Thursday, April 21st 2022

Good morning and welcome to a world without any particular holidays. I mean, that’s it. There are no more dates to look forward to. The spring holidays have come and gone. I guess there is some Jewish misery just around the corner where we don’t eat so that we can remember other people who don’t eat or other such nonsense. It’s time to just raise food.

I haven’t been on the internet this morning and it’s already almost 8:00. I haven’t felt any great interest in even getting up. I guess there is a definite limit to how much physical labor I can do and when I come close to that limit or exceed it even, I guess I don’t recover as fast as I thought.

Or maybe I do. I usually feel pretty normal once I get going. And don’t get me wrong because I’m an old guy and truly, eating a whole food vegan diet does amazing things for your recovery. It’s a bit like being on steroids I imagine without the unrestricted muscle growth. It’s not really that you’re putting something in there, though you are putting healthy things in there. It’s more like you’re taking things out. I’m talking about foods that cause inflammation, block out and clog up your circulatory system and your excretory system and generally deplete your muscles ability to function. It’s not so much that you’re adding anything, it’s just that you’re allowing health to be.

This is kind of why my opinion of recovery from global warming does not include a bunch of corporate genius and giant machines. I believe the truth is simply that we stop abusing the planet.

I have an ex-girlfriend on my mind these days and I can’t help thinking that she lives a particular lifestyle in which she makes use of her youth to simply mask the fact of how much damage she does to herself. This doesn’t make her particularly unique. She is doing exactly what the world asks her to do. The world loves making use of young people, cannon fodder for the corporate lifestyle. But she has The bravery and limitless lifeline of a person who has not yet felt age.

If she’s reading this today I don’t want to break anything for her but I learned about this even before I got there myself. I have always been a statistical follower and a believer of numbers and when I was a teenager I did a study of major league baseball players and aging. This probably started from Reading Bill James and his baseball abstract.

George William James is an American baseball writer, historian, and statistician whose work has been widely influential. Since 1977, James has written more than two dozen books devoted to baseball history and statistics. 

If you are a sports fan these days and you understand that there is this constant barrage of numbers coming at you to define play on the field, this is the guy you can blame for that. He’s the one who started everyone thinking and talking like this.

I had a thought though and wanted to know when during a person’s aging process they tended to have their best year. So I picked out a couple of dozen great players who played well into their 30s or even into their 40s and simply scanned the statistics by age of when they were the best possible producers. And the number came extremely quickly. It was somewhere between 26 and 28.

When it became obvious how true this was, I asked myself why and the answer came back pretty logically. I called this “the first whiff of death”.

The logic was that it was probably at about this age when someone wakes up in the morning and realizes that they are tired. It might be the first time in their life that they don’t just bounce out of bed and go back to it. Suddenly, partying all night has a price. You cannot just keep going because the energy that we get from God or nature or whatever is the truth of our species is built and there for some specific darwinian reasons. We are supposed to make children and there comes A Time where our life span simply dictates that this is no longer our job. We wear out. We get old.

Nothing particularly amazing about this. Every Gardener knows that every plant has its season and I suppose religious and political leaders who study the demographics of the people they steal from also know very well about the productive years that people have and those years when we’re going to have the most pregnancies, wanted or unwanted.

This is not startling news and anybody who gives it half a thought would understand this. Even at an Instagram glance, you can tell the physical beauty of a model changes at a particular age. We know what that theoretical age of purity is, at least visually these days, and we know what it looks like when someone is well used. 

Again, this is just humanity. It’s just who we are.

Of course, how we relate to people of different ages is important. To my way of thinking, if we start with respect for everyone, including ourselves, we probably have diverse and interesting conversations and opportunities for knowledge depending on how many times a person has made the trip around the Sun. Young people with their energy have optimism and fast humor, mature young adults have their seriousness and razor edge, middle age people have their sardonic wit and knowing sarcasm and old people have their kind resignation. Of course we don’t let this progression happen. This is not what our modern “our attention is on our mobile device” progression is, but this is basically a model of humanity without electronic heroin.

