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!

We had our first sleepover!

 For the first time since starting out on this project, we had company stay the night! My mom and kid sister came out and stayed with us.

While the Lady Shacklefords had some wine and cheese, I taught the Littlest Shackleford how to carve a pumpkin:

Things turned out pretty well! She was able to handle a power drill with a forstner bit just fine--super handy way to put fun circles and designs on a pumpkin.  If you try it out, just be sure to hold the pumpkin for the little ones.   And be careful with paddle bits--pumpkins don't have enough structural integrity to cause the drill to kick back, but paddle bits throw pumpkin EVERYWHERE.  A forstner is a lot easier to manage, since it doesn't make quite as much mess. 

I really like the way her stars-and-circles pumpkin came out:

A lot of my photos didn't turn out so well, but the pumpkins did! I made a point on this trip of bringing out the good SLR, and then put it under the back seat in the truck to keep it safe during transit.  By the time we arrived, I'd completely forgotten I brought the SLR and didn't remember until we were back in the city and I had a cell phone full of terrible photos.

I'd pretend that wasn't entirely my fault, but it was.

While we were at it, we moved the bathtub out back to take advantage of the new back door we cut in.  The back of the cabin is eventually going to be an enclosed greenhouse, like a conservatory. For now, it's a handy place to keep the bathtub out of the rain!

We picked a heck of a night to have family stay with us--it rained nonstop for 48 hours straight, and our creek flooded:

Nonetheless, the night must go on--and a bit of rain doesn't make all that much difference when you can relax and watch it from somewhere dry:

The weird paddle there, by the way, is the "don't scald your hair off" paddle.  When you've got the fire going, you can sometimes build up a layer of hot water on top of the bathtub.  This thermocline can be severe--the strongest difference we've measured is 120 degrees on top, and 75 degrees on the bottom.  Fahrenheit, of course. Sorry, as an American I don't use proper units for temperature. 

The baths went well. I think it blew Elder Lady Shackleford's mind that she could be in the middle of the woods, in a bath, with a cup of Earl Grey tea:

Pretty sure that was life-changing for her.

Now for the screw-up.

What, you thought this was going to be flawless? Nah, come on--this is our first time having somebody sleep over. 

And our cabin is 8 feet by 12 feet.

And we have three dogs.

And we had two people sleep over, not one.

You may, at this point, be doing the math and realizing that there were more bodies than places to put them. 

Funny thing is, my wife and I came to the same conclusion: "we'll just sleep in the hammock, and let the guests sleep in the cabin".  This seemed like a reasonable conclusion, and we barely even talked about it.

First problem was, our dogs sleep in bed with us, and won't sleep outside. Their line between "outside" and "inside" is really blurred because of the cabin lifestyle, but when we say "ok, it's bedtime" they all climb right up into bed.

Not usually an issue except that we forgot that Nisba, the hound, has a tendency to shove.  When she's really sleeping hard, she will shove with all four legs and push you clean out of bed (technically I should say "she will push Mrs. Shackleford out of bed, because she always does this with her back to me"; I've never been shoved out of bed this way).

So we have my mother and youngest sister in bed with three dogs, one of whom likes to shove the "lady of the bed" out of the bed. 

She shoved them both out of the bed during the night.

Our other "big dog" Tula is a Cane Corso, and she likes to lay on people. We joke that it's her way of keeping people safe.

After Nisba shoved Littlest Shackleford out of bed, Tula laid on her and stayed there through the night. So my mom is sleeping on the floor and my littlest sister is pinned under a dog bigger than her. Two out of four humans aren't having the best time of their lives. 

Meanwhile, out back, my wife and I tried to figure out how to sleep in the hammock together.  Ever tried sleeping in a hammock with somebody? No matter how much you love them, you will not like them during this experience.

Why not just set up two hammocks, you ask? Because we had to fit the hammock under the protection of the cabin. The rain didn't let up until well after our company left. 

