Ironically enough...

 Given that it's been five months or so since my last post, I find it pretty ironic that the last one was about time management.

Short version: I'm pooped. We've been working on the cabin, in fact we've done a huge amount of work since the last time I posted anything, I'm just generally burnt out on the internet and the people who inhabit it. 

Anywho, as proof we're alive and have made progress, here's a snapshot from our security system--we have hardwired internet, cameras, a storage shed, air conditioning, a deep freeze, and a bunch of updates to the electrical system.

I'll post more at some point, but man... the internet is exhausting. I'm sure we're all feeling that way, but I tell you what, after 18+ months of this pandemic, I've had about all the internet I want or need for a lifetime. 

Let's talk time management... (Part 1)

 Alrighty folks... I alluded to this a lot in the last post, and I think it's time we talk about something that comes up surprisingly often: time management.

Amusingly (given the topic), I have too much to say on this for a single post, so this is just Part 1 where I explain the problem.  I'll do Part 2 shortly and talk about solutions and mitigations.  

One of the most common questions I get when people hear I'm building a homestead is some flavor of "but what are you going to do without electricity?" or "aren't you going to miss __________?". I think that this belies a really interesting problem in how people think about sustainability and self-reliance.

So I want to talk about the Amish for a moment.

Shut up, it's my blog.

Most people think that the Amish reject all modern technology, which is completely incorrect. The Amish are, generally speaking, excellent machinists and mechanics, and most Amish communities have a "telco shack" of their own where they keep cell phones, tablets, and other communications devices.  

The biggest difference between the Amish and most people reading this blog is that the Amish look at any new technological development with suspicion. Their default position is "this is probably bad for my community" and then the new technology has to prove it's not.  Compare this to the general attitude of society at large which says "new is better!"  

Think of how many products you see advertised where "new" is a key reason you should buy it. We tend to assume that new technologies are awesome, and then people who push back against that are asked to provide the burden of proof.

The Amish aren't Luddites, they're skeptics.  That's why they have cell phones--being able to communicate with loved ones or call for help is fantastic--but keep them in a phone booth, out of the home and out of their pockets.  That's why they have electric lights, but they keep them in the machine shop--you want good light when you're fixing a diesel engine, but in the home, there's nothing wrong with a more natural circadian rhythm that sends you to bed when you run out of light.

That's a lot of text, so here's a really cute pupper from our last hike:

Ok, so that's a lot of words to say something simple: choosing to live more deliberately, and choosing to opt out of some modern systems doesn't mean you need to opt out of all of them.

You know what's amazing? Not spending your whole fuckin' day just working up the willpower to get your ass out of bed.

I want to walk you through a very real scenario that happens to folks who try and do this. I say this both from experience and from knowing others in the same boat.

First, you start off with lots of energy and drive. You feel like you're doing well, and you make lots of progress quickly--you're out chopping wood and clearing brush, and your camp starts to look less like "camp" and more like "home".  You work long days--up just after dawn, brush your teeth, throw on your work clothes, and get crackin'.  If there's two of you doing this as a couple, likely one of you will get to work first thing in the morning while the other starts making coffee, maybe frying up a couple eggs or making pancakes.

This lasts maybe as long as a couple of months.  But every day gets a little harder and a little slower.  The mornings are cold, and your back is sore from yesterday's work. Yesterday, your back was still sore from the day before that.  Your fingers are dry and chapped from being exposed to the elements all day, and you keep adding more little cuts here and there... your shins are especially rough. Even though you wear pants, it seems like you're constantly finding new little sharp plants you didn't know were so damn common.  Why the hell do so many plants have thorns anyway? Did you choose to put up your camp in the middle of some kind of fuckin' thorn farm?

What ends up happening is that eventually you reach a point where your day looks like this:

6:30am - The sun comes up, the dogs rustle, the birds chirp, the humans go back to sleep

9:30am - The sun has been up for hours, one of the dogs wants to go outside, the humans slowly start moving, pondering the work ahead of them

10:00am - The dogs all want to go out now, so it's time to finally get up. One of you does. Maybe today it's you, because your partner got up first yesterday. Maybe it's your turn to stay warm. 

