A further note on off grid living

I watched a video on lowtech, sustainable devices, which is a bit frustrating because these happy idiots overlook some of the most blatant shortcomings of some designs : "yeah, this anaerobic digester doesn't smell at all because of the air-sealed lid", but how about once a week when you open the lid to fill the bucket with organic matter ? You just get a real good whiff of the bacterial colonies you just told decompose this matter. Or "this solar water heater is real easy to make, look, we just scrapped an old fridge to use the door and the back tubing". Yes, and don't mention the ten feet of copper tubing which is ultra expensive, and which you have to bend in a coil inside the tank to heat the water.

But that was okay, i mean, there was some ideas you could pick up.

Then i started this video about a thirty years old who bought 74 ha for 230 000€ and has lived on it ten years doing everything by himself.
First, i was surprised how he could describe himself as a web illustrator fed up with city life, if he's lived in the countryside for the past ten years. This would make him a 20 yo seasoned professional (?) with a good knowledge on how the rat race works.
Then i was quite puzzled by how he quickly brushed off how he lives on a 230 000€ plot his mother bought. And then proceeds to tell everybody how they should live their life (to his defense, he says to not buy the same kind of plot he did).
Then he goes on to tell the camera how society is so bad and so evil, and he advises all young people to run from their schools because "arrêtez d'aller à l'école (...), tous les jeunes qui font école d'agriculture, tout ça, tout tout tout tout est inutile. Donc ça va inquiéter les parents, c'est sûr, mais vous perdrez pas votre temps, y'a tout sur Internet, y'a tout dans les bouquins, vous saurez bien plus que vos profs (...) Juste la liberté du pouvoir d'achat... Tu t'insères dans ta petite case, tu fais ta petite activité tous les jours, puis tu peux acheter des choses. C'est ça la grande liberté, super... Mais au fond voilà, les mecs ils savent rien en mécanique, ils savent pas construire une maison... Bref faut savoir tout faire, hein, souder, machin, et bon, faut tout réapprendre parce qu'on a perdu notre temps toutes ces années à l'école. Sinon ben voilà, on est dépendants de demander des services aux autres. D'une société de service et d'achat et de revente (...)".
And it... enrages me. How does he think the internet is working right now ? How does he think the knowledge is out there for him to cherry-pick ? Who made the machine that polished the buttons on his obviously expensive "nature-consciously" woven shirt ? How would exist the juridical status he says earlier you've got to apply for ?

And when all the rich kids will have bought all the 74 acres, where will us all go ?  And once all the young people will have flocked to the countryside living off of society, how will society evolve and still produce knowledge ? Where will the scientists train to tell him how methane is balanced and sulfur filtered in his biogas digester ?
I held fast for five minutes, then stopped. (and then re-watched it to correct what I had first written to you, to be fairer to the guy)

See, that's exactly what i blame Thoreau for (i dunno if you read the post) : accusing modern society to be evil, and underlining how stupid it is to live, support, or justify it, while completely ignoring its necessity to one's own way of living.

It's mind-boggling. The negation of the whole of society's value to a man. The only fact he can speak distinctly and I can watch him and I can talk about it to you in another language is a direct consequence of occupation specialization in society.
These people are parasites, and tell others "you so stupid still living in this society, man !". Because yeah, if everything is on the Internet, if looms make your cloths that you don't have to weave them on your own, if the wool comes from New Zealand with you paying as much as if it comes from Tyrol (and there's not enough sheep in Tyrol to clothe every people in Germany alone), it's because of hundreds of year of societal, scientific and engineering progress, industrialization ; and people are still out there in the thick of society allowing him to live in his precious bubble. If he had to get the iron ore, smelt it, refine it, mold it, forge it and sharpen it just to make the scissors he's using to cut his beard and hair so fashionably, maybe, maybe I would listen to him. And this is just one tiny example.
But since he's not, I don't care for his judgement on society and on people getting regular jobs.

See, it's one thing, as i want to, to live with as low an impact as possible, and as low a budget as possible, on the margin of society.
It's another to condemn it and all the things that make it possible to actually free yourself from barely surviving in the wilderness.

It's what I hated about Into the Wild main character, his arrogance and ignorance thinking he was ready to deny society's gifts and services (and i'm not merely saying "modern living" here, but also the society of men with their helpfulness, their inherited wisdom, their personal experience).*

It's also what i don't like about Zoufris Maracas' Cocagne lyrics :)

There was this sentence in a rap song I really liked, and i really thought was profound, which i still stand by and means a lot to me :

Un homme seul est viande à loup.

It hasn't always meant this to me, but today, here's what i would get from it : try to live without society's services and we'll see how you fare being an animal. We have tens of thousands of years worth of unlearning that. Believing our personal intelligence will make up for this loss is arrogant and foolish.
Even actually surviving alone in the wild, like the old man in the Colorado weather station, is sitting on the shoulders of giants.

