It’s truly amazing how you can click on a few Youtube videos about a topic you are interested in, and quickly the number of advertisers selling you products in a frantic fashion. Lately I’ve gotten interested in learning more of the ins and outs of off-grid solar systems, not the tiny little 12-volt system like I have my truck or the whole-house grid-tied suburbanite systems that the advertisers are hawking left and right.
The truth is I want to understand modern solar technology, and not wokeness. Everybody wants to sell you being woke, glossy plastic packages. I understand basic things like power and current and stored versus used energy. I am familiar with a lot of electronics but I don’t necessarily fully grasp the modern off-grid solar technology, specifically the latest technology. Even if I don’t build my off-grid place tomorrow, I want to know what options are out there as I really don’t want some woke house out in suburbs.
While the marketers and the hawkers of all things plastic don’t want you to know, wokeness is a mental disease put forward by industry to sell more socially-conscious products. But solar energy is real, and it’s a powerful tool to power a homestead, when implemented correctly. You don’t have to live the suburban lifestyle in the big houses with the electrically-mowed lawns and grid-tied solar panels on roof that are totally divorced from reality.
Thursday is Juneteenth and I probably would be heading north if it wasn’t going to be fairly wet and cloudy on that day, and if the following week wasn’t going to be so hot and sunny and nice – and I have to take off at least part of the following Friday for a dentist appointment. Thinking of possibly working from home on Friday, then the Potholers through Monday. The following week who knows. too far even to forecast the week.
Didn’t ride at all this weekend, 🧤 but I got gloves so my hands won’t get so caked on with that bike grease the next time I service my bike. I could have ridden at Partridge Run or on Saturday but I really didn’t feel like it. Just wanted to walk. Will ride in today but it doesn’t look great for riding in the rest of the week. 🚲 But if Thursday is Juneteenth and Friday I work from home or drive in before heading to camp in the evening, then I really won’t have a chance to drive in.
Not sure what my Juneteenth plans will be, 🛶 maybe I’ll try out that new-to-me kayak launch at the Henry Hudson Park or maybe I’ll explore somewhere else locally. Go shopping for heading up to camp after work on Friday. It feels werid not going up on Thursday, but it looks wet up north, Friday looks fairly cold up north, and then Monday, and honestly Tuesday look like banner days in the Potholers though I think I’ll be back that following Monday late and work a week from Tuesday. 🏊 It’s summer but I got to be in the office some times even on hot days, and be home on sweltering nights. My suburban office is air conditioned and on the north side of building overlooking the old city so it’s always fairly comfortable in the summer months. 😰 If it’s really hot I don’t have to ride in, I can always hop on the bus. .
The thing is I have to a be bit choosy and picky about days off, 🗓️ as it’s only the start of summer and I want to take off six-days for summer vacation, at least a few long weekends up at the Potholers in the heat, then do some trips in the autumn. Independence Weekend is two weeks from Friday, so I’ll probably want to leave at 2 PM on that Thursday for regardless of where I go. Time goes by quickly. Plus it wouldn’t be a bad thing to roll some time over into he next year. I don’t love driving up north at 5 PM – and I won’t be able to get bacon 🥓 if I don’t leave until after work. Still I am going to miss heading up north for Juneteenth and I don’t want to be back next Tuesday for work in the heat.
Cornmeal pancakes with onions, broccoli, whole wheat flour, oatmeal and turmeric, 🥞 topped with plain low-fat Greek yogurt and parm cheese. Finally mostly finished off that gross vanilla flavored Greek yogurt with added sugar that I accidentally bought and should have emptied into the toilet and tossed into garbage to be recycled into carbon dioxide ♻️ but I ended up eating it. See this why I need hogs. 🐽 Not just for the manure and bacon. I get that you can get crap grocery store bacon, but I’ll never buy it, not even the fancy WOKE-branded bacon in the rainbow 🌈 color that promises on the label to be prepared by loving hands in organic free-range range barns by black transvestites. I still have some I Love Bacon left from Memorial Day Weekend that I can bring up north regardless for Juneteenth Weekend whenever that ends up starting, on Friday once it gets hot out and Potholers delightful. I will need to get some more books 📚 out of the library as many of my loans are expiring later this week, and it’s important to have lots of reads for up at camp.
You the preacher liked the cold and he knows I’m going to stay, California Dreamin’ on such a winter day.
