Fun With the Yellow Pages

Let's say you found yourself in a situation where you desperately needed 10 gallons of hot sauce (I'd recommend Sriracha, it's great) AND you needed a propane stove to cook on?  Why go two places when you can go to just one? Just call Scoshi World!

Rumor has it they also deal in septic supplies..... talk about covering all the bases!

The Finer Points of Buckets

So my bucket collecting days are all pau (Hawaiian Word of the Day: pau [pow] - finished, done, complete), and that's good and bad.  At the end, I was collecting  at least 50 five-gallon buckets full of green waste a week.  On the upside, it made my arms really strong.  But with the large amount of compost we now have on hand, and with the rainy season quickly approaching (making dry compost piles a figment of everyone's imagination), it was decided to put compost creation and therefore bucket collection on hold indefinitely. Chances are we'll be back at it in the spring.

Still, you know it's time to stop when you start getting buckets like this one:

Trouble in Paradise

The unthinkable of unthinkables has occurred.

My hammock started to rip.

I know what you all are thinking, and the answer is "Yes, it is serious!"  I've found that I've come to depend on my hammock as a place of refuge and comfort at all times (except when it's really windy or rainy or the mosquitoes are really bad).

But there is good news.  

There's a name we've given for the living arrangements I have (tarps and corrugated metal roofing as bathroom walls, urinate on whatever trees look like they need it, plywood floors with garage paint on them, and yet hot water on demand, a fully functioning recording studio, and internet), and the term is "farm chic."

Therefore in true farm chic fashion, I've fixed my hammock.

The Four Subaru Outbacks of the Apocalypse

This car (or its owner) believes I'm the Antichrist.

(post time: 2 minutes...thus the uncropped photo)

Because 10 Minutes Isn't Enough....

And 15 minutes is more than you're legally allowed.

Son of Jor-El...

Imagine I photoshopped a potato rake in there somewhere

KNEEL BEFORE ZOD!!!

Like everyone from Krypton, our farm is now powered by the Earth's yellow sun.  Our improvements were extensive and very effective.  We swapped out four low wattage panels for twelve high watt ones, added a charge controller, a DC monitoring system, rewired the power shed, added  door to the battery room, and generally made everything better.

Before we were getting a max of 2.5 KWh out of our solar, and now we're at 6 KWh on really cloudy days, and up to 20 KWh on sunny days in the summer.  Life is good.  We can now use electric fridges, power up the studio w/out running the generator, and I'm going to invest in a nice surround sound system after Christmas.

I was planning a long detailed blog about this, but there's no way I could do that in 7 minutes.....plus it'd be boring.

Strangely enough, we were doing all of this work at the same time that Des blogged about her publicity she and her mom were getting about their system.  I really wanted to blog about it then, but we didn't have all of the components yet.

Also strange in the timing, Hawtness.com posted this photo, that basically represents exactly what our farm and system look like now:

I swear I didn't photoshop that at all

The Return of the Blog

You may not be getting anything, but it's free! What do you expect?

I took that photo at my local Walmart a while back.  

Anyway, I'm back!  (I thought about making my triumphant return a three part series called "Fellowship of the Blog", "The Two Bloggers", and "Return of the Blog" but the idea of photoshopping myself into a hobbit seemed too daunting.)  The real reason I'm back is that after having several people ask me "What's up with the blog?" and after responding several times "mwhydunno.....", I've decided it's time to get off of my kiester and start blogging again.

The reasons for my hiatus are valid and varied, or at least they were at first.  I was really busy working at the school, and then pineapple season kicked in, and then I moved to LA and met this hooker named - no kidding - "Obi-Wan $10". (Any or all of the previous sentence may be fictional.)

Anyway, once all of my running around subsided, I realized that I was still pretty busy.  And all of the stuff I was busy with was pretty boring (read: you wouldn't want to read it).

"But how is that any different from anything else you've put up here Cameron?" I can hear you all saying in unison.  To which I must respond, "Touché salesman."

Therefore I will now regale you with all that I thought about writing about but didn't.

Unfortunately (or fortunately), Regan called me out on his blog, saying that it only took him seven minutes to write a new blog post.  I take twice that just running through title options and three times that photoshopping potato rakes all over the place.  But I've taken it as a challenge, and I'll try to complete the next series of posts in 7 minutes or less.

Enjoy (or not).

It's all such a bargain