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!

Maybe you've noticed the redesign. Maybe this is your first trip here, in which case you'll have to take my word for it - this is a great redesign!

But why would I do that? What could have possessed me? I mean, the old design was no great shakes, but it wasn't bad, right...

Let's back up a little...

This is my blog. Not my business blog where I write about the hand-carved crochet hooks and knitting needles and hair sticks (that's new - thanks, Elizabeth) and looms and spindles I make. Not my farm blog where I talk about the building of barns and houses, and the care of sheep and goats and llamas and horses, and gardening and farming. Not the Road Dog Blog where we transcribe what the dogs "say" for your reading entertainment. Not my partner's blog where she writes about how she approaches each day and task with her own beauty and grace. Not my step-daughter's blog where she photographs life on the farm from her unique perspective.

This is my blog... It should reflect not only the topics I'm wishing to speak of (ecology, sustainable living, art and technology), but also the things I love... am passionate about.

I love inventing things, and gadgets. I've always been a fan of MacGyver and James Bond and Batman. However, I've always thought that said inventions should have some class and grace and beauty. MacGyver's emergency lunar lander made with just his Swiss army knife and duct tape, baling twine and the scrapings from a bicycle frame were never that elegant. Batman's gadgets were cool, sure. Bond's gizmos were, maybe, the best, but they were too concealed - I know, they needed to be.

I'm also a fan of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells and that era. Inventions then were ornamented
with wrought iron and twisted brass and cast bronze and there were dials and gauges. Gadgets truly looked like gadgets. Yet they had elegance and grace.

They were art!

It would appear that I'm not the only one that feels that way. Apparently, while I wasn't looking, and entire trend has sprung up under the moniker "Steampunk." These folk like to create or recreate modern items with old-fashioned materials and methods - or at least make 'em look that way.

The finest example I have found is now featured with permission of the artist in my header there at the top of the page. This is a computer monitor and keyboard that would look at home in Captain Nemo's quarters or in the study of The Time Traveler or Phileas Fogg. You really should take a look at this gentleman's outstanding and imaginative work and the work of other Steampunk artists, too. I don't think this art form - which I believe is similar to my own desire to live a simple, beautiful life - is going away.

I was talking to a frend the other day.  The topic of community came up... as in, "why isn't there one up here?"

It wouldn't have struck me so, but I had heard the same comment several times before. Why?

Seems people are too busy just scraping by to spend the time building a community.

I think that's a crying shame... kinda goes with all the 'neighboring' posts (there one here on Sustainable Reality and one over on Laffing Horse)  I've been writing lately. But it's true, and it's so easy to slip into that rut...

• Get up
• Do chores
• Check email over coffee
• Assemble daily to do list
• For me that usually means a couple small TriLooms, one large TriLoom or a dozen crochet hooks or knitting needles
• for Jen that means shipping everything I made the day before - usually not enough, but I'm catching up - and listing things in the store
• For Lena that means helping Jen ship - or taking over when Jen has to work in town or run errands and spinning and crocheting
  
• Pick bacground noise - here, that's likely to be a wide variety of music or a movie, we don't have TV - and get to work...
• Maybe break for lunch
• Maybe break for dinner
• If the weather's nice enough and we're caught up in the shop, or close to caught up, or just need a break from it, go work on the farm for 2 to 4 hours
  
• Do chores
• Research and write a blog post or three, catch up on email
• Go to bed

1. had to do with homesteading, the practice and not the website company
2. weren't politically slanted (not that I don't have my views, but as a homesteader I'm more interested in soup and cement mixes (not in the same bowl, please) than I am in this candidates views or that court ruling's effect on the availability of nosehair clippers on commercial airplanes - but I digress... and exaggerate a little)
   
3. had been updated recently. By recently, I mean sometime this year.

• Sarah’s Homestead Blog
• Howland Homestead Farm
• Natural Family Living Blog
• Hidden Haven Homestead

Just a wee li'l rant this morning.

There's an interesting article over at PC World: Is Rural America Doomed to Dial-up or some such.

I read it and the article has some valid points. I could refute and assist and debate and agree and I live way rural, so I wanted to comment. In order to comment they want you to "sign in." What? an email address and your name... sure, to prevent spammers, right? Maybe they'd drop me a line later asking me to opt-in or somesuch. OK.

No. A full page questionnaire that might take 15 minutes to complete unless you use autofill... and even then it's a one shot response to an intriguing article.

PC World, you've just lost a reader!

Oh, yeah, my comment:

There's so much to do, it's often easy to get wrapped up in the day-to-day and forget to 'Neighbor.'

But neighboring is really what communities are all about. You help them and visit, they'll help you and visit. No one can do it all, but through 'neighboring,' it can all be done... eventually.

Yesterday, I went to assist Gus and Cynthia in putting up scaffolding. It's time to side the second story of their house and the scaffolding has to be up between 10 and 12 feet in the air to do this.

