A few months I got out one of the classic books on timber frame construction from the local library on Hoopla. Some really interesting pros and cons to this old building method mostly sticking around today in very old houses and barns.
Since the time change, I’ve been getting up each morning at 4 or 4:30 AM. I see no purpose of being awake after dinner time at around 7 or 7:30 PM when it’s cold and dark out as I haven’t yet turned on my heat nor do see I any purpose for paying for the light.
Humming along with the sound track song from Midnight Cowboy, 🤠 waiting for the sun to rise so I can hop on my mountain bike and ride to the suburban office building, past the oil tanker trains, garbage recycling plant, and next to sewage treatment yard to the land of endless fake ceilings and T-12 fluorescent tubes as they flicker away as their old magnetic ballasts drip PCBs and fade away after the decades come and gone. I can’t see their faces, only the shadows of their eyes.
I did the local bus thing yesterday, 🚌 and some ways I wish I had driven my big jacked up truck to work, but I did not thinking that would be a post-special election party 🎈 that never materialized. It’s fine, it was rain by end of the day, ☔ and I would have gotten wet riding back downtown, and I probably would have had to catch the later local bus home, unlike last night which earlier local bus was running late, so I caught that home and I think I was home by a little before 6 pm. It sucks that express bus is no more. And they’re cutting the local buses again on November 30, reducing the Route 18 frequency to every 45 minutes mid-day and on the weekend. See that’s what I get for voting for the Trumpster, but I just was tired of endless whining of incumbent in White House. Plus it’s more fun running candidates against the man at top of the ticket, then having your man there. People ask my opinion of the non-Assembly elections, and I’m like I don’t care as long as our people win. I guess I should care more about politics beyond what is right under my nose. 👃 But I don’t. I still think it’s cool Mike Cashman is now an Assemblyman, even if I didn’t get any free beer 🍻 and unhealthy food out of it last night.
Truth is I am missing Plattsburgh and the Adirondack Mountains 🏞️ even if the endless trash-filed suburbanite houses and trailers of the villages and suburbanite hamlets where the Democrats live outside of city, aren’t exactly my romantic vision of what Rural America should be. 🚽 The smell of the sewage treatment plant next to my office 👃 hit my nose hard after those days of tangy smell of paper plant and manure-spreading farms 🐮 of the North Country. It was cold up north, but at least it was real unlike the endless boring suburban houses, city buses stinking of shit cannabis and ghetto criminals screaming their brains out on street corners trying to panhandle you. Some day I’ll live in a place like Plattsburgh, though far enough out in the country, so while I’ll visit the city from time to time to get supplies wrapped-in plastic for the burning barrel, I don’t have to have a hog yard or said burn barrel so close that I’m gagging on the smell. A place without vinyl siding or asphalt roof, that is either made with pig-pen siding boards or logs. 🏡 Such places exist even if I wasn’t canvassing there.
I still haven’t decide if I will take off Monday. 
I so want to get to get out to Madison County before rifle season opens, 
and ride trail and just hang out, but they’re still talking about a half inch of rain on Sunday, and then very cold and blustery on Monday through Veterans Day. 
I do want to spend time in the wilderness, having a fire, 
maybe smoking a little grass, riding trail 
shoot a few guns, maybe get myself a tree rat or two 
and just enjoy the nights. But not so much in the rain, though I could tolerate a day or two in hypothermia conditions if I have my heater 
, tarps and a good fire. Spending time up at P-SUC and Plattsburgh makes me want to spend more time in wilderness, and in the small cowtowns 
. That manure smell was so pungent on Tuesday when I was out canvassing in Lapham Mills on Election Day. If I don’t head out of town on Saturday for the long weekend, maybe I’ll add to the long weekend after Thanksgiving though I kind of want to get back to the woods before then.
I’ve been topping off the charge on the lights for the mountain bike. 