10:30am - It's time to find clothes and socks--do we still have clean socks? Are my shoes dry yet?

11:00am - The humans are finally dressed, now it's time to start on coffee. Somebody has to go outside and get some water, somebody needs to clean the French press. Are we going to have breakfast today, or are we just going to get to work? You don't even ask the question out loud--you both know the answer is coffee. 

12:00am - The coffee cups are finally empty, the French press only has a cup left but your bellies are full because you haven't been eating breakfast lately, so the coffee feels like a full meal. It's fine, you have to clean the stupid thing again tomorrow morning anyway, so who cares if you leave a cup in the bottom?  Time to work up the energy to go outside and get some work done

12:30pm - You finally get outside and get to work. Despite the slow start to the morning, this part is still fun. The sun is bright and shiny, life is awesome, and the puppies are adorable as they lounge in the sun, watching you haul something or other heavy and cumbersome around. 

2:30pm - You're starting to get hungry, and you're thinking about what you're going to make for dinner

4:00pm - Time to start on dinner. You both need to stop choring for the day because one of you needs to clean up the camp while the other gets cracking on food.  You need to do dishes before you can cook, so somebody's gotta go boil water again...

6:30pm - The sun is starting to go down, you can't get anything else done for the day, and food's just about ready. Time to settle in and enjoy yourselves for the evening.

8:00pm - Sure, it's early, but you're pooped. This was a long day, wasn't it? Time for bed.

Yes, I'm aware that sounds like a clinical depression diagnosis. What, did you think that trying to survive off your own skills and wits in the woods would be uplifting and fulfilling every minute of the day? I mean, it is uplifting and fulfilling on the whole, but nature is hard. Everything is hard when you're doing it yourself.  Everything you have to do is harder today than it was yesterday, and it's going to be harder tomorrow than it is today. 

That "hypothetical" day above (really it's anecdotal) feels like it lasts 14 hours, but you only get a few hours of work done. Those few hours aren't even pushing yourself that hard--you just don't have the gas left in your tank for that kind of push. 

Next thing you know, you're telling yourself "I've adjusted to this lifestyle, this is just how things are out here!", but all your projects are falling behind, and you're not keeping up with your basic needs. 

Alrighty, now I know that might sound a bit sad, so here's something fun and natural to tide you over till Part 2:  ever seen a coyote close-up?

Cute little guy, isn't he?

My word... has it really been four months?

 Apparently, like many things in life, updating a blog is a bit of a pain in the ass if you stop for a bit.  Stupid habits, and their need to be maintained.

The last four months have been a big time. As I write this, we're two days into the Spring of '21, so it's hard to believe that I last wrote a blog post while we still had snow on the ground. Of course, 2021 was a bizarre year in Southern weather--while we didn't have anything like what happened in Texas, we did get 12 inches of snow here in Nashville, and basically couldn't leave the house until it melted.  That was a hoot.

The puppies loved it, of course:

When I look at the photos, it's hard to believe this was just a few weeks ago:

We did have to make some hard decisions between sustainability and convenience, though.  I'll do a follow-up post about this, once I've finished this "hey I'm still alive!" post, because this has been a major subject of conversation in the last four months.  One example is that we swapped out the wood stove for a propane heater for now:

Unfortunately we hadn't stocked up enough firewood, so we were struggling to produce enough heat off the wood stove. We were also getting a bit too smoky in there, so we decided to just pull the wood stove out and plug the hole in the roof for now. We'll put one back in, but for now we're deciding between a better quality wood stove or learning to build a fireplace (and we're leaning towards learning how to build a fireplace).

On the utilities front, we made great progress though! 

Right? That's pretty uptown, ain't it? We've got a ceiling fan, electric lights, and a great battery bank on our solar setup now.  Not too shabby for a couple months' work!

If your brain went "wait, couple months?" then yeah... exactly. Hence why I need to do a follow-up talking about things like motivation and time management.  What, did you think living in the woods is easy? Shut up, city-jerk.

