Target practice

Dogs, smart as they are, just don't cut it when it comes to long term planning. So they piss into their feed bowls, they piss into their houses.
As an experiment, I have set up this pissing log. And yes, I squirted a bit on it myself. The first chance he got, Solan tried to outdo me. So now the log is broken in.
This is how my life turned out.

On my way home from work

It's ok.

Human powered station wagon

Here's a funny thing: Commuting by bicycle is easier if you have a car. You can get to work on your bicycle and then use the car to do your shopping in the weekends and other stuff like, I don't know, visiting friends or something in the evenings. If a bicycle is all you've got, on the other hand, you can't suddenly decide to do a lot of stuff at once. If you want to visit someone, you had better do it on your way from work because once you're back home, you'll be too pooped to go out again.
This is one of the reasons I'm so obsessed with load carrying on bicycles. A bicycle without a rack carrier is not really a mode of transportation, it's a toy on par with a trampoline or a croquet set. But even a rack only goes that far. Once I've stuffed my panniers for a set of decent "civilian" clothes and some groceries, there's not a lot of space left. I've done quite a lot of touring with front- and rear panniers, and you really can take a lot with you that way, but packing takes a lot of time.
Spacious and accomodating as the bags on my long tail bicycle are, I could carry even more if I added a pair of "Wideloaders", essentialy kind of shelves that run along the extended rear part of the bicycle, from slightly behind the crank and past the rear wheel.
I made some myself with som dowels, plywood and hose clamps. The advantage is that carrying bulky items is now a lot easier, and even when I don't have that much to freight, packing no longer requires incredible dexterity and four hands because stuff can rest on the wideloaders while I fasten them to the bicycle.
Picture set of the process here.

Much to my delight, this humble piece of carpentry has been featured on Bikehacks and The Xtracycle Gallery.

Post-apocalyptic Settler Thriller Fiction

It's cold up north: And pretty dismal in the future.

It's a genre unto itself, the tale of just how bad the shit will hit the fan in the near future. Think "Mad Max", "Escape from New York" and "The Day After", or just think Kevin Costner. His films "The Postman" and "Waterworld" were, whatever else you might want to say about them, pretty archetypical the way this line of storytelling goes.
"Far North" by Marcel Theroux slots into all this quite nicely. But there's a twist here, in that the protagonist has been brought up by exactly the kind of people who are more or less expecting the apocalypse.
Makepeace Hatfield lives on her own outside of the almost entirely empty town Evangeline sometime around, I'd guess, 2060. Evangeline is one of a handful of settler towns established by Americans, mostly religious ones, in Eastern Russia. For a while, it seems, life was one really long "Mother Earth News" fantasy, part greenhouse ecotopia, part nineteenth century American frontier.
But then, it seems, climate change takes hold, states fail, and the settlers are inundated by hungry, violent migrants.
The storyline itself in "Far North" is made up of the stuff that these kind of novels usually are made up with. Makepeace meets other people, is enslaved, escapes and so on. The normal stuff.
What makes the book interesting are some of the insights in the inconsistencies in the mindset of all who dream of an independent life, close to nature and possibly to God. The main moral of this story is that it's easy to be virtuous with a full belly, considerably harder if you're hungry. Makepeace herself has a kind of thin-lipped integrity and somehow manages, most readers will probably feel they would not do quite as well.

Marcel Theroux
Far North
228 pages, faber & faber

Old Lady Svendsen's Honey Shack

Here's Old Lady Svendsen's honey shack, eight miles or so from my home. This is where she keeps her seperator and all apiary-related paraphernelia.

Mrs Svendsen has developed an intolerance to not only electricity, but to candles and kersone. And ultimately to bee stings too, so she doesn't do beekeeping any more.

The only other beekeeper in the area I know of only kept a couple of hives, but he developed an allergy too. He switched to chickens.

But Mrs. Svendsen knows a lot about how bees behave and forage in the forest, and has even written pamphlets about the subject, respected in the beekeeping community I am led to understand.

She used to keep bees all around the forest. I would see her tending her hives here and there, but they're all gone now. I liked seeing her bustling about, I liked seeing someone working in the forest, doing something else but sawing stuff down. If you're going to manage a forest, you need to cut trees, I understand this. It's just that it's nice to have diversity.

There are still active hives on the other side of the path from the honey shack, though. No idea who manages these now. Should do some sleuthing.

How to stack poles

This is the quickest way to stack poles. It's hard to see here, but the bottom ones rest on a treestump. This way almost no part of any of the poles touch the ground. At the same time they won't tip over, and are well exposed to the air.

People used to know this in a way that felt as if it was almost innate. These days, you have to look around and pay attention.