So our night was spent climbing in and out of the hammock, my wife trying to set up a bed on the ground underneath it (significantly less than awesome), and genuinely considering just hiking back out to the trailhead to sleep in the truck (decided against it because of the storm). Finally, some time in the wee hours of the morning, I woke up and Mrs. Shackleford was nowhere to be seen.  Checking inside the cabin, she'd finally gone inside and was sleeping at the foot of the bed like a dog, with the dogs reposed regally, enjoying their newfound place at the top of the pack. 

Lessons learned:

1. We need to build a bunkhouse before we have more guests stay over

2. Our dogs are assholes

3. We should build a doghouse

Bonus spooky thing we woke up to:

That's not a small spider.  Hooray October!

Camping vs. Backpacking vs. Homesteading

 Howdy folks!

This week has been spent at the "city house" earning some money, hence why there's no fun progress pictures from the homestead, but we're headed back out today after work...

...Which got me thinking about an exchange I had a while back with a colleague.  I work with plenty of backpackers and avid campers, and my colleague (who is a huge backpacker) was shocked and appalled at my "kit".  He picked up my daybag once, and looked at me with these great big bug eyes like "you seriously carry this much weight?"

So that's something I want to talk about real quickly, because I'm not a prepper, I'm not a camper, and I'm not a backpacker.  Those are all very different things.  Me? I'm a homesteader.

Case in point, here's what it looks like when we're preparing to leave the "city house" to head back out to the wild:

And that doesn't even include the pile of stuff we already keep in the truck normally, like our medkit and tools, or the literal thousands of pounds of equipment and supplies we have out at the cabin waiting for us. Nor does it include the shelves and shelves of reserve supplies we have at the "city house" so that we can up and leave any time our bills are paid up and we can disappear for a while. 

See, we're not packing light. We're packing long-term.  

This is Mrs. Shackleford with a "light" load:

So what's the point of all this? I don't know, maybe I felt like rambling on a Friday and it's fun to pretend I have an audience. 

But seriously, if you're considering doing something like this yourself, here's some advice: ignore backpackers and campers.  Any review you're reading that complains about something being too heavy or bulky, ignore it.  Any video you watch where somebody uses the phrase "ounces make pounds", unsubscribe.

A camper wakes up at dawn and fixes eggs and bacon, then plays in the lake or the woods with their kids until making hotdogs for lunch, and settling in with some beer and s'mores in the evening.

A backpacker wakes up and puts the whole of their worldly possessions in their backpack and hikes off into the wild blue yonder (usually following a proscribed path somebody else more intrepid already made for them). 

If you want to do like we are, your day starts at dawn and you spend the first couple hours making breakfast and coffee, getting dressed, and getting all your shit together for the day. Then, you're going to work your balls off until about 3pm on whatever you're currently building, repairing, or upgrading.  Why 3pm? Because when 3pm rolls around you have no more than four hours of daylight left, which means you've got evening chore-ing to do: better make sure you have wood for the night, supper plans that you can finish before sunset, water for the bath, clean water in the filter bucket for drinking, entertainment plans for the evening.  You can't just go to bed at sunset and wake up at sunrise--hell, half the year, you've got more darkness than daylight. You need to have shit to do, son.  Check batteries, clean dishes, make sure there's no food left out that's going to attract animals. Make sure there's alcohol left so you're not just sitting around dead-sober waiting for sunup (this last part's optional, but I'm no teetotaler and don't expect you to be--as my mom said once, "I'm not going into the apocalypse sober, dammit").  Yeah, the evenings are the best part, because that's when you kick back and relax, but relaxing on the homestead isn't like relaxing on your couch at home--you're still working until well into the evening. 

Campers and backpackers are there for recreation. Backpackers especially are in it for sightseeing.  Also, there's nothing wrong with that! Hell, if you haven't done it, you totally should! We have some of the best sights in the world to see, so go out there and see them before they burn down or flood or get paved. Seriously. 

But if you want to build... If you're not sightseeing, but building a home, you need to remember Peter Zeihan's #1 principle of economics and logistics: moving stuff is hard.  Focus on getting a way to move things, and not just on your back. Into horses? Awesome. Get a horse.  Are you like me, and don't have a place to put a horse when you're not using it? Get a steel horse. They eat dinosaurs and shit pollution, but they can haul a hell of a lot more than you can.  If you're reading this five or ten years from now, and we have all-electric ATVs, change that to "they need solar panels that are made from toxic chemicals, and they support lithium mines in some of the worst corners of the world, but they can haul a hell of a lot more than you can" for the same dramatic effect. 

