Imagine a jogging suit that charges your ipod.
Nah! That's thinking small. I want to build a house-sized tent that powers everything inside it or a sailboat with a backup electric motor that needs no generator. How about an electric sail-car that generates it's electricity by moving?
What am I talking about? Researchers have developed a fiber that generates electricity!
I'm also wondering what it would be like to spin this into a yarn for a nice self-warming sweater!
We were conducting business as usual when a person offered us $10 for a book. We're reasonable folks, so we started dickering... $14.93, we said. The response we got was insulting... something along the lines of "You people! It's all about the money with you people."
Well, the book is brand new, has a cover price of $21.95, was already marked down to $19.95 and is not available anywhere for less than $14.93. We were being nice! We're stupid that way.
But the "It's all about the money!" remark stuck in my craw.
It is NOT about the money. We'd give the stuff away if we could... in fact one of our employees has "stop them from giving stuff away" written into her job description.
Why? Why don't we just give it away?
We still have to pay rent and an electric bill and a phone bill and taxes and buy some groceries and a truck payment and insurance and hay and feed bills and more. We had to buy the book in the first place in order to have it here to sell.
But it's still not about the money... it's about a fair exchange!
The book cost us about as much as 3 bales of hay or 2 bags of grain or the materials for a 2-foot triloom. You can have the book, but you've got to send me 3 bales of clean quality hay or 2 bags of 12% protein (no copper added) sweet feed. I don't need materials for looms right now. We could also use a truck payment, but the finance company won't accept partial payments from outside sources... wanna send a truck to us? We'd need a replacement for our Dodge Diesel 2500 QuadCab longbed.
However, the place we do most of our business is called ebay and we accept payments through Paypal. We wish it were ebarter and Tradepal, but it ain't... yet... Even if it were, I'm thinking that the postage on a bale of hay would kinda scuttle the trade right then and there.
I've read several articles over the course of the last several months with titles like "Easy timber framing" and "Simple household solutions." While I'm in the workshop, I have my radio tuned to KKPT and I get to hear Mick singing about how time is on his side, or Charlie Daniels being like his ol' blue tick hound, laying round in the shade.
These two concepts don't quite go together. At least they don't for me. Sure, there are lots of things that are simple or easy, but when you have 908751 simple things on your to-do list, getting thought them is not easy unless you have enough time.
For instance, scything hay is easy. Sure, it's a lot of work, but the task itself is easy. The fields around here should probably be hayed in late June, again in August, and maybe once more in late September. I can cut an acre a day... but that day has to start at 4 a.m. and end at 10 p.m. with a HUGE lunch break. It would be murder (or suicide) to work like that in the heat of the day (frequently 100° and 100% humidity). However, while I'm cutting hay, the barn's not getting repaired, the looms aren't getting built, the crochet hooks and knitting needles aren't being carved, winter firewood's not being brought in (and this is something one should start early on... believe me!), the beer's not getting brewed, and so forth and so on.
I could fence off the area and let the animals graze on a rotational basis and then only hay once a year... or maybe not at all, right? Wrong. Then the time I would send haying has to be spent building fence. That's even more work if you're trying to do things without a budget. T-Posts and wire cost a lot and splitting rails is no picnic. Of course, I should only have to do this once. On the other hand, I'm again losing time to moving the animals from one paddock to the next and back to the barn at night.
I could buy hay. In fact, I do buy hay. This frees up my time to get the things I need to get done, done. However, because the hay that I buy is around $5 per bale and it takes roughly 600 bales to feed out critters for one year - that's $3000 for those that didn't do the math - I am now trying to get more looms made just to cover the cost of the hay. No time was freed up! Add to that equation hay hauling and stacking - more time! Just buying the hay doesn't make it materialize in your nicely tarped hay yard or barn - (^%&(%)*^% Scotty, get that transporter fixed!
Sounds like I'm whining. Hardly! I love the life I'm living. However, here's a fine opportunity for folks leaning towards this kind of lifestyle with visions of leisure time away from the 9-to-5 grind to learn from someone else's mistakes. It ain't leisurely (which is why you've not seen a post here since November of 2007)... but it sure is fun!
But it wasn't enough.
For one reason or another the people that built the houses left. When they left the houses were left... unattended. Some were vandalized by people, some by nature. Important parts were taken, pipes were burst by freezing. What's left are houses with high ideals... and a lot of damage. Maybe more damage than can be repaired. Maybe they need to be bulldozed under and a new house built on the foundations.
There's a lesson here and it's simple. If one plans on ding something ecologically sound, one must stick to it or take care that what was started is maintained and protected. Without the maintenance and the protection, all of the groundwork... all of those good intentions... might come to naught or less than naught.
