reepicheep's journal

Where are you and where are you going?
reepicheep
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Post by reepicheep »


enigmaT120
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Post by enigmaT120 »

Reepicheep if you see this I hope you are safe from the fires... if you still live at that intentional community then I think you must be close.

Cheepnis
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Re: reepicheep's journal

Post by Cheepnis »

I also hope you are safe and that all is well. Any progress on the Tiny Home?

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Egg
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Post by Egg »

Hey reepicheep. Been quite a while since you posted. Hope everything is okay?

reepicheep
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Joined: Mon Dec 29, 2014 7:45 am

Re: reepicheep's journal

Post by reepicheep »

Hello all! I live! I appreciate the check-ins and support -- somebody even sent me money a couple of times, with me posting zero content for months, which I was shocked by.

Here's the blog post which is basically just a video.

Here's the email update subscribers got:

Hello all,

Contrary to all the rumors, I have not disappeared. Progress on the house has been slowed by external events -- basically the zombie apocalypse that unfolded in Portland. I evacuated to Idaho for a few weeks during the worst of the smoke, and then when I came back we moved the house from Tigard to my handyman's front yard. His kid started school again, which is all online thanks to the other apocalypse, and so his ability to help me has been diminished to just a few hours in the afternoon every day. 

Still, we've finally gotten over the hump where nothing seemed to happen for weeks on end, and we've accomplished quite a bit in the last few couple of months, which you can learn more about by watching the video I posted on my blog.

I'm also having some professional success. [Community] (where BioSquare will eventually go) hired me on as their "Bookkeeper" almost a year ago. In truth this was a glorified administrative assistant role; mostly I was supposed to scan things and email them to our real bookkeeping firm in Eugene. However, I've been learning more and more about bookkeeping in the last year, and my organization even paid for me to take a Quickbooks class. Our firm in Eugene has reduced what they charge us each month thanks to me taking on more of the work, and I've been given a raise.

And then a couple of weeks ago, the bookkeeping firm we've been working with hired me on to help take some of the communications and scheduling burden off of their current employees. It is, again, not quite bookkeeping, but definitely bookkeeping-adjacent, with the opportunity to do some payroll and to develop my skills further, with room for more down the line. The firm is a small operation, only three (now four) folks, with people working there for years seemingly happily. There's plenty of work, even in the current economy, my new boss seems to treat folks well, compensate them fairly, and the work is mostly in service of a number of non-profits and small businesses focused on environmental remediation work in the Eugene and Lane County area, which makes my hippy soul happy.

I did not expect to discover bookkeeping as a viable career in my 30's in the midst of a pandemic, but I find the work challenging, interesting, and the amount of time I'm giving both to the new job as well as to [Community] seems sustainable. Plus, a remote desk job in my heated bedroom is a nice complement to the physical labor I'm putting into the house, with the windows open, the rain pouring down outside, and everybody still wearing masks while we drill holes in stuff and try to stay warm.

I hope my readers are as well as can be reasonably expected under present circumstances. Safe, warm, healthy -- these are blessings, and not everyone has them.

See

reepicheep
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Re: reepicheep's journal

Post by reepicheep »

@Egg, @cheepnis, @enigmaT120, how are you three doing? What a holiday this is...

DutchGirl
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Re: reepicheep's journal

Post by DutchGirl »

Weeeeeee, you're back. Good to see you again!

enigmaT120
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Re: reepicheep's journal

Post by enigmaT120 »

Yay! It's good to hear from you, I was worried. I thought you were still down there east of Eugene where one of the big fires was.

I'm doing adequately as usual. Sold some timber to pay for a new road to Weyerhauser property so I can have logs hauled out that way rather than over my driveway bridge. So I'll have about 1600 seedlings to plant this winter. Plenty of firewood laying around though.

What are those clamps on your PEX? When I replaced the water lines in my house with PEX I was able to borrow a Wursbo (something like that) expansion tool. It opens up the end of the pipe for long enough to stick the fittings in, then the pipe goes back to it's normal diameter. Pretty cool. The tool is really expensive, the fittings are cheap.

Anyway glad you're doing well and got away from the smoke!

DutchGirl
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Re: reepicheep's journal

Post by DutchGirl »

What developments in the US. The capitol being stormed by the country's riff raff. It's really sad. And I'm guessing, reepicheep, it's something you feared happening. Or something similar. I hope you're holding up?

