I am absolutely wiped at the moment as I rode a wave of enthusiasm all day. I felt focused, energetic and free of self doubt. I felt like my life was open to possibility.
The strength in my marriage with Alex has always been our commitment to working through our emotional journeys together. He was able to be reassuring my through slow climb back from the depths of my health challenges. He helped me turn it into a source of strength. Next year will be ten years together and Alex really got the “in sickness” portion of the vows a little earlier than anticipated.
This is the first time in both of our lives we’ve ever truly been stable. And that’s a strange thought. That our lives have been so chaotic for so long. We finally have money and a home we own and good health and it’s all at the same time. All of the instability of startups and limited resources and bad health are over. And only really in the last six or seven weeks has that been true. As we just finally bought our first home. We moved to Montana in August.
We climbed through the aftermath of the Great Recession together, made our first angel investments together, raised venture capital together, and now finally thanks to the pandemic we’ve been able to secure a place to live and a wide horizon to plan how to use our resources and time. I am responsible for talking this blessing and letting it provide the foundation for our long term goals. Millennials might just accelerate in middle age just yet! I know it feels like I am.
If I haven’t yet recommended it to you, my favorite sit-com is called Letterkenney. It’s about a group of young Canadians living in a small town in farm country. It follows the hicks, skids, and hockey players as they go about their lives of mostly manual labor and occasional drug dealing. This premise dramatically undersells the show which has the smartest writing and quippiest dialog this side of an Aaron Sorkin drama. Except it’s about ten times as vulgar and much less pretentious.
One of my favorite ongoing bits in the show is how everyone is always “choring” as a background. Or if you aren’t choring you need to get back at it. Want to go out? Pitter patter, let’s get at her by getting back to choring.
Between various work obligations today I have been getting back to choring myself. I had a whole host of both farm and house chores that got put away today in my frenzy of focus. First up was doing seed starts for my winter hydroponic lettuce and herb garden. I used this guide from my favorite resilient living website Unprepared.
Feeling invigorated by the success of the mornings planting and by the nutrients in the head of butter leaf I harvested, I turned to other overdue bits of choring.
A grey bookshelf with an esoteric mix of books.
I unpacked and organized some of the books I keep on hand for reference materials. You might spot preparedness & resilience topics. Also my library on consumption, class & money. My capitalism meets Marxism meets political theory books. And then of course a lot of Greeks.
A pantry well stocked with dry goods
I then tackled the organization of the pantry. That’s got a long way to go but at least I took it from a bunch of stuff Willy Nilly into a basic organization. We’ve got shelves dedicated to dried fruit, an entire shelf for nuts, and other sundry spots for grains and sugars and the like. Shockingly there are drawers under this where I’ve put beans and lentils to keep the onions and potatoes companies.
I’ve got so many chores that listing out all the choring for one day both motivates me to keep at it but also reminds me that we get a lot day each day around the homestead.
I recommend having habits from which one doesn’t deviate. I’ve come to appreciate how much the daily exercise of writing has come to provide a kind of scaffolding on which I hang the rest of my day.
But it can be easy to get lost in a habit too. I had originally started the act of daily writing as the habit. But I sometimes forget that there is more I can do on top of the foundation I have laid over these past eighteen months. I could integrate more of my past writing into the daily writing. I could do more to make it visible. I could do more to make it accessible. I could do more to make it durable. Perhaps now that writing every day is a firm habit I can expand on it.
In that spirit I am doing a little link round up on what might warrant a look back. A few posts that I thought were particularly good. A few posts that reflect some of the zeitgeist that I am digesting. And a throwback that some of my internet friends reminded were worth while.
The Thursday Styles Problem is probably one of my favorite essays. It’s about who knows what when and how that power flows.
It’s hard to look straight on at your desires. Why is it that some of your life arises from your priorities and focus, but others are just chances and circumstances?
The hardest part about looking face first at being responsible for yourself is that you are both in total control and not in any control. We want to live with willpower. We want to be people of purpose. And yet life is happy to show us how much it’s all just dumb fucking luck.
Because we are what we make time for in our lives. And if we don’t make honest time for ourselves how the fuck will we ever know what we actually want. If you let life idle past you that’s fine. Because that is the path of fulfillment all along. And in letting ourselves just be maybe we find entirely new reservoirs of resources.
I’m considering taking a wilderness first responder course. I’ve got other priorities for the fall but I also made a commitment to a resilient rural life. Somewhere in my own desires I may find that what I want can and does align with the rest of my life. That by opening up to something new I also see who I am more clearly. I believe they call it getting perspective.
I like to be prepared. It’s my personal opinion that this winter is going to be a bit rough. There is no single issue but rather a patchwork of intersecting crisis points that make me a little edgy.