Crank it up

Look at almost any picture more than, say, thirty years old of a groups of western people, and you can't help noticing that they look really different from what western people look like now.
We're not talking about the weird glasses, funny hair-do's or those really, really short shorts. Anybody can get hold of some vintage shades or flea-market garb and pretend they're at Woodstock. But the bodies looked different. Folks used their bodies more for, well, just for everyday stuff.
When was the last time you saw a male law enforcement officer with a head wider than his neck? Even policemen who are fit are just plain big, in a way very few were before.
There's a lot of protein going down.
Tamara Dean's "The Human-Powered Home" is a book about using muscles in daily life. It's not about transport, as a gazillion books have been written about that already, and it's not about boring stuff like taking the stairs instead of the elevator.
Instead it's about hand-cranked mp3-players and cycle-powered washing machines and the cranks (ahem) who build and love them.
Flipping through it casually it might seem like a vaguely superficial introduction to the, for many of us, obvious fact that if you add some pedals and a drive train to some machine, you sure can power a lot of funky stuff. But it's actually thoroughly well researched, full of hard chunks of facts and destillations of recent scientific projects.
This is a very good sequel to "Pedal Power in Work, Leisure and Transportation" by James C. McCullagh (ed.) which came in the wake of the 1970's oil crisis, and much less confusing than the interesting, but abysmically poorly written "Human Power - The Forgotten Energy" by Arnfried Schmitz.
Quite importantly, the thouroghness of Tamara Dean's DIY plans for human-powered equipment indicate that she has actually built this stuff herself.
"Empowerment" has become such a horrid word, full of implications of permissive self-indulgence. But here's empowerment in a very real, cool and yet sweaty way.

Tamara Dean
The Human Powered Home
- Choosing Muscles Over Motors
New Society Publishers, 2008
261 pages

Old school velomobile

Cyclecars, or velomobiles, have always fascinated me. No matter how much you like cycling, there's still something magical about the enclosed, womb-like car. A velomobile seems to have the best of both worlds.
Also, if you live in a muddy place in a cold and wet climate, you become obsessed with the idea of remaing self propelled without becoming unbelievably dirty.
Incredibly, a book has been written to cater to even this interest, "Folkhemmets farkoster - Om Cykelbilen Fantom och andra fräsiga hembyggen". It is beautifully written and illustrated. The author, Claes Johansson, even builds the cyclecar "Fantom" himself.
In Sweden during WWII times were good compared to almost anywhere else in Europe, but still no joke. All cars were forcibly " borrowed" for the war effort. So people built their own. On the top here is Johansson's modern build of a model called "Fantom". As many as 100 000 plans for this velomobile may have been sold in Scandinavia during thirty years in print. Above is the extremely unfortunately named "Pedobilen". While the Fantom was made of plywood built around a steel tube frame, the Pedobil was built more like a canoe, with wood and canvas. Below is an excerpt of the plans for Fantom.

This swedish fad for velomobiles in the war years are what prompted danish CG Rasmussen to start making his modern-day version, the Leitra.

All pictures in this post taken from "Folkhemmets farkoster", Byggförlaget.

Update: You can still order the plans for Fantom here. In other words they have been in print for 65 years! The drawings do not seem to have changed since WWII. But you can also get the plans for free along with the book mentioned above.

Doghouse of regret - update

Here's the double doghouse mentioned previously, the one Ø. , much against his better judgement, built on commission. Note the nifty pewter details around the openings and on the roof. This is a completely non-chew house.
A neighbor came by and saw Ø. securing the house on the trailer.
"Do you build dog houses for people?" the neighbor asked.
"Fuck off," said Ø.
He didn't say that, of course. He's a nice guy. He said this instead:
"Normally, I don't."

Luxury dog houses

Here's M., constructing dog houses of her own design. In this model, the dogs have a small foyer which prevents the wind from blowing directly into the sleeping area itself. In it's first incarnation, M. fitted these houses with roofs that had no overhang, which certainly looked very neat and contained, but allowed some water in. The new versions have short overhangs, you don't need much.

The struts are 2x2s, the plywood is plastic coated, which the dogs never chew. There is some debate on the use of plywood for dog houses, as this makes them rather air-tight. In his book "Winning Strategies for Distance Mushers" Joe Runyan has an anecdote about some dogs who develop a skin condition due to the humidity in their plywood houses. The jury is still out on this, though.

One absolute advantage of this design is that male dogs do not get a chance to urinate into their own bedding.

To see the houses in use, go here.
Through pure serendipity, friends J. and T. who live at 79 degrees North on Spitsbergen have adopted almost the exact same design (below). At their place it is really essential to have houses that prevent snow from bloing in. Because it blows all the time.

My own doghouses are much more conventional. But as we're deep in the woods, it never blows and the houses stay dry at all times. I just need to place them high up so the boys dont foul their own sleeping quarters.

Update: M. strongly recommends that while the floor of the "bedroom" of course should be insulated, the floor of the "foyer" should not. By keeping the floors at different levels, water will not seep into the sleeping area.

Dippin'

Here's Mazunte, cooling off during a run. In wintertime, the team has run a hundred k with nary a stop. In summer, they need to cool off and take a break every couple of minutes.

Smells like teen hermit

Environmental warfare: If the smell of newly baked bread works for 7-eleven, I feel it should work for me.

"Whoa," said GF. "You sure smell of your cabin."
"Really?" I said happily. "What does my cabin smell like?"
"Well. Sort of like, mold and kerosene, you know?"

