Hey admins. This one right here…

In which way am I complaining? I am explaining why calling a valid solution a bandaid might be construed as belittling their very real knowledge of this process. And how that is a regular pattern in a lot technical fields.

And don’t give me this shit about ‘I’m not the person you were talking to’ This is an open forum not a direct/private message.

You can’t expect people who are knowledgeable about this stuff to just forever accept that someone asks for advice, gets told the solution, and then ignores/belittles the person with knowledge.

This is our daily life experience. We get hired to be experts, and get told by non-experts that our solutions are not tenable every single day. Only for that solution to eventually be accepted when the user in question figures out their idea was not useful and the expert was correct.

We have to put up with it at work, we are not obliged to accept it here.

I’m sorry. But you are insane if you think some kids putting a few fireflies in a jar come anywhere near the negatives of loss of habitat, pollution, and disruption of the food chain.

Math is fun. Try it some time.

@jadero@slrpnk.net Tagging because I thought you might not get a notification from me replying to my own post instead of yours :p

Finally have some downtime to flesh this out a bit.

We are in our mid-40s.

Thinking ahead about the systems we use is paramount, as I have crohn’s and other immune-related problems surface as debilitating gout and/or iritis, and my wife suffers from hip issues. Everything is being planned on single floors, with as little stairs or walking as possible. We both know how hard it will be in another ten years.

We use a standard woodstove mainly due to the fact that we live on a bunch of acres of trees, and there is enough standing dead to get some ‘free’ firewood every year, and I truly enjoy dropping and splitting trees.

Our main water source is a creek about 200 feet from the main house. In the winter I have to keep 200 feet of hoses and the gas-pump in the bathroom to have it thawed when I need to run it and fill our two 1000litre totes. From there we have a 12 volt pump that is connected to a small charge controller with two 100watt panels and a lithium battery (cannibalized from the 5th wheel we lived in while building our tiny house)

This system is working ‘ok’, but if a well company would actually show up we would probably trade it for a well in a heartbeat. Especially my wife, who is very tired of driving to the city to do laundry.

The actual method of getting hot water to the kitchen tap might drive some folks nuts, but for us it has just become part of life. it goes something like:

Our water heater is one of those propane driven camping units with the propane bottles stored outside. And our cookstove/oven is also propane (shout out to unique appliances for their sweet offgrid models!)

• Turn off the bath’s hot tap (this is connected directly to the water heater and acts as a relief valve in case the water heater fails to shut down the flame and build pressure in the system)
• Turn on the Kitchen hot tap
• Go back into the bathroom and turn on the valve that allows water to flow through the camping heater, and since the bath tap is closed, the pressure diverts into the kitchen where the tap is open.
• Reverse all of that to ensure the pressure doesn’t build in the system when shutting down. …

For lighting we primarily use solar string garden lights due to the fact that it took us over 13 months to get grid power which gave a lot of time to get used to minimal power from a little all-in-one bluetti power bank and a couple of 750watt panels. And now we just enjoy the light they give off, and the fact that they just turn on and off in conjunction with the sun.

We have since switched most of our internal things like computers, pet lights and a small emergency space heater to 110v, but being out in the boonies means a lot of power outages and glitches, so we also have the bluetti ready to serve things like the fridge, snake light and heatpad, and our internet, when the mains go down.

We are always finding little things to help, like installing a usb fan above the woodstove to supplement the anemic air movement from the little stovetop fan that we bought, or improving the efficiency of the small heater in the bathroom to also warm the incoming water lines when they are hovering around freezing temps so we don’t get frostbite on our fingers under the tap.

I dug a septic tank and field myself last year, and moved the toilet from an outhouse to an actual flusher. That was like moving from the slums into a palace for us! No more 3am runs to the outhouse at -30C!

I am starting to feel like we are getting less work than our old life, but the truth is probably that I am just more used to the work I do every day, and can even enjoy some of it.

Oh yes… A snowblower. I blew the bank on a used commercial 48inch blower last year after we got stuck in our driveway by a plow piling literal 100 pound ice blocks at the end of our driveway on christmas eve. I’m a strong guy, but those bastard blocks were just impossible to move by hand. NEVER AGAIN. Now I run the big blower every time I see even an inch of snow. And I go out past our driveway so the plow doesn’t have anything to push in my way.

I won’t even start on thawing the incoming water lines every morning as that has just become part of life, and/or the removal of snow from the roof of the house or the outbuildings.

Spring is coming. And this year is the year of ‘improving, not building’ so we shall see what comes out of it.

I’m sure I missed 100 things here. But I have to get back to work now. Thanks for giving me a reason to type all this out :) I sometimes forget how far we have come from carrying buckets of water from the creek, and digging an outhouse…

Commenting here to remind me to flesh out my reply when work isn’t breathing down my neck.

Short form - This comment is so very similar to how we think and work. I would love to discuss more.

Especially this part: “some of those “do as I will” activities might be seen as chores by others.”

My morning chores are the best part of my day. Probably because I chose them, and do them in conjunction with the flows of seasons and the natural changes in which animals and weather patterns are visiting us. Chores indeed… More like meditation!

I also live this life, and with a dayjob + all the infra work around here I am working harder than I ever have in my life. And I used to literally dig ditches…

The Sunday morning coffee with chipmunks on my lap makes a good picture, but it doesn’t begin to capture the stress and sweat that is necessary for this life.

My hope is that in 5-10 years I’ll have systems in place that will take some of that work away, and then when I’m done with the dayjob I might actually get to enjoy it!

People who think they can come out to a forest, cut out just enough room for their tiny house, and relax for the rest of their lives are insane.

Yeah, I’m doing a terrible job because I was trying not to seem like I’m advertising for them. I’m not related to them in any other way than I love their coffee.

DM if you have any questions.

I order by email or phone.

Who am I kidding? I’m terminally online… I email. But I think I did the first by phone.

NXT Roasters out of edmonton alberta. The guy is a roasting genius and invented his own forced air roaster. We moved across the country and still order our coffee (caf and decaf) from them after trying dozens of local and semi-local alternatives. Nothing comes close.

I strongly recommend their decaf and the yellow cataui for full-caf.

I have never had a comment make me feel this old.

-Signed, an old man who used to publish zines in the early 90s.

The standard, IMO, should be “contributes to the conversation” vs “contributes to the noise”.

Respectfuly - I think that should have stayed on reddit. There is no reason we need to follow the cultural norms of a place we left. Downvoting obvious bullshit is always ok to me whether that bullshittery adds to the conversation or not.

Kwaso!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnI6IPtx4Yk

This is not evidence that the term is a slur.

This is the definitions of words which most everyone in this thread certainly already knew, strung together with your opinion that they are connected.

While this has been somewhat entertaining, I don’t think I’ll continue to feed your delusions any further.

I will not be replying again. Goodbye.

Care to provide any of that? Because so far all I have seen is your opinion, and a bunch of people disagreeing.

It sure seems like you’re in here trying to enforce your personal opinion that the word people are using is a slur.

You don’t get to decide what is a slur. Go away.

Ron Agrees

Root removed!

As a Montreal-born poutine-sucking monster I agree.

But it is still fun to say otherwise.