You’ve got crop yields all over the place from another wild climate change year. You’ve got the rising costs of fertilizers. You’ve got an energy crisis brought on by the war Russia is waging against Ukraine. You’ve got whatever China is up to with its Covid policies. And then of course you’ve got our lingering economic fuckery and well you can see why I’m worried.
I went through our emergency food stores today and did some turnover and replenishment. We didn’t opt to move some things with us to Montana (some items had expiration dates necessitating donation) so it’s been on my to do list.
I’ve got a spreadsheet that includes fats, starches, sweeteners and less glamorous proteins like beans and canned fish. It theoretically calculates our our caloric needs and what is provided for in our supplies so we can more easily assess if we have enough on hand for different scenarios. In reality, I’ve never actually had full inputs clean enough to generate an output I trust. So I kind of wing it with this basic level of precision.
I don’t think we’ve quite got a year of food on hand but I have taken a lot of tips from the LDS suggestions for food storage. We’ve got pounds of wheat (and a hand crank grinder). We’ve got 25lbs sacks of rice. We’ve got big jugs of cooking oils. We’ve got sugars. We’ve got spices. I’ve got quite the collection of dried legumes.
I feel like I basically have what is necessary for a bad winter in Montana. I hope we’ve got enough for any supply chain constraints that might make it harder to get things to our modestly more rural homestead. But in truth I’m just following lists and hoping if something happens I didn’t fuck up too badly. And I’d we did well we’ve got shotguns and ammunition and the local deer are a little too cavalier about their safety. For now.
I’ve been procrastinating on two core projects for the fall. Both of which involve making a modest investment between $100 and $250 depending on how fancy I want to get. So it’s not a throwaway amount of money but it’s also not money I should be hesitating on.
I’ve been in my head about it for two or three weeks even though I regularly need to make decisions about much larger sums of money for projects with much longer time horizons. I finally got myself over the hump on clicking order after going over my plans with my husband Alex for an hour. Which we’d definitely bill at more than we spent.
PROJECT ONE: TEST APPLE ORCHARD
The first project is getting in a few apple saplings in a fall planting to test out where we want an orchard. It’s not a full orchard with a big wiz-bang multi-year permaculture plan. We literally just want to get in four to six dwarf trees in the soil as soon as possible as we’ve been told it’s feasible to do fall plantings of heartier Zone 4 varietals.
We did a soil sample and the results came back with very encouraging results. Our back pasture has excellent quality soil despite being compacted by horses.
A soil health assessment from Ward Laboratories.
And yet I struggled to make a purchase. I made a trip to the nursery. I fucked around on a bunch of websites. I ordered catalogs for next year’s spring plantings. Finally this afternoon we threw caution to the wind and bought six dwarfs from Stark Brothers. The total came to about $250 and if it all fails well I’m glad I spent the money on fruit trees instead of a disposable consumer good.
PROJECT 2: SEED STARTS
The second purchase was seed starter supplies for our winter hydroponic crops which we plan to cultivate in the barn. We got a LettuceGrow system early in the pandemic and absolutely loved the quality of greens we got out of it. We’d been able to buy starts (aka seeds that have sprouted and begun to grow) for it in Colorado but this winter I wanted to do my own growing from seeds up into starts.
The goal was to have constant rotation of red and green leaf lettuce along with romaine and kale by staggering seed tray starts. It would be easier and have fewer failure points if we did a new batch of seed starts once every couple of weeks for consistency and move them from one grow light seed tray to the LettuceGrow once it fully sprouted.
Here were all of my friends and colleagues just out there doing the work. And I was too scared to experiment myself. Finally today we bought everything we needed from Amazon and purchased six or seven seed types from Johnny’s hydroponic collection. All told for everything it was $86 for a set up that should work for many seasons.
THE LESSON
While I’d never tell anyone to just go nuts putting shit in the ground without some research, I do think it’s possible to be too in your head about growing. I’ve been reading so much about fancy techniques like permaculture that I had neglected the most basic lesson of both startups and gardening. Execution is exponential. Just start doing something. Make it small. But you have to just start. Just plant. Just make things.
A bell curve with a smooth brain, a midwit and a Jedi. The midwit explains Sepp Holzer’s permaculture. The Jedi & the brain just plant.
I never had a wedding so I missed out entirely on “you did a big thing” gifts. City hall weddings don’t inspire Boomers to open their wallets as it turns out. But buying our first home seems to have triggered a celebratory mood amongst our nearest and dearest. People are happy for us.
While we don’t have a gift registry (though maybe we should), I’ve been impressed by the thoughtfulness with which our friends have approached our house warming.
One of our friends sent a card that perfectly captured the intensity and joy of the situation.