And how's the house getting along? Maybe with the holidays you've not been able to work as much on it as in normal (ahem) months, but I hope you're still seeing progress.

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Egg
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Re: reepicheep's journal

Post by Egg »

reepicheep wrote:
Fri Nov 27, 2020 12:22 am
@Egg, @cheepnis, @enigmaT120, how are you three doing? What a holiday this is...
Hey reepicheep. Sorry, I totally missed your update. The answer to your question of how I'm doing is also my excuse for not seeing this - just had another kid in Dec so bit of a maelstrom of kiddo-admin. Really glad to hear you're well, though :D . Like some of the other posters, I was starting to worry.

reepicheep
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Re: reepicheep's journal

Post by reepicheep »

Still alive! Put the last board up on the last wall today! Houses take a really long time to build ya'll! Someday I will make another video.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/ZjVt3LpuM5mH4KJv6

https://photos.app.goo.gl/GWpwe78in4iQWxWc7

DutchGirl
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Re: reepicheep's journal

Post by DutchGirl »

Hey, you're back; awesome!

Those walls are looking good!

Jin+Guice
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Re: reepicheep's journal

Post by Jin+Guice »

Fucking houses man.

George the original one
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Re: reepicheep's journal

Post by George the original one »

Project complete, sweet!

DutchGirl
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Re: reepicheep's journal

Post by DutchGirl »

Hey... is your house ready in time for some pretty cheap winter heating (because of good insulation and smallness)?
Are you living there now, or not yet?

reepicheep
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Re: reepicheep's journal

Post by reepicheep »

I live!

House still not done. But I see the light at the end of the tunnel. P.S. It is hard to build a house. Especially if you are interested in aesthetics.

Currently living in condo, not in community anymore. My life there imploded a bit, long story. Happy to have had an easy fall-back. My life's motto is "pivot." Planning on moving house to a property in Washington. I've been spending time there getting it ready. Rental, but maybe stick around in the area for a few years and then buy.

Had a job as a bookkeeper in my previous living situation; was easy to find a new position paying more. Now I'm freelancing with multiple clients and took on an intern/assistant. If she sticks with it I will make her a business partner in a couple of years. I like working for myself.

Going back to school for woodworking full time in January. Had unused vocational rehab benefits from the VA. Very amusing that I will have built house before learning how to build house.

Saw a sign with a phone number yesterday. Said, "Cash for Diabetic Test Strips." If that's not a perfect encapsulation of Late Stage Capitalism, I don't know what is.

DutchGirl
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Re: reepicheep's journal

Post by DutchGirl »

You live! Great to hear from you again! And I'm glad that you're doing okay. That job on the side as a bookkeeper developed nicely, I hope you like the flexibility of being your own boss.

If you go learn woodworking, I'm sure there will be a few "oh, that would have saved sooo much time!" moments :lol: . But oh well!

reepicheep
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Re: reepicheep's journal

Post by reepicheep »

I'm turning 35 in 2025 and for a couple of years now I have contemplated the book I want to write, including going so far as to telling a semi-mentor/professional figure in my life a couple of years ago that when I turned 35 I would know enough to write a book.

This idea isn't totally crazy -- I have something like 90k words to my name written in blog-posts, articles, and journal entries over the last couple of years, mostly on adult education topics/self-reflection, and have even been paid to write (about accounting, of all things) once. As I wrap up the house, I guess I'm looking for the next big project, which is presumably after I spend the next year or so in and out of wood working school. I think I will be somewhat better equipped to build some of the things necessary to sustain my life while writing the below described book.

I find my style of writing does well when it's centered on my own personal experience. As a kid I wrote (frankly pretty derivative) fiction in-line with the sci-fi and fantasy books I was reading most often; now as an adult I still enjoy those work but spend most of my time in academic study of topics that interest me, usually through audiobook or podcast. I don't think I'm up for writing something of length that is not very closely related to a narrative of my own personal experience.

If you're familiar with "Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek" by Annie Dillard, I think her style at its most exhilarating is what I would want to shoot for. She weaves the books she's reading and the information she knows into her personal experiences exploring her local naturehood over the course of the year. When I read this book in high school my English teacher told me that as she finished the book Dillard was subsisting on mostly sugar and living among stacks of notecards all over her living room. That frenetic intensity is reflected in the book, and it makes for a captivating read.