The second problem with this is that we do not respect. Young people are to be mined as resources as are anybody else on this list who has anything possible to steal or be exploited for. We live in a society of complete voraciousness, without any sense of respect, and now it’s just a constant barrage of violence against one another. No one is interested in hearing your wisdom, they just want to get what stuff they can while there is time to get it.

Consequently, every age of development has lost its charm. Old people simply don’t wish to be harmed anymore. I am one of them. Working people simply wish not to be touched or harmed while they are working. Young adults wish to have an open road to do what they need to do and don’t like to be bothered. Young people just want to get lucky in their exploitation and even the children of Innocence, who have been raised by sarcastic humor and pornography, simply sit around in there insanity wondering what the hell they are supposed to do other than get raped.

It’s hard to know what is right and what is wrong. It’s hard to know how to speak to people anymore. Sometimes I try to talk to some people I know but I find that there is a hardness to everybody. The hatred runs very deep and the fear has everyone completely insane. Only the hopeless have open faces but you can snap them out of it simply by saying that you’re not a new and virgin resource for them. In my case this is very true. I’ve lived a long enough life, been enough places and been through enough hardships to know the truth about where I stand. You must forgive me for not exploiting people when they think I’m virgin pussy. I’m not.

Like I say, my feeling is that we need to learn to respect again and leave each other alone. And of course I am also talking about nature. We can’t build anything and we can’t organize anything that will do any better than simply ceasing to poison and ruin our habitat and each other.

This is easier said than done because nobody listens to you when you speak and nobody’s open to any ideas other than keeping the slave system moving. If we ain’t making money, we are going to get crushed so we just keep running and running and running even though we don’t know why we are running or where we are running to.

And in the case of two of my neighbors or even two of our neighbors and my current country of residence, how do you talk to someone who comes with 10 km of tanks and loaded guns and missiles aimed and fired into population centers without any particular military targets? How do you convince people who have allowed themselves to become murdering psychopaths to even think about showing respect for life?

You can’t. And you can’t talk to Old Friends anymore and you can’t talk to relatives and you can’t talk to neighbors. The paralysis is too deep and the merry-go-round will not stop. It’s an e-ticket ride that we are on and even if you don’t believe me from these words, check the climate statistics. It’ll tell you how quickly we are aging and if you can’t notice that we are well past the first whiff of death, you’re just too numb to understand the math.

Anyway, now I have to get up. I just got a call and the tractor is coming and I am getting next winter’s wood supply. From what I understand, there is a possibility that they will drop it near where I’m going to store it in the barn but that it will be my job to stack it.

Maybe I’ll give a call to an alkash friend or two. A couple of bottles of vodka does wonders when you’ve got 5 cubic m of wood to be stored away.

What a great country! All you need is to pretend to be friendly and provide a few bottles of vodka and you get enough wood so you don’t freeze to death during the winter.

***

Well, that is a serious pile of wood. Also, this particular batch is way more dense then what I paid the exact same amount for last year. I don’t know how long the old batch had been sitting around or how much the termites had gotten into it, but I am dubious about my ability to hand cut this group. It looks good and it definitely looks like it would keep you warm if you can actually get it lit.

Luckily, it’ll be at least 10 months before I use it and possibly more. If I continue to be frugal with the wood I have, I might hardly even need to get into it. I don’t know this for a fact and truthfully, I will buy this again next year whether I need it or not. I know people dislike hoarders these days and I can appreciate that. But I don’t see a whole lot of public support and if I don’t take care of myself, nobody else will.

I put in a call to my new friend but his phone is off. If he wants to come help toss logs, he can. I have a little bit of business here in the village. I need to get some gloves and I have a letter at the post office. I’ve been using fingerless bike gloves for all of my farm work and they seem to work really well to protect me against wooden shovel handles and lifting wheelbarrow handles. But I think I’d like to have some fingers if I’m going to be throwing wood around for the next couple of days.