While I was over there, Jeanette was helping shear a sheep and trim some hooves for the county fair.

Neighboring is also an opportunity to learn without the pain... sorry, Gus and Cynthia, but we're not building a cordwood house and our house will only be one-story.

Imagine a car that charges in 5 minutes and travels about 100 miles.

• ABC News: New Tech May Make Batteries Obsolete

• The Sietch Blog » Organic Solar Cell Breakthrough

• A Low Impact Woodland Home

• Homegrown Revolution: Self Watering Containershttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

Remember my comments on stumbling blocks? Maybe you read what I wrote about my enemy and ally...

Either way, after another several hours stumbling (without the aid of Stumbler) around the Internet, I think I've got the majority of the bugs worked out of my TO DO list using that almost magical combination of Quicksilver, Stikkits and RSS.

That combination is not quite doing what I want it to do, but I'm told it can. It's getting close. I've dropped into the Stikkit forum and asked a question or two about getting the programs to do what I want.

We'll see what they say.

In the meantime, having put the majority of that problem to rest, we've started work on the farm again and I've gotten back to a semblance of productivity in the shop.

I'll keep you updated...

I know what it all means. After all, they're my words and I can interpret them however I want. I can even spell them differently if I phiel like it.

But that will do no one any good. Actions like that won't share new, helpful ideas with you, C. Reader, and building up a wall around my own thoughts is a sure way to stagnate.

It's not sustainable.

In order to communicate effectively, then, we must have some agreed upon definitions (and spellings, but that's another post some where some day).

Take a look at the definition of sustainable. You can read the whole thing. I did. But the definition I'm most interested in... the one I want to work with here, is number 5:

• to keep up or keep going, as an action or process: to sustain a conversation.

• to uphold as valid, just, or correct, as a claim or the person making it: The judge sustained the lawyer's objection.

One of the things you'll find yourself giving up if you decide, as we have, to start the homestead from scratch, is time. There just ain't enough of it.

Still, for all the lack of time, there are some things I will not give up. I don't consider these niceties or luxuries. I consider them necessities.

Computer time. The computers in our household are vital for our business of teaching and selling fiber arts. With them around, though, we find time to blog a little (or a lot), surf a little, research a little and they can become time wasters in a hurry. We jokingly (or maybe not so jokingly) call them hypnogourds (a silly reference to the fun Xanth series of books by Piers Anthony).

Books! We have library cards at every town we go to and we do frequent them to the tune of once a week - each - while we're there. That's Castle Rock and Monument, CO (really really nice libraries!), Mountain View, AR and Hammond, LA at present. I've still got cards, but don't know if they're still valid, for Craig and Rocky Ford, CO, too. If you haven't been to a library lately, go as soon as you can. Gone are the dusty stack of mouldering books with the stern, white-haired librarian stamping books thunderously and telling you to "Shhhhh!" Instead, there's computer access and printing - often even Wi-Fi, and multimedia (DVDs and VHS and CD and cassette - music, videos and books on tape) as well as books. We have a rather huge library ourselves and when we get the house built, the plan is to have all of the walls covered in books. No simple, silly bookcase for us - walls, I tell you! That why I was shocked and appalled when I read yesterday that few people read books and those that do average less than 7 a year. I've probably read more than 20 this year and it's only August and I've been busy.

Then there are things we find easy to give up and I think that this might be what's sucking other people's time, too.

Television. I did a little (very little) research and found that the average person spends about 4 hours per day watching television. We haven't has television since, um, since... well, since Fox canceled Firefly. We still watch movies. Sort of. They're on in the background on the computer and I'll glance up when there's something exciting going on. We treat 'em more like books on tape, really... and we have a lot of those, too.

Video games. Last night, as I began this post, Jeanette was researching keywords to beef up our search results on eBay and sees "PSP." She asks me what it is and I say "I think it's a file type for the old Paint Shop Pro (which used to be really great shareware from Jasc) program." Nope. PSP stands for Play Station Portable. It's the most searched term on eBay. Makes me want to put the line "Spinning is more fun that a PSP," in our listing, but that would be dishonest, right?

I'll grant you that playing a video game or watching a reality show featuring people drinking pigs blood as a sport might be more fun than diggin' post holes, but I guarantee you that you'll get more done and (eventually) feel better for a little hard work.

Oh, but my father is surely laughing at me now!

Well, it's kinda new... sorta...

I wrote in the Laffing Horse Diary the other day that my blog was my website. Seems people were getting confused looking for us and finding my daily (or sometimes not-so-daily) ramblings.

People stayed confused. Bummer.

They wanted to find out about Laffing Horse Woodworks, or Foxbriar Farm, or Common Threads. I wanted to tell 'em about my neighbor.

Since we - Jeanette and I - cannot count ourselves as a majority of two (well, we could, but what good would that do us... or our readers), we decided to turn all of our websites back on and desegregate them.

