How did the house stand up over the winter part 2: electric boogaloo

This is a post concept I did last year, and it was a bit anticlimactic but still stands as a good window into what everyday is like out there. Since it was a good post concept, I decided to roll with it again this spring. I basically started rolling tape as soon as I was off Highway 93, and talked about my hopes and expectations. It's a nice little drive with me on the backroads of Nevada.

I then shot some footage once I rolled up to the house, and commented on what I saw. I got to work almost immediately, even during the video. Once again, the angles are terrible - I am not good at photographing myself, especially on video. But you get a good look at the way things stand when I left. To spoil myself...

Back in Omaha for the winter

Hello everyone, long time no post.

As always, there's a good reason for that. The laptop is on its last legs, but everytime it seems to get better at the last moment so I don't replace it. If the laptop's electric is bad, the van's electric is worse, and I have to resort to electroshock therapy half the time to get it moving. Going into town from my homestead became such a chore that I ended up dreading it, and avoiding trips for all but the most important things, because it'd often be a day or two before I could get the van moving again.

It's not the battery, and after extensive unprofessional diagnosing I'm pretty sure it's not the alternator either. I haven't fully ruled out the spark plugs, but I don't think it's that either, because sometimes when the electric is low the AC will randomly come on even though it's off. That is a symptom of every Chrysler owner's most dreaded problem: a fault with the electric brain. The electric brain is a part that never used to exist, it's not strictly necessary to the operation of a motor vehicle, but it improves gas mileage at the cost of rendering the vehicle a particularly well-engineered brick when it dies. The electric brain itself isn't particularly expensive, but like many things in a Chrysler it's buried someplace almost inaccessible, in this case inside the engine block. So a few hundred dollars of part is accompanied by about a thousand dollars of labor.

The van isn't undriveable, after all I did get here in the end. But it's touch-and-go enough that I won't be leaving Omaha in the spring until and unless it's fixed. And it was getting less driveable as the weather got colder, which is why I called the season a bit early and came home. But at least this way, I get to see the leaves fall.

Camping cuisine: personal pan pizza

As I'm not dying, I'm also not starving. I've decided to take more pictures of the fancier things I cook, in order to prove that point.

Today's entry is pic related: a deep-dish personal pan pizza, chicken and bacon with buffalo sauce. My extended family is based around the Chicago area, but the Noo Yawkeh gripes that "it's a fuggin' casserole, not a pizza" have somewhat landed. (IMHO the best pizza comes not from Chicago or New York, but from St. Louis. Imo's Pizza, or really any shop that'll make you a pie with Provel cheese, is the best pizza money can buy.)

That said, in the middle of the desert, this is a pretty tasty casserole. I've levelled up my dough-raising skills and I'm pretty proud of the results. There's a non-zero chance that I'll be making this in Omaha over the winter too. Also, on a more personal note, this is my birthday. I'll probably be celebrating out in the field when this is published, but if I'm in town I'll swing by and post something up.

This is your weekly notification that I am not in fact dead yet

I have never, ever been good at technological communication. I'm a firm believer in the notion of putting the phone away when people are talking to you, of prioritizing the folks in the here and now versus the folks across the wire. And then I moved to a place where I would never get an unwanted call again, where even making a phonecall required driving into town.

Maybe it's the spectrum folk's difficulty with multitasking that causes this in me. Here I am doing something, anything, and my flow is interrupted by a ringtone. I know this is part of it, because people that send five texts in a row irritate me by disrupting my concentration with every notification. (I've done it too and probably will again, but I'm trying to remember not to.)

Homestead and garden update: 6/27/2021

I promised an update on my homestead a while back, and then went radio silent. It was because of several reasons: apparently Blogger causes my laptop to overheat so I can't use it easily unless I can go hang out in an air-conditioned place long enough to write up some posts, and even though I can code HTML, I have to finish my posts online because I can't code for the images offline. I've also been super busy with the homestead, which, dun dun dun...

...did survive.

First of all, foremost of all, let's talk about the garden. I took this set of pictures right before I left for a trip to Denver, which I'll schedule to post sometime later this week. (I'm writing all of this on Friday, trying to work my way through a vast set of photos.)