* I just read that he must not have been so ignorant after all... My argument still stands.

Kodawari

This was posted on Reddit in early October :

My job is putting wristbands on people at a museum. My boss says I’m the best wristbander at the place. Here’s all my wristband-related wisdom.

When you’re getting a wristband put on, always put out your wrist with the palm of your hand facing up. That way it won’t stick to your arm hair.

If the adhesive part of the wristband doesn’t align and sticks to you, fold it over.

To take off a wristband, grab the loose part on the interior and pull it in the opposite direction it’s facing, towards the adhesive.

When putting a wristband on a small child, make sure you ask them if it’s too loose/tight.

As for dealing with a child’s wrist size, you can either wrap the band around the wrist until it fits, or you can make a “whale’s tail” with the band (stick the adhesive strip to the underside of the band so that it fits the wrist and the rest of it will stick straight up). You can either cut off the excess or let it stay depending on the child’s preference.

If you know you will be wristbanding a lot of children, it can be helpful to cut some short in advance so that they’re sized appropriately.

If someone obviously wants to put a wristband on you, don’t try to take it and do it yourself unless you’re confident you can do it. You probably can’t. It’s hard to do one-handed.

When you have a lot of practice wristbanding, you will be able to do it very, very fast. Use the time you save with the application of the band to make sure the adhesive is lined up.

Brace the band against the wrist with your middle fingers while you line up the adhesive with your thumbs and index fingers.

And finally, every single person makes the joke that it’s like going to the hospital/to the club. You’re not funny or original for that one. Sorry.

I positively love the effort and analysis this guy's putting in a mundane, lowly task. I'm just fascinated.

There's also that tongue-in-cheek character in both The Flaming Carrot comics and the movie that was inspired by it, Mystery Men : the Shoveler.

His superpowers are that he shovels better than anyone his wife's ever known.

The Japanese call this kodawari, the "obsessive pursuit of perfection", passionate about, striving towards, embracing, insisting on, and paying (close) attention to, the uncompromising and relentless pursuit of perfection.

Another akin word I like is shokunin, "dedication to one's craft", mastery of a profession, obligation to work his/her best for the general welfare of the people.
I can relate on a procedural level (something is think more and more as my own work specialization). You're not doing good for acknowledgement, or even self-gratification in your own skills ; you're doing it the best you can because if everyone is doing the best he/she can, then the overall well-being and purposefulness is guaranteed. A principle that is lost with misguiding, which is why the concept must be decided upon and kept, and why rules are rules.

The Japanese have a lot of lovely, handy, hardly-translatable words.

Demis & Pintes

Les pintes, demis et bocks sont des termes hérités des systèmes pré-métriques. Ils dépendent donc de

• la culture qui les a imposés (Française, Impériale, US)
• historiquement, le standard local qui les a imposé à sa culture-mère ; c'est-à-dire qu'avant d'être la "pinte française", la pinte a été la "pinte parisienne", qui était différente de la "pinte de Châlus", etc.

La pinte

La pinte française actuelle est 0,5 litre. Historiquement, la pinte de Paris faisait ≈ 1 litre (0,952 litre).
En Belgique, la pinte fait 0,25 litre.
En Québec, la pinte fait ≈ 1,14 litre.
La pint impériale fait ≈ 0,568 litre.
La pint US fait ≈ 0,473 litre.

Le demi et le setier

Les Romains mesuraient les liquides en conges de ≈ 3,23 litres et en amphores de ≈ 19,44 litres.
Un sixième de conge était un sextarius, qui est devenu un setier en français. 1/6 conge = 1 setier ≈ 0,538 litre.
La moitié d'un sétier était un demi-setier, soit ≈ 0,25 litre.
Le demi-setier est devenu le demi, et il fait maintenant 0,25 litre. On ne parle plus de setier en France.

Le bock

Le bock est un type de bière allemand (Bavière et Basse-Saxe).
Il est servi dans un verre à bock, qui en France fait 0,25 litre.
J'ai pas trouvé pourquoi on utilise cette quantité seulement en France (en.wiki et de.wiki ne parlent pas de verre ni de contenance dans l'article Bock). D'autre part, c'est maintenant rare de demander un bock à un bar, même si la plupart des barmen doivent savoir ce que c'est.