I have been worrying about this. It is one motivation, actually, for my incessant bread baking. Surely, this activity should overpower other smells that I by now have become so accustomed to that I no longer notice them.
But no.
Remember how as a kid you would always notice how different other people's homes would smell? And it was always impossible to know what your own home smelled like.
The solution to my new odor issue is probably more electricity during winter, so I don't have to rely so heavily on the kerosene lamps. And add some fan to the storage room, where I keep my kit. There are commercial outfits that provide solar powered fans, but they seem unnecessarily expensive, compared to just stringing it together.
Or I could just move to town, of course.

Literally gone fishing

Passed C & H on my way home from work, they were out by the lake fishing.
Another day in the life. Just another day.

A short history of powdered milk

Good enough for babies and polar explorers: Good enough for me.

When I was a kid, you could get several several brands of powdered milk, if my rapidly deteriorating memory serves me right. And there were both "whole fat" and "skimmed" varieties. I remember philosophizing over what the deal was here. Why not simply use more water to get the "skimmed" variety? No one told me about fat to calcium ratios. Kids were left pretty much to their own devices those days.
Around the same time I spent a lot of time wondering about how Donald was a Duck, Mickey a Mouse and Pluto a dog, so what was Goofy?
I was that kind of kid.
But less and less people in developed countries buy powdered milk these days. You can tell a product is going out of fashion when staff no longer no where to put it. Powdered milk can be found along with the baking goods, next to the coffee whitener or even some place in the vicinity of the shorteners. It you're looking for powdered milk, every trip to the store is an adventure.
Maybe not an extremely good adventure, but you have to take what you get.
What kind of people want powdered milk, anyway? People who don't go to the store a lot and people without access to refrigeration, that's who. Fourteen million people in refugee camps and me.
But I gave up normal powdered milk a long time ago. Now I use baby formula. I no longer tell people about this because it grosses everybody out. It doesn't matter if I tell them it's just cow's milk with fish meal and some vitamins. It's not as if human mammary glands ever enter the picture here.
Baby formula actually tastes more like normal milk than conventional powdered milk. And people on hard-ass expeditions to the South Pole and Mount Everest use it all the time. And baby formula is always in the same spot in the store, right next to the diapers. Nobody fucks with parents of babies.
There is also the thrill of buying everyday baby stuff. It's sort of like being a father, while remaining absolutely and completely irresponsible.
Marco Polo supposedly reported about the use of powdered milk among the Chinese. Now New Zealanders dominate 40 per cent of the world market.
So much to learn.

Wood lot tech

I can sit on my knees in a mushy bog and saw away on a log propped up by two stumps, because that's the way I roll. But finally, finally, I upgraded my wood lot infrastructure and the whole firewood business has picked up momentum. Above is my saw horse, which can be collapsed into a flat and vaguely transportable package. Below is my improved wood chopping stump, fitted with supports. This way, it doesn't keel over every single time I split a log. The supports just extend in three directions, because with a fourth one I would have a hard time finding a place flat enough to put it down on.

This isn't North Dakota, after all.

Hermit attends woodland chapel

Dropped by the local chapel on my way home. I should do this more often.

Forest garden

Friend and neighbor K. toiling away in her vegetable patch. Note the word "toil". This is why she has some real self sufficiency going, and I don't. 

God, freedom and outhouses

Here's a story in the New York Times about three things that interest me a lot: Weird minorities, personal freedom and what to do about the shit you create. 

NICKTOWN, Pa. — In 29 years of enforcing sewage laws in Pennsylvania, Jack E. Crislip has never faced violators more adamant, or more pleasant to deal with, than members of the ultraconservative Swartzentruber Amish sect. (Link.)

De-clog it!

An interesting proposal: For any off-grid chemist and housewife. (Photo: senseless)

There are several reasons to avoid using normal plumbing in an off-grid kitchen, and instead simply schlepp the gray water in a bucket to some random place outdoors and just dump it.
Reason number one is that you don't want to deposit all your fluid wastes in one spot, unless you invest in a lot of work creating a gray water treatment system and all.
Another reason is that since you might not use all that much water, water often being at a premium in an off-grid home, your pipes are going to clog. You really do not want to poison your real estate with commercial drain cleaners.
Some genius called senseless seems to have a solution to that last point, though, a bio-friendly drain cleaner.
The recipe calls for "16 ounce bears" and "Rid-ex". I have no idea what that means. So I guess I'll stick to my gray water bucket for the time being. Looks clever and scary, though.

(Via Make:blog)

Real wealth

High livin': And no, I'm not talking about the books.

Friends and neighbors O&K have book shelves made out of old beer crates. This is the ultimate modular system. And it looks nice.
O. picked up the crates for free from some brewery which went from one standard size to another one forty years ago.
Lately I saw some similar crates at a cute little antiques shop. They were priced really, really high. A decent months wage would buy you about twenty.
O. and I quickly calculated that by far the most valuable thing he and K. owns are their bookshelves.
So DIY pays.

Unasked question

Tools of the trade: The unsung pleasures of mushing.

