Permies thread on time- and energy-saving hacks

Was reading a nice chewy thread in the permies.com forum. Lots of great tips about household time-saving hacks, and energy-saving hacks (our own human energy, as much as fossil fuels or any other kind of energy).

https://permies.com/t/95798/Homesteading-Time-Saving-Hacks

Lots of good tips. In the thread, someone posted a chart of age-appropriate tasks for young people. That’s definitely one good way to save energy, is to have all household members participating according to their abilities. You can take a look at the chart here on my Facebook.

Anything you would add to this chart, or change regarding the suggested ages?

BTW I personally avoid using the word “homestead” (aptly described by EcoPunks as “an inherently racist concept rooted in colonial violence”); I say smallholding or household.

(Why not to use the word “homesteading,” post by Eco Punks https://read.ecopunks.live/homesteading-an-inherently-racist-concept-d169adc03574 )

The Permies forums (founded by Paul Wheaton) are a vast resource. And relatively low-bandwidth since it’s mostly text and some photos. Also have found the site pretty straightforward as far as user-friendliness. I’m not the most tech-savvy person in the world.

Things you wish people would stop romanticizing

• car ownership

• air travel

• “hustle culture”

• moving to some remote acreage to “live off grid”

Regarding car ownership:

In many parts of the USA, most people are basically forced into car ownership. Even fellow environmentalists. Still, I would like to see more of my fellow environmental activists treat car ownership like a necessary evil or a non-ideal situation, lamentable systems design failure, etc. — instead of some cause for rejoicing. Bragging on social media when they get a new car, when their kid gets their first car, etc. It’s always jarring to see fellow eco folk unconsciously reinforcing the consumerist and anti-public-transport social norms.

Regarding moving out to remote acreage to “live off-grid”:

I’ve actually never done this, and don’t aspire to – but it’s grating to constantly hear people rhapsodize about how it’s their dream etc.

Come on, just unplug your TV, turn off the lights, light a candle and fire up the barbecue. And get some rain barrels.
You can do it in your own home, in your own neighborhood, right now! I do it all the time — it’s how I live. And many other people as well. If you Google “off-grid in the city” you’ll find some very interesting content.

For additional off-grid fun you can just sleep in your garage sometimes when you feel like it. THAT, i do enjoy.

And you don’t even have to give up the convenience & connection of living in town. (BTW it’s totally possible to be a hermit and still live in town, ask me how I know <wink>.

We can choose our level of reclusiveness and still live in healthy interdependence with our neighbors; contribute to our communities.

(This post was my response to a prompt from a Facebook page called “God,” which asks interesting and thought-provoking questions. You can navigate to the original post from my post here. The prompt was “Things you wish people would stop romanticizing because you’ve lived the reality of it.”)

Surplus food – crazy times

A person could have a whole full-time occupation just trying to use and / or give away food that’s being discarded but is still good. Oftentimes the surplus food ends up being far away from the hungry people.

Today it’s 15 little cartons of skim milk and about as many cartons of juice. All have been sitting in a friend’s freezer as they were unwanted by clients of a meal distribution service.

If any of this sounds like blaming anybody, it’s not. This is a reality of life in a society where people are spread out and the distribution doesn’t always match where the needs are.

My friend hates to waste food as much as I do, but she didn’t want to drink the milks and juices herself.

The church down the street wasn’t answering its bell or phone. And a friend I called from another church said his church probably wouldn’t want them — which I understand because it’s perishable and they don’t know where the stuff has been.

I share a fridge and freezer with two housemates so there’s usually not freezer space for so many items.

For various reasons, today I have taken the approach to keep the juices and use them up soon in some sort of beverage to share.

And to try making homemade evaporated milk from the milks. I’ve never made evaporated milk before but I have seen instructions online. In short, you cook it down by simmering for 45 minutes or an hour or so. Don’t let it boil.

Today I’ll try doing one batch in the solar oven and one on the stove burner. I’ll reduce it to as small a volume as possible and then use it in cooking and baking.

BTW I’m really happy because as of yesterday I finally have a nice little swivel stand for the solar oven. I took apart a chair someone had thrown away at curbside. Removed the wheels, and the chair back. This was after trying to use the chair as is. The oven kept slipping off and being hard to keep level and so on. My latest version of the swivel-stand consists of only the horizontal part of the seat, plus the legs with the wheels removed.

