Not only are the evenings deep and dark, so are the mornings as I wait for the sun to rise. Maybe it’s because I’m up with the Teat Strippers at 5 AM waiting on the sun, watching the wind push on branches thinking I could step outside to see how cold it is and take in a deep breath of the diesel smoke from the passing pickups and trucks, and smell of silage and fresh cow feed on the air. Memories of summer and all the green stored away in the silage clamps.
The bread is done in oven, 🍞 🎃 while the black beans cook down on the stove, the acorn squash in the oven. Last night, I cooked up rice and red lentils with some balsamatic vinger and MSG for a light but sweet taste. Omelet this morning, the eggs 🥚 are cooking down now, haven’t decided what vegetables will be in omelet, probably onions, corn, spinach. Maybe more balsamatic vinger, I like my food to be tangy and a bit acidic.
Then it’s off to work on my mountain bike, 🚲 listening to more of the Cheap Colorado Land audio book by Ted Conover. That book brings me back to photo I took years ago of the mobile home in Medusa, sitting below the towering Catskill Mountains in the distance. ⛰️ Maybe it’s because while many if not most people are poor and outcasts, I do dream of a life out in the hills and mountains. There is something wonderful about composting your own shit, making your own electricity, raising your own livestock and crops, making your own heat through wood, burning and burying your own trash.
This photo is etched on my mind… Not sadness but reality, the smell of wood smoke, diesel and maybe a note of burn plastic.
But no, I live in a very different world. 🌎 In the land of wokeness, with the overflowing recycling bins and trash cans, just waiting for the smashing over the garbage truck to haul down to the garbage recycling plant and sewage treatment yards that I inevitably ride past. Then past the public housing ghettos and freeway interchange. Today should be nice for the ride in, assuming it clears out ☀️ early enough, though even in the cloudy I’ll still ride. 🚂 I’m hoping the rain holds off tomorrow so I can ride in and see the Canadian Pacific Christmas Train 🎅 which will be idling at the Albany Oil Train depot tomorrow morning as I ride back. I smashed that pink styrofoam egg 🥚 tray in that white garbage bag, soon enough I’ll turn it into carbon dioxide and styrene gas though probably not much as compost the wet crap and burn the shit hot! Beats a million years compressed in the local garbage dumping yard in the Pine Bush after people pretend to recycle their yogurt containers. ♻️ Hell, even the recycling symbol is such an industry scam like so much of woke culture is these days.
With mom sick I didn’t go anywhere this weekend 🏡 except on my mountain bike. It was a good weekend, did some cooking, got out to Five Rivers Environmental Education Center twice, then rode out to Voorheeesville and Bender Mellon Farm Preserve, past Meads Farm and Preska’s Dairy. 🐮 I said hi to ladies, as smelled the cow shit, hay and silage. Never turned on the heat this weekend, but spend a fair bit of weekend hiding under the covers with my heated blanket ♨️ or with my hands under the heating pad and maybe once or twice I turned on the space heater when my hands were cold. That bread I made this morning was good, but that acorn squash really hit the spot. 😋 People throw away the crust, but I actually think that’s the best part. Plus my 5-gallon compost bucket is overflowing after two weeks, I should dump it in outside bin.
Maybe I would have bought that homestead next to my parents house where I’d put in wood heat 🪵🪓 but it didn’t have a woodstove and my insurance lady didn’t seem interested and giving me an estimate on how that would impact my rates. Truth is it was too close to neighbors and highway to burn too much debris, even if it was zoned agriculture and had a nice barn and outdoor sink for butchering. 🐖 🗡️ But that house is sold, and I could buy somewhere else, but I”m fine with my cold and cheap apartment, 🏠 reading and listening to the stories of the off-gridders from under the covers of my bed. Next weekend at this time, I’ll be away from suburbia, in wilderness, next to my propane heater 🌲 and rip-roaring camp fire. 🔥 I am still saving, and at some point, maybe when I retire, I’ll have that off-grid place with the simple T-40 board walls and metal roof, goats and hogs and burn barrels out back. 🛢️ And no I won’t be recycling my plastics or even taking them to county-mega dump like the woke suburbanites do while denying such shit. But first, let me sing along with Gram Parsons about the Kickers, Cowboy Angels across those prairies with their waving grain. 🌾 🚜 🇺🇸
I have all those data queries 🖥️ and other projects left over to work on from Friday, when I get in the office and hopefully the QAS USPS Mail encoder will be finally linking to the library and soon we can start working on address corrections and updating the mail file. 📂 Three day work week, then Thanksgiving 🦃 hopefully with the family if mom feels good, might be one of last Thanksgiving we all spend together as my parents are getting old.
Then up north, watching the weather for a week from Monday but I still think I want to do three nights up north if at all possible, 🏕️ preferably somewhere farther north then East Branch but whatever a few nights 🌲 in wilderness is better then staying home in woke suburbs where electric cars, grid-tied solar and recycling plastics – and swearing at the color television at Donald Trumpster ✊ ✊ 📺 – is all the rage. Honestly, I don’t miss not ever owning a television but even I do check Twitter, Truth Social and New York Times more then I should when I should be reading. 📚 Ride back downtown in the darkness, wait for later local home, 🚌 quick dinner then bed and maybe read some more before sleeping or watch some stupid YouTube video of some dairy man doing wild-assed farmer shit. 🐮 Then sleep and up at 5 AM tomorrow morning. Truth is I find a lot of inspiration in the Cheap Colorado Land audio book, even if I’m not sure that’s quite the life for me, though maybe many aspects will be true to the off-grid homestead I ultimately building a few years that hopefully won’t involve grid-tied electricity or woke and fake plastics recycling but hopefully hogs and goats and a blackened burn barrel and lots of composted poop, healthy, good foods and cananbis.
