Sunsaver, Livining Off-Grid In Suburbia- Happy Taconight America!

[luvinlife offthegrid]

It's good to see you back! And... don't worry about "child labor laws" (your first entry). In Youth Development, we call it a "stipend". Glad to hear you're doing well.

 

[sunsaver]

Hey trim, hey lovin! Great to hear from yall again! Im so happy to be back online that i could virtually dance! The garden is looking great today, albeit a bit dry. So here we go again with more from where i left off:

A very frustrating week is in progress, that is if we define progress as being one step forward, and several steps back, a trip, a fall, a skint knee and some barbed wire hooked all-the-way into my finger, the one ive been using the most lately- the middle one. Only two people showed up for the plant sale on saterday; but that's the way the cornbread crumbles. It's no skin off my teeth, at least the ones i still got. And at least i sold some plants, enough to get the groceries i needed, some food for the cats. But the real kicker is driving all the way across the parish, using the last of my gas money, and having my customer not be home. Even the cell phone's mail-box is full and "can not accept messages at this time". Probabaly a GOOD thing that i can not reach this particular customer today. I feel like my whole day was wasted. I'm trying to save up money for a new computer. I cant afford to drive across town for nothing. This is the time of year i need to be planting my food for the summer and fall. I can't afford to be jacking around with odd jobs, fifty bucks here and there. If the job doesn't pay enough for a new computer, then it simply isn't worth my time. I would do better at home, spending time with Moneygirl and The Fatman, living off the land and enjoying my time, rather than stuck in traffic, waiting for a new bridge to get built. I'm ready to stop answering my phone forever, to chuck it off a cliff as hard as i can throw it, or even better- smash it with a sledge hammer like i'm trying to ring the bell at the countyfair. I feel like i did during the trip to Arkansas, when i stopped to get my ex-wife some hot peanuts. We were somewhere near Hamburg, and the old gas station was right out of a Rockwell painting. They even still had the old pull-a-bottle type soda machine with a glass door. The back door was open to a junkyard of old tires and rusted carcasses of automobiles, tall grass and some deep, dark-looking woods. 'I could just take off running.' I thought. 'By the time she came inside to see what was taking me so long, i would be nearly a mile away. I would dumpster-dive for food. I would assume a new identity, a new life. No one would ever know what happened to me or why i disappeared, just a way of escaping my life, everything, and become some one else.

Well, i won't do that. But this will be my last post until i get a computer. I don't have the time or money to come to the library every time i want to rant about something. I would love to spend more time on here, especially at the end of the day, but this rural library closes so early! I have to go. It might be a week or more, but when i come back, i plan to have my own computer in my own garden. No more wasting time to suffer fools lightly. Adios, amigos! Buenos notches!


It's so good to be home again! Home, in my secretgarden of fruits and flowering delights, so sweet and fragrant that even the nats buzzing and bugging about seem more like tiny angels worthy of a live and let them make honey attitude. Whenever i see someone duck and cover because of a tiny bee, i first ask them if they are allergic. Most people will lie and say, "I think so!" To which i always just laugh and say, "you're bigger than he is!" Hee Haw, George Bailey! See, you had a pretty wonderful life after all, til that little ole bee took you out, huh? Wasn't that an episode of CSI Miami? Ha ha, LOL, it is to laugh! When a bee is working a flower, he is so into what he is doing, that he is oblivious of cowlike creatures walking around on our hind legs. I used to come out in the morning with a nice, hot cup of green tea, and park my face above the entrance to a yellow jacketed hornet's nest. If had walked onto the nest like a clumbsy oaf, i would have been covered in stingers like a prime rib tossed into a tank of pirahnas; but as i was sneaking up on them, i was able to park my eyes in front air terminal central. It was like standing in the middle of a runway at Chicago's O'Haire International Airport. It's nice sometimes, after working hard, to just sit and smell the jasamine, munch out blueberries. Blueberries already? Thats wierd!