That is words I sung to myself as I watched as the home, that homestead next to my parents house has finally gotten moved into that could have been mind for $150k or maybe even just the $120k that apparently was ultimately paid. I do rent month-to-month after all. I don’t have to stay. But the house I looked at year ago now was pretty dumpy, really not much different then my apartment, an old one-story structure with a sloping stone foundation, collapsing floors, oil heat next to a busy rural highway where the trucks run their Jake brakes through the night. With a barn, she’d and sink for butchering animals. A swampy pasture and hay field. The lack of a woodstove, wood lot and insurance issues were a deal breaker. But I passed it up for something better, my freedom, maybe eventually that off-grid cabin somewhere in a free state. It looks like they’re a nice family who moved there, someday they might be my future neighbors.
I rent month to month, I don’t really have any family locally outside of my increasingly elderly parents. I don’t kid myself, I know it’s only a few years before I get asked to move back out to family 5-acre homestead to care from them and ultimately end up with their property full of junk and brush. Going to need a lot of goats and chainsawing and fire too clean that dump up. A much too large of a structure, and ordinary grid-tied, leaky old house but probably with a lot of possibility. But I still like my freedom, I don’t want to be stuck feeding goats, hogs and chickens at least for a few more years. I know you can butcher animals – they’re not like pets – but I sort of like my freedom I have now. I like living in hte city and riding my mountain bike or taking the city bus everywhere, only driving when I want to get out of town. I mean I could buy a place in the city or a suburban house, anything would be nicer then my dumpy old apartment. But I kind of like living month-to-month, even if I know some day I may have to leave at the most inconvient time.
Freedom comes Thursday or Friday. I could leave on Juneteenth to head north and take off Friday – indeed that was initial plan but Thursday looks awful wet, cloudy, and cold up north. Friday is better but cool. The thing is a major heat wave is pushing in next week, m and I’d rather take advantage of my limited time off to be swimming and cooling off in the nice weather, rather then sweating at home. After driving up to Partridge Run and all over today, I really have had my confidence built up in my driving skills and the condition of Big Red, so I’m ready to go psychologically. I should check the oil though before leaving. And then I’ll get up north, be floating, cooling off and smoking pot. Still, it’s been such a cool spring that the appeal of floating on the tube and hanging out in the Potholers seems limited but that is to change it seems next week.
Truth is I am pretty bored with summer and same trips I’ve been every summer for going on a decade plus now. Juneteenth at the Potholers and the House Pond Campsite, how original. Then maybe a trip to Schoharie, then Finger Lakes National Forest in late July into August, and a few other random trips. The same places it seems, because those are the places I like and I’ve tapped out and discarded the rest locally. Next summer, I really want to do Michigan and Wisconsin and see the Upper Midwest for a change, but not until I replace Big Red, which uses too much fuel, is too difficult to drive into small campsites and parking lots. I kind of wish I wasn’t living month to month, and I didn’t decide after a few looks at that property and the hitch over the insurance and lack of a wood stove to walk away. But I was more interested in the Potholers and a life based on escape last summer then a life based on reality. Smoking pot seemed like more fun then driving back and forth to a house out in the country in the snow, shoveling pig shit and feeding grain.
The lyrics of California Dreamin’ are the “preacher liked the cold” and not the “preacher likes the cold”. Time keeps ticking by, and while assets and investments keep growing and offering future opportunities, it sucks being so broke these days and feeling like I have to ride my bike to work to save on the bus fare, even though I also enjoy the physical and mental clarity the commute gives me. It certainly beats driving, that any house out in the country would provide. Even when I do camp in the same places in wilderness, year after year, I do try to find new adventures and places to explore and clear my mind, but it gets tougher the more I explore each year.
I might end up just hanging around in town on Thursday and working remote on Friday from the library in Delmar so I can leave early for the Potholers and take off Monday rather then Friday. Next week is going to be warm, and that’s when I’d rather be floating in the river and swimming in the heat. The following Friday is my dentist appointment, so that might be yet another opportunity to leave town early for a long weekend either in Schoharie or Vermont. Even if I don’t do much either weekend besides listen to music and podcasts, smoke pot and read, and have some rip roaring fires, it’s good to get away from it all. Maybe I should do that Michigan and Wisconsin trip this year, but I’m not ready, and I’m anxious enough about driving creaking ol Big Red on just ordinary trips, much less 8-hour days at 75 MPH on Midwest expressway.
Very little sunshine to be seen today but at least it’s not raining. More sun for Monday but then rain returns. And possibly a half inch of rain for Juneteenth but fairly mild. I’ll have to consider my weekendplans as weekend gets closer, though Friday through Sunday looks warm and sunny but creek levels will be high.
