I wish I had a gutter track! 🧹

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I wish I had a gutter track! 🧹

My apartment has these awful, worn out carpets that require vacuuming and are always getting muddy and dirty. The mud is hard to get out of them, and while I try not to track mud indoors, it happens. I always have trouble with the vaccum cleaner plugging up and even with occasional vacuums things are always dirty.

I can’t imagine ever having carpets when I have my off grid property. They just get so dirty and difficult to clean. I was fiddling around with the one again plugged up vacuum, swearing at myself and wishing I could just have vinyl or hardwood flooring in my cheap apartment that was easy to clean.

Or better yet, a gutter track like they have in tie stall barns to haul manure and waste bedding out to the manure spreader and apply to the land. It would be so nice if you could just sweep all the spilled food, the mud and muck to a track that would haul it out out to a bucket you could dump into your burning barrel. Not have to deal with not getting all the crap swept into a broom pan and dumped in the trash. Or even without a track but just a gutter, it would be a shit ton easier to clean.

I know that’s kind of a fantasy as I don’t live in a barn and the same kind of laziness I denounced with hot water heaters yesterday. And it’s not like I produce 12 tons of waste a year to manage. But I certainly hate carpeted floors and my forever jamming vacuum. I’d rather just sweep and was them, take out the trash and burn it and be done. None of this softy urbanites shit with their carpeting and automatic Roombas.

Biden pledges to replace government fleet with electric vehicles | TheHill

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Biden pledges to replace government fleet with electric vehicles | TheHill

President Biden on Monday pledged to replace vehicles owned by the federal government with U.S.-made electric vehicles, doubling down on a similar campaign pledge.

“The federal government also owns an enormous fleet of vehicles which we're going to replace with clean, electric vehicles made right here in America by American workers,” he said while?discussing an executive order?aimed at increasing federal procurement of products made in the U.S.

The remaining Trump Signs!

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The remaining Trump Signs! 👨🏻‍🌾🐔 🐘 🇺🇸

It’s easy to dismiss Donald Trump’s supporters as bad, racist terribly racist people or ignorant hicks. Especially after that disastrous, out of control protests at the US Capitol where a number of people were injured and killed, and a lot of politicians ego hurt even more. But I’m not willing to write off their party in one swoop, or say that all conservatives are bad even if maybe they’re investing too much stock in the lamest of ducks — former President Trump.

Long after the results were known, the Trump – No Bullshit banners can be found farms, rural homesteads, and other properties around America. While some have disappeared, inevitably dumped in the trash sent to landfills and set on fire in burn barrels and other stuck in barnyards and attics, others keep them up as a sign of resistance, much similar to how liberals across America in 2017 proudly displayed signs on their lawns that said RESIST! Their opposition not totally irrational, many of them are already hurt under the Biden administration policies – such as the limited availability of ammunition for hunting and target shooting.

I respect conservatives for having their views and being politically involved. They may not treasure their current political status, but so is the results of the disastrous administration of Donald Trump during the pandemic. I don’t view them as ignorant or racist or bad. Many of them who make their living off the land or hobby farm, know a great deal more about the natural world then do I. Farmers and homesteaders are not stupid people by any stretch of the imagination, although you can question maybe their lack of knowledge of big picture things when it comes to the policies that make up national policies for the big urban areas. They should advocate for what they believe is right, moving beyond the failed administration to better representatives going forward.

Do I agree with all conservative policies or ideology? No, I consider myself to be more of a liberal or maybe a libertarian. But I don’t think we should be afraid of the smell of silage, mud or blood. Just because folks make the products that we all depend on, and support the other guy for president, doesn’t mean they are bad or evil. They in many cases are advocating for what is best in their interest, just like us Democrats advocate for what is best for our cities and more urbanized, diverse areas.

Nessmuk | Mountain Home Magazine

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Nessmuk | Mountain Home Magazine

In 1841, a young Wellsboro man named George Washington Sears and a young New Yorker named Herman Melville shipped out of New Bedford, Massachusetts for whaling grounds in the South Pacific. Both returned home to writing careers: Sears as the famed woodsman, outdoor writer, early conservationist and poet known as “Nessmuk” who has since vanished into obscurity, and Melville as the author of the obscure novel Moby-Dick, a critical and commercial failure rediscovered as a great American novel in the Twentieth Century.

It’s time to rediscover Nessmuk.

George Washington Sears was a bearded, “shiftless,” diminutive, five-foot-three, 109-pound character, a legend in the bars of Wellsboro and on the lakes of New York State, who was a famous American outdoor writer for Forest and Stream magazine, author of the classic book Woodcraft who invented and popularized solo canoeing and light-footed camping, a poet compared to Whitman in his lifetime and called “the hook-and-bullet Thoreau” today, and an early conservationist who was trained in the ways of the woods and waters as a child by “an athletic young brave” of the Massachusetts Narragansett tribe named “Nessmuk.”