But not really, shit can be hard, man. This isn't all we've done, but it really does start to feel like it sometimes. Looking back on the last few months though, once the weather warmed up, we got a lot done really quickly.

For instance, we built a loft!

Holy storage space, Batman!

We also installed a sink that drains into a bucket:

Indoor plumbing comes later--for now it's just nice to be able to brush our teeth indoors.

And we built a new door:

We wanted a window, and the door we had was entirely too drafty, so we made a new one--two layers of OSB with insulation between. It's pretty snazzy.

We also decided to celebrate Spring by trying out something we saw online--a tankless propane water heater. Again, that follow-up post about time management will touch on this, but long story short, holy shit running hot water is amazing.

I think that about wraps up the updates... I have some great photos of hiking around on the land (we discovered some really amazing rock formations), and I have a couple of other posts planned to show off things we're working on--my woodland mesh network is becoming (in my opinion, at least) pretty impressive, so I want to show how that works.  Of course, I also want to talk about time management (as I've mentioned entirely too many times now), and I want to show off some of the larger purchases we're working towards.

But for now, I bid you farewell! Stay awesome, homesteaders and fantasizers, life outdoors continues to be awesome, even when it's a crapton of work.

Baby it's cold outside

 Ya'll know that winter is cold?

We got snow already! Sure, it was gone in two days, but it still lasted two days. That's longer than snow usually lasts in Tennessee, and it came a lot earlier than it normally would.

While this makes the humans happy, the dogs have mixed feelings on the subject:

It also turns out (and this shouldn't surprise anybody when I say it, but my dumb ass had to learn this the hard way) it's a hell of a lot harder to keep water warm when it's cold as balls outside.

So after completely failing to get a bath hot enough to wash comfortably, we realized we needed to insulate the tub, which is now adorable:

You know the saying--if it looks stupid, but it works, it ain't stupid. Head's up to anybody else who thinks bathing in the woods is a good idea (it is), you're gonna want to insulate your tub prior to November. You'll save a lot of wood for heating, and you'll save yourself the realization that you're a fuckin' moron.

On the upshot, we did get a new critter on camera--a bobcat this time:

Look at that big beautiful bastard. Gorgeous, isn't it? That's my favorite wildlife picture we've gotten since the bear came through.  It almost looks like a ghost because of the lighting, which I think is appropriate for a wild cat.

While I don't have a single photo of the events, Thanksgiving also went beautifully--cooked the whole meal over the fire, had the family come out and spend some time hanging out, and since we were outdoors the whole time and miles away from anybody we haven't already had contact with, we managed to be pretty responsible about it. 

On the whole, I think this photo sums up November 2020 on the Shackleford homestead:

If you give a mouse a cookie

So now that we have internet... what's next?

This is more of a question than you'd expect, because the internet is a 3/4 mile hike away from our cabin.  Even direct line-of-sight, it's a quarter mile away and up a big ass damn hill.

Plus, now the same place that has internet has a ton of electricity--with four hundred watts of juice, we can charge batteries and phones and tablets and laptops, but what are we going to do? Just sit in the grass while we wait?

Hell naw. Enter, "Cafe Telco".  The shack formerly known as Telco Shack has a whole new lease on life.  Check this bitch out:

Bam! Suck on my creature comforts.

See, Mrs. Shackleford sent me a text one day saying "Murphy TV?" and I said "...you're a genius", and she said "shut up and get to building, scrub."

So that cabinet holds a TV, propane stove, some basic niceties like coffee and tea, and has a chalkboard for the front.

Whole thing folds down to make a nice-sized table (it's 32" by 40") and it's plenty level and sturdy.

Now, when we're working or charging something, we can relax, like Mrs. S and the puppies here:

This development pleases the dogs:

We also upgraded the batteries in Cafe Telco, to a pair of big-ass 100 amp batteries:

And things are trucking along nicely:

Make power go

 Alright, so we can get internet, but we have to have someplace to put internet.

Problem is, the internet is only physically available in the furthest possible place on our land away from where we spend our time.  