Yesterday I was so ambitious until I wasn’t. Got up, cooked down the beans had breakfast, showered. And then I just collapsed with low-energy. I thought I had gotten enough sleep the previous night but I hadn’t. Truth is I’m not sure it’s Lyme disease as much as it’s a lack of sleep. 💤 The nicer weather has me staying out later most nights, then when I ride up, have a bite to eat and are still wound up a bit, I end up watching a video on my phone, 📱 Of course the web advertisers, thanks to my Mobile Advertising ID and clicking or making a stupid comment on some cancer advertisers ad are so sure I got cancer. ♋ Probably from all that weed and plastic I’ve burnt up in woods over the years. 🔥 I ended up taking a nap through mid-day, as the skies poured more most of the morning, ☔ and then it was cloudy and kind of cold. So no camping last night.
I did spend much of the afternoon reading Max Fraiser’s Hillbilly Highway 📖 well into night down at the Town Park. 🏞️ I ended up walking down there as I get tired of riding everywhere, even though my bike is working fine but my bike headlight isn’t charging 🔋 and I lost the second one I had up in the Adirondacks back in April. So I ordered two more of them, though it means in the mean time I have to be careful about sunset 🌇 if I’m going out to Five Rivers or the Town Park. Should arrive this week, though maybe not before the Juneteenth Weekend. Hillbilly Highway is fascinating, it’s the story of the migration two and from Appalachia to the factories in Midwest especially the great auto works in Indiana and Michigan in the 1930s through 1960s. The factories sought out cheap work, but what they got was a lot a conflict and new culture both good and bad. Cities of pigs and brothels as they say. 🐽 Pigs are great but they can be smelly.
Thing that sucks about Juneteenth is it looks like more rain, 🌧️ and then fairly cool and cloudy up north on Friday. I am thinking maybe I don’t head up to the Potholers on Juneteenth but instead skip taking off Friday, or only take part of the day off if I want to get bacon 🥓 and then go up after work and stay on Monday, when the heat wave is expected to push in. ☀️ Creek levels are going to be mad high, which isn’t great for floating nor cooling off on the Potholers with all the rain. 🏊 Things will drop though by Saturday I’m thinking if I go up after work on Friday. The thing is the following Friday I was planning to take off, because I have my dentist appointment at 11 AM and thought I could work from home in the morning, 🖥️ and then from there, head up to the wilderness. Maybe Vermont or Schoharie that weekend, but it depends on the weather. I really was looking forward to four solid days up at camp, hopefully nice and warm and sunny. ⛽Gas up my truck today at $3 a gallon but I doubt those prices will remain around long, with the Middle East going to all shit. Trump can demand lower gas prices and yell drill-baby-drill but there is no guarantee such things are even likely to work.
Ithought about for a while truck camping up at Rensselearville State Forest 🏕️ but in the summer there is no guarantee that the campsite will be avaliable especially on a Saturday, and it was cool and gray yesterday. Certainly wouldn”t have been good for hammock camping but I wanted to have a fire. 🔥 It was decent at the park last night. This morning I stocked up on groceries. $15 for a 100-pack of nitrile which seemed pricy but they’ ll last for a while. I was concerned that nitrile produces cyanide when thrown way and burnt, but that’s not the truth with nitrile butanate and I’m sure there are other things that produce trace amounts of cyanide I’ve burnt over the years. Dairies incinerate lots of them with farm trash. Just stay up wind and hopefully they won’t stink not that I expect to use that many of them, just an occasional one when working on bike with the gears or chain, so my hands don’ t get that tough to remove bike chain grease all of them. 🍃
I was surprisingly low on groceries, and I thought about just getting a few maintance items like milk 🐮 and bananas 🍌 to keep the panty full until I could do a bigger shop on Wednesday in prep for the Juneteenth Weekend camping trip but with the weather it looks like I might just shop on Juneteenth for the weekend, work Friday and head up north on after work and enjoy the sun then. ☀️ I guess I don’t have to leave early and I don’t have to get more bacon at For the Love of Bacon 🥓 – indeed I actually have some left over from the Memorial Day Weekend trip but it’s all part of the experience. For somebody who doesn’t eat processed food I sure do like my bacon up at camp, cooked down with lots of spinach, onions and other goodies.
I was thinking about going down to Hannacroix Preserve and also the Coeymans Creek WMA but I’m leaning more towards Partridge Run and hiking some of the roads this afternoon. 🚶 I both want to drive to test out my truck and be a confidence building activity, as I’m still filled with driving and auto anxiety, and also get out into the country. Partridge Run is certainly much more country. Plus, it will be quieter up there, much less likely to run into other people. 🐦 I hate the road noise of the Thruway at both of the prior places, plus Berne and Westerlo are so much more rural. Maybe I should check out some land and houses that up for sale, but I still don’t want to build in New York nor do I want a long commute while I’m still working in the city. 🖥️ Gas is still cheap currently. And maybe I can check out that farm with the burn barrel out back that still burns shit. 🛢️ Don’t tell a liberal that.