Once you've gotten over the moving stuff is hard hurdle, don't worry about all those YouTubers and dingbats online who say "you've gotta cut weight, brah."  Focus on getting the most durable version of something you can afford.  You're not hiking--nine times out of ten, you're gonna drag that sumbitch out to the woods once, and then after that, it never comes back out.  So who cares if the first time you drag it out there, it weighs a ton and you work up a cussing sweat? If you don't have to replace it for 20 years, you're good. 

Remember--this is fun as hell, but it's also a ton of work, so don't be shy about having what you want. And don't try to go all minimalist.  Bring stuff purely because it's fun. Bring a boombox, bring a chessboard, hell, bring your drumset if that's what makes you happy. Just solve transportation first, and then any time you see somebody flexing nuts about how lightweight their pack is, remember that while they're sleeping on the ground and eating dehydrated stroganoff out of the same cup they use to make their instant coffee, you're sleeping on memory foam and drinking a Malbec out of real glassware.

You're a homesteader. You're building a home, not sightseeing. Be good to yourself--you worked hard, and earned it. 

Actual advice: water

 Huh, would you look at that?

I made this blog purely as humor, to give some laughs to the good folks over at Hubski who've helped me rekindle a belief that the internet isn't a disgusting wasteland of assholes.  But then to my surprise, I got a bunch of real questions, like "how does your water filter work?"

With that in mind, figured I'd share this with you all. Just in case of apocalypse, this is by far the most convenient way I've found to make a residential water filter.  It's also under a hundred bucks right now in 2020--this isn't a Mother Earth News schematic that says it costs $23 but still lists the prices in 1976 dollars.  

Parts list:

• 2 x plastic buckets
• 1 lid to fit the bottom bucket
• 2 x plastic screw-in spigots
• About four feet of 3/8" tubing (your size might vary based on which filter you buy)
• Sawyer water filter kit, Lifestraw filter bag kit, whichever brand you can find (like this).
• Something to hang it from--trees work fine
• Some way to hang it (I'll give you a few ideas below)
• Optional but awesome: Star San foaming sanitizer (so you can periodically sanitize the "clean" bucket)

The basic idea is really simple.  The top bucket is left open, and is suspended high enough off the bottom bucket to give it good head pressure (most of these filters will take about 3 feet of head in order to function).  Don't make it too tall though! If it's too tall, then you'll spill water all over yourself when you fill it.

The bottom bucket is closed, and has a lid on it. Both buckets have a spigot installed (if you're a homebrewer like me, you can just sacrifice a couple of primary fermentation buckets--I had two spares handy, so I just used those; if you don't brew, the Ale Pail buckets I'm using are only $12 online). 

Connect 3 feet of 3/8" tubing to the spigot on the top bucket, then connect it to the threaded adapter that comes with your water filter.  Screw on the water filter in the right direction (it has a "flow" arrow on it to help), and connect the output tube that it came with (it'll be a lot thinner than your primary tubing because the outputs on these are pretty slow; a "fast" filter takes about ten minutes per gallon).

Either drill a hole in the lid of your bottom bucket, or if you're using an Ale Pail, use the airlock hole that comes pre-drilled. Then, thread the output tube of your filter into it.

If you can't find a filter kit that comes with all the tubing and adapters, don't worry, it's super easy to piece it together.  The white threaded adapter you see in this picture is just a garden hose to 3/8" hose barb. The screw threads on every brand I've tried are the same size as a garden hose, so it makes finding adapters really simple. 

Now all you do is open the spigot on the top bucket, close the spigot on the bottom bucket, and fill the top one with water. Gravity and science do the rest. 

