Pigs! Lately I’ve been watching or actually more like listening to YouTube videos while at work including North Country Off-Grid and jnull0 and Our Wyoming Life. I also sometimes listen to the NRA’s Cam Edwards 40 acres and a Fool podcast, where one of livestock he raises in tammaworth heritage hogs.
Growing up my neighbors raised hogs besides other livestock. Some of my friends from high school still have them. Pigs are kind of smelly, they root around in grain and food scraps that ferments when they rot. They can be rough on fences too and can tear up a landscape rooting around in the mud, seeking a good wallow to cool themselves out. Wild hogs, which have long escaped shooting preserves and farms can be incredibly destructive to farms and forest alike.
I’m not that much of a fan of store-bought bacon, especially after I let some bacon spoil and then try to cook it, but there are many cuts of pork that are incredibly delicious. Definitely need a strong fence, truck and a cage to move the hogs around, although I guess I would be better to shoot and process the animal on my own land. I’m not much of a meat cutter but I could learn, burying the guts on my own land so they rot away in a few years rather than sit in a landfill for a million years, compacted next to plastic bags and crushed television sets.
When I own my off grid cabin, my hope is to live as close to zero landfill as possible, putting waste to as high of use as possible.I don’t generate that much in food waste, keeping it out of the garbage keeps it drier so anything I end up ultimately burning out back will burn hotter and cleaner. Turning food scraps into feed and ultimately food is even better. Sure, I can and will compost but feed us a higher use. Likewise paper trash like shredded junk mail can be used for bedding, one more thing to keep out of landfills and out my burn pit, as most paper products don’t really burn that well, especially if they are wet.
Owning hogs might mean that I’m more strapped to my land, but when I’m at the point of having an off grid cabin I don’t think I’ll be as interested in traveling and camping, as I’ll have much of the same adventures on my land.
For twelve years now I’ve used Linux as my primary desktop operating system. I can’t imagine using any other operating system on my computer. Here’s why:
It’s totally free with easy updates via apt-get. Distribution upgrades sometimes requires a bit of tweaking of files but are relatively easy to use. No fancy installers that block what you are doing or lots of windows to click through.
Software all comes through the apt-get mechanism, you don’t have to go to risky websites to download software.
Standard Unix programs and functions are easy to script in bash and pipe their output between processes.
Most things nowadays are done on the web and the Linux web browsers are in most ways the same as the commercial platforms.
OpenOffice is a fully functional and stable office platform for all my office software needs.
QGIS as somebody who enjoys mapping and exploring land has become a killer geographic information system, especially in recent years. It takes full advantage of the GRASS platform and various Unix based GIS software.
Great professional web development tools that are running in their native environment
I am not a fan of overly glossy things, so I use the fast and simple XCFE desktop environment which is great because it never changes. Even Linux itself pretty much stays the same, although little things evolve over the years.
That’s the thing I’ve discovered over the past year observing the housing market and researching what living options are available for me. Houses are expensive but not that expensive and if I wanted to sell some stock, cut a big check, I could buy a house, no mortgage or bank involved.
Yet, every house I’ve looked at really isn’t what I want. Suburban houses and especially houses in the city are so generic. Same vinyl siding, shag carpet, white walls, neighbors near by. Same old natural gas or oil heating system that drinks energy. Vast spaces to heat and cool, rooms to light and appliances to feed their vast amount of energy. Most require an automobile to get to and from, with all the expensive tickets handed out by cops, court appearances, gasoline and insurance that must be burned every week. I could tolerate driving, but not for complete crap plastic suburbanite’s building that I despise.
Truth is that what I want to land, buffer from the neighbors. I want to be able to have fires, burn trash and debris, ride four-wheeler and shoot guns, have smelly livestock like pigs and manure, guts and compost piles without causing a nuisance of having code enforcement and the cops on my ass. I could tolerate driving to work for the good life, especially if we finally moved to a part-time remote like so many other agencies are doing. But it has to be truly rural, in a place I actually love. Not this suburbanite crap, that comes a dime a dozen.
You know that’s a really profound question that I really yet to find the answer to. While I didn’t view my dream of what is a good life – the off-grid homestead – as materialistic now I’m coming to the sad realization that it mostly is. Happiness is ultimately not what you buy – be it a big screen TV, pigs and cattle or a tractor with a manure spreader – but your ability to find Zen and meaning in the now.
For too often I’ve been consumed with the thoughts of tomorrow, planning for that house on the hill with that burn barrel out back and cows mooing in the field with the big jacked up truck and four wheelers in the front yard. Maybe not the glamorous homesteads you see in the magazine but some working land. All the thinking of the accrued benefits of hardwork and saving. I was concerned about the memories of the past. But maybe those things don’t matter as much as I used to think they once did.
There is no time but the present. It’s not to say that the past has no impact on the present or that today’s actions won’t impact tomorrow. But in many ways those things are meaningless as the only thing that exists is the present. That said, I still continue to work for the future even while I try to find more of now.