Here's a question non-mushers almost never ask: What on earth do you do with all the dog poop, you odd, odd little fellow?
Basically, I scoop it up once once a day, put it in a bucket with assorted hay and wood chips lying around the dog houses, and carry it to the compost pile which is so far away no guest will ever come across it by accident.
The pile doesn't really smell. Honest, it doesn't.
Some mushers have enough dogs to warrant professional-looking "poop scoops", normally the ones made for horsey people. Two flat shovels of different width is good enough for me.
Above are the important tools. The gloves are no joke, without running water you want gloves.

Area Hermit Has Great Ideas For Saving Planet

How the other half lives: Phoenix, Arizona. Hermit in forest on the other side of the planet suggests improvements. (Photo: Google Earth.)

We're screwed.

Forget peak oil. We're heading toward peak everything.

It's all going to hell.

But while we all lounge in the waiting room of the apocalypse, it's sort of nice to think about what we could do.

I may live in a small cabin, use train and muscle power for transport and sprout my own lentils, but I don't live more sustainably than the next guy in any significant way. However, I've discovered one thing: We don't need all that much electricity in our homes.

I have solar panels rated at 180 watts, with a battery bank of 550 Ah. And nine months a year, here at 60 degrees north, this has turned out to be more than enough. My batteries' state of charge rarely dips below 85% except during winter. I power my computer, wireless broadband connection, iPod, cell phone, lights and small battery chargers on my system, and would have more than enough juice left for some pumps, fans and and an energy efficient freezer, if I had only gotten around to buying them.

A conventional washing machine, though, would still be a bitch.

Anyway, with some lifestyle changes most homes could power themselves large parts of the year. In an ideal world most houses might have more panels than I have, and they would all be grid-tied instead of using the rather questionable hermit system of lead-filled batteries. And we're talking about the mildly maligned photovoltaic cells here, a system which is not very efficient but is blissfully low maintenance. Add some windmill farms to the equation and we can have stereo and tv, too.

If we all made more power than we used in bright, sunny times, the surplus could be utilized to pump water into artificial lakes, so we could use hydroelectric power on rainy days. The possiblities are mind-boggling.

It's not going to happen, of course.

For one thing, we can't all heat our homes with wood, the way I do. And so far, there simply aren't enough solar panels to go around, or even any theoretical chance that there ever will be.

And normal people just like using a lot of power. Not because we're all idiots, but because we get used to conveniance pretty quick.

CO2 emissions are fun!

But solar power, if you've got it, actually does work.

I'm just saying.

Hit it!

Our turn: We got half a tank of gas, some kibble in the trunk and 1049 miles to Anchorage. (Photo: Kristine Nyborg)

From the always excellent Bush Radio. 

Staying put

I am posting this photograph not only for its Pulitzer Prize-type quality, but because it is a picture of a very, very good dog. It's placed outside a grocery store inside the main train station. If it moves half a foot in any direction it will tip the bicycle over, as it is connected to it through a line fastened in its harness. Thousands of people and assorted dogs are passing by, but this Alaskan Husky stays put, calmly waiting in its harness for its owner to come back. 

Even the most sedentary of my dogs (yes Bibi and Bembo, I'm talking about you) would never be able to take the pressure. They would tip over the bike, get frustrated by the clunking and the rattling, and look for some nice person or dog to smell and lick. 

Doghouse of regret

This is my friend Ø. He is a musher and a carpenter. He takes care of dogs and hammers away all day, every day.

For some reason he agreed to build a doghouse for a friend. He claims he has absolutely no idea why he would want to volunteer to do even more dog-related carpentry in his already completely non-existant spare time.

"For fucks sake," he said.

This is a semi-detached model for two dogs. An inner wall separating the two units will be added later.

"Goddamn fucking shit fuck," Ø. explained. 

But note that Ø. has perfected the art of building dog houses that are as sturdy and snug as possible for the dogs, without weighing five hundred thousand pounds.  Pictured here is the frame and the inner plywood walls. Insulation and exterior walls, (shiplafted boards, I imagine) will be added later. On his own dog houses, Ø. often fastens a door hinged at the top to flap both ways, short enough to leave a substantial clearance above the threshold to prevent a dogs' hind legs from being trapped when it swings shut. 

They're great dog houses.

"Fucking cunt shit dog crap," commented Ø.

More animal transport

Via the always fascinating No Tech Magazine. 

Wooden bicycles

Some people just make do. The picture above is taken by road engineer Kjell A. Solberg somewhere on the border between Congo and Tanzania. It is not an art project or made for fun or anything, but for transport. Note the uncanny similarity in design between this one and the Philippene one below, culled from a piece in the blog of Make Magazine.  

Lots more stuff about this subject here. (Thanks, Peter!)

It seems so easy...

... but it never really is. Still, I find it impossible not do stare dreamily at stuff like this. From the July, 1946 issue of Popular Mechanics. 