My other current inspiration is Mark Boyle, who wrote "The Moneyless Man", about his year living without money in the UK. Some of you have probably heard of it. It evokes many ERE principles, and I might have even first encountered it here before listening to it for the first time on that bike trip I took a few years ago through Europe.

But what to write about?

I've spent a fair bit of time designing a fully off-grid solar system that (at least in theory) should be able to totally power the house quite comfortably. So of course, the first thing I want to do is to try to live without it for a year. Nothing that plugs in, no first-hand use of fossil fuels, aka no transportation via anything other than a bike or my feet or something of that ilk. No modern communications equipment other than the mail. There will likely be some necessary exceptions.

I have a number of problems to solve and parameters to figure out.

Water
The property I'm moving to in Washington is on a well, the well is pumped electrically. I could just run a hose to an outside tap that is built for that purpose. Is that an exception, or do I need to spend the next couple of years getting a rain water system + biofilter together? This is an eventual goal anyway -- I'd like to have at least 5k gallons in capacity. However, this is a potentially seismically active area. Having something that is tall enough to sufficiently pressurize my taps and something that isn't going to tip over or get significantly damaged in an earthquake may be diametrically opposed. It would be easier and safer to fill a low-to-the-ground tank next to the house and pump it in, but doing that by hand would mean I'd be bathing out of a bucket.

There is a possibility of collecting a bunch of water off the roof of the main house and then running it into a tank nearby and then down slope to where I'm parking, but it would mean trenching pipe under a gravel road about 200 feet. I don't love that and it's pretty far outside of my capacity for DIY. I have a shovel, not a tractor. Also plenty more pipe to get messed up in an earthquake.

I have a Berkey filter by the sink and so I'm not particularly fussed about not doing a whole lot of chemical or UV filtering of rain water prior to bathing in it; I think I can get by with a homemade biofilter and then filter again at the tap for drinking water. A guy selling water filtration systems did try to scare me about Legionnaire's disease.

My wood stove can heat water and pipe it through my current plumbing set-up. How well that system works has yet to be tested, but there's room to expand capacity for storing heated water. Otherwise I have on-demand propane hot-water heater that is wired into the house. This heater would be technically off-limits for the year, both because of the electrical start and the propane fuel it uses. So warmer weather water heating, if necessary, might be accomplished through a solar hot water heater and an outdoor shower, or even potentially piping a solar hot water heater set-up into the house down the road. Or just taking colder showers/washing dishes/clothing in cold water. It might be warm enough to do that some of the time, although I suspect not often enough for my liking. Or perhaps I'll toughen up.

Laundry
Bucket and a plunger, washing underthings in the shower (assuming I can solve that problem?), probably doing significantly less laundry. Line dry or drape by the wood stove (I intend to have a wall-mounted drying rack for this intended purpose).

Toilet
I will have a Home Biogas system set-up, which flushes with grey water from the kitchen sink and runs without electricity. It will need to be in a greenhouse and, per the manufacturer's recommendation for this latitude, can be kept warm with a water heating device that is dropped into the main tank. This is an electrical device, so not kosher. I am considering ways to passively heat the greenhouse with solar mass as I construct it and to use waste heat from the wood stove exterior flue in the greenhouse to keep it warm enough. The Biogas system may not work the entire year -- I should be able to still flush into it, it just won't digest waste as quickly as it is supposed to, and may not produce enough methane to cook on in the winter. However, the system is designed for two people and has plenty of capacity. I think it's unlikely that I will overburden it even if it is not operating at peak efficiency.

If I have a genuine issue making this system work, I am familiar with humanure composting systems and can set one up. I don't love them. I also have a portable black water RV tank and could technically flush directly into it and then dump it into the property's septic system, but I would like to avoid that if at all possible because of the waste of nutrients.

Food
The starting conditions as currently outlined do not require that I produce all of my own food before or during the year, although the owner of the property has desires to improve the food growing capacity and has a small garden and chickens. She has been receptive to my proposal for meat rabbits and also wants goats, so there is likely to be additional capacity by 2025 although probably not enough to make up a viable year-round diet for one person, especially since the growing season is relatively short.