My first glance tells me it would be about 4 to 6 hours of work to move that pile indoors. It is a substantial pile of wood. And when I get back, I’m going to break out the wheelbarrow and do about 20 runs to see what kind of event I can make in it. If I get help, this is a plus. But if I don’t, I can’t leave it out in the weather. I mean, I can because it will take at least 8 months to dry out at least. But let’s be professional about things.

Incidentally, the new water system is working fine. I have Overkill in the back of the root cellar. There is way more water retention than there is water coming off that roof. However, the one barrel that I have under my main roof is already about 240 L full. Ideally, I should run at least two or three barrels together, run a PVC pipe between them so that one fills, the others fill out. That’s a productive place. And of course, I have the vast expanse of the barn roof to catch but that seems more complicated than is possible to fix today.

Basically though, all is in hand. I have wood for heating, I have water being collected, I have a pump system for moving the water around, I only have five boxes left to top off and less than 20 Forest runs to bring up the fertility in the rest of my gardens. And after that, I collect leaves for mulch and do the planting. Maybe that’s a lot for 10 days of work but maybe it’s doable.

I’m going to have to go to town next week. I have a banking issue that needs to get taken care of. And then I’m going to have the eventual confrontation with my ex partner. We are going to work things out one way or the other. We are either going to decide that we can work together without infuriating each other or we are going to part company and settle up.

Sad but true but what else can I do? I no longer have the knees for groveling nor the stomach for it. I have never learned to beg and I have no tolerance for anything other than reason. I don’t mean reason as in acceptance of fascism, I mean reason as in acceptance of reason. We can either do this because we will agree to do it in a civil and respectful manner or I’m turning in my season tickets. I don’t need the drama and truthfully, I don’t need Sunday exercise. I get to do my fresh air workout every single day.

To the bat cycle! Let’s go find out what they want from me at the post office and then I will act like a young swordsman and start tossing my wood around.

***

I would say that that was a good trip to town. As for the reasons why, I will tell you.

The package waiting for me at the post office was ivy that is supposed to be planted on my front fence. This will act as a green barrier between myself and my perpetual polluter chicken neighbors and will also act as a bit of a privacy fence blocking any view of the hunchback. Nice? I say appropriately neighborly.

I found the gloves that I was looking for at the market and when I asked about a little bit of dark chocolate I was surprised with something that I did not even know existed. 100% bitter chocolate.

I am not a giant chocolate fan. Certainly not as much as my ex partner. I did not have a sweet tooth. But in the evenings in the warm room, I do like to make some key and with it, I like to eat some nuts and raisins. I won’t do this every night, but sometimes I like to add in a tiny bit of bitter chocolate along with it. This may seem a bit overly civilized or even a bit feminine for my normal way of speaking, but I like it. And why not? A person has got to relax at the end of the day.

It’s a Chinese manufacturer and though it says there is sugar in here, it’s vegan friendly with cacao oil and soy binders. Nice.

If all of this was not positive news enough, the bike ride over there was calm and smooth and almost effortless. The rains have the sand packed down and there was almost zero slip and slide. The new gearing makes this bike an easy push and actually having a road to ride on for a change almost makes me feel like this place is worth living in.

I say almost. I am still a pragmatist.

Just as I arrived back here, I had a note from a friend telling me that I speak like a boat captain. Interesting comment.

When I was younger, I used to dream about living on a boat. I used to balance out the economics of it along with the freedom. If you are really tired of the sites, sounds and smells of human activity, you can always push away from shore and hang out with the ocean breeze for a while.

I think that dream died though when I actually had a chance to do some long line fishing on the Gulf of Mexico off the Louisiana shore. I was looking to make some money while on my bicycle trip across the country and hooked up with a small team of fishermen. We would connect window sash weights to 200 m of line with 10 to 20 hooks on each and to see how many fish we could bring up.