I was worried that leaving this garden alone for a week would result in some dead crops. But outside of a couple of the more weakly-rooted mustard leaves, that didn't happen. Instead, the crops seemed to take the opportunity to spread their roots deep to suck out the remaining moisture, and now those huge root structures are helping push them up. So I'm super stoked. Follow me past the jump and see something besides this gorgeous repotted cactus that I tricked into thinking it's raining.

So my foray into mycology. This here is a genuine golden oyster mushroom in a fruiting stage. I'll cut it in a few days, cube up the mass, and fry it with onions to make mushroom sandwiches. I am definitely going to expand my mycological holdings as soon as I have the space to. I'm thinking I might buy some spores and some sawdust, and just grow it on the floor on the walkways. I won't be likely to step on one, and usually the grainmass isn't fruiting so it'll usually be an empty walkway. But I have to build that greenhouse first.

How did the homestead hold up through the winter?

I had fitful dreams in Omaha that I'd drive back west in the spring and discover that the shack aspiring to be a tinyhome one day that I'd started out in the desert would be wrecked. Blown apart by winds and the uneven pressure of the earth before a proper floor could be built. Flooded due to floodworks dug hastily at the end of the year that wouldn't be able to keep the house dry against a hundred-year storm. Eaten apart by mice, held together by spiderwebs. I had no idea what to expect, and my subconscious mind was more than happy to fill in the blanks, the dick.

Well, I rolled up the day after I left Denver, and I decided to capture the moment on camera if you'll look to your left. Now that I'm back onsite, I plan on taking a lot more video to post up on here. (Boy howdy was uploading it a time... I'll keep that in mind in the future.)

In any case, after taking stock of that, I began dealing with my crops, a process that's still ongoing, and one that I'll describe in detail (with pictures!) in my next update.

Another trip through the Rockies

I haven't posted in a while, and for a very good reason - I went back to Nevada. By way of my college town, where I spent a week and change catching up with old friends and waiting out some nasty late winter storms.

But I'm back, and this time I have a blog, and some confirmed readers outside of the realms of random (but beloved!) strangers from Leftbook. Let's start from the beginning.

First off, that gorgeous pic to the left. I ended up doing a favor for some friends and delivering some goods to Denver, getting some gas money in exchange for saving them a trip. Denver is slightly out of the way; I can travel from Omaha to the collective by hopping on and off I-80. But if the detour pays for itself, well, I-70 west of Denver is probably the most picturesque piece of interstate in America. It certainly has the most picturesque traffic jams; I don't generally whip out my phone in heavy traffic but everyone was at a standstill.

That time I was stuck in a desert for a week

The car battery may be a humble, uncomplicated piece of technology; a long-known bit of acid and base bolted together, but it demands our respect. Everyone talks a big game until they turn those keys to the sound of inadequate electric whimpering under the hood; then we are all equally powerless before our Maker. Some people have been stuck in grocery parking lots, others at the mall, others on vacation.

I was stuck at home for a week last year, but "home" is a desert, with little help. Make the jump and I'll elaborate on the story.

Repairing the solar system, finally; also spring planting begins!

I used to have a solar panel system (as well as a hot water tank) on the top of my van. It, and the days of design work that went into it, were wrecked in a Nevada windstorm. I decided to keep things simpler this time.

I went to the stores here in Omaha trying to find those metal bars that people put on the top of their cars. You see them out in the wild all the time - the ones that make it hard to tell what vehicle's a civilian and what vehicle's a cop when you peer through your rearview. They're all over the place, but apparently no merchandiser in this town has ever heard of such arcane wizardry. So I improvised with ratchet straps, galvanized fencing wire, and some bungee cords on top for good measure. After a couple trial runs through the interstates of the Omaha metro on relatively windy days, I'm comfortable with their performance. They slid around and sailboated a bit up there before I added the bungee cords, but the straps held them firmly to some piece or another of the roof, because they're wired to the straps.

Archaeology and Spruce Mountain: A photo essay

Last year in Nevada, I went on a decent number of what I can only describe as side quests.