“There is no better feeling in the world than than going from ‘wondering if you can do it’ to realizing you’ve just done it.”
I assume this was some kind of Hallmark graduation card but it really did capture some of the awe of the moment. Having spent 18 month searching for a homestead I’ll admit I wasn’t entirely sure when we’d actually graduate to the “just done it” phase. It sort of happened all at once when we stumbled onto a property that met every single one of our criteria.
We took a very research intensive approach to deciding on where to live and what to invest. Maybe it was the founder mindset that plagues both my husband and, I but we just couldn’t help but do an aggressive deep dive into all the variables. Some people move on vibes but we needed the numbers to back up the feeling. Checking the math is probably a good habit.
It’s a relief to get to the “we just did it” phase though as with any long play you find yourself wondering if it’s all just an elaborate fantasy. In an age of quick fixes and instant gratification, the slow roll isn’t that glamorous. Trusting that your preparedness will positive yield action is hard. Trusting that you will act when your preparation are needed feels even harder. But here I am. Having done the thing.
A lot of folks seem to be coming through Montana over the next two weeks. Maybe it’s the nature of high season that people flock to Montana at the end of the summer?
But it’s been quite fun to have all kinds of friends, mutuals and acquaintances reach out to make plans. Visibility on Twitter has played a large role in this, as anyone passing through Montana might be inclined to grab a meal or a drink if they scroll their local mutuals. I like to think I am top of mind because I am a good hang but it’s probably because I’m just quite visible.
All these tourists has got a bit of a “center of the universe” feel to it. It’s like a mountain summer town version of Manhattan during fashion week. Or Los Angeles during the Oscars. I’ve got to say it feels like I’m Monaco and it’s F1 racing season. Every city of note has an event that brings all of the jet set to their hometown.
I’m usually mixed on doing too much social activity but I’ve been feeling like socializing more. I’ve even been eating out with much more frequency. And what’s amazing about it is that in the past I didn’t want to do more than a couple events a month. But this end of summer in Montana thing has me looking forward to more deck cocktails, eating cold cherries on the marble kitchen slab, going to pubs and ale houses, and maybe even a few steak houses too.
I’ve noticed a deepening of my sense of personal responsibility for my own experience of daily life since we moved into our home in Montana. It’s the first home my husband and I have ever owned our own house. And we jumped into the deep end with a rural farmhouse.
The freedom to do whatever we like to our own property has been intoxicating. Even small changes are deeply satisfying. Or perhaps it is because they are small that they are such an effective demonstrations of how it is possible to derive a sense of satisfaction by taking responsibility for absolutely everything.
Let me give an example. I always apply moisturizer after washing up so my hand tends to slip on rounded knobs. That used to be a thing I’d just tolerate as a small inconvenience. But now that we can do absolutely whatever we like to the house we decided to just replace all the door knobs with door handles. Just said fuck it this little annoyance simply doesn’t have to be something we tolerate. We can take responsibility.
Is this giving us a false sense of control over our lives? Maybe! Being human is still mostly a chaotic experience. But we don’t have to tolerate any of the little bits of chaos over which we now have total control. Did I have control before? Also yes.
I could have stopped applying moisturizer and accepted needing dry hands to turn a doorknob. There are obviously always ways to take responsibility for any situation. But it sure feels great to take responsibility for living the way you prefer. Which in my case is with soft hands.
We say we want accountable politicians but then we punish them when they hold firm positions. Principled politicians are begging ravages right now. Of course, they reward our fickleness with their own. It makes political discourse a conduit for performing accountability instead of doing it.
If a politician cannot hold a viewpoint or position that you disagree with but still holds your generation support, we’ve stopped having a civic body and instead developed into rabid fandoms. And we wonder why the leading lights of both parties only pay respects to their most radical members. Everyone gets abandoned in that situation. Your only options are bad ones.
I say this because I think it is time we started endorsing politicians for who they are as people, even if their policy positions might not align with yours. Trusting someone because they have demonstrated good faith is a social good. We should strive to be accountable to each other even in total opposition. That’s the only way anyone will ever build systems in which any of us are free. Otherwise it’s coercion anyway you slice it. And what’s fucked up is you probably know it but are ready to argue me on the technicals.
We have to expect others to have principles in order have them respect our own. That’s always been the fundamentally libertarian platform. That others have the freedom to hold firm in their own version of the good life and we should have our good life respected as well. Live and let live.
If just coercing someone to your side is enough for you, if mere compulsion is an adequate civilizational goal, then by all means reconsider if you are American. It’s an imperfect union.
Me having a line means that you can have a line too. Our respect for boundaries is what allows us to interact as adults capable of ring responsible for our own actions. Maybe it’s not ways to our advantage. But having a line means you can be trusted. And being trust worthy is safety.
