Thank You! Now Taking Requests....

You all get one free shirtless rock star today. Who knows what else could be coming...

Actually this is our friend Ryan, who we’ve always found willing to take requests as well, like “Hey Ryan, try to make standing in our future cess pit look sexy.”

🙏 Big thanks to everyone who became a new subscriber over the past week, including the DAO fam that became PAID subscribers and one particularly Machiavellian individual who ensured we remain shackled to this endeavor for the long haul by signing up for an annual subscription.

Sincerely, thank you all for continuing to be an inspiration and a life raft in a world that could use a few more.

And biggest thanks go to my wife who has been shepherding this effort for a few years and the better parts of my life for a few decades now. We had an anniversary last week. I don’t say we celebrated it because we both forgot on the morning of. 😮😮She was busy leading a group of women on a solstice campout retreat, and I got caught up putting a final coat of stucco on our mud room only a year after starting the project I assumed would take just a few months to complete.

It’s not the first time we’ve both forgotten. We had a good laugh rather than an argument, which I think is a good sign.

On the off grid front: My seven part series on living disconnected from infrastructure has been rolling out over the past few weeks over at CNET. Part six goes live Thursday, followed by the finale a few days thereafter.

I had a list of prompts to write about for this series and for the past few months I would pick a time to just sit down and write about the last three years of our life. The words flowed easily and in voluminous torrents. There’s simply so much to say and reflect on about the beginning of the 2020s in general, and especially this journey we’ve been on.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of what I drafted was a little too personal or in the weeds for CNET’s general interest audience of people typically looking for easy to grok tech tips. So I’ll be posting some of the outtakes and too-spicy-to-publish excerpts here.

For example, here’s a never-before-seen shot of noted Americana artist Ry Taylor posing in our gray water trenches in summer, 2020:

Over the next week I’m also going to be filming some videos around our homestead for CNET, basically producing a tour of our tiny world.

If any of our subscribers have some special requests for things they’d like to see while I’m filming, please let us know in the comments. Want to see exactly how certain parts of our system are plumbed or wired (presumably so you can tell me what I did wrong)? Or maybe you want a glimpse of our gray water system, the lizards living on the front wall or the roof that blew off our neighbor’s house two years ago that’s still sitting in the sage? Let me know what you’re curious about and I’ll do my best.

Much more coming very soon. 😎

-EM