It was miserable work and I was not very good at it. There were quite a bit of laws about what you could and could not catch and this seemed the most hypocritical thing in the world because you have no control about what bites and gets stuck on your line. The biggest fine was from bringing snapper on board and every time we caught one, despite the fact that we had killed it, we had to get rid of it. If we were caught by an inspector with a red snapper out of season, it would be a huge fine to the captain and possibly his license.

There was another nuance of this boat and that it did not have any winch to pull the anchor up. In order to raise it, they would usually send me out to the tip of the bow to place a ball on a tether to the line. They would then drive the boat backwards pulling the anchor towards the ball and then we would haul in the line by hand and bring the anchor on board. Pitiless work. Hand breaking and skin ripping uncomfortable work.

We even had a night where we weathered a rather serious storm. I was in my bunk getting tossed around like a cork as the boat was throwing things off the wall and onto the floor. True to my nature, I was laughing my ass off. Perhaps I would not have been laughing so hard if we ended up going under the water. But nobody else seemed worried about this and the captain made no effort to head back to shore.

That pretty much ended my dream of managing a boat. However, if you are going to Captain a boat, you are supposed to know every nut, bolt and weld on your ship and you are supposed to understand clearly what’s going on. 

Maybe all I’m trying to do here is manage this little property the same way. They have houses called earthships. These are houses with passive solar systems and heating via connected greenhouse and cooling by underground piping. They often recycle black water and gray water instead of throwing it into septic systems. Basically, earthships are houses that physically help one to live one’s life, producing food and enough energy to allow a reasonable lifestyle.

This place I’m living in now is not a dilapidated shack. I heard that from an American friend last week. This house is not dilapidated and was not dilapidated when I bought it. It’s just not very modern and has been standing proud and functioning well for about 50 years.

I could do some upgrades to it. Serious upgrades cost money and if the world ever sorts itself out and reasonableness or even some good luck comes my way, I might realize some of my building dreams. But just exactly as it is and exactly as I bought it, this place functions pretty well. I didn’t freeze to death this winter and it is an amazingly beautiful place during a hot summer. This water system I have put in for really not very much money will allow me to grow some things. And hopefully my gardening choices so far this spring will allow enough plant food for a nice harvest. And in a few years, fruit and nuts and amazing beauty every spring Time.

I’m not really interested in troll opinions and I’m really rather allergic to negativity and complaints. I have had way, way, way more than my fill of alcoholic pity parties and I just don’t need to go along with the local high school popularity contest.

But if you want to know why I am happy where I am, maybe it is because I am the captain of the ship and I have a pretty cool ship to be a captain of.

Now, if the world would be kind enough to stop fucking with my ocean and stop ruining the ecology of the region and the mental and physical health of all the occupants, we might all have a beautiful garden to hang out in as we watch the world spin around the Sun. And as a vegan, I’m really not thinking of boat ownership anymore and would prefer people to just leave the oceans alone.

***

Yeah, I got screwed. I asked for 85% and the sales person asked if I would go for 100%. I was pretty pleased. Next time, I’m just going to buy the package of cacao. That is 99.9% cacao and then I don’t have to worry about this bullshit. It’ll be in the fridge. If my ex partner ever gets brave enough to want to show up again, it’ll be there waiting for her. Damn, you can taste the sugar in there. And if you do read the fine print, it’s actually only 56%. Double damn.

It’s a shame. I guess you can’t trust Chinese capitalists any more than any other capitalist.

***

I think I wanted to try to make this issue with my ex partner very clear.

Like all things in the world, everything is a little good and a little bad. I don’t hate the woman and I don’t hate women but at the same time, there is a lot to take there and I am not sure I’m physically capable of just laughing It off.

I will be specific about this particular issue that’s going on right now. On the positive side, the idea of putting in beans in the lower field was hers and it was a damn good idea. My original plan was just to plant trees and berry bushes and be done with it all. Her suggestion was a very good one because beans are nitrogen fixers, they end up being excellent green manure, they are good ground cover and they generally improve soil health. I also eat beans everyday so all of this was positive and an excellent suggestion.