Absolutely Hard Core

This is Helen (1924 - 1995) and Scott (1883 - 1983) Nearing.
They were out of their minds.
Ostracized from their jobs in academia and the arts for their political opinions, they moved out of town and started farming. They were pretty much the first "back to the landers" in the contemporary sense of the word.
And man, were they intense. No meat. No eggs. No draft animals. No pets. No alcohol. No smoking. Not even bread, as this encouraged too much eating. For entertainment they would play instruments in the evening. Or have "talks", whatever that meant. They had lots of guests who came by and occasionally would lend a hand but just as often, one gleans from reading the Nearings' book "The Good Life", just being a nuisance and in the way.
But they lasted for ever. Scott, it seams, only called it quits after actually consciously starving himself to death at 100.
I imagine that to understand their seemingly unbearably dour approach to living off the land, one has to realize where they came from. The whole "no animals"-policy seems to have been linked to an intense hatred of slavery in all its forms. Though very left-leaning, they seem to have been far too disillusioned, or simply too American, to have any fantasies about the world being saved by a strong, well-meaning state implementing their own practices.
The Nearings were actually truly self-sufficient, growing blueberries (you can actually cultivate new world blueberries, the Nearings did it in old tree stumps) and gathering maple syrup as cash crops. They ate almost exclusively stuff they grew themselves in pretty cold climates (North-Eastern US) and completely without any type of fertilizer from animals. Managing all this deserves a lot of respect.
Their books are mostly still in print, and available from all the usual suspects. They're worth reading, you can just skip the most schoolmarmy bits.
Below is a picture of them with a swede saw. Gotta have pictures of swede saws.

Unsafe at any speed

Hideous solution: To a nasty problem.

For use in civilization, I have a 1948 "The World" single speed bicycle. It is a joy to ride and gives ample excuse for musings on how everything made today is total shit compared to those glorious machines manufacturers managed to put together way back when. 

But it's not as if spare parts are all that easy to come by. All brake wires, for example, are sold in only one length because nobody needs barrels in both ends these days. On a modern bicycle with v-brakes, you cut off the piece you don't need, end of story. But on my front hub brake I need a barrel at each end to fasten the bloody thing. So I ended up cutting a cable in two and fastening the pieces with a wire cramp to get the correct length. Not a pretty sight.

There are some venues that cater to the tastes of us sad, sick people who drool over old bicycles, though. Like British Brooks and Danish Sögreni. Ah, those leather handles! 

Dog house w/ sod roof

Note birch bark and pretty flowers: Try to ignore finger in upper left hand corner.

Why not go in style. Neighbours O&K have this doghouse, temporarily without occupant, with a nifty old school sod roof. Note birch bark as impermeable bottom membrane. 

More animal transport

Except here it's humans transporting an animal, instead of the other way round. More human powered animal transport here, note that theaccidentalhermit.blogspot.com does not endorse, or is in any way affiliated with the product advertised in the last link.

Keeping cool

Neighbours O&K save and freeze all the gristly parts of moose they don't consider fit for human consumption and give them to me. (This is intended as dog food, I hasten to add.) I store stuff like this in army-issue insulated food containers. Frozen stuff stays frozen in these for days. Of course, it pays to fill up the cavities as much as possible, and store several of these boxes together.

You know you've been living off-grid for a while when...

Felis: Is an off-grid cat.

1. You think nothing of wearing a headlight indoors.

2. You automatically reach for your matches in your pocket when turning on a stove, even if you're visiting people with mains electricity.

3. You can distinguish immidiately between light from halogen, incandescent, fluorescent, metal-halide, low pressure sodium or LED sources. 

4. You can no longer smell the kerosene. 

5. You wear wool long after everybody else had moved on to summer apparel. 

6. You think it's interesting that sleeping bag liners are easier to wash by hand than normal bed linen.

7. You no longer feel you need to show off by lighting a fire with a single match. A cup of diesel speeds it up nicely. 

8. You know where your thermoses are. 

9. You actually start paying attention to all that boring stuff about batteries and compost.

10. You know the frequencies of all your favourite radio stations, but have never heard of any of the popular tv shows. 

The unusual ones

"Östlyan" Photo: Åke Mokvist

"De ovanliga" ("The unusual ones") is a book by Swedish photojournalist Åke Mokvist about people who live, well, differently. Some of them are eccentric aristocrats, but a fair share of them are (ahem) crazy woodland hermits. 

The little cabin "Östlyan" (above) was built in 1964 by the woodsman Sven Nilsson on land owned by his employer. He asked for permission to build it, using only stuff from the surroundings, and lived there for thirty years. Note how the exterior walls are made of birch bark, the insulation was dried moss. 

Mokvist reflects on how most of the people who fit into his category of being "unusual" are either really old or very young. The baby boomers, a group which he technically belongs to himself, he dismisses as simply too conformist for their own good. 

Incredibly, "De ovanliga" sold 100 000 copies in Sweden, and a follow up, "De ovanliga 2" has recently been published. Obviously, there's some kind of thirst for reading about people who chew their oatmeal slowly while looking at squirrels running up trees. 

To the best of my knowledge, the book has never been translated. Though available from assorted Swedish online stores, these usually demand a Swedish postal address. 

Even doing a Google images search mostly renders pictures of the photographer himself, looking vaguely gnomish. 

