It was, apparently, a good year for grapes. Picked a lot of them today.
Used our new Roma Food Strainer and made grape juice out of about half of them. Don’t know what we’ll do with the rest yet.
Madison received about 3.63″ of rain yesterday, so our drought is officially over. That amount set the record for daily rainfall for any day in September in any year. The previous record was 3.4″ on Sept. 18, 1874.
If you have to call someone you don’t know to get it done, that’s a corporate solution.
We believe in the illusion of reality manufactured by corporations, and most Americans have been doing so for generations. It’s no wonder that breaking free of that illusion is difficult.
I’m trying to break free of the corporate illusion of reality and find true reality. That is my life-long fascination with the basics: where food comes from, where our waste goes, how do we keep ourselves warm in the winter, what are the minimum and essential requirements of life — the fundamental truths of life. I’m at a point in my life when my beliefs are less flexible, and I’m returning to some of the things I recognized as truth 30 years ago.
For humans, part of our reality is language, written and spoken.
These days, virtually every human problem has both a local and a corporate solution. The local solution solves the problem for you. The main purpose of the corporate solution is to profit the corporation. It may also solve the problem for you, but will probably create other problems for you, for other humans, and for the planet.
All of us need to recognize that corporate solutions always create problems, and all of us need to go as far as we can towards solving our problems without any corporate involvement and as locally as we can. It’s not easy, it’s not something you learn how to do overnight, and it’s not something you put into effect overnight, but we all have to start. Corporate solutions always create problems, sometimes for you and sometimes for others. Choosing the corporate solution is always wrong.
What I mean by contextualizing the local solution is the process of incorporating local solutions into your everyday life and your every waking thought. I mean to destroy and abandon the corporate illusion of reality.
When you shop online, you are inevitably participating in the corporate illusion.
Think about satisfying your basic needs. You can always do that with local solutions. Consider the possibility that needs that can’t be satisfied locally are not really needs, but wants created in you by your participation in the corporate illusion of reality. It’s likely that satisfying those wants will not make you feel better, but will just lead you to more wants.
Prepping is finding a sustainable, local, non-corporate solution to the problem of survival for yourself and your family.
We’ve had about a month of dry, warm weather. It’s been beautiful, although I’ve had to water whatever I want to stay alive. And we have not had our usual mid-September light frost, which was fortunate for my butternuts.
I’ve been digging coffee grounds into the garden as much as possible. They’ll be nicely decomposed by Spring.
Still have lots of potatoes in the ground, but they should keep there just fine as long as it stays dry.
Today I partially disassembled the wood stove to clean and inspect the catalytic converter.
The good news is that the catalytic converter looks like it’s still in good shape. The bad news is that it was 60-70% blocked by a layer of ash sitting on top of it. Also, one of the retaining clips that holds the plate in the back of the stove was off, which was probably allowing smoke to bypass the cc. ALSO, the channels for smoke exiting the cc were at least half blocked with ash. So put all that together and we were getting very poor results from our stove when directing smoke through the cc, which was pretty clear when we tried to do that and the fire just died.
The longest the cc is supposed to last is 7 years, and we installed the stove in 2002. However, since it’s been blocked, it wasn’t really being used, so I’m reasoning that it might have some life left in it — at least another year.
That was the first time I took the stove apart and looked at the cc, so that was 7 years worth of ash that was built up in there. That’s something I should do every year, and will do so from now on.
Why anyone would make a stove with a cc in it, when designs exist that can meet EPA requirements without one, is beyond me. I suspect the profit motive, and a desire to continue the income stream by selling replacement catalytic converters. I would never buy a stove that used a cc again.
Also, swept the chimney.
D with red peppers harvested today. I plan to dry most of them. They’re quite prolific and trouble-free, and these are definitely the best peppers I’ve ever grown. They probably average about baseball-size. We grew these from seed.
Also experimenting with ways to eat wheat berries without grinding. Brought these to boil in the evening, then put them in the haybox overnight. Brought them back to boil next morning. Had some dried, sweetened cranberries in there — quite good.
Today I also dug 5 gallons of coffee grounds into the 20′ of the first potato row that has been dug so far.
D keeps wanting to swim in our little plastic pool while wearing underwear, so he goes through a lot. I washed a bunch today using the bucket and plunger method to make sure he doesn’t run out before laundry day. It’s not too bad, as long as you sit down and keep the bucket between your legs — it’s actually kind of relaxing. Trying to do it while standing up is painful.
Ending and Beginning 