This particular type of ivy was her idea. My original idea was to grow what is called English ivy here to cover up a wall and turn it from concrete gray to Green. My idea is a bit more extensive and is connected to a passive watering system that is also still in the making. Her ivy is intended to grow on the street side and become a barrier blocking the auto emissions that my neighbors seemed intent on throwing at me everyday of their lives. This was also an excellent idea and I cannot take credit for it.

My complaint is that when she is here, she is not interested in conversations or suggesting things. She doesn’t ever want to take part in the meeting, she just wants to do. I don’t mind the physical help, but she likes to do on her own volition. She likes to do what she wants and how she wants to do it and very often, her choices are completely opposite mine.

As an example, she is a fully Russian gardener which means killing things and building for some sort of aesthetics is far more important than soil health. She has no thoughts of any alternative water saving ideas and when she goes to work, it says much of a killing spree as anything else.

As you can imagine, it is a bit frustrating to be with someone who does not want to listen to me speak and wishes to act without speaking to me.

I guess to make matters worse, she doesn’t really seem to understand that when I visit her in her apartment, I do everything I can to be a good guest. I am a respectful guest and I tried to do everything humanly possible not to abuse my hospitality or overstay my welcome.

On the other side, I would really appreciate it if my kindness was not understood as weakness and my difference and easy manner should not be mistaken for groveling. I am just a Democrat and I will not be below anyone and I do not wish to have to be above anyone. I also get really tired of people trying to push past me especially when they go against my wishes.

So this is the deal. No, it has nothing to do with sex or romance or contracts of any kind. We are supposed to be really good friends. But she is really hard to take when she comes up for a visit. And of course, she only has one day a week just like all the other lunatics who come out to the village to run gasoline powered weed wackers to create some artificial aesthetic based upon something somebody told them 25 years ago. I understand how the mentality works, I just don’t particularly want it on my territory. I’m doing something different and I’m looking for a different result. Just a little bit of respect and we’ll be in business or, we’ll go a different direction altogether. Just as long as everybody’s happy.

***

It’s about 5:00 and I don’t want to stack Wood anymore. I don’t really want to do anything anymore. I am incredibly tired.

I made a dent in it. I definitely made a dent in it. Maybe I got 25% of it or maybe 20%. 5 cubic meters is about a cord and a half. The problem was not just stacking it, it was creating a place for the wood to be stacked in a reasonable manner. In the woodshed, as it from here on will be known, there was already old wood, a bunch of garbage, a lot of organic material from food gathering and a pile of fire starter kindling blocks. Everything needed to get moved in order for there to be a reasonable place to stock up the wood.

So in addition to filling the wheelbarrow, transporting it into the woodshed and stocking the contents, I also had to rebuild the old wood pile and move all the garbage so that I had at least two rows of access.

Anyway, it was a lot of physical work and a bit of leg pain to get all this done.

In the middle of it, I got a call from the government office. They have kind of figured out this inspection business. It has to do with the size of my parcel. But now their story is changing. When I was sitting in the office and they were smiling at me, they let it be known that there was quite a bit of the forest that I could acquire. Today, and without actually knowing anything, they started quoting rules I had not heard of before and basically pushing their rhetoric to the negative. However, they absolutely insisted that I needed to come in in the morning and pay my money all the same.

They do this. Belarusian and Russian women do this and government people do this.

I don’t know what planet people around here are from but I really don’t do business deals unless I have hard numbers at the bottom line. I especially don’t do business deals where the numbers move around esoterically based on the mood and friendliness of the people speaking. And I also don’t do deals when there are rules that say if we wait until warmer weather, the whole damn thing costs me less money. I may be a foreigner but I have lived in this bureaucracy long enough to know what my rights are.

This being said, I either will or will not go again to town tomorrow. When I say go to town, I don’t mean to go into pinsk. I just mean to head to the government office about a mile down the main road. If they have everything squared away, especially for the land inspection, I will go there and get this thing finished. If the deal is still up in the air, I will leave it until next week.