Still, these are massively inspiring books. Rather worryingly Mokvist writes in "De ovanliga 2" about receiving a letter from a "man who said he had lived like the people in my book, but had been civilized by the woman he loves and no longer knows how to return". 

Oh well.

Emelie Cajsdotter: She says scary hippie stuff like "I learned more from a leave of grass in New Zealand than I learned at school." But still. Photo: Åke Mokvist

Sail away with me, baby

I have hoarded too many books on how to survive the apocolypse. But one of my favourites is "Sailing the Farm" by Ken Neumeyer. Subtitled "Independence on thirty feet" and "A Survival Guide to Homesteading on the Ocean" this little tome tells the reader how to grow crops and forage for food while at the same time bobbing along in a little sailboat. 

Obviously a man who relished the odd challenge now and then, Neumeyer seems to have become a vegetarian and thus even refrained from fishing. No coincidence, then, that he's included a rather comprehensive guide of edible seaweeds. 

Written shortly after the oil crisis of 1973, the author sees The End of The World as We Know It looming close by, and also has suggestions on stuff to bring along that can be bartered in hard times. (Gold, weapons and tobacco, to name a few.) 

He also has some instructions on how to make sills to destillate water from brine (pictured above), and this seems to be the part that has secured the book some after-life on the internet. 

I bought my copy immediately after seeing it mentioned fleetingly in the "Heirloom Technology"-column in Make magazine, judging by the prices on Abebooks the demand has risen considerably since then.  

But what a wonderful, weird little book this is.

Hooking up

This looks dramatic, but is actually just Thor hooking up his six dogs. 

If it ain't broke...

If it ain't broke, don't fix it, the saying goes. Except it will usually break down, won't it? So to survive any kind of life, you need a shop. 

Friend K. does this well. He's built a shop adjacent to his little freestanding office. While the office is insulated, the shop isn't. But it's paneled with greenhouse plastic and has lots of light. Much nicer than my shop.

Why lycra is a bad idea

Learn how to get dressed at Homegrown Evolution.

No inverter

Look at any schematic for current home power systems, and you will see, somewhere, an inverter. An inverter is a magic doo-dad that changes the 12v DC (direct current) that's stored in your batteries, into AC (alternating current, 110v if you're in Japan or North America and 220v almost anywhere else) that normal people use in their household appliances.
Me, I'm such a very, very special person and though I have a small inverter (above), I almost never, ever use it.
The reason for this is that every single piece of electricity powered equipment I have runs on direct current anyway. Converting the DC from the batteries into AC in an inverter which then feeds into a gadget that is going to convert it all into DC again is wasteful and makes no sense.
That inverter uses quite a bit of electricity on it's own, so much that it heats up and needs an electricity-hogging fan to cool it down. And it's noisy.
My modem, my wireless router, my charger for flashlight batteries, the iPod charger, the phone charger, they all run on 12v DC. And for the computer I have an adapter that converts the 12v DC into 18v DC.
The only things I don't power directly through the DC system are the chargers for my Ni-Mh battery packs for my headlight and for my camera batteries. So if I don't charge these at work, I need my little inverter. I'm sure these chargers can be hacked to work on DC, but I don't want to mess around with battery chargers.
Never, ever, ever tell people who work in shops that you need something for your "solar power system". Tell them you need a charger/adapter "for your car". Cars use 12v, and most of the assorted hardware you need to set up a home power system can be found in the aisles devoted to electrical components for cars.
Some lamps actually run on 12v too, especially those with LEDs or halogen bulbs, and have small components inside that revert the "normal" AC into 12v DC. I've messed around with some of those so they work on my system.
To be sure, converting it all into AC would make some sense if I had lots of power and a large house, say, and had electrical stuff all over the place. The wires need to be pretty thick if you're going to transport 12v over large distances. Much, much thicker than if you go for "normal" AC. And goodness, the cost of wires add up fast.
So here's another case of small being beautiful. Or at least easy.

With the lights out, it's less dangerous

Here we are now: Entertain us

Neighbours M&M are connected to the power grid, but it has a mercurial temperament and power comes and goes. They invited me for dinner, and when the lights went out they were well prepared, with candles and this beautiful vintage oil lamp. I could tell immediatly it had a round wick 10/16 of an inch wide. But this detail I kept to myself. 

These are good people. Why would I want to be boring.

As always, when the lights came back on, we all felt a bit sad and shy. There's something special in the quiet and dark of an outage. Unless, of course, this happens all the time or you really, really need that defibrillator. 

Update: Turns out that there are solar powered defibrillators around, at least in public spaces in Germany. So that takes care of that, then.

Hermit attempts interior decorating

Felis the cat inspecting my herb pots, made of re-used olive oil cans. "Dude", she says. "This is just so gay."