I am something of a food hoarder (prepper sounds equally as obnoxious) and have hundreds of thousands of calories of stored food, both in the form of dried/powdered bulk foods (beans, rice, oats, etc) and frozen meat from local farms, which I buy in bulk a quarter or half an animal at a time. I am almost certainly not going to eat through all of my stores in the next couple of years, although I'm likely to put a good dent in them if I don't replace anything, and as they are aging it is necessary to get through them to some degree. I don't know what to do about the stored meat in the freezer -- smoking/canning/salting/drying/making sausage out of all of it seems well beyond my current capacity, food storage capability, or skill set.

I also have six months (for one person) of freeze-dried emergency rations that last 25 years, so while I'd really like to do this thing in more style and with more reliance on local agriculture, instead of with a "bunker prepped for the apocalypse" mindset, I would probably not starve if I rationed just those out for a year. I bought them for no-shit emergencies.

There's an unimpressive small grocery store within biking distance of this property, although it would be a fairly sketchy bike ride in a couple of places. And part of my intent here is to work towards/demonstrate the ability to be more thoroughly self-sufficient, so I don't want to be relying on the grocery store overmuch. Is it cheating to buy something refrigerated at the store and then dunk it in a bucket of cold water for a day or two?

In the summer there's an unimpressive small farmer's market within biking distance every Sunday; I imagine that befriending some of the folks who sell at it more regularly might hook me up with more abundant local produce at a more frequent rate than the market can provide on its own.

Does one buy a year's supply of kibble in advance of this adventure, or is that cheating?

Heating/Cooking

Primary heat source is a wood stove. It also has the ability to cook on top, either via skillet or Dutch oven. I have very little experience using my Dutch Oven and do most of my current cooking via Crockpot and my reheating via the microwave, though I did live without a microwave for most of two years without much trouble. Additionally, my toilet system is the Home Biogas system and this will (theoretically) give me the ability to cook on a single methane burner for at least some of the year.

I think that Solar Air Heaters are an interesting DIY project and the orientation of my house (with a lot of southern exposure for the panels) may lend itself to implementing such a device, and that building one is within my current skillset. However, the time of year it will be most needed is also the time of year that is most cloudy.

Solar Cooking

In the situation where I do not want to use the wood stove and maybe having trouble with the methane, it may be possible to cook outside on a fire pit or rocket stove, or to create a parabolic solar cooker or solar oven. Or to just eat a lot of salad during the time of the year that it's too hot for a fire.

Cooling

I purchased a Mark II A/C unit that runs on solar power. I have tested it and it would be sufficiently effective to cool the loft of the tiny home so that I could comfortably sleep in a space that would likely get too hot in the summer otherwise. It's possible that a fan in the loft sucking air out at the opportune time might also keep the space cool enough. However, both of these are electrical devices, and thus out of bounds. I imagine a screened in porch or even just camping nearby in the summer may be cool enough most of the year to be comfortable at this latitude. However, when it is really, really effing hot there is likely also fire danger and smoke/air pollution issues that make sleeping outside ill-advised. I am sensitive to this kind of pollution, unwilling to subject my dog to it unnecessarily for the sake of a book, and not sure how to resolve this issue. Simply sleeping on the floor downstairs under a cool sheet may be the only available compromise.

Refrigeration

I currently refrigerate just about everything, including things I probably don't need to. Need to explore ways to...not.

Socializing

I imagine that one of the most profoundly difficult things about a year like the one I'm describing is the sense of social isolation I would face. I am involved with several community groups and organizations in Portlands, I see friends and partners regularly, and like most folks of the modern era I maintain both daily and distant connections through various technological means.

The property I am headed to has a small family living on it in the main home; mom has her kiddos half-time and her boyfriend is a regular (and increasingly frequent) visitor. They are in many ways ideologically compatible with me and seem like sober, well-adjusted folks with many skills appropriate for a rural and homestead-type lifestyle. It may be possible that by 2025 another resident will have taken up space on the property; the current other person is rarely there and spends most of their time in Portland. So, there are people around (people who will not be participating in my experiment, but who are low-tech oriented in many ways). Mom is an English teacher and likely to be enthusiastic about the idea of playing host to a writer-in-residence who is trying to live very, very, very off-grid.