Here's a few tips that I've picked up after using this for the last year:

1. Don't worry about a vent hole in the bottom bucket. The air pressure that builds up is actually really nice. You want the bottom bucket to be a more-or-less closed system so that you don't have to sanitize it too often, so ideally, your hose into the bottom bucket should be a pretty tight fit.  As the bucket fills with clean water, it'll build up pressure, which helps give you some nice water pressure out of the bottom bucket. The air pressure also keeps the bottom bucket from overfilling, so even if the bottom bucket is full, you can top up your "dirty" bucket. As you use clean water, it'll relieve pressure and refill itself. 

2. Don't sit the bottom bucket on the ground--have it elevated, so that it's easier to fill other vessels from it. In my setup, the bottom bucket is hung up too, and it has about 10 inches of ground clearance. Then, I put an 8" or so piece of tubing on the bottom spigot--makes it easier to fill tea kettles and other odd-shaped things without spilling.

3. These filters have to be cleaned out occasionally, so don't glue it all together or anything like that.  Once every couple months, you're going to need to blow out the water filter with clean water (you just flush clean water through it backwards to clean it out).  You'll notice when it's time because the filter slows waaaaaay down.

4. Brand is mostly irrelevant, it's more about what's available.  I've tried Miniwell, Lifestraw, and Sawyer filters.  I found that the Lifestraw is the most thorough--it leaves no "woodsy" flavor in the water--but it's also pretty slow.  The Miniwell is perfectly acceptable, but it left more "woodsy" flavor (you could kind of taste the local flora in the water) and that freaked my wife out.  The Sawyer is by a large margin the fastest-flowing, so that's the one I prefer.  It's almost as good as the Lifestraw in terms of flavor profile, so we've found this is our favorite.   This is also where almost all your cost comes in. The Sawyer and Lifestraw will both set you back $50-$60 depending on what kit you can find. The Miniwell is more like $35.

5. Yes, it really does work. In fact, we've tested the water pre- and post-filter, and we keep water testing strips with us so that we can periodically double-check our results.  No matter what filter we're using, we've been unable to detect anything harmful in our water (it's actually significantly cleaner and softer than our water in the city, which is already perfectly drinkable). 

6.  Ok, last one, but: make your top bucket movable.  I originally just used a ratchet strap to strap it to a tree.  This worked, but it meant that I had to lift up buckets and dump them in.  Now I've upgraded to a hanger I made that has a couple of bolts to hold the handle in place and keep it from slipping.  I find this much easier, because I can take it off the bracket, set it on the ground to fill it, and then lift it up when it's full.  Saves me a lot of creek-water-in-the-face type accidents:

There you go folks! I hope this helps somebody out in the future.  It's not a huge amount of running water, but you'd be surprised how much of your day can be done with a 5 gallon bucket.  We wash dishes, clean our hands, make tea and coffee and juice... it's really very "normal" feeling.  

It's very low-maintenance--we usually go through about a bucket and a half every two days, clean the water filter every few weeks, and Star San the bottom bucket once every three or four months to be careful--and having an essentially unlimited source of drinkable water takes a huge load off both your mind and pack-weight. 

If you ever need it, I hope your apocalypse is full of clean water and happy days. If you want to set this up as an emergency-preparedness kit, you can unscrew the spigots, nest the buckets together, and keep everything inside the buckets with the lid on. Since it all screws together in just a few minutes, this is an awfully handy way to never run out of clean water. 

That's no moon, it's a house!

 Continuing with our plan of "let's accelerate this thing", we spent the following months--as the poets would say--busting our asses.

We set up a table, and realized that having a level surface to put things on will really change your life:

We built a roof over our porch, swapped out our shed-style doors for a single, more solid door:

Why, we even got power and lighting up and running:

 

Yes, things were starting to look pretty cozy.

As time wore on, and we kept heading out to build, things actually started to look like home:

Naturally, watching us build things continued to be exhausting, and the dogs continued their duties:

Which brings us to today--all the rest of the posts on this blog are retrospectives, entered all on the same day to catalog the ups and downs (and really, really downs) that have brought us to where we are. Since I'm basically talking to myself at this point, I make no guarantees about when I'll post more, but I'll try to keep uploading new pictures and updates as we keep moving from "freezing to death in the woods" to "a comfortable homestead."