Now you'll find the following:

• Laffing Horse Diary
  • This is where I'll write about the woodshop and all the wonderful goodies I build and design. Crochet hooks, square crochet hooks, afghan crochet hooks, Tunisian crochet hooks, flexible crochet hooks, knitting needles, circular knitting needles, double-point knitting needles, square knitting needles of all types, drop spindles, Navajo spindles, TriLooms and more can be found right here.
• Foxbriar Farm
  • Daily trials, tribulations, and celebrations of life in the Ozarks. Here there be critters! Llamas, Jacob Sheep, Lamancha Dairy Goats, Angora Goats, Dogs, Cats, Chickens, Bees and Nugget and 'Fria - the two old token ponies and hay disposal units - will wander side by side with half lunatic ravings about how to best build a house out of scrap lumber and baling twine.
• Sustainable Reality
  • Where High Tech meets the Homestead. We're homesteaders, sure, but that doesn't mean we're not civilized. We've got DSL run right to the barn. We'll blather on about new green technologies, how to use your computer and Internet connection to support the farm, and the like right here. I might even tuck in a few personal musings.
    
• Spinning Dreams and Weaving Yarns
  • Jeanette's personal musings. I'm sure she has a more defined idea of what will go here, but she's not told me quite what it is yet.
• Sis
  • 'Lena spends a lot of time on the farm. She has a very good eye for photos and a gentle, healing hand with the animals. She can tell you about it - or show it to you - in her own way.
• Road Dogs
  • Jeanette decided that our dogs should have a voice. You'll hear from Aniken the white German Shepherd, Quigley UpOver the Aussie in America, and Scraps the Chihuahua crossed with a bat crossed with a potbellied pig crossed with a pug.
• There's another, but Jeanette says I can't tell you about it yet... don't worry, though, as soon as it's ready you'll hear about it in a BIG way. Gosh, I hope it's ready soon!

Ever have one of those days?

I started out trying to write up a to do list. I hate paper to do lists 'cause I lose 'em or don't finish 'em and can't remember what I had on 'em when I go to make a new one and end up duplicating a lot of what was on the old one I lost.

Tracking so far?

So I turn to my trusty computer. Here's what I want... a to do list that links to my address book and can be linked to a calendar and can be fed to a Google gadget and can have entries posted from just about anywhere. It's got to be sortable, too. If I enter a name in the address book and a to do item that references that name I don't want to see the name in the Google gadget
... just the to do item.

I want to sit down at the keyboard and type "to do: call joe smith about digging a ditch today," and have the program know enough to put a to do item with a due date of today and a note about ditch digging and a link to Joe's address book entry in a Google gadget I can see n my home page.

Is that asking too much?

I don't mind having to use a hotkey keystroke or two. I don't even mind having to perform a little drag and drop action for sorting and assigning categories. I don't expect it to decipher typo.

I do mind having to learn a complete secret code to enter the information... especially if I can't get a Captain Midnight Secret Decoder Ring in my box of Lucky Charms.

There are lots that seem to come close:

• Toodledo
• Hands down the best to do list manager I've found. No address book integration I can find, though. Great Google gadget. No way I can find to enter data without switching to the site.
• Stikkit
• Best all around, if a bit quirky, freeform personal information manager I've ever seen. I love this app! Having said that, I cant get things to consistently link and the Google gadget shows everything or nothing... there seems to be no in-between. I can enter from Quicksilver which is also great, but also quirky.
• Palm
• Won't properly integrate with much of anything anymore. I love my Palm... I've got 2 of 'em and had several others, but where the hardware was keeping up, the software slipped. Because of that, I'm sorry to say, I now have a nice, compact eBook reader/solitaire/cheap digital cameraMP3 Player. Not that that's a bad thing to have, but it no longer does what I bought it for successfully.
• iCal/Address Book from Apple
  
• They'll sync and they'll link, but in order to get them to do it right You have to use several work-arounds and bounce from this site to that site to another. I've never gotten the to do's to sync successfully anywhere.
• iGTD
• The once upon a time champ of to do lists has succumbed to featuritis. Now, what was a simple, clean, easy way to manage a to do list has become buggy and unstable, over-featured and underpowered. That, and it never did work well with an address book or sync to Google gadgets.

• Expresso for Macintosh
• ohhh yeah... gadgety goodness and eye candy. This PIM wouldn't sync to anything, but it did put a prettified version of your calendar and to do list right on the desktop as wallpaper and it could be accessed with a hotkey. All I can find now are other folk, like me, lamenting the loss of this PIM (and all the rest of Berkeley Systems).
  
• Okna Desktop Set
• This memory is so old I can't quite remember why I loved this program. I seem to remember it doing almost everything including linking to a built in word processor for easy creation of business letters and such. It's still around, but it's for Windows and I am long since a Mac devotee and if the website is any indication of their current coding skills, I'm just as glad it's not available.