Fun fact (NOT!): Did you know that sometimes people maliciously tamper with food before giving it to homeless / hungry people? Like as a hideous ghoulish prank.

So even if there were a bunch of people around right now possibly wanting a little carton of milk or juice — which there aren’t because they are laying low, understandably — it’s gotten harder to distribute surplus food.

The craziest examples are for example sometimes pounds and pounds of whole shelled pecans or walnuts will show up, then make its way through the neighborhood as unwanted surplus. Some fancy thing that retails for $15 or $20 a pound but there’s a huge surplus and it just ends up at the curbside. Dried cranberries and so on, I kid you not. Or cans and cans of salmon.

(I love all kinds of fish, fresh or canned, and was able to use a lot of the extra as bait for the trap neuter release effort in our neighborhood where we are trying to get the feral cats spayed and neutered.)

Well, just some thoughts on using up surplus food that’s gotten jammed in the distribution system. I’ll let you know how the evaporated milk experiment goes.

I really admire people who run food pantries and can cook something and a bunch of people will want to show up and eat it. It’s not as easy as it sounds, and I really appreciate the work you all are doing.

Photos of the solar setup etc. here.

Update: The evaporated-milk experiment is working.

Using hurricane water during a boil-water notice

One advantage of keeping “hurricane jugs” of stored potable water, is that it also works during a boil-water notice! I try to keep 5-6 days’ worth on hand for each household member.

In response to a question I got from someone on my personal page: Can the stored emergency potable water go bad?

My answer: It can but we’re vigilant about swapping it out. If it’s stored in plastic containers it can take on a plasticky taste.

Plasticky taste (and possible yucky chemicals related to storing in plastic bottles) is not a problem with glass bottles etc., but even in glass bottles if it’s stored in a place with too much exposure to light it can get algae.

All of these things are easily solved by not keeping the storage containers in a bright place, and/or not using light-permeable containers. But the most readily available and least expensive option for most of us is probably sturdy plastic jugs. Many of which are light-permeable.

If in doubt, I disinfect water with a few drops of household chlorine bleach and let it sit. Haven’t felt the need to do that though.

I have several of those big water cooler jugs which people toss at the curbside trash. They are about 5 or 6 gallons. Not sure why people throw away containers that are great for storing hurricane water, but there you have it.

And I feel that swapping it out at least once a year is key. I often swap ours out around this time of year, to use the water on the yard during the dry season.

(Generally I use zero city water on my yard at all. This past week I did a couple of Chris Searles -style trickle-watering experiments, which probably used a total of 40 gallons of city water via the hose I keep on hand for emergencies.)

Footnote: Our city came under a boil-water notice a couple days ago. They still haven’t lifted it. Our city’s public-works department is excellent, and they err on the side of caution. No known contamination has happened. But the city issued the notice because electric power outage caused the prescribed water pressure in the system to drop, which can cause harmful bacteria to multiply.

When there’s a system glitch like this, people can be tempted to point fingers at a person or department, but it’s really more an artifact of complex centralized systems. Many of our modern systems are inherently brittle. Such as a water system that relies on electricity to do its job. (Again, our public works department is excellent and I expect they do have various redundancy built-in, but glitches can and do happen, it’s just part of life.) As always, the best takeaway for us is to build parallel, redundant, resilient systems into our lives. Such as rainwater tanks, and hurricane water jugs.

PS. Chris Searles’ trickle-watering experiments, I have mentioned on my pages but if you haven’t yet seen, check out his BioIntegrity channel on YouTube. Here is a 48-second clip that’s very encouraging:

How to water big trees out of drought; 48-second video clip with Austin Youth Council.

And Chris also has many more detailed and lengthy videos in which he explains and documents his drought-busting experiments.

PS. Good news rain update! OK, I’m not trying to go all “post hoc ergo propter hoc” on you guys, but I’m just saying, 30 minutes after I did “big laundry” this morning (using about 7 gallons of precious stored water from the rain tanks) and hung it out on the line, it’s raining here! (“Big laundry” = giant sheet which I fold in half and use burrito-style, + thicker sheet used as coverlet, + pillowcase & other smaller items.)

Masking, Covid, denial & fatigue

Prompted by a link to an article that popped up in my social feed. In The Atlantic. The Evermaskers. The isolation of people who take precautions against Covid has only gotten more intense. By Daniel Engber.

