Morning folks on this Hump Day 🐪
I did the bus thing yesterday, and it wasn’t fun running from the bus to the shuttle through the Capitol past all the Future Farmers of America, hoping I not get noticed for not wearing a suit and tie, trying to catch the bus in, and feeling morbidly obese when I got into the office for not riding my bike to work.
It was even crazier then that. 🤪 The Colonie Planning Board Meeting agenda item we were at Save the Pine Bush was taken off the agenda at the request of developer 🌲 who is trying to work with the Pine Bush Commission to mitigate concerns about them building on an important wildlife corridor for Karner Blue Butterfly 🦋 and other endangered species. And then after the meeting I got a bus 🚍 home, and there was a crazy black man pounding on the back door insisting “Let Me Out!” and then another equally crazy old black man muttering just werid random phrases as the bus slowly but surely made it way out to suburbs. 🚏Bless Betty, the driver who puts up with all that crap. Honestly, I was kind of impressed how much mitigation the developer was proposing for that proposal, but it’s a stinker of a proposal for neighbors, especailly as they want to take a gravel lot and turn it into a garbage collection and transfer station. Maybe just demolition debris and not rotten steak bites, 🗑️ but it still is an important connector parcel.
We got talking about one of Pine Bush volunteers from back in the day, 🚙 living out of their van in the cold in rural Saratoga County. I guess he’s pretty broke in his later years, doesn’t have much money 💵 but is making do on his land in the cold, showering at YMCA. 🚿 Then we got talking about Veteran who lives in the winter in a wheelchair 🪖 ♿ under the overhang at the Capitol, the one I sometimes see in Empire Plaza. I mean, kind of like me, winter camping, 🏕️ as the farmer asked if I was a Veteran. No, but I like spending time out in the cold burning debris. 🔥 In some ways, I’ m actually very sympathetic to that tough lifestyle – as I want to build an off-grid cabin / homestead eventually – and who knows how hard life will be before that goal is complete. I don’t really have a problem shitting in a bucket or outhouse in 20 degrees. Hell, I like the idea of composting all that poop 💩, having a smelly ol’ burn barrel and compost pile 🗑️ rather then an overflowing trash can each week packed in plastic mixed with apple cores, steak bones, junk mail, bottles and plastic wrappers. But don’t you recycle? ♻️ Butchering my own meat, own garden crops and stored food supplies like a prepper – a simple life without every day shopping and buying food wrapped in tons of stinky plastic to burn. 🐐 So many I’m more sympathetic then most to that kind of close-to-nature living like that homeless vet and the van-life, though I’m certainly not that poor as I look at big-assed Ford SuperDuty trucks. I just don’t like suburbia with all those houses covered with plastic, the overflowing garbage bins with their plastic garbage sacks full of plastic and rotting crap, and jap-crap SUVs and crap-Euro lux-o-mobiles. 🚗
Ran into my neighbor this morning running out to the store getting milk and eggs. 🐮 I thought he knew that I had retired Big Red but apparently not. I mentioned I retired Red because of body – I corrected myself frame issues – and planned to replace him in the spring. He asked if I was planning to get another Chevy. I said no, a Ford and left it at that. I wasn’t going to mention I was thinking of an big assed F-350 truck. He is apparently heading out snowboarding 🏂 today. Sounds like fun, going to be a beautiful day after such cold lately with tons of snow everywhere. 🥞 More apple and carrot pancakes 🥕 to start of the day, last night was kidney beans fried with some onion and remaining green pea soup, with some cornmeal and corn, kind of a garbage plate. Part of the onion rolled behind the stove with the mouse droppings 🐁 and mildew, that went straight into the compost bucket after I fished that out. Truth is I am kind of embarrassed about spending so much money on a big truck, but it will be great over the next 15-years. That said, I am still looking at a pretty stripper SuperDuty without much chrome, I do like that Ford XL Off-Road Package with the nubby tires and other minor improvements but also all work with zero chrome or carpet and vinyl everything inside the cab. Halogen headlights, the configuration used out on the oil field, ranches and Forest Rangers.
