Update on The Debster, and cousin Crazy George goes off-grid

I thought this was worth a chuckle ...

Well, the Debster has been home for a couple of days now, and life is settling back into some semblance of normalcy. She is still pretty limited in what she can do, but is improving daily. She gets up and down the stairs from the bedroom fairly well, and is doing her prescribed exercises with only a little bit of prodding from "the management of this torture chamber", meaning me. Her incision is healing nicely. She is normally a very slow healer, so that is VERY good news. And she has begun to cut back on the pain meds, also great news. One other thing that I really hope to see happen is that as the pain recedes and she gets some normal motion back, she will be able to work on strengthening herself all around. She has been in so much pain for so long, and hence virtually an invalid, that she has allowed her muscle strength to atrophy to an alarming extent. This is going to be a long process, but I hope that by the end of the year, after the other knee has been replaced, it will speed up quickly.

I received a letter the other day from my cousin Crazy George.

Hey Ronbo! [I'll explain that later]

Well, Patsy and I finally did it! We bought a spread near [name of town redacted]. You been yammerin about self-sufficiency and going off the grid for so long that we decided you just might be right.

 We have about 100 acres. It's kind of hilly, par for the course here in the Missouri Ozarks, too rocky to be great farmland. Most of it is wooded, but there are a couple of acres fairly level and clear, with a nice sized spring-fed crick running through it.

The nearest town is about 5 miles away, and our property is about a mile down a dirt road off the county road. The closest "neighbor" is about a mile away. There are NO utilities run out here at all.

This is a stock photo of a 1971 Airstream similar to George's.
He doesn't allow photos of his. Or of anything, for that matter. Kinda paranoid.

For the moment, we are living in our Airstream camper. We haven't decided what we are going to do about a permanent abode, but we are leaning towards building a log cabin. There is no shortage of building material, that's for sure!

There is a small outbuilding that hasn't fallen down yet. I'm going to do some repairs on it, and use it to house our garden tractor and our ATV. 

We had the crick tested, and the water has no chemical pollution. So I am going to put up a 500-gallon cistern, and a generator-powered pump from the crick to keep it filled. A good charcoal filtration system should take care of other remaining impurities. Eventually we will have to figure out a better water supply; that generator uses a lot of diesel fuel. Even adapting it to run on waste oil, and bio-diesel which I will be able to make myself, it is not economical enough to be a long-term solution.

I need to run into town and pick up some supplies, so I'll be mailing this from there. Give me a call. Although I don't have cell service out here, you can leave a message and I'll be able to get it when I get to town.

Hope to see you out here visiting soon.
George

Well, I have to go as well. Time to get the Debster up, get her breakfast, and finish the laundry. More to follow soon.

God bless!
Ron

Cell phones and gardens.

Somebody posted this on Facebook. Kind of funny.

At my age, 54, I remember when phones were these clunky black things that were wired to the wall, and the headset had a coiled cord that would occasionally get tangled, and to call someone you had to literally turn the dial seven times.

Then, along came the push-button "tone" phone. Then, a real revolution, the cordless phone. The base was still hardwired, but the handset was cordless and could be carried around the house, and even out into the yard.
The cellular phone was the big revolution. The bag phone was a clunky thing. I never had one but a couple of my friends did, and they thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread! 

The earlier self-contained cellulars were approximately the size of a brick, and about as heavy. I did have one of those.
Fast forward to today. We continue to call them "phones", or "smart phones", but in truth, they are not really phones anymore. They are miniature computers that have a cellular phone function. It seems like everyone has one now. And we can't figure out how we ever lived without them.
But maybe we should. As wonderful as those things are, all the stuff we can do with them, they have a real dark side, that isn't spoken of very much. They are easily tracked and their location pin-pointed to a precise location. Early cell phones could be triangulated by which towers they pinged, but the best a tracker could do was pin-point a neighborhood. All the new phones, however, have GPS tracking built into them, that allows them to be pin-point located to within a few feet, in real-time.
And we have heard so much about the NSA spying on our phones. It is a scary world out there, and getting scarier by the minute. Big Brother is watching you!

Have been thinking about my garden, and how I want to do it this year. I think I am going to do a raised-bed version, with concrete blocks around it. The raised bed will have the tomatoes, squash, zucchini, peppers, onions, and so forth. And the holes in the blocks will have various herbs, and perhaps some flowers. 

It is a little late now for this year, but I have also thinking about ways to start seeds. I have thought of a way to utilize cardboard toilet-paper tubes as seed pots. And, I have been looking at those plastic containers that contain the strawberries that the Debster buys during the off-season. They hold two pounds, and are a convenient size. Black plastic with a clear lid. Can't help but think they would make decent miniature green-houses for those seed-pots. I think I'll start stocking up on this stuff, and see what happens.

Another project, that I will be working on soon, involves stuffing those little cat food cans, or tuna fish cans, with paraffin-soaked cardboard, to be stored and used as emergency stoves. Will have to experiment a bit. And I doubt they will be good for anything extensive, but in an emergency situation would probably be great for at least heating canned soups and such. Watch for more on this in the near future.

Until next time
God Bless
Ron