What else?

I told my ex partner about the ivy arriving by post and she was excited for a minute or so. Not excited enough to say anything that makes sense but she seemed happy that I was calling her. I guess she became less excited when my call to her was not with love in my heart and my knees firmly on the ground begging forgiveness. I know this is what we all want because we all believe we are deserving of groveling from our loved ones but I’m not sure it’s going to happen.

I don’t need to make life harder on myself than it needs to be but this is exactly where I stand. In my mind, a little help would be lovely. If that help however drives me insane, exactly where is the value? It’s like being told to come in and sign papers for the government office when they themselves do not even know that the deal is incomplete and that they’re rhetoric is too changeable.

The easy thing to say would be what anybody from here would say if I explained it to them exactly as I have here. “You don’t know our people”. This in fact would be a perfect you don’t know our people situation.

My only point is why on Earth do “these people” continue on so ridiculously. If there is no such thing as competence and every single movement of every single piece of paper contains an element of potential drama, who could possibly live under such a circumstance?

I got an answer from a friend of mine. In a moment of male kinship, he told me that he had read what I wrote above and said that I completely understood the situation with women. They expected too much from us and believed they were entitled to live a life without any particular responsibility while being completely entitled to be on the receiving end of money. Men do not live in such a beautiful world and women just laugh at men and say that we are jealous.

My friend is married and has three kids by the way.

If I were to take a crack at this, I would blame the financial situation.

Before the Soviet Union came to an end, nobody really worried about money. Nobody got a lot of money or at least they were not supposed to get a lot of money and therefore everybody was kind of the same. Everybody had to do the same sorts of things to get by and most people relied on the sort of manual labor that I’m doing right now. If you wanted to have more to eat, you should grow your own food. If you wanted a little more fun in your life, you had to bring a little more life to the party.

I’m sure it was actually heaven or at least they were taking a good solid shot at making it heaven. Now of course, you can’t get them to think like this anymore. They put words on what everyone was feeling and logically seeing like Donald Trump used to put words on his competitors for office.

“You are just experiencing nostalgia.”

“Call communism was actually terrible. Remember all the corruption from Moscow and all the theft of our resources.”

“Communism was a joke. It was all fascism. Now is much better.”

This of course is all bullshit and comes from the same propaganda that tells us that there are Nazis in Ukraine hunting down Russian people and this gives the Russian army a right to fire missiles at kindergartens and hospitals.

The truth is that they understood that they were not going to be high technology but that if everyone pulled together and worked as a team, they’d probably do okay. Of course, if we are talking about Belarus, we are talking about a colony of Moscow and so for sure, much of the wealth created here by the sweat of the brow and the work of the nation ended up heading off by train to Moscow at prices decided by Moscow itself. A residual of this system is a part of this land signature inspection business I’m going through.

All this being said, the system built very resourceful and pragmatic people. People had to be prepared to work hard to get what they want. Most of the people I actually like here that I have met are people that came from the Soviet School. They did the best they could with the materials they had. They didn’t complain and just kept pushing.

I’m not a young man and I’m not perfectly put together anymore but in a way, what I’m doing is proof that this theory is true. There is still a ton of wood waiting to be put away and it’s raining right now. But I made a dent in it and I have nine raised beds and four more garden plots and 75 m of beans in the ground because I kept banging away at it. No gasoline except for the tractor that brought the wood today.

So what is the truth? The truth is that I am worn out and I don’t want to do any more physical labor today. I understand it’s another day in the can and that if I wanted to be more serious, it’s going to be daylight for more than 3 hours. I just don’t care anymore. I really don’t want or push that wheelbarrow anymore. My body is just saying stop and I have decided to listen to it.

That by the way is another good thing about being the owner here. It is my body that is telling me when to go and when to stop and not some idiot looking at his watch and holding my paycheck over my head.