Town is within biking distance although, again, it's sketchy and may not be doable year-round. There's a library and an absolutely charming book store and coffee shop, a quilting store, a couple of restaurants and bars -- and probably about as many churches per capita as there are guns. The parameters of this experiment do not require other people to turn their lights off if I enter their space, so I imagine I might find some like-minded folks I want to hang out with from time to time.

It's possible that I will receive an occasional visit from Portland; how exactly to schedule that will be a real trick. I will not insist on other people coming to see me by foot, but it does feel somewhat disingenuous to urge people to drive an hour for a booty call with a person who may be bathing out of a bucket. I've looked at the bike route from where I am to Portland and it does not seem feasible. That also puts me in a position where I would have to spend the night somewhere with someone using all the modern conveniences. Probably people would frown on me using their backyard as a bathroom.

I may become lonely enough to join a local church. Perhaps they would welcome a mostly agnostic cultural Jew if I wore a USAF hat and kept my mouth shut.

I imagine I'd write a lot of letters. I think it might be fun to acquire a typewriter and some carbon paper so that I can save copies for the book.

Music

I own two guitars, neither of which I have the foggiest idea how to do more than the very basics with. I imagine I'd get better -- I would have books for learning. I don't know about tuning without some kind of device.

Hand-cranked record players don't seem to be a thing anymore?

Entertainment

I am, happily, a voracious reader and I imagine I'd get a lot more reading in than is currently typical for me. Combine that with writing, the farm chores necessary to keep myself alive, and the occasional semi-scary bike trip to town and I might perhaps avoid significant boredom.

Perhaps I'll finally pick up a meditation habit.

News

2035 isn't an election year. Unless Mt St Helen's is erupting, I'll be happy to check out. There's a local-ish paper that gets copies in the bookstore, I'll probably peruse from time to time.

Money

Modern bookkeeping for small businesses is done almost exclusively through Quickbooks Online, and so continuing my client roster is a no-go. I do have an assistant, but whether she would want to take over the entire business (and then hand part of it back to me?) in a couple of years is hard to predict. Bookeeping itself it a job entirely based on two needs:

1. The need for a business owner to keep track of income/expenses and therefore measure the health of their business.
2. Audit prevention and response.

While to some degree there have been bean counters as long as there have been beans, it seems unlikely that there will be much call for this particular skill in the future post-apocalyptic wasteland where most people are subsisting on backyard rabbits and potatoes. In any case, there's zero chance I'll be able to make any money at it while refusing to use a computer. Nobody is keeping books by hand anymore, and quite frankly I don't think I'd even know how.

On one hand, I could play this game on easy mode: I have a pension from the VA, I could set it up to get direct deposited to a local credit union, I could go there from time to time and draw some of it out in cash. It would be sufficient to meet my much-reduced monthly expenses by a large margin.

On the other hand, there's plenty about this set-up that is already cheating -- I have expended a significant amount of financial and human capital in building a comfortable off-grid home to begin with, and a good chunk of that money was earned while I was working in the USAF or while I was working/earning a pension these last two years. My homesite relies on being able to use some of the main home for storage -- a space that will be on-grid climate controlled. I am fortunate in ways non-replicable for many people, and so if the book is intended to be anything more useful than a "look at me, I did this thing" model, I think I need to find a way to get my financial needs met by generating money off-grid and letting my pension just sit around for awhile (more on that later).

I estimate my expenses to be as follows:

$7200 annual rent
$1200 annual health/dental insurance
$2400 annual auto insurance -- could be given up? (I own a truck and car, more on this later but it's ungodly expensive and I don't love it)
$1700/annual tiny home insurance
$216 annual life insurance costs
$1,636.60/annual dog expenses (food, meds)
Not accounted for: pet insurance, vet bills, medication for dogs and people

Unknown Garden Costs -- By 2025 I think I'll have a better idea of these expenses/inputs
Unknown Food Costs -- my current expenditure seems to be zero help as a baseline
Unknown Project Costs -- I imagine my woodworking hobby might take center stage during such a lengthy time with few other distractions, and I don't know how much I would be spending on it or even if I could find the materials I need to do some of what I would want to do.