But it's really good internet (better than we have in the city, in fact).

Enter, Cafe Telco, nee Telco Shack:

Doesn't have to be anything fancy--it's just to hold some batteries and a router and a few other pieces of miscellany.  So the weekend of Halloween, Mrs. Shackleford and I loaded up a bunch of plywood and 2x4s in the truck and drove out to the homestead to put up a 4x8 shack. 

Luckily, something small like this goes together quickly, so in the first day I was able to get the shack built out, and then had the second day to wire it up:

Those solar panels there are 100 watts each, at 12v.  They're joined in series and parallel to bring them up to 24v total, like this:

This isn't my first solar setup, so I was feeling pretty confident about the design. The 24v charge controller that I got will let me run up to 40 amps through it, and since each of those panels can only do 100 watts maximum, that means they're going to max out at about 8 amps, so the idea behind running the panels this way is that I'm currently at half my maximum input, and I can add another two pairs of panels before I max out my charge controller.

Obviously, because I was feeling pretty confident, I had to fuck up on the batteries.

When I was first setting this up, I just had two little 35 amp batteries--those little black fellas there.  I think they're golf cart batteries, actually.

Problem is, I've set up a BUNCH of 12v solar systems, and this was my first time doing a 24v system, so let me show you first what I needed to do.  This is pretty simple:

Right? Nothing fancy, just a simple series circuit with my two batteries. 

Here's what my dumb-ass did because I was in autopilot and wasn't thinking while I worked:

Whoops! That's a bomb.

So after briefly melting one of the battery terminals all to shit--see the end-result below--I corrected my mistake and radioed Mrs. Shackleford to have a good laugh about how I nearly done blowed myself up. 

See that melted terminal in the back, kids? If you ever want to discover how quickly you can move, just accidentally make an explosive arc-welder while miles away from any possibility of help or rescue. 

Good news is that nobody was hurt except for my pride (and possibly my retinas), and the Telco Shack was born. 

The next weekend, the co-op sent out a technician who did a bang-up job wiring the Telco Shack with gigabit fiber!

Hot diggity, we can work from the woods now!

How we discovered trees aren't routers

 So, when you think of Halloween, what comes to mind? Treats, candy, maybe a few adult beverages? How about rushing to the woods to build a shack, outfit it with solar power, and then get internet installed?

I should back up a moment...

So as anybody existing in 2020 or later should know (and if you're coming from an earlier time, I'd love to know how you got ahold of this blog--please send me a letter at Central Intelligence Agency, Office of Public Affairs, Washington D.C. 20505), this year has been something of a clusterfuck.

In fact, calling it a "clusterfuck" is probably too offensive to anybody who likes to fuck in clusters (I'm not hating; not my thing, but you do what makes you happy dude). So "dumpsterfire" is probably more appropriate. 

That sticker now adorns the box I keep my .22 in, because 2020 has two 2s, and my brain is a child.

In preparing for the dumpsterfire that was our election, and the ongoing shenanigans resulting from our country being run by the lowest common denominator, Mrs. Shackleford and I started thinking about what it would take to be able to ditch our city home and run away to the woods for good.

Water? Check.

Shelter? Check.

Food? We have a six month supply, and by the time that runs out we should be up and running with the garden and foraging.

...but what about employment?

See, we're not preppers. We don't think the world is going to end, we think the world is going to continue going largely unchanged except for the continuous downward spiral as unchecked neoliberal capitalism continues to flush us all down the collective toilet.  That means we don't imagine a future where Yellowstone blows up and wipes out the government and everybody's debts and we all just focus on fending off raiders and slavers.  We imagine a future that's just like the present, but shittier and with the government giving even less of a pretense of caring about anybody except the mega rich.

That means jobs. That means remote work. That means internet. 

Turns out the extreme north-easternmost corner of our land is close enough to the nearest power line that a local telecom co-op was willing to put up a fresh pole and run fiber optic to our... trees?

Shit.

Trees can't do anything with fiber optic. 

Join us next week as our intrepid heroes battle to bring a little bit of "grid" to their "off grid" adventure!