South of my agricultural collective lay Spruce Mountain. It dominates the landscape across the northern Ruby Valley, as you can see in the image to your left, taken by Snow Water Lake in the spring. It's not the nearest mountain to the collective, but going off the top of my head I believe it is the tallest. It also has turquoise deposits, and like the rest of Nevada, archaeological features of interest.

The whole area of the Great Basin has been settled, abandoned, resettled, and abandoned again, by the looks of the archaeological record. Anywhere that doesn't have a regular source of water is subject to this fate as miners come in, take what they can while there's a market for it, and leave once there isn't. Houses and structures get built, then abandoned to the ravages of time once they're no longer useful. Sometimes people leave behind items in good working order; I got a cooking pot and skillet this way.

How to build a tinyhouse in a desert

I've gotten questions about my tinyhouse. I've left Nevada for the winter, so unfortunately I can only use pics and videos I've already taken to illustrate the process I used to make it, and what it looks like now. And as I look through the video I took, it didn't capture the stuff I thought it was pointing at. It's mostly just me talking and pictures of a cloudless blue sky, so we'll skip that bit. The parts that aren't blue sky have been GIF'd for your viewing pleasure to the left, and my narrative in the video isn't really necessary as I'm writing one here.

The first part was building the road to the property. I won't dwell on it too much except to mention it, because if you're trying to do what I'm doing, property access is always your first consideration. Many people who live near me built their roads through other people's property. For the most part, that's okay - so long as you get on with your neighbors. But the moment a feud starts, you don't have the legal right to drive to your own property on the road you built. So literally, don't cut corners here. It took me three months to even just get to my property, because I was pulling out sagebrush and levelling the dirt and digging swales. But it all went through public property, where the developers of my ghost town had once planned for a road to go before never building it.

A year and a day later: here in the precious blood I stand.

A year ago today, the neighbors came to my van to ask me to check up on their daughter. I drove down the dirt road towards Highway 93 figuring that I'd be changing a flat, or that her rusted-out hoopty had finally had enough and I'd be giving her a ride home. But for whatever reason, a dark thought crept into my head. What if it's real this time? It scared and disgusted me, and I went back to reimagining the steps to changing a flat in the dark. Find the jack, ratchet off some nuts, slide the tire off...

And then I saw the lights, a sickening cacophony of reds and blues filling up the desert and then receding, photonic harbingers of terror, and my internal world collapsed in on itself.

Regenerative agriculture, food forests, and the ancient redwoods of Nevada

I'm starting an agricultural collective in desert land in Nevada to employ people as co-owners of a business that will grow a wide variety of food inside and outside of greenhouses using the principles of regenerative agriculture and dryland farming. We will get the water we need by saving 95% of it from escaping in the greenhouses, and rainfall on the greenhouses gets added to the total, so if the land we buy is half greenhouse, we've effectively doubled the rainfall on the other half.

With that extra water, and since the part of desert I've built my tinyhouse in is only desert because the water flows away too quickly and the water table is quite close to the surface, I will replant the redwood forests that flourished here before the uplift of the Sierra Nevadas 5 million years ago. The current sagebrush habitat will not be supplanted, but enriched, getting 25% more water due to the redwood forests preventing evaporation losses alone, and more diverse animals and plants creating better soils. Plenty of carbon will also be stored in the redwood forests themselves, which will be kept thin enough to allow every level of the forest to get sufficient light to bloom.

Pictures from Nevada, and the stories behind them

Sitting here in Omaha for the winter, the past year of my life almost seems like a dream when I think about it. I went and built a road and a house and had all manner of adventures and hardships in the desert. It was a surreal ordeal, but I survived and adapted and can now help others do the same.

Going through my files, I found a bunch that I hadn't organized in any real way. It's as good a place as any to start. And while I'm doing officekeeping on the subject, I think I'm gonna have a division of labor on subjects between weekdays and weekends. I'll keep the dense and wordy theoryposting and historyposting for the weekdays, and blog about the collective and my art on the weekends, to sort of put things in a lower gear for everyone. That said, let's get on with it!