Winter Home
Winter Home
Project: Pioneer #58, October 27, 2024 Sunday 9am
The spiral of time seems to be winding more quickly, day by day; a vortex pulling us toward whatever inevitability we’ll experience very soon. Things are busy here in pioneer-land—we’re preparing. Not just for the new world we may find ourselves in, but for winter in our small covered wagon.
Project: Pioneer is the live weekly reality journal of a couple and their small dog as they leave their ‘normal’ life in a luxury apartment for a new semi-off grid life in a small recreational vehicle. We cover prepping, politics, spirituality, afterlife, RV life, and personal finance. Half of all subscription/donation money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses. You can listen to the audio podcast version of this journal at Substack, Apple, Spotify, PocketCasts and others.
I wrote last week’s post from the hotel, prior to checkout. It fired out into the interweb as we flew over this beautiful country, blissfully disconnected. We arrived home in the morning, to an absolutely mobbed airport full of vacationers (in October?) and business travelers, same as the one we had left just a few hours before. We spent too much time going from restaurant to diner trying to find someplace to eat. All were crammed to the max. On the radio, we heard report after report of just stunning economic and stock market performance. Then we heard voters being surveyed, some complaining about “Bidenomics” and the “bad economy.”
We had to hustle, it was moving day, and it was just brutal scurrying around, packing up the woodland camp and relocating to our new winter location, then setting up. We’re a team, and we got it done. In the week since, we’ve tightened up, made further progress on putting in the foamboard insulation, heated water hose, and connecting up the water lines. Remember my past procrastination on hooking up the sewer and water? Bah. This time, I jumped right in. It’s done.
To be honest, it’s a bit rough adjusting to our new location. We’re more packed in than we were down in the woods, out of necessity. The covered wagon RVs band together to protect one another from the wind and other elements. We have two neighbors with multiple yappy dogs, so it feels like we live inside a pet store. It’s easy to get mad at those people, until we remember the pure joy and comfort Pia brings to us, especially when we’re having a hard time. I was outside working on the foamboard yesterday and the one woman stopped by. She told me she ended up with the four yappers when her ex didn’t follow up on his promise to take them during their divorce. She’d recently lost her job. So, again, more reminders to give people a little grace, you never know what they’re going through in life. As it gets colder, windows will close, furnaces will be running, and that noise all fades into the background.
You might remember my ongoing drama last year with the neighbor I called Elmer. We almost came to blows at one point. Last winter, his wife rammed their vehicle into the support beam holding up the steel roof over us, almost bringing it down and narrowly missing our huge propane tank. They’ve bought a house and left the pioneer life. I wish them good luck and good health.
Luckily, the weather has been amazing fall splendor, albeit cold at night and in the early morning. We have our extra-large propane tank out front and that’s hooked up too. After all that, I got to have some fun. I unboxed and set up our new solar system—admittedly a starter system with two 200-watt rigid panels and around 5,000 amp hours of energy storage. It’s enough to run our rig for a few days, even without solar recharging, which will add to that. It’s fully expandable, so now that we have a comfort zone, we’ll be adding panels and power banks as we see deals too good to pass up (hello, Black Friday!). We finally feel good about our solar game.
As well, we picked up a great deal on a LiFe4PO (lithium iron phosphate) battery with 230 amp hours to replace the old-school AGM battery on the tongue of our wagon. I haven’t hooked that up yet, as I’m sorting through the options as far as a converter that can properly charge and maintain it. Fun pioneer/prepping learning projects! We’ll likely add to this as well, with additional batteries to run in series or parallel. Bring on the winter, Trump apocalypse, alien landings, climate chaos, whatever!
Giavana, Pia, and I have also been busy looking at remote cabins and land. That’s a really fun and uplifting project. Of course, we can’t bite on anything until we find out if this country will turn to Trumpistan or not. That won’t be resolved on November 5, it will take until Jan 20th, inauguration day, to feel safe. Even then, it could be the start of the threatened/promised civil war. This is not conjecture, people with the ability to move on such an idea are actually proposing it, seeding the idea in the cult members, to get them to ruin or possibly end their lives for Trump like the poor bastards that did back on Jan 6, 2021. It’s sad to watch the lemmings thrust themselves over the cliff, but from a purely Darwinian perspective, perhaps it’s the true and necessary cleansing of our species in order to survive.
Back to the vortex I mentioned at the beginning of this journal post. Everything is happening so fast! In the midst of all this, we’re working hard on the election. Phone banking, online deprogramming attempts, and more. We have to travel next weekend for a wedding. We come back, and head out of the country on election day, our work complete for now, to watch it all unfold in safety, far away from the stress of it all. Those should certainly mean some interesting upcoming posts!
In the meantime, please help fight this horrible authoritarian fascist any way you can at moveon.org, swingleft.org, or indivisible.org. Let’s not be having to answer to our kids and grandkids when they ask how much of the horror of their lives could have been avoided if we’d done more to elect Kamala Harris in this very moment. Like, today.
"At the end of the day, we must go forward with hope and not backward by fear and division."—Jesse Jackson
"Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness."—Desmond Tutu
"We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope."—Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Let your hopes, not your hurts, shape your future."—Robert H. Schuller
"Hope is like peace. It is not a gift from God. It is a gift only we can give one another."—Elie Wiesel
This pioneer journey continues…
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