Notes

You suffer from amotivational syndrome 🏡

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I talked to banks about getting a mortgage and started down the road for pre-approval. I talked to my friend who has the 10 acre old homestead in Greenville, how he got there. I looked at several houses, toured one in June asked questions about one to a realtor. I read books about buying a house and building your own. The houses and properties I actually liked where much too far from work. Many had other issues, some would have been a cash purchase and needed to be built from the ground up, prefab or otherwise. Most much where too large.

The banks were happy to steer me towards a conventional 30 year mortgage for $2,000 a month. It would finance up to $275k to $300k, probably more house then I would need and want but actually not an unrealistic budget when a lot of ready to move into, nicely maintained but older houses are in the quarter of a million range. Of course, most that the banks really like are your very typical and boring house in suburbia. And I would be paying that through my 72nd birthday, assuming that I didn’t refinance and didn’t pay it off early.

It’s really hard to find a house under 750 square feet. Some people are like don’t you want to heat and clean an extra room or two as a home office? Plus storage for tons of crap you’ll most certainly secure as a homeowner. No not really. Honestly, I thought that 700 sq ft house I toured was bigger than I liked. Plus it had a dirty old oil burner and no wood stove. Plus I guess running water, flush toilets and an indoor shower are great in the winter and for reasons of convenience but it just seems like a lot of crap to break.

What I really want is the simple, small hunting style cabin that is common in the Adirondacks or the more remote parts of Pennsylvania. I’m not saying that I wouldn’t have some solar panels, gravity sink and hand pump, outhouse and outdoor heated shower. Propane range for cooking. I get such living is harder than the current suburbia way of living but I despise the shinny trash everything every other week and replace of suburbia with the shiny and new.

I could have looked harder this summer gone by, had I not spent so much time up in the woods, reading, smoking pot, riding my mountain bike, floating in the tube and finding distraction in my kind. I could have moved Zillow back on my phone as soon as I killed my phone and aggressively persued every listing I could find that sort of made sense to me. But I did not, preferring to spend as much of my summer up in the wilderness, high as a kite while I kept sending my landlord $800 checks as he hammers and grinds along the unit next door as a gentle reminder that time is not long for my current moldy apartment.

I mean this summer is not unlike other summers. Big Red brought me to the wilderness for many nice nights though the cannabis and the Grateful Dead records were a friendly addition. Maybe it was much too ordinary of a summer with a little extra sparkles. But if I had been a little more aggressive I could have my own land at this point, be growing my own cannabis and having livestock, or at least clearly leading to that point. And I’m now a full director in my office, this should mean I should have moved out of just out of college apartment.

Truth is that I’ve not found what is right for me. I’m not going to waste my money on a big house in the suburbs that I despise and don’t care about. A house might be a good decision if you care about the building and where you live, but I don’t want some place out in the suburbs with vinyl siding and carpeting that I don’t give a rats ass about and wouldn’t care if the roof collapses or the building burns to the ground. A house is not a good investment if you don’t care about it and would be just as happy with it not long in the world.

WV Off the Grid Cabin

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I really enjoy watching these videos at night of different people's off-grid cabins. It's interesting to see what all kinds of different people do. West Virginia is definitely a beautiful state, quiet and very delightful, especially in the National Forest region.

NPR

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Community college can make degrees more affordable. But transferring isn’t easy : NPR

With their open enrollment policies and low tuition, community colleges offer crucial access to higher education. They educate 41% of all U.S. undergraduates, according to the Community College Research Center. And when those students enroll, 83% plan to transfer to four-year schools, according to the Center for Community College Student Engagement.  But that transfer process can be fraught with challenges, including structural barriers that force students to spend time and money taking extra classes.

“Most students leave empty-handed,” said Huriya Jabbar, a professor of education policy at the University of Southern California. “There are bureaucratic hurdles. There are really opaque transfer policies. There's not enough information about … which courses will transfer.”

Landfilling human poop 💩

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My office in Menands is down the street from the North Albany Sewage Treatment Plant, which processes about 83 Olympic swimming pools worth of water each day, reducing harmful pathogens and nutrient load before taking dumping much of Colonie, Menands and North Albany’s waste water in the Hudson River. It’s also home to one of state’s remaining sewage sludge incinerators, where they use natural gas to dry and burn off the solids separated out of waste water process, both generated on-site and trucked in 6-days a week from sewage treatment plants across the county and beyond. It wastes energy and produces carbon emissions, but greatly reduces the amount of sewage sludge ash that is currently disposed of in City of Albany Landfill in the Albany Pine Bush.

Lately there has been a push towards more composting of sewage sludge, but that has not been without problems. We live in a chemical-rich society, and wastewater not only often contains treated industrial effluent but also landfill effluent, the remains of pots and pans washed off, soaps and chemicals used in cleaning, and so forth. And it all get mixed in with the poop and pee, that is itself can contain the byproducts of pharmaceuticals. Most notable is the problem with PFOAs which have caused all kinds of issues for farms in Maine when they’ve been detected in farm field soils. Probably PCBs would be an equal problem, had they not been phased out what is going on 50 years ago now.

The thing about it is landfilling and incinerating might reduce immediate human exposure to the toxic compounds in sewage sludge, it hardly makes the problem going forward. And its a terrible waste of nutrient value and only increases climate emissions. I know whenever I can I will pee outdoors, and don’t think twice about digging a cat hole and using my bucket shitter up in the woods. I tihnk that’s a vastly more sustainable option. I really don’t love the idea of septic tanks either and capturing all those solids and having to have them pumped every few years. Yes, there is some biological degradation both in a septic system and a waste water digestion, but you’re still disposing rather utilizing nature’s fertilizer.