I can relate to this. I avoid indoor meetings when possible, but it’s not always possible, and I’m really frustrated that people have indoor meetings unnecessarily. There’s a lot of times when we could be meeting outdoors or by zoom.

I had Covid once, it wasn’t a bad case but I think I got long-term effects. I’m not worried about dying but I am worried about worsening effects if I catch it again. And there are other viruses too.

And it’s not just about me. I am a relatively healthy person after all. But I’ve met a lot of people via social media who constantly have to mask and avoid any kind of close contact with people. Add, all of us in my household have had health challenges and I don’t want to expose anybody unnecessarily.

One time I was indoors and masked, expecting others to be masked because most of them are older than me. Nobody was masked, one person sort of speaking for the group said they feel protected enough by the vaccine. I belatedly had the thought also that it might be they felt protected because they have good healthcare access.

And of course there are times when I take my life into my hands willingly, to go see a film be in a social situation. It’s a bit crazy, navigating all this.

I do think my immune system recently got better after I dealt with some long-term emotional junk that had been weighing on me.

I don’t like that people who mask and practice distancing are labeled the weirdos. I hated watching things get back to normal because it seemed like such a blatant ploy to restore consumer spending and prop up office real-estate.

One of the most generally conscientious people I know, who recognizes & acknowledges the situation re communicable diseases (as well as various other situations in the world), said to me, “I’m just tired of thinking about it.”

That made me draw a sharp breath.

And boy, once people who are cushioned by wealth and social status get tired of thinking about something, that’s just that. Don’t look up.

And I realized how many things that’s true for, including the signs of biospheric collapse. That even people who share a common recognition, many of them are just plain “tired of thinking about it.” And for whatever reason, they don’t have to think about it if they don’t want to.

Nobody is pretending the shutdowns were a glorious good time. but they had some unexpected silver linings, both ecologically and socially. I mean in terms of social movements but also maybe even in terms of prodding us to find ways to deepen our social connections even while we were physically constrained from gathering.

One thing for sure, the rise of widespread teleconferencing enabled activists from around the world to participate in conferences that we never would have been able to afford to participate in person, and maybe wouldn’t even have been invited to or otherwise had access to (even if we had been able to justify the eco-footprint, which I would not have).

BTW I lived in Japan for five years in the 1990s, it was a revelation to me at the time that people would choose to wear masks in public simply to protect others from catching a cold etc. How refreshing to have lived in a culture where it was normal to be so considerate of others.

On a related note, a recent article in I believe it was The Guardian highlighted a study showing that people will take more action on climate if they believe that others care as well. Makes sense. Behavioral contagion (or at least attitudinal contagion even when people in this consumerism-infected society struggle to find ways of matching their behavior to their beliefs) does matter.

Yes, here you go, it was in The Guardian. Spiral of silence: climate action is very popular, so why don’t more people realise it? By Damian Carrington.

Due process

To the people saying that migrants don’t deserve due process if it turns out they got in illegally:

1) In order to determine whether they are here illegally, there has to be an investigation; we don’t get to just grab people off the streets and throw them onto airplanes and send them to prisons.

2) Let’s say they do turn out to be here illegally, and/or have committed a crime etc.. They still have rights.

If criminals don’t have rights, then all the government has to do is find some excuse to label people as criminals, and voilà, those people will no longer have rights.

It’s what every tyrannical government in all of history has done. This is why people who break the law still need to have due process.

Due process may sound messy and inconvenient, and may even sound wrong. But think about it.

Due process FOR ALL protects all of us against capricious and tyrannical government — the kind of tyranny that our founding fathers set out to safeguard against. Which is why due process FOR ALL is enshrined in the Constitution.

(And yes, other administrations have done wrong with immigration policy as well. Just because we criticize the current measures does not mean we don’t and didn’t criticize previous administrations.)

(Yes, in case you might be wondering, this is still an environmentally focused blog. The environment is not something that can just be picked out as a separate issue. Tyranny and the carceral industrial complex have an unacceptably high ecological cost on top of the other problematic aspects.)

PS. Regarding the political climate in general — I actually think things have been taking a downward turn at least since 911. People in the USA started to be willing to trade liberties for what they perceived as “security.” We got beefed-up militarization and policing. I don’t feel more secure, and I think probably a lot of other people don’t either.