I'm sure this list will expand. I can imagine many other things I will need (vehicle renewal? shoes? woodworking tools? toothpaste?), but I'm not at all sure that I'll be able to get them via the mail or in the small town near this property.

Even with a lot of the expenses of modern life cut out, if I intend to maintain a modern life I can to some degree come back to (mostly all the goddamn insurance and investments), I think I'm probably looking to spend around 20k-30k in that year. How much of that could come out of my pension and thus not be considered part of the true "monthly nut" I need to crack -- the kind of living expenses that would be only relevant in a context where I intended to live the rest of my life in such a low-tech, off-grid fashion, remains to be seen.

It seems unlikely that I'm going to be able to make what I want to make solely off of hand-tool woodworking and gardening while selling only to locals.

Possibly property owner would lower rent if I invested significant labor into the property, but I doubt it.

Medical Care

There is a small clinic and pharmacy in town. I need to look into whether I will be able to be seen there. I do not know yet about local veterinary services.

Cheating

While many of my current expenses and automatic withdrawals could be completely cut off (Spotify, car insurance?) I don't intend to go a year without contributing to my Roth IRA. I haven't looked into it, but mailing a check once a month to Vanguard probably not a thing? Right now my investments are automatically debited from my bank account once a month. Similarly, I pay for all of my insurance via ACH.

With some forethought, a lot could be set up to run for a long time without any intervention of mine, and to this end I've recently set myself up a quickbooks account and am tracking my personal finnces as if I was one of my own clients. I anticipate getting a much better grasp on my spending soon; frankly I've been exceedingly lax about it for years.

Possibly my mom would be willing to look things over for me from time to time and monitor for any issues. I might somehow freeze all of my credit cards in advance of starting this project to reduce the risk of fraud while I am not available to monitor. My credit overall is already frozen as a matter of course.

My email inbox is an absolute disaster and I have no idea how I would be able to turn off the many pressing parts of my life that go through this inbox. Thinking about trying to get away from this part of my life and moving it analog seems nigh on impossible.

I would break any and all rules of this game for a medical emergency requiring hospitalization or urgent care for myself, an animal, or another person on the property.

I own two vehicles; I'd like both of them to work after the year is up AND I may need to be able to drive off the property for a medical emergency -- mine, my dog's, or another resident. I have friends who could babysit and who would occasionally drive both cars, but I don't know that they would be willing to take on paying the auto insurance, and that leaves me potentially alone on the property without a vehicle.

I do not know what to do, if anything, with my phone. I would like my family to be able to reach me in an emergency -- they all live in another state. I could possibly give them the phone number of the property owner and otherwise stick my phone in a box for a year. It's possible that without actually locking it up and giving someone else the key I will not have the self-discipline to maintain my semi-monastic intentions. I am, at present, very attached to my phone.

I am considering whether a once or twice a month phone call with my therapist might be an appropriate breaking of the rules, given my history of mental health challenges and the possible importance of monitoring for issues if I am unable to resolve any problems that crop up from social isolation, loneliness, or boredom. My therapist might need to have the ability to encourage me to terminate the experiment early. I have not discussed this possibility with her.

Pre-stocking supplies? For example, I have been sufficiently deficient in Vitamin D often enough that I take 2000 IU/day. I could easily buy a year's supply of this and other supplements and medication ahead of time. Dog food? I buy them in 25 lb bags and have them shipped. I don't know that I can find what I need in the town near this property as dog has a fairly particular diet. Could I transition him to a raw-food diet? Potentially, but the quantity issue doesn't change. He's 70 lbs and he eats a lot.

The 9000 other things I'm forgetting.

Did
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Joined: Mon Apr 01, 2013 7:50 am

Re: reepicheep's journal

Post by Did »

I got irritated by Mark Boyle when he took the money from the sales of his book which advocated living without money and bought a house. He now advocates not using technology. He looks ill when interviewed.I’m not sure his lifestyle suits him health wise.

mooretrees
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Re: reepicheep's journal

Post by mooretrees »

You might find these folks useful in that they’ve been living without electricity or fossil fuel for a decade or more by now. They do use trains or buses every great once in awhile and have a regular phone, not a cellphone.

https://www.motherearthnews.com/sustain ... e0z11zmar/

The book idea sounds interesting, is the early idea to sorta do a “one year without technology” idea?

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