RealityPivots

This:

From Passing lane, barn

came about because I started to build this:

From Passing lane, barn

I’m a proponent of the Humanure method of composting human waste and it has worked for me for 10 years. This Spring I decided to build a little shed to keep my 5 gallon buckets out of the rain. One thing led to another and now I have half a barn and a little sheltered spot on the north side to keep my buckets dry.

We only got two weeks of Census work rather than the 6-8 they had projected. I want to return to Buenos Aires but I’ll have to dig deep to make it happen. Two of my favorite bloggers, Carolyn and Debbi, are going soon. What fun it would be to meet up with friends at milongas. If I go again I want to stay for a year or two.
I keep working desultorily around Shedville, completing projects that will be handy when I return or will make the property attractive to someone who wants to lease it for a weekend getaway from Seattle.
I finally found the giant unglazed pot that I needed to make my refrigerator.

From Refrigeration and water storage

You plug the hole in the bottom and put sand in between the exterior and a pot you place in the center. Then you add water to the sand. The water evaporates through the clay and that evaporation acts as a cooling mechanism. It works best where the air is dry so it might not be too effective here but I just want it to preserve things like lettuce a little longer.

From Refrigeration and water storage

I’ve made an arrangement with a neighbor to buy water. They pay $2.18 per 1000 gallons and I’ll pay them $10 — a good deal for both of us I think. I’ll run a hose over to the 275 gallon tank I bought. It used to store whey.

From Refrigeration and water storage

I need the water for the garden mostly. In previous years I stuck with garlic and shallots that I planted in the fall, mulched heavily, wished them godspeed and didn’t worry about water. Now I’ve got a lot of things planted that need water consistently. My first attempt at asparagus is showing spears and the new strawberry plants are healthy.

I keep thinking about a zen story I read a long time ago and have thought about off and on over the years. A zen student who was a great musician abandoned that for his study of zen. The lesson I imagine is that the satisfaction of living in the eternal now is superior to chasing ephemeral passion. I find myself dissatisfied with my very groovy present only because I imagine a BsAs of passionate dance and friendship. However, it wasn’t that way when I was there before and, in fact, I was drinking more Malbec than was good for me.

The gardener is off in Thailand studying massage but I struggle on.
I harvested the first lettuce from the Solarium.

From Solarium, salad, seeds

From Solarium, salad, seeds

The Solarium is great. Any sun makes it a wonderful place to bathe. I made up two privacy screens to replace the plastic wrap I had up to cut down drafts.

From Solarium, salad, seeds

From Solarium, salad, seeds

I put 20 assorted pepper plants in yesterday.
The lawn needs mowing. The alder logs need to be inoculated with mushroom spores. I’ve got all my seeds to plant.

From Solarium, salad, seeds

Water! I need to create a reservoir.
Hup!

The garden is under way. I’ve got seeds sprouting but I wanted to jump start things so I bought some lettuce and cabbage starts from the nursery.

From Another shed

And I’m ready to inoculate some alder logs with mushroom spawn of Reishi, Pearl Oyster and Shiitake.

From Another shed

I’m building a new shed on the edge of the garden that will include a bigger composting toilet.

From Another shed

Eight weeks of work for the Census, listing people and places in prep for the enumeration of next year, starts with training this week. I’m teasing myself by debating whether to take the cash I earn and run off to Buenos Aires or prepare for the economic collapse by wise investments in Shedville.
Last week I returned to weekly Tango Practica for a visit and was persuaded to fill in at a class two days later. My first tango in months. Yes, I still love it but I’m dissatisfied.

I went and got two pickup loads of sheep shit today. A neighbor raises Jacob Sheep — a heirloom species — and the gardener and I talked with him last fall at the end of a long walk. Since the gardener is off gallivanting about in SE Asia for months more, I’ve had to step up to the shovel and pitch shit myself if I want a garden to feed me through the collapse.

From Sheep shit, water heater

I’ve also gotten around to building a shelf for the water heater in the Solarium. Now I can start planting in there. I’ve got a new idea to build a small wood bathtub.

From Sheep shit, water heater

The January 26 issue of the New Yorker has an article titled The Dystopians that has introduced me to two people I’m really enjoying getting to know.
Dmitri Orlov was born in Russia and came to the U.S. when he was 12. He visited Russia again during the collapse of the Soviet Union and draws parallels with possible U.S. responses to collapse. At his web site, Club Orlov, he has this to say:

Forget “growth,” forget “jobs,” forget “financial stability.” What should their realistic new objectives be? Well, here they are: food, shelter, transportation, and security. Their task is to find a way to provide all of these necessities on an emergency basis, in absence of a functioning economy, with commerce at a standstill, with little or no access to imports, and to make them available to a population that is largely penniless….

What if you still have a job? How do you prepare then? The obvious answer is, be prepared to quit or to be laid off or fired at any moment. It really doesn’t matter which one of these it turns out to be; the point is to sustain zero psychological damage in the process. Get your burn rate to as close to zero as you can, by spending as little money as possible, so than when the job goes away, not much has to change. While at work, do as little as possible, because all this economic activity is just a terrible burden on the environment. Just gently ride it down to a stop and jump off.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote a book titled The Black Swan. He says this about himself.

My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves & the quality of their knowledge too seriously & those who don’t have the courage to sometimes say: I don’t know….” (You may not be able to change the world but can at least get some entertainment & make a living out of the epistemic arrogance of the human race)….

What I do: I am interested in how to live in a world we don’t understand very well –in other words, while most human thought (particularly since the enlightenment) has focused us on how to turn knowledge into decisions, I am interested in how to turn lack of information, lack of understanding, and lack of “knowledge” into decisions –how not to be a “turkey”. My last book The Black Swan drew a map of what we don’t understand; my current work focuses on how to domesticate the unknown..

I just love reading what these guys have to say. It makes me happy I titled my web site RealityPivots.