I will need them for the evening commute downtown to catch which will inevitably the later bus home, but who cares it’s cold and dark out. Sucks that I do have to take the local back home from downtown, but it’s too dark this time to ride the bike trail, plus it’s against the rules and who knows who is back the in hollar after dark. I probably should go to the laundromat this evening if I’m heading out of town for the long weekend but I guess it doesn’t matter, I can be wear dirty clothes up to wilderness 
if need be.
I do want to get up to Salvation Army and Goodwill 
to get some more shirts, but I can do that in a future weekend if I head out of town this weekend. I also want to get some pictures of the John Wolcott Hikers Underpass sign to put on the Save the Pine Bush website. The next two weeks are rifle season so not good for riding in the back country until December. Two weeks until Boy Scout’s Sportsmart, I kind of want to look at getting cross country skis as I cracked one of my old pairs, and was disappointed how much fiber glass I got out of them when I burnt them. Then after Thanksgiving, probably it’s up to East Branch though I’ve considered also the Hudson River Gorge. 
Or maybe up around Mason Lake if no snow and the gates are still open. Who knows, that’s still a while off. 
It’s going to be god damn fucking cold riding my mountain bike to work today, but what’s the alternative?
Often a lot of internet videos of homesteaders and farmers, have their properties all prettied up for the cameras. The manure piles well hidden, the mud and muck washed away, the pungent smells of life and death not lost in the transmission of the camera’s photos.
When I was out canvassing in Plattsburgh and surrounding towns like Beekmantown and Peru, I was pretty much in the standard rural/suburbanite neighborhoods with the endless chipboard houses covered with off-white vinyl and colored sand asphalt roofs. Plastic that shows the mud and muck, UV destruction. Same old grid-tied houses, with weekly garbage hauling, flush toilets going to sewage or septic tank with the poop and paper stored for landfill disposal. Some considered by those to be modern suburban houses, others rundown old trailers. But not really homesteads with goats, hogs, sheep or cattle even if at times the tangy smell of manure hung over the air from nearby dairies which are out spreading this time of year with the corn chopped.
To be fair, the neighborhoods I was walking were walkable and suburban or rural villages. Or trailer parks. They were the places where Democrats live who have priorities besides keeping their guns and being left alone with their livestock and trash fires. Many did have wood stoves, and there was the occasional “modern” log house, and I saw actually quite a nice one out on Cumberland Head with a steel roof, still hardly the backwoods off-grid cabin I toured back in college many years ago, when people were still using lead acid batteries, compact florescents and those big old Outback Inverters with separate charger controllers, and solar was still expensive and boutique technology. I know such places exist in the Greater Plattsburgh, but I wasn’t going to visit such places in search of Democrats. Most of those places are really in the backwoods, up in hills in the remote parts of Altona, Blackbrook, Dannemora, and other towns well hidden from the road.
I get it’s New York State with the burn ban, and I was never in a real rural area. And I do know those places exist, even if they aren’t as common as the places that fill your Zillow feed, at least until you disable that program on your phone. No everything is that typical vinyl commercial crap, sold as beautiful, colorful and sometimes sustainable plastic even when it’s not. But most of what I saw was a mixature of wealthy houses along the lake, very suburban neighborhoods, and trailer parks – which very much had the big televisions, high-speed internet, weekly trash pickup and just as much junk as the wealthy residents.
I do romanticize a lot about the nobel savage, as if most of the poor lived on homesteads without overflowing weekly trash baskets full of plastics, where houses weren’t wrapped in plastic, where processed food wrapped loaded with saturated fat and sugar in colorful packaging wasn’t the dominant form of sustenance. Places that might smell of manure or burnt plastic occasionally, but are vastly more sustainable than those with weekly trash service and unlimited coal and gas fired electricity. Where the poor eat real food, because they had no other option, as they couldn’t afford the cheap crap constantly being forced down our throats by the advertisers. Where toxic vinyl wasn’t the norm, where wood and logs weren’t seen as too quaint even for the rural home. Where people have land, where whatever nuisance they create by everyday living has basically no impact on anyone else. There is some of that town in the of Plattsburgh but not really.