This is the shit

Well, here's the thunderbox. Note the polystyrene seat. This seat always feels cosy and warm. It is such a wonderful invention, a whole lot better than the cold, plastic stuff people use in The Towns.
Why does not everybody have an outhouse instead of a wc? It is a mystery.
In the lower left hand corner is a bucket of wood chips. Once business is completed, add some wood chips on your produce. No smell, and composting goes quicker. Wood ashes work too, but you easily end up with wood ash everywhere, so I use it on the compost heap itself, rather than straight in the bucket.
The whole toilet system just isn't all that complicated or interesting. Unless you got nosy neighbors who live close by, there's no reason to invest in complicated freezing toilets, microwaving toilets or enormous revolving compost chambers. No matter what, you still end up having to deal with your own feces. And the more low tech your system is, the less can go wrong.

More animal transport

A mahmout and his elephant in Thailand. From the series World Animal Day at Big Picture.

Sweet Swede

Photo: Jørn Moen

Here's me, going at it with a "Swede" saw. This is the saw to use for green wood. So far I have not used my chain saw up here. Too scary and dangerous, considering that I work alone. Also chain saws are a hassle to keep in shape, and offensively noisy and dirty. And if you've ever tried buying gas without a car, you'll know that gas stations are mysteriously placed at locations that are almost inaccessible without a motorized vehicle.
Ole Wik, in his excellent book "Wood Stoves - How to Make and Use Them" (Alaska Northwest Publishing Company, 1977) writes:

A few of us around here are still holding out against the chain-saw revolution, relying instead on bow (Swede) saws and elbow grease. I like bow saws because, above all, they are quiet. They use no gasoline or oil, and do not smell; they are light and easy to carry; they have no moving parts to wear out; they're practically indestructible; and they're inexpensive. (...) True, bow saws are slower than chain saws, but that means you spend more time in the forest. They take more work, but when the winter is over they leave you with good, healthy arms. (...)

Occasionally I've considered looking for another type of saw that might beat the bow saw without going to gasoline power. The search usually leads to the big two-man whipsaws that loggers used before the advent of lightweight power saws. My conclusion is that a whipsaw might be useful for working through a log that i too thick for a bow saw, but otherwise wouldn't pay. A whipsaw blade is substantially thicker than a modern bow-saw blade, so it cuts a wider kerf (groove). It takes extra energy to remove the extra wood. Perhaps this is why loggers called the saws "misery whips".

I've done enough sawing to have contracted tennis elbow (city pussy-wussy that I am), so I have taught myself to be amidextrous when it comes to this chore. And whenever I do carpentry I always use my Japanese saws, that cut on the draw instead of on the push.
There are several blades available for the Swede saw, including one for meat. I use the ones for cured and green wood. None of the ones I have found, however, can be sharpened once they're worn down. The rainbow tint on the tips of new blades indicate that they have been "induction hardened", and they sure stay sharp for quite a while. But once they're worn down, that's it.
In my experience, bow saws are not entirely indestructible. Especially vulnerable is the small aluminum tab that keeps the blade in place on the far end from the handle. And no, you can't buy replacements. I end up winding pieces of baling wire around it all to keep the blade in place. These days, it's even hard to find separate blades in some hardware stores, you're expected to buy the whole setup every time the blade wears out.
I've only ever seen the "whips" Wik writes about as rusty decoration in restaurants that try to be twee and rustic. But new ones are available for sale from places like this.
Wik's book is long out of print, but available at Abebooks.

The optimistic gardener

Made a new veggie patch today. Will my toil bear fruit? 

Yesterday's news: Newspapers make a weed barrier. 

Full of shit: Compost, home made in every sense of the word.

Soiled: Added some soil. Not wonderful stuff, really. Pretty nutrient-free and acidic. 

Wrapped up: I'm not one for plastic mulches, but I need something to protect the soil before planting and while I forage for "normal" mulch, before the forest gnomes start planting stuff on their own. 

Return of Son of How to transport propane on a bicycle

Here's an old picture, the last one in this series. Note how the propane is fastened with the seatbelt (the children's bench is removed).

Theaccidentalhermit has readers in China, according to this site's webcounter. On hearing this, friend Ceegee wrote the following play:

Wang sits at a table in an office, holding his head in his hands. The computer screen on the table glares darkly at him. The door opens and his friend Chen enters the room, but Wang does not look up.

 

Chen - Oh, Wang! What's the matter?

Wang - My truck broke down again... it's no use.

Chen - You know what they say... the road to misfortune is the road of not trying.

Wang - Yes, but now how do I transport the propoane into town?

Chen - You can actually read about this, and many, many other interesting things, here on this website...

(Chen reaches over and turns on the computer. The screen fills with light and the light from the screen floods onto Wang's face as Chen's fingers dance across the keyboard.)

Wang (blinks) - Amazing! I did not know such a fantastic website existed!

Chen (laughs) - But now you do.

Wang - I will visist it often. 

Kerosene addiction I: Flatwick lanterns

Don't be square: The typical flat head of a wick in a lamp that has been turned up too high. 

An off-grid life easily involves using a lot of kerosene. Kerosene fumes are a leading cause of lung cancer for third world women, who spend large parts of their lives inhaling all kinds of nasty stuff while preparing food over poorly constructed kerosene ovens.  

Still, proper maintainence of kerosene-burning equipment might mitigate some of the damage, and if you use these infernal devices constantly this involves some serious wick trimming. 