Should be a nice day for riding in, 🚴 already in the mid-20s with no wind and some hazy sunshine ☀️ as it pulls over the horizon earlier and earlier. Working on that sunrise and sunset 🌇 diagram yesterday, I was frustrated about emojis not working, and realized I should upgrade to Fedora 43, so I did and the emojis worked again but I had to recompile some of the packages in R. 🖥️ But I got my emojis back, which have been somewhat broken since I switched to Fedora last spring. ☺️ I also got playing with some different R scripts, coming up with new ways to process data. I’ve been working on a Moon Calendar like a sun one I posted the other day, and new weather diagrams. I do wish the snow was gone from the bike trail so I could ride both ways, but soon enough that will be the case. But I don’t see it warming up any time soon.
Indeed the weekend looks made cold, 🌬️ ❄️ so I might try to get out shopping tonight at Hannaford on my mountain bike after work. Probably come home on bus, 🚌 and then after dinner I will ride down to Hannaford. I don’t love riding Delaware Avenue in the dark, though I might go through the suburban subdivisions though it will be tough to ride all way on the back streets due to cut over being snow-covered. 📚 I guess the weekend is a good time to continue my study 🔎 of buying big-assed pickup trucks 🛻 and some of the other books I have out, but it’s fine as there is too much snow to do much hiking at Five River or anywhere else. We were discussing last night in car ride back to Downtown Albany how this has been one of longest cold periods the city has had in many years, and some of the worse for Big snow banks everywhere. Years ago it used to be more like this but with climate change, and the lower elevation of city, it usually doesn’t get this cold for this long. 🌡️
Essentially a “suburbanite house that smells like cow shit” 🐮 🏠 💩
This has lately become one of my favorite phrases to mock the ever so common home for sale posting I see on Zillow and other sites – buy this rural house with a long commute on one acre of land!
You might ask where I came up with such a phrase, but it really go back to my days in my youth as a Boy Scout in Clarksville, that small hamlet in the Town of New Scotland off NY 443. We met at Clarksville Church, and during times in spring and the fall when either Meadow Brook Dairy’s Van Wie or Tommell Cattle where spreading, it could definately be pungent at times from the dairy-air. I just remember the look at that farm kid whose dad picked them up, after quite apparently working with silage and not showering after. Now pungent! As boy scouts, and young people we made a lot of jokes, mostly very mean spirited about farm folks and smell of cattle.
Clarksville is very much a small town, hamlet. It smells like cow shit at times, and it is quite small and walkable, though there are few businesses one can actually walk to as general store is long gone and they’ve struggled to even keep a pizza place open. But truth is there is probably some appeal to living in a small town, like you probably know your neighbors and there aren’t the issues of big cities like homeless and drug addicted people. Not that you see much of them outside of downtown. But also so many of those houses, especially in the hamlet, are so close together. Rural living but not without a lot of land.
Rural hamlets reminds me a lot of campgrounds. I guess it’s camping to sleep in a tent or a camper on a driveway packed right in next to another camper. I mean, I guess camping in a campground in strictest sense is camping, it’s not the same as sitting in a house or an apartment downtown, though many of the tow-behind campers are essential miniature homes on wheels. And in many cases, people who build their own homes, or need inexpensive living in a rural location live in those RVs.
But at least in my mind, that’s not camping. It’s certainly not the kind of camping I enjoy, where in most cases the nearest campsite is a 1/4 mile or farther away, per the requirements of the Adirondack State Land Master Plan, or just the general terrain of the back country. Places where I can shoot guns, listen to music, have a roaring fire and even burn a plastic trash or smoke some grass without anybody caring one way or the other. I have to say all my time camping in remote back country, far away from people kind of informs how I want to live, and even 5 acres, much less 3 or less acres, just seems much too close to live to anybody else. Yet, it’s hard to find places like that – just like it’s hard to find places that I like camp at that are less then hour, and often as much as two hours away from home.
The thing is so many even rural houses, are essentially suburban these days with high-speed internet, large televisions, propane or oil climate control, curbside weekly garbage pick-up and of course essentially unlimited grid-powered electriciiy. If a rural house is not actively homesteading or farming, it is almost completely divorced from landscape, except maybe when they step out their door and take a deep breathe of the dairy air in spring time. And much like camping in a crowded campground, with RVs and tents back to back, what do you get with such living, besides a long commute, quickly tired and junked automobiles and large gas bills for your 4×4 pickup driven to city every day?