Chopes et chopines

La chope est avant tout un contenant, un verre avec une anse pour boire de la bière. Une tradition veut que les chopes aient été équipées d'un couvercle pour que les maladies ne se transmettent pas par les postillons.
A l'époque napoléonienne, on a introduit la mesure de chope (en Allemand, Schoppen) pour remplacer la pinte de Paris. Donc 1 chope ≈ 1 litre (0,952 litre).
Avec le temps, le sens de chope s'est rapproché du sens de pinte, et maintenant, une chope est officiellement en France un verre pour boire la bière qui fait 0,5 litre.
La chopine faisait la moitié d'une chope, qui elle-même remplaçait la pinte de Paris, soit 1 chopine ≈ 0,476 litre.
Au Canada, la chopine désigne le quart impérial, soit ≈ 0,568 litre.
Aujourd'hui, ni la chope ni la chopine ne sont utilisées en France comme mesures de quantité, mais uniquement comme contenant pour boire de la bière (avec un sens "médiéval", humouristique, ou satirique).

A note on off-the-grid living

Samuel Taylor Coleridge had a famous word on how you must raise a child in the countryside. Coleridge is a must-study author as he's part of the Authorized Reads in the Canon of our (yours and mine) household catechism : namely, he is a character in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.
So, his Frost at Midnight goes :
"(...) For I was reared
In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze,
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags.
[...]
Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw (...)"
I like poetry. I like how putting superfluous efforts into writing in order to express oneself truthfully begs readers to put efforts into considering alien thoughts.

So anyway, reading it and about it put my mind to thinking about living in the countryside again, and then how it means that in the lifelong struggle between the Urban and the Rural mes in my mind, the latter is winning more and more battles.

It should also one day progress into reading (again) how Tolkien argued against the urban and industrial complexity of his modern world, because i think a lot of my rural aspiration comes from a legendary setting instilled in me through his stories. Coming back to the nurturing stages of my will to live away from the rat race would clean up any fantasy or romanticism still wedged in it (the will).

It echoed on the few words i had read of Thoreau's Walden at Jackie's, and how profoundly stupid i thought this immensely popular author was, which is in itself unsettling. My argument is : that in his first pages, the guy exhorts everyone to combat the mind-numbing, life-crushing cycles of an industrial, developed society, by satisfying oneself in the simple life of living from little in the wood, where he goes as far as estimating the -limited- cost ; but doing so, it underlines how dependent of this industrial society the hermit is, because the cheapness of a raccoon's hat or a carpenter's trousers comes from mass production, specialization of work and the gathering of financial power to invest in this mass production and specialization (ie banking). I compare it to something i read on your wall about how "changing women's behaviour to prevent rape" matches the proposition "make sure he rapes the other girl" : "go buy cheap stuff and live in the wilderness" is tantamount to "leave the dirty work to others so you can leave contentedly". Living cheap would not work if you had to make everything you need to do so on your own and from scratch ; even the mindset of living in the wild comes from a philosophy that was only allowed by food surpluses produced at some point by someone else. It is something of an obvious conclusion that civilization was built at some point when a few generations in a row didn't need to devote all their time to producing food, clothes or shelter, because someone else did.
Plus, he failed to address the problem of purpose ; in the passages i read, Thoreau only argued in favor of watching nature cycles unfold around you. It doesn't quite pack enough intellectual punch to develop one's personality, capacity or experience.

Anyway, this all came back to my current thoughts about "living off-the-grid" and how i think it is crucial to define it before trying to do it. Wikipedia defines living off-the-grid first, as i think the first people who used the term did, as living without the necessity of a remote infrastructure. Most essentially, electricity. But it sure doesn't mean living without electricity, nor even living without a weekly visit to the supermarket and get a McDonald's order on the way back. The basic idea is not even associated to living cheaply or eco-friendly, as an engine-generator working on diesel complete the requirements of being off-the-grid.
Wiki reminds that "A common misconception is that a true off-grid house is able to operate completely independently of all traditional public utility services. Although this is not the case". As i said at another time, i don't think living off-the-grid is desirable to me, if it means living in autonomy. It would mean more sacrifices in means, comfort and entertainment that i'm ready to make. Off the top of my head, eating all meat groups (beef, pork, lamb, poultry) would require a big volume of production and consumption (a community) to be sustainable or even workable ; clothmaking is fun and works for a lot of things, but some of the garments i want in my wardrobe need bought, especially shoes ; even if a lot of moving and hauling can be done with a horse, a vehicle has to be bought and serviced. Actually, the whole concept of being autonomous disregards the need of servicing ; to be able to maintain and repair all of the equipment needed to live off-the-grid would need a huge amount of dedication, that you couldn't put in some other, more interesting, more profitable tasks. The most obvious solution to not need exterior aid with your amenities is to do without them, and you fall into the cycle of shrinking your comfort instead of learning how to maintain it smartly.

