day.
Knowing that I needed ready access to a toilet a few times a month was enough to curtail my running to the point where I just quit.
Excellent! I’ve just started my own investigations in the same direction, so please keep us posted on your progress.
Have you looked at Friendica? It requires more of a server than what I’ve got, but it looks pretty good to me.
A couple of days ago, I set up a GoToSocial instance. It’s still alpha software, but it looks pretty good so far and is a lot less resource intensive than Mastodon. It’s also server-only, but the clients I tried all worked with it just fine.
I’ve been able to follow people on regular Mastodon instances, but haven’t interacted outside my instance beyond mere following.
It was easy to get going on “bare metal” (no Docker), although I had to start over once because of a documentation gotcha. (The instructions as-is will leave you with an old version instead of the newest version.)
FWIW, I wrote up my experiences here.
For truly personal servers (single account), there is seppo.social, but I haven’t figured out how to actually getting it running! 🤷
When I was calculating costs in anticipation of putting in solar, I played around with several online calculators. Latitude, panel orientation, and angle. I was surprised by how few extra panels were required to do “stupid installs” like vertical, horizontal, west-facing, etc.
I used to be all-in on e-reading, starting with my science fiction and mystery magazines back in the Palm Pilot days.
I now am back to almost exclusively reading hard copy (except for the aforementioned magazines, available directly from the publisher).
It’s a relatively simple process. I use the library’s own online search system to reserve and suggest books. In my case, there are actually 2 different systems: the local library’s own search and reservation system and Saskatchewan’s interlibrary search and reservation system. I use the latter for all my searches and reservations, because it gives me direct access to everything in the province. I use the former only for recommending books for purchase.
I swing by the library once a week to drop off anything I’ve borrowed and pick up anything that came in.
About a quarter of the books I recommend end up getting purchased by the local library (actually a regional collection of rural libraries). Most of the rest are supplied from the provincial archives (a copy of everything removed from library shelves is retained in the provincial archives) or through interprovincial loans. If things get really desperate, there is a process for getting hooked into international lending. I remember when my dad was building his replica of a late 1920s Bugatti, he ended up with books coming from the United States and even Europe. In one case, he got a personal photocopy of some mechanical drawings that came from a private library in Italy.
My e-reading is now mostly limited to what I can get directly from publishers (Dell for the aforementioned magazines, 2600 for their magazine).
One cool thing is that my reading habits have influenced what is actually on the shelves in our small village library. They used to have no science and very little history or biography. Now they carry enough locally to justify having small sections for those. It used to be a given that I never browsed their offerings, depending 100% on interlibrary loans. Now I have to take a few minutes to see if they’ve added anything interesting to the shelves. The librarian says that I’m not the only one who’s noticed and those categories are increasing in popularity, so it’s possible that I’ve even shifted local reading habits a bit!
I’ll just drop this here.
Our local library in a small village is open only 15 hours a week. All of our trips in are planned around “book delivery day.” That’s the day all the books and other media that we’ve requested come in from other libraries around the province and across the country.
That’s also when the library is at it’s busiest, making it a good place to catch up on community events (ie gossip!). Some people have “coffee row”, others have “book day.” There is plenty of crossover, so there is no danger of missing out. :)
Be careful with the use of library apps. The Coming Enshittification of Public Libraries goes over some of the problems.
What I would like to see is a way to manage the borrowing of digital media in a “choose your own player” model. Even if that would mean having to pay for a compatible player.
For now, I stick with the libraries’ own search engines and recommendation systems and do as much borrowing via physical copy as possible.
We’ve had a Nature’s Head for nearly a decade. We don’t have “guest problems” partly because we get few guests and partly because we’ve got it set up in a little ensuite in an unused corner of our bedroom. That leaves the main toilet (an RV toilet) for guests.
Having worked with sewage in the past, dealing with the contents of the composting toilet is almost pleasant!
This size of system isn’t for everyone, but one of those “family sized” models with a separate chamber and urine diverted to sewer plumbing or french drain that also handles grey water should be a no brainer. One that we looked at even used the weight of the user to automatically open the flap, eliminating most “guest problems”.
Ah yes, the hockey model of play, with strategic use of penalties to influence the outcome.
I don’t know about anyone else, but this boomer basically grew up in libraries. The local village’s library is one of the more popular places in town for pretty much everyone of all ages.
More experiments that are followed through to completion, with the results used to improve outcomes across the board instead of being repeated in an endless series of trials.
I went to an experimental high school in the early 1970s. Among other things they tried were:
Multi-grade classrooms for the transition years from arithmetic to introductory algebra to pre-calculus. Not the traditional 1 teacher for 2-3 grades, but 3 grades with 3 teachers taking turns. Some of us moved between grades depending on what we mastered and what we struggled with. My perception was that about 1/2 would get through 3 grades in 2 semesters, 1/4 would get through 3 grades in 1 semester, and 1/4 would require the full 3 semesters. But they cancelled the experiment after 1 semester.
Contract assignments in a history class. We were given the list of papers to submit at the start of the semester. Despite class running normally, we could choose to do the necessary reading and research to fulfil the contract as we saw fit. About 1/3 of us completed our contracts by halfway through the semester, then they didn’t know what to do with us.
Work at our own pace with the promise that if we finished early enough, they would transition us to the next grade without waiting for the next semester. A few of us put together an alternative study group and invited others to join. About 1/3 of the class took 6 weeks to finish all the homework assignments and write all the exams with the lowest mark being in the high 80s. They decided that this meant there was something wrong with the plan, cancelled the experiment, and forced us to sit through the rest of the semester. Nearly half of those hard workers opted out of further education after high school and two actually dropped out without a diploma.