I spent eons learning this properly, which is why I'm droning on about the subject now.

The most normal and certainly the cheapest kerosene lanterns are the so called "hurricane lanterns" with flat wicks. "Deitz" is, in a sense, the Hoover of these kind of lights. "Feuerhand" comes in at second place. Get the largest ones possible. They give out a bit more light than the small ones, of course, but more importantly you don't have to fill them up all that often.

Storm lanterns are pretty safe, but back in the days when kerosene light was all the light you got after the sun set, using storm lanterns in living areas was considered a sign of extreme poverty and squalor. These days, happily no one can tell the difference. Kerosene lanterns will always seem cosy and christmas-y.

A common mistake is to turn the wick up high, to get "more" light. This is counterproductive, the light quickly dims and the lantern starts sooting up. A sure sign to look for is a red flame, which indicates low temperature and incomplete combustion.

What you want is a nice, rather narrow yellow flame.

Be sharp: A flat wick the way it's supposed to look.

The design of flat wick lanterns has remained unchanged for almost a hundred years, which sounds cool but also has lead to generations of people having to fiddle with an infuriatingly impractical wick-fastening mechanism. 

If your wick has gone square-shaped cut it at an angle (above). And you're set to go.

Thor's rig

Not a halo: That's Thor in the back, obscured by his headlight.

Met Thor on my way home the other day, out with his six alaskan huskies. He uses an old cross bike, with the motor removed, as a training rig.

Cross bikes are great as dog training rigs, but they're scary in all slippery conditions. When I had a cross bike I studded it's tires, which helped a bit. Thor has modified the chains for his old car to combat dead musher syndrome (Below).

Get a grip: Car chains on a cross bike. To prevent dying.

This only works though, because the tires' treads are not all that deep. "And it doesn't really work on the sides of the tires," Thor said with a facial expression that indicated that this was an opinion based on serious empirical evidence.

He's also added a ball hitch for a small trailer, so he can carry gear for camping trips. The hitch is placed beneath the rear mud guard (below).

Get hitched: Small ball hitch for adding a trailer, placed below the rear mud guard.

Thor plans to add lead weights to the rear suspension, as the lack of weight on the rear wheel makes the rear brake almost useless.

Being a musher is a never-ending DIY project. Go customize, or walk home on your own.

Portable puppy pen

If you don't make an effort, your puppies are going to end up like Kaspar Hauser, with very limited training in dealing with strangers. 

My horrendously able and handy forest dwelling, mushing neighbours Øystein and Marte have a litter now, and have made a portable puppy pen to ensure the li'l ones get exposed to the world outside the dog yard. As Ø&M live right next to the train station, they make sure the pups are accessible to commuters and school children on their way home.

Putting it together: Details of the deceptively simple system for adding ekstra pieces to the pen.

The system is very flexible, one piece can be removed and the pen can be placed next to the cabin door. That way the puppies can play inside, and the humans don't have to worry about them running out into the street or onto the tracks every time the door is opened. New pieces can be added to expand the area for running around and doing busy puppy stuff.  

Return of How to transport propane on a bicycle

I might be giving the impression here that I do nothing up in the woods but consume vast amounts of propane.

But better safe than experiencing the total collapse of civilization without the option of making a really nice sauté.  

Here's another way of transporting propane, but this only works with the small containers. I've fastened this baby to my Extrawheel one-wheeled trailer. 

As mentioned previously, I'd rather avoid two-wheeled trailers. I had a Bob yak for a long time, and even crossed large parts of the US with it, but alas, it ended up being stolen by som very evil people. The Bob had the advantage of a platform where you could fasten down your backpack, and on really difficult terrain you could strap backpack & trailer on your back, and carry the bike. The Extrawheel, however, is better in many other ways. It is excellent for carrying soft, bulky loads and groceries. Coupled up with some front panniers the Extrawheel is perhaps one of the best options for touring. 

Boxy stuff is better left to the Xtracycle and Christiania. 

Hermit's verdict: Perhaps the best trailer of them all, as long as the luggage is either small in size or somewhat malleable. And I've tried a lot of those trailers out there.  I should either get a life or a driver's liscence. 

More human powered transport

Here's me, moving house almost exactly four years ago on my Christiania trike.
There is, doubtlessly, a very high village idiot factor to trikes. This can't be helped.
It's a wonderful machine, but not really made for the kind of inclines and logging roads I get. I've used it quite a bit for training my dogs, hitched them up in front, but as the brakes on all three wheels are hub brakes, they're difficult to maintain once they're worn out.
Trikes also are at a disadvantage in cities, as they can't really be wrestled up on sidewalks and you can't pass cars waiting for a green light.
Hermit's verdict: On flat surfaces with not too much traffic, there's something undeniably majestic about cruising along on this vehicle.
In hilly areas, well, you develop some great calves. Heavy, but very well built machine, fine old world craftmanship.
And kids love it. It even has a little bench and a cool prarie wagon-style canopy. And a seat belt! Schlepp those li'l goinifs around in style!

Lest I Forget

Only six months left until the snow falls again.