Personal
Blue skies and no wind makes for a beautiful morning ☀️
A cool autumn but not cold feeling without the wind and lots of sunshine.
Taking down camp 🏕️ once again but as soon as Friday morning if the weather is decent I’ll be back in the woods as I’m thinking of doing a long weekend up in Madison County at Charles Baker State Forest. 🚵 Thinking about riding trail and maybe bringing the kayak 🛶 and on Saturday or Sunday paddling up through Nine Mile Swamp.
Probably check out Huyck Preserve 🚶 midday then maybe log in and process some of the data jobs at the Rennselaerville Library, then head home unpack, shower 🚿 and hop on my bike 🚲 and ride down to Hannaford for at least enough groceries for the first half of the week. Monday I’ll go to the laundromat to have clean clothes for work and then Thursday get propane, supplies and fuel ⛽ for my truck in preparation for that Columbus Day Weekend trip to Madison County.
Who knows though, the hurricanes 🌀 down south could change track or other things happen between now and the end of the week to change my mind. But I would like to do a trip to Madison County when it’s still colorful, warm enough to kayak and the trails are still open at Charles Baker. But I do fully admit it will be a busy weekend for work so it won’t be all fun and games.
Just buy a house, it will be great 🏠
Your the Director. You make good money, you’ve saved and invested, you could buy a house with cash or get it at a good interest rate if you wanted the tax advantages of letting your money grow in the markets.
Don’t you know it’s foolish to pay rent. You’re just making your landlord rich, paying his mortgage. Renting is a temporary thing you do or what you do when you have no other options because you’re poor. Did I mention it’s foolish? Think of all the money you would be saving, paying the bank and establishing equity in your own home.
You’re in your mid forties but you’re still riding your mountain bike to work most days, except when you take the bus and transfer over to the shuttle. You know like the drunkards and the poor who don’t own cars. You’re spending your weekends in the wilderness, smoking pot, drinking beer and burning shit. Listening to shitty old music. Even when it’s cold and snowy as you hate living in the city.
But I really don’t want a suburban house. I hate lawns, I hate carpeting and vinyl siding. It would be such a waste of money to buy a structure I hate, costs a ton to heat and light and I wouldn’t bother even making the most minimal of repairs because I hate it and it’s all just garbage to me.
I want a small cabin up in the wilderness wherey I can shoot and own whatever hand and long guns I want without special government permission, burn whatever garbage I want and not waste my time washing out plastic bottles and tins cans for fake recycling, have pigs, goats and any other livestock I want, grow cannabis and other feed stuffs. I don’t mind shitting in a bucket, chopping wood or fiddling around with batteries and solar as that’s that I do half the year when I’m not back in my cesspool apartment in the city!
It will happen some day. Not that far in the future. I can see my net worth increasing and my years of experience paying off at work. After all, not everybody becomes a director. The financial experts say I am a fool but they are not me. They don’t understand my love of the wilderness and the small towns, the freedom to live the life I want to live. The houses I see on Zillow are so distasteful as is everything New York State and the liberalism it all involves.
Studying the rural landscape 🐐
One of the things I find myself spending a lot of time lately is trying to understand the rural landscape and people’s relationship to land and property. The architecture and barns, the livestock raised, how people piece together a living in the country.
Methods of study vary. One is the simple just traveling to rural areas, riding rural roads on my bike. Climbing mountains and peering down into the valleys. Things I’ve done for years now, but now with a much more careful eye, trying to figure out what I actually want to some day not that far in the future incorporate into my life. Styles of architecture, layout of homesteads and gardens, livestock and even toys like ATVs, tractors and trucks.
But at the same time I’ve been doing a lot of reading and listening to e-books about farming and homesteading, books about the wilderness and how people relate to the land. In many ways it’s taking off my rose colored glasses on the topic. I grew up in the country, I know about barnyards and breaking ice to water ducks and feed dogs in the winter and all the smells and hard work that go along. Still maybe I didn’t think as much about stewardship and how much farmers of all stripes struggle to stay on the land, and the hustle to stay afloat selling what they can. Often it really is a fight for life against markets, pests, disease and weather. Or how 5 acre homesteads chew away at once vibrant farming lands. YouTube videos are good to get a look at every day operations of farms and homesteads but sometimes five hundred page books give you a lot more of the back story.
People will say I’m wasting my time in analysis and study, years of my life are rapidly fading away while rent checks fly out the door padding my landlords pockets. But I want to do it right, build the right homestead in the right location, be thoughtful not rushed. The time is not now but will come and armed with facts on all aspects of rural life, I will make better decisions. I grew up in the country and went to school in a small town, yet there is much more to learn.