So i think the strict definition of living off-the-grid is not enough to embody what i would like to do, and the abusive definition of living off-the-grid as in autonomy goes far beyond it. Defining it as eco-friendly is not broad enough, and defining it as smartly is not specific enough.
More interestingly, living without the need to pay for utilities (which is what the off-the-grid celebrities mostly do) falls short of what i picture myself doing in terms of horticulture, self-sufficiency in consumer products, low-impact technological equipping, and aesthetical considerations.
The sources of what i would like to do are :

• the will to be able to produce things to be able to comprehend, not barely understand, how they are made
• the will to make and use beautiful, smart and useful things
• the fantasy of being in a position corresponding more to people and settings i've read about and loved,
• the fantasy to open my routine to more contemplation (through idling, entertainment, working and moving)
• the need to have a lower impact on nature (as a whole, not within my own three acres only)
• the need to be less dependent on outer production of goods and services

A consequence and self-sustaining force of this mode of living would be living cheaply, which would in turn allow for :

• less need for a high income, and
• more limits on the expensive comforts I could afford, hence decreasing my threshold of entertainment or comfort tolerance (little side-note on this : not reducing comfort and entertainment down to Thoreau's "sit and watch the leaves fall, that's all you need to forget your teeth are chattering" ; and it may be the point on which our opinions and needs may differ the most.)

As for what i picture myself being able to produce, by opposition to buying, i would say :

• power-related : power for lighting, machinery, and electronics, whole heating system (air and water)
• Food : vegetables, fruits, dairy products (from outside milk), poultry, fish, game, beer, bread
• health and household products : soap, cream (from oil or animal fat, homemade or not)
• clothes : t-shirt, male and female skirts, dresses and tunics, lightweight fabric (linen, kombutcha or home-grown fabric), maybe some wool spinning and crocheting (i don't see myself doing it, from lack of patience, but it's doable)
• furniture : some casual or temporary fixing could be homemade

What i don't picture myself being able to produce, hence what i see myself buying :

• power-related : light bulbs (clever architecture and smart tricks could go a long way to prevent over-consumption, but you'll still need some bulbs), machinery itself and electronics (although i should strive to replace complexity with tricks and smarts as often as i can)
• Food : flour, yeast, beef, pork, lamb, exotic fruits, out-of-season produce, sea fish, exotic meats
• health and household products : drugs, exotic creams and soaps, lye, acid, ammonia, oil and animal fat not homemade
• clothes : rain clothes, shoes, nice clothes (like, going-out clothes, or meeting-people clothes)
• furniture : some can be done, but the sheer volume of wood needed to cover all of one's needs for furniture is quite big

Some of this buying could come from or be replaced by recycling, repurposing, salvaging, or gathering from the wild.
Some more of this buying could be replaced by bartering or exchange for services.

The means I would see necessary to this mode are :

• horticulture : not farming yet but not just gardening
• husbandry : at least poultry enough to have twelve eggs a week and two chickens a month. Some sheep would help, though not for their meat (i can't see myself preparing a whole sheep on a regular basis).
• a horse : i may be romanticising, but a horse is a lot better than a lot of machinery. It hauls a lot, goes everywhere (slopes, undergrowth, rocky patches), gives you manure, stabilizes your mood as a pet, and you can also ride it.
• dogs and cats : self-explanatory
• indoor space : a lot of indoor space, not necessarily in the main house, but in spaces which temperature and humidity can be somewhat controlled. I think necessary to have a lot of underground space.
• outdoor space : even if a lot of space isn't needed for vegetables and poultry, a lot more is necessary for by-products farming like linen/flax, oil/sunflowers, essential oil/herbs, and timber/trees. However, i don't think more than a demi-dozen acres is needed.
• running water : a well or stream, and some connected ponds
• power generators : i don't quite have a set ideas on the best way to generate electricity, but i'd guess that the more diverse your sources, the safer you are
• walk-in or a lot of freezers and fridges : living sustainably means storing and freezing a lot of shit to waste the least
• electronics : a heavy reliance on probes, servos, and cameras, and a strong computer system. Automated watering system, indoors water system, automated heating... Also, remote-controlled cannons to help growing shit, like automated airgun to deter birds and foxes
• smart or low-impact building materials : i strongly believe in getting rid of plastic, concrete and other non-basic materials for wall and floor construction. Rammed earth, for example, seems to me a perfect, industrially-tested method of construction which is manageable at a one- or two-persons scale (with the help of a rented vibrating compactor or a homemade hydraulic press that you fill in from the top unto a certain mass, then slowly empty through a tap in the bottom)
• method : i think it integral to this mode of living to be planning, describing thoroughly and noting down the results of every system. This will need a strong commitment. The scale i'm thinking of is like writing down the ingredients, amounts and results of every dish you're making on a day-to-day basis (even if, obviously, it won't be needed for cooking).
• four or five children of our own, to bypass the legislation against child labour