Global warming, mars in phase with venus, the supermoon we just had, a change in the orbit of the Earth around the sun; whatever the cause, my blueberries are ripening way too early. Most of the blackberries are not even fully red, yet i'm not curious enough to dwell on the reasons why, fossil fuels, the follies of man's greed. Ive grown accustomed to extreme weather where freak events and tornado warnings are the norm and average temps are rare. It's above normal today, beautiful in spite of it, and The Fat Man is cuddled up beside me being loveydovey. Most of the time he is grumpy and aloof, just like his character's namesake from the classic film, The Maltese Falcon. Monkeygirl is likely being a cat on a cool, tin roof, her favorite new sleeping area away from the flies, fleas, mosquitos, and other blood-suckers from the Planet of The Vampires, an under-rated "B" sci-fi movie from the early sixties. I have been up since 6am, have already watered the plants in the nursury area (the sun garden), and i now have time to write and relax, think and plan my daily "to-do" list, or just sip coffe and mosey around the grounds. I'm often surprised at just how big one acre of woods can feel when walking around it, and it never fails to surprise my visitors and i alike that a few moster trees can drop enough dead wood to fill my daily fuel requirements for cooking (with the exception of a long stew, pot roast, or my signature Catholic school style, Italian spaghetti and meatballs. A quick fire can heat some left-overs, cook pasta to toss with some fresh herbs and olive oil, or scorch a quesodilla made with sharp Vermont cheddar and tobasco peppers. A zip stove made from a coffee can makes cooking possible with even less wood, twigs and even pinestraw which abounds. Im so happy that i made the transition to off-grid living, even though it was a difficult and often frustrating process of camping out in my own home at first. I now walk in and turn on the lights without a thought, unless the weather has been cloudy for a few days. There are times when i do have to conserve my solarpower; but for the most part, i take my electricity for granted even more so than when i was on the grid. Sooner or later, spaceweather will strike. A small meteor or a massive coronal ejection from the sun. A gamma ray blast from a slightly too nearby supernova. Whatever it will be, it will happen again sooner or later. If everyone lived as i do, we'd all miss the internet for however long it took to get the grid back up. Other than being socially isolated and pissed-off about missing the season finale' of Person of Interest, we would still have lights and electricity. I am reminded of that movie from the 80's called "Red Dawn". The Soviets invade, but find that nearly every one of us red-necked hillbillies from Louisiana owns a high-powered rifle and have good aim. Toss in a non-dependance on the grid, solar panels on every rooftop, and it would make for a well armed and self-reliant nation with a great sense of non-invadable national security.

Giant blackberry + giant red bird (a cardinal, also known to persons with hangovers as "alarmclock birds") + lazy cat, twenty feet away and not even flinching, yet staring right at the poacher; equal one irritated Sunsaver! "That big red bird right there Monkey! What the hell kind of cat are you anyways!" This is an actual quote of me talking to my cats in my garden, as family, bad kids in need of a time out, and my accent is more "hey yall," like tv parody, though not as exagerated, and less like the cajuns down south or them cityfolk in Nawlens. "Do i have to put down this computer and chase him off myself?!" The bigbird suddenly dropped down to the clothesline, a mere three feet away from the Frankenberry, for realz? "Holy ****!" I exclaimed. I dropped the laptop on top of a seed tray, crushing seedlings, and grabbed a stick. "Get out of here!" I yelled. I flung the limb with good aim, but missed as he flew away, only just in time, as if to laugh at my pathetic arm. "You're no Drew Brees!" The redbird crowed back, "better keep your day job, BOY!" He cackled off into the distant hieghts of the tree canopy and started tweeting the alarm, over and over with that annoying whistle, like a phys-ed coach with OCD. I turned around and looked at a yawning catmouth returning a blank stare. "Your fired!" i told her, in my best impression of the Trumpster.

 

[dragonlaurel]

Good to see you here old friend.

 

[sunsaver]

Good to see you too, DL! Great to have my online journal back. No more scribbling down ideas on scraps of paper like Emily Dickenson, destined to organize them into a hoarder's pile, or leave gabarge of paper thoughts scattered all over a maniac's desk. No more texting myself essays. If i loose my train of thought, i can come online and remember what it was i thought about on that day.

 

[Denim Deb]

Hey SS, so good to see you back! I had about giving up hope on ever seeing you again.

 

[lazyday]

Good to see you are writing again. Love your writing style.