One more thing to say before I start boiling something for dinner. Despite sanctions and my current egregious financial situation, I would say that I have not wasted money on this piece of property, the water system, the wood or anything else that’s been invested here. If I take a look at my total finances for the year, this year is definitely a loss. This is not my first year that has come out in the red but there haven’t been too many. I’ve had lean years for profit where I basically just broke even, but this has been a red year.

However, if I take the actual number that I have to my name, despite this being a red year, I am pretty much exactly where I was when I decided to leave my apartment and move to the country. If I take my finances from exactly that date, everything I have spent on this place up until now has basically made this a wash. Yes, I have less money now than I did at the start of the year but if instead of crying, I simply balance this against the money I would have spent on rent and utilities in my old apartment, again, it’s not a wash, it’s still my money.

I hope that makes sense. The amount of money that I am down this year is about the amount that I would have paid in Rent and utilities. But keeping in mind that we are at War, I spent a few months in the hospital and I have been enjoying living up here except for my chicken neighbors, again, it’s a wash. I didn’t lose anything by making this choice. No money has been wasted and my situation, in terms of lifestyle, personal satisfaction and my financial picture has improved.

Maybe you call that an empty justification or maybe you call that wishful economics, but what I’m saying is everything is going according to plan and I am free to quit working when I feel like it and I don’t have to worry about walking too loudly on the floors or breathing too many Auto fumes from the courtyard below my window.

I mean, who knows, maybe the war ends and people start being kind to each other. Maybe somebody buys my book or my books. Maybe I actually catch a lawyer and he starts pushing my corrupt thieving family members. And maybe I even start getting calls from people from my life just to say hi and find out how I am. No drama, just the desire to hang out and talk a little bit. No politics, nothing horrible, no broken brains from the internet, just some familiar banter from people with whom I have spent quality time.

Do I sound lonely? Do I sound like I am suffering from nostalgia? Do I sound like I’m pining for the old days when things were better? Am I pining for the old days when we were all still friends and working together to make good things happen?

Absolutely. 100%.

***

Dinner was good. Nothing to speak about. I do have some things that I want to say but I was listening to Ed while I was eating and I thought I would share his lecture. This is him making an incredibly eloquent presentation at a university. The guy’s good. It’s not just that you can’t argue with him because he makes videos of people arguing with him. This particular speech was not to an argumentative audience. This was to an audience that already agreed with him. And of course, not to be redundant but I agree with him as well. Go figure.

https://youtu.be/rt3XYexmu74

***

Just a few more words and then I’ll call it a night. After dinner, I decided it was a good moment to try out the water pumping system. It’s been raining all day and one tank is almost completely full and the others are filling up drip by drip. So I brought out my non OSHA approved homemade extension cord, the pump and the rather cheap plastic hose I bought and said everything up as best I could. The hose doesn’t want to lose it’s kinks. I should have thought of better quality when I bought the thing. Also the pump itself works pretty well but it’s very loud and doesn’t have an on-off switch. You have to unplug it to stop it and you probably can’t let it run dry for more than a few seconds.

I did the math on how much water was in the tank and based it on a number something like 17 l a minute and set a timer to let me know how much time I had. The hose was long enough to get to my drip system and I filled each tank for a little over 2 minutes. When I got to the end, I pulled the plug and checked the original tank and saw that the water was only a centimeter or two above the intake valve. Everything worked perfectly except for everything being Tangled macaroni and the hose being a little cheap for my taste.

It was not so much work to set up and transferring water from place to place is just simply what we have to work with. After this test I had a few more thoughts in my head about maybe getting a longer and better quality hose and a few more barrels. Everything is within my price range and the math of getting to all of the trees and all of the gardens works out okay. As long as the well doesn’t go too dry and we get at least a reasonable amount of rain and I manage to get the barn roof harnessed, everything will work out fine. And also maybe I like how loud the pump is. It’ll be perfect when I use it on Sunday mornings just for my neighbors.