Back on Cheese Hill 🧀
Just sitting here, staring at the Catskill Mountains much like three weeks ago. I’ve been coming up here a lot especially in the autumn. I should bring my shot gun and get my license but I’m fine just sitting here. I don’t eat that much meat anymore.
I know that cabin for sale out here that stole my heart out here was much too far from work,🏚️ but I do love it out here. Years ago when I was young – decades before this was state forest I used to come out here and just sit at the end of the road looking at the mountains. ⛰️ Plus out here was a good place to seek out homesteads with burn barrels to look at even in years after the ban. 🛢️ Mostly all gone fifteen years later. But even if I lived remote, I’d have those shit gun 🔫 laws of New York. My apartment is a mess, it needs a good cleaning but I’ve been away so long. Facing another winter there, I need to get more weather stripping around the door 🚪 that continues to rot away. Still it’s fairly cheap. Been quiet 🤫 the past few weeks as the landlord – dairy man has been busy harvesting not working on the unit next door. Money 💰 has been good this past year, between the high interest rates and the booming stock market. I can make the leap when I want but I don’t want to fall flat on my face, ☺️ and still kind of want to get in twenty years with the state for the higher pension amount.
Smoked some grass and forgot to tighten my kick stand 🏍️ before I went out riding. Bolt 🔩 bounced out and is gone but I found the kickstand and it’s a standard water bottle cage bolt 🍶 so I stole one from there and will replace by stealing another part of my old bike 🚲. Made me cranky for a while this morning but after lunch and some riding I’m feeling better. Plus that whole issue of my eyes 👀 being irritated from the contacts. I’m out of paper towels 🧻 so I didn’t wash my hands 👐 well enough before putting them in it seems.
Been thinking 💭 a lot about my use of the R statistical language. Is R a real programming language? It’s not a general purpose language like C or even Python and I wonder what value I get out of learning and using it every day. I think that’s why I’ve been so interested in learning and getting really good at C and now Rust. I do like a lot about Rust. But I’ve also been study a bit of modern Javascript and Java. Truth is a lot of the concepts can be used from language to language and for a lot of things I do R and the tidyverse are perfect. 🖥️ Still when I tell people I do most of my work in R, I just get snickers. Of course, a lot of scripts in the office are based around good ol Awk which is if anything far less of a language then R.
Landowner, not a homeowner
Eventually, I plan to become a landowner more then a homeowner. Land not just a place to have a home on, but land where I can call my own, use for my own purposes, study nature and wildlife, hunt and trap on. Public lands are a fantastic resource, but they aren’t really my own even though I temporarily occupy the lands.
As a landowner you become responsible not just for your home, but also maintaining the land to maximize habitat and value to you. There are many ways to use land, farming, firewood, timber, hunt, trap, and so forth. Careful methods of use can maximize both the value of the land to you and wildlife that lives on it.
Land is more important to me then any kind of home I would have on it. I don’t want to chop down the forest or develop it more, I’d much rather take an adapt an existing structure, and use as much of the land that I own for natural purposes — be it agriculture or forest property. I would like to meet as much of needs on-site as possible, from renewable energy to food, to an live with as small of an externalized impact as possible.
Delegitimizing government is a feature not a bug of Trump
If there is anything that I really like about Donald Trump is that he is making government less legitimate and heald in less esteem then it often has been in the past. I’m not at all convinced that government workers and politicians are all noble people, indeed most of them are there primarily for a job and getting paid.
Calling government work noble and declaring government workers to be heroes is simply an excuse to underpay government workers, have unsafe working conditions and generally be uncompetitive to the private sector. Parades for fallen cops and soldiers doesn’t make their work places safer or better compensated, it simply strokes egos without improving anything. And it causes cops and soldiers to do inferior work as they believe they are special for being underpaid and forced to work in an unsafe work environments. And it displaces jobs potentially done better privately.
Trump is tearing down the notion of “the people” in the courts, holding the government rather than individuals in contempt. A ruling of any court is inherently political, all judges are either elected or are appointed by elected officials. They have biaes they face when interpreting the law. He’s also reminding us how laws are often rigged to favor incumbents and established players – and while he likes to point at Democrats and liberals – it’s pretty obvious it cuts both ways.
It’s not to say there is no role for government. There is. But government service is no more noble than any private persuit, indeed cops and soldiers are just as essential as farmers, plumbers and software engineers and cell phone manufacturers. Truth is modern life is impossible without all facets of the economy and government workers really aren’t any more important to society than any other industry.