Yup. I’m Bo7a.
Don’t forget us folks who built their little house themselves and can’t find/afford insurance.
For me it was ‘this house is too small to qualify under normal terms, you will have to pay ridiculous premiums’
420sqft isn’t exactly a shed. But these companies are stuck in a different era.
Taking weed to BC (Canada)
I’m seeing a lot of “ai” generated trash in the paper now :(
There is an ice cream chain in Quebec called ‘les chocolats favoris’ who make a cone that is in line with this.
We are.
This idiot, however…
The periphery of small towns covered in makeshift tents and shanty style campers would disagree with your statement.
These encampments used to be for seasonal workers passing through. But more and more become year-round all the time.
You are certainly correct about the bulk of homeless making their way towards the cities, but there are a growing number of those who don’t.
Everything you say is misconstrued through some lens over which you have no control.
example:
Me: Hey do you want to go for a walk when you are done what you are working on?
Them: Why are you always so critical of how long things take?
Me: What. The. Fuck?
Thanks. I won’t tell them or it’ll just go to their head.
I know a single data point is pretty worthless. But here is our most recent experience.
When we suddenly lost one of our 5 year old brother cats the one who was still with us got lethargic and very obviously wasn’t himself. We waited about 2 months then brought two rescue kittens home about a week apart, and did a fairly relaxed intro for each.
He hissed at both of them for the first 5 minutes when physical contact was allowed but otherwise he left them alone. Within a week they were sleeping together. Now they can often all three be found in a big furpile licking each other and he is back to his playful self. We considered not getting another friend for him. But we are so very happy we did.
Cat Tax: Batman (The older brother) is on the bottom left, Eddie Vedder Allen Poe is the one sitting up, and Skeeter can be seen squinting on the right as she always does when she is in her happy place.
Whoa! thanks for sharing your experience. Your work was definitely appreciated. 25 years later, mainly due to that silly need to play pirated cartoons for the kiddos, and a CD rom I pulled out of the trash - I am a sysadmin who wears an architect title, and I have built some amazing systems. Maybe if Caldera hadn’t been what it was I wouldn’t have been interested enough to make it work, and to realize a love for unixlike systems. So yeah. Thanks :)
Caldera linux 1.2.
Those days were magical.
I had just started my university days and I had two young kids who wanted to watch cartoons but we couldn’t afford cable. I ended up scrounging parts from the garbage bins in and behind the computer lab to scrape together a workable desktop.
If I recall correctly it was 333 MHz. Originally installed Windows 98 SE on it. But media would stutter no matter what I did, even if all other processes were killed.
A monk friend of mine (my university was geographically attached to a Benedictine monastery) asked me if I had tried Linux as it should be easier on the system resources and still allow me to play most media.
The rest, as they say, is history.
I finally gave up the hate and embraced the poeterring-ing a few years ago. Can confirm I de-aged by 15 years as a result.
This is our experience as well. Restaurants are supposed to be a treat, but these days it seems like every one is in a race to see who can provide the least quality garbage from the sysco truck.
I’m referring to how folks use it on social media. ‘car free city’ very very rarely would mean banning cars from a city.
I’m not saying it is the correct term. At all.
‘walkable cities’ makes more sense to me.
In general usage it means ‘the ability to get by with the usual needs of life without needing a car’.
At least as far as I understand it.
Pazuuuuuzuuuuu, Oh pazuuuuzuuuuu
Where are you pazuzu?
@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!)
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!
Check out who runs CNN now and all will become apparent.