Different name. Pretty much the same story.
Category: Rural and small-town living
Life far from freeways, Starbucks, malls, and other benefits/distractions
I just finished a really terrific new book: Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom by Ken Ilgunas (a young man I suspect we’ll be hearing more of over the years). I had heard somewhere that it was the memoir of a kid who got freaked out by his student debt and went debt-free by living in a van. Sounded interesting enough. But it turns out that’s only about 1/10th what this book is about. It’s about a young, coddled, clueless suburban slacker who decides to grow himself up. It’s about the insanity of starting adult…
Just because. It came up in comments the other day and it’s always been a favorite of mine among Hardyville columns. This was a collaboration between ex-Significant Sweetie Charles Curley and me, concocted during some interminable car trip across Wyoming. (All car trips across Wyoming are interminable, which is one reason I’m not there any more.) I love the “credit” Charles gave himself at the end. Besides, it’s just a Good Idea.
Joel’s long-rumored book, A Solar Electric System On the Cheap, On the Fly, and Off the Grid, is now available. It can be yours in .pdf for a mere $4.99. Besides describing in good and useful detail how to build an ad hoc solar power system (Joel created his for just $350), it describes how not to do it (e.g. don’t do it like Joel did with the first system he scrounged together). It also shows larger, more professional systems created by five of his desert-rat neighbors. As you may know, Joel and I were desert neighbors for a while.…
Whoohoo! Somebody has made a video adaptation of F. Paul Wilson’s 1978 story, “Lipidleggin’.” Wilson (a physician when he’s not writing great, freedom-tinged supernatural fiction) wrote it back in the day when the fedgov insisted margarine was just the healthiest thing in the whole, wide world — which somehow makes it even more amusing now. Thanks to Jim Bovard for finding and sharing the link with me on what appears to be the very first day the video went on YouTube. And thanks to John Marc Green & Company for making it.
Today, I’ll step aside and let Joel speak: The first rule of living on the edge is this: You’re in charge. You’re responsible. If something goes wrong, nobody’s going to come and fix it for you. There’s no point grumbling and waiting for the guy with the wrench, because the guy with the wrench is you. That brings things to a very basic and vital level. I used to be consumed with worry over things like who was undermining me at the office, or how badly a customer was going to screw me on draft revisions, or how to deal…
… where crab is so plentiful people have to give away their surplus. Thank you, furrydoc! I haven’t opened and eaten a whole crab since I was 19. And that was on a beach in San Francisco, where the crab was accompanied by large torn chunks of French bread and I was accompanied by … a tall, dark stranger. Might not have the ambiance this time and my dinner companions will all be short, four-legged and hairy. But this’ll be a delicious adventure.
So. The county recently had a sale on properties foreclosed for non-payment of taxes. I’ve never paid attention to such things before, considering any form of tax sale or asset-forfeiture sale to be out of moral bounds. This time somebody pointed out that two of the parcels up for sale were hilltop acreages near the end of winding dirt roads. Not far from this neighborhood in miles, but a world away in possibilities. I went so far as to look them up online and do some sighing over them. Of course I didn’t consider bidding. But I admit that was…
Over the weekend I canned eight pints of this and 5-1/2 pints of that. And from start to (endless) cleanup, it took about half the weekend. The whole time I kept wondering, “How did Grandma do it?” My grandmother (like yours, most likely) canned hundreds of pints and quarts of … everything. It was part of the routine of feeding an enormous family. And she did it without help. No one but Grandma was allowed in Grandma’s kitchen. (Which was unfortunate, because not only did she work herself to death; her daughters grew up with minimal kitchen skills. But that’s…
We had a whomp of a storm blow through here yesterday. Oh, no Sandy or Katrina. Not even a Great Gale of Ought Seven. But a pretty good sample of winter weather. Real estate signs and garbage cans cartwheeled through the streets. The smaller rivers all overflowed, leaving farmhouses sitting on grassy islands. Lots of limbs went flying. And two big pieces of sheet metal blew off my neighbor’s wood pile and into my yard while I was gathering the last of the apples, which the winds had kindly harvested for me. Those airborne guillotine blades didn’t even come close…