 

[sunsaver]

Thanks LazyD! Missed you too, Wonderwoman! Im still busy working out the bugs of the new calculator, re-finding my favorite websites. just the pleasure of high-speed wifi is so awesome, like the days of early radio and the birth of commercial advertising. You can sing about frosty ohs, so long as the concert is free. There was a whole list of how-to plans, solar power, Tesla patents that i wanted to build. Fortunately i have a visual memory sort of like that lovely actress from Taxi that the Unforgettable character is based on. Not with names, numbers, or dates at all, but maps, directions, mazes, wiring diagrams, faces, that sort of thing. Once ive been there, i can always find my way back to it. A means for generating high frequency, high voltage lightning with two transformers and a spark gap. I'll have to try it some 4th of july when i have lots of money to blow on copper wire. "Here, touch this.. it won't shock you. See. Look here. Now step on this... Zap!The big capacitor is also a stun gun/spot-welder! Always wanted a Tesla coil to go with my rabbit-ears spark gap. At today's insanity, i could call it an investment in precious metal, or at least a cool light show to put on at parties or events, Frankenstien on Halloween.

 

[sunsaver]

i was asked about my coffee can stove:

A zip stove is used by campers, hikers, hobos, or by anyone who needs to cook or re-heat food, boil water for drinking, or other emergency use. Take a coffe can, whelch's grape juice, or any large tin can and burn it in a fire to remove the plastic liner. Dont breath the toxic fumes which are known by the State of California to cause cancer. Then use leather gloves and some tin snips, heavy stainless steel kitchen scizzors, or a sharp and sturdy pocket knife to cut a triangle shaped hole at the base of the can, one third of the can circumference at the base of the triangle-shaped hole, and the two opposite sides of the triangle hole meeting a third of the way to the top of the can (the top of the can is gone, cut off with a can-opener, so the top is the rim of folded metal that the plastic Folgers or MaxwellHouse lid snaps onto. Then take a bottle opener that has the triangle shaped end for punching holes in the top of juice cans, and punch holes in the side of the can, just below the rim, by pushing into the side. Go all around the top making small triangle shaped holes. The flames will come out from there, like a gas burner ring. The pot sits on top of the rim. Load the new zip stove from the top with straw and twigs. Light the fire from the big triangle hole at the bottom third of the can. Once the wind hits it right, the draft will keep the stove fired as you load in twigs from the front opening every few minutes and you might need to blow some; but you can boil water in just two minutes or wip up steamed, organic veggies found along the trail.

 

[sunsaver]

A squirrel less than ten paces away. Cat and squirrel with locked gazes, a deadly game of staring showdown: who will look away first? I whistle the spaghetti western tune from "Shoot Out at the OK Corral". The mood is set. All that's missing is sound of a rattlesnake or the somber tolling of a church bell.

Cat flinches first, squeaking out a half meow as if to say "I want to eat that so bad, that i just can't sit still any longer!" Squirrel starts barking, shoots up the tree like a bottle rocket.
"Good job, Monkey! You're my best watchcat ever. I guess you can have your job back."
"Meow."
"You're welcome. Here's a bowl of kibble."

Timing is everything.

I just saw that pesky cardinal again, its dinasaur eye aimed at the waves of red and half-purple berries, soon to be blackberries. It's a small crop by commercial standards, but plenty for fresh eating and snaks. By next year, i should be canning some, making jam, selling fresh fruit, etc. A dozen blueberry bushes are also loaded, just enough for feeding my red blood cells and scouring out any leftover junkfood from my arteries. I need not sing about the health benefits of dark colored fruits. The journal of the AMA can do that for me. I will however boast about my own recovery from years of superheavy alcohol consumption. For those who missed it, i almost died from liver failure in late 2011. Over-the-counter pain medicine and cheap vodka dont go so good together. Extra strong coffee, thick as chocolate milk and bitter enough to choke the average man, is my new drug of choice. I have an assortment of all natural herbs, made by God, but Bayer asperin is the only man-made drug in my medicine cabinet. It's a chemical-free romance for me. I'm in love with life, and i want to be healthy enough to enjoy it. I have lost about 40 pounds over the past year, and now feel healthier and lighter on my feet than i was in my thirties. Walking around all day, watering plants, digging in the dirt, and throwing sticks at the birds makes for a good daily work-out routine.

Tomorrow is plant sale day. I have to start cleaning up, setting out plants on display, making new signs to go up along the highway, and watering all the small containers that dry out quickly in the heat. Coffee is cold now. Back to work. Chat with yall later.

 

[snapshot]

Hope you have a really good sale day tomorrow!!!!