All this happened overnight. Will it be spring before I find my axe or get my vehicle down to the road? My skis are backordered and will be here Dec. 4th. If they send them UPS the guy will leave them at my neighbors house, 2 miles away. Then I can ski up to my cabin. They are fat and short and have metal edges. They are waxless and they come with bindings. You don’t need special boots just strap yourself in and go.
Category: General
hovering
When I was little and I would fall down the stairs or fall off of a wall or get knocked down, I would pass out. Then I would hover above me looking down listening to what people were saying. My dad always said, “She just got the wind knocked out of her again.� Then slowing I would spiral back down and wake up.
Cabin stove.
This is my stove. I bought it online at Cabellas along with a 12′ propane hose and regulator. I drilled a hole in the floor using a 1″ spade Bit 
I have it hooked up to a 30 lb propane tank outside. I think this will last me all winter, but I have lots of spares if it doesn’t. The stove simmers well, yet it also has a high 15,000 BTU output.
Update: It’s March 27th and the stove has worked well all winter. I’m still on the same 30 gallon propane thank that I originally hooked it up to.
Update: On October 30th, almost a year after I hooked it up, my 30lb propane tank finally ran out.
The snow comes down like rain.
The snow melted yesterday. I thought today, for sure, I would head out to cut more wood. But it started snowing this morning and hasn’t stopped all day. I shouldn’t let another nice day pass without cutting wood.
My solar panel offers little effort on these days. I have to start the generator to charge my batteries if I want computer time.
My bottles are leaking.
My cabins a mess!
The bottles are leaking!
My valuable water is quickly depleting!
Snowy morning.
Yesterday was sunny. I vowed to go cut more wood. When I woke up I was suprised to find snow.
It’s 37 degrees and all is quiet.
On a earlier post I complained about my digital thermometer waking me up at night because of it’s ice alarm. After reading the manual, and finding no way to disable this sleep depriving “feature”, technical guru, Laen Finehack, came up with this idea to disable the ice warning alarm on a Oregon Scientific thermometer model #RMR382A :
The ice warning only works on the #1 sensor so just set your inside unit to channel 2 or 3 and the outside sensor to the same. Tonight when it dropped to 37 degrees, I felt relief when it didn’t go off.
town harvest.
In the back of my truck is 65 gallons of water, 3 gallons of lamp oil
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Once you leave will you ever truly go back?
Once you leave society and experience the peace, beauty, and serenity of living alone in a beautiful spot, I don’t think you could ever go back, totally. I think you would always be kind of bitter, mad that you weren’t back in your peaceful life. Though, after months of being alone without anyone else’s thoughts, part of me sometimes gets bored and wants some new thoughts. Now I have a solar panel, a phone and a laptop to appease that part of me, I’m wondering, now, will I ever have to go back? – And also, with all that stuff, will I ever really leave?
My cabin’s water system.
I don’t have a well so I fetch my water in a bunch of one gallon bottles. There is a spring about ¼ mile away but, in the summer I worry about the cows polluting it so I pay the town 10 dollars for 500 gallons and fill up at the community spigot. In the winter, I put 4 jugs in my backpack when I head out for my walk, and fill them up at the spring. I also have a 55 gallon drum in my loft that feeds to the sink below it. I fill it up using a funnel and the one gallon jugs. Mostly, I just use the water straight out of the jugs and save the water in the barrel for when I need running water, like to rinse my dishes. This system combined with 8 gallons of hot water on my wood stove is a comfortable system.
I keep the empty bottles on a rope wrapped though their handles. That way I just have to grab the rope and sling all the empties into my pickup.
In the winter I leave a couple of the bottles outside to freeze then put them in my cooler to keep my fresh food cool.
Every day you should…
When a nomad stops moving.
Sometimes when I’m sitting in my cabin, my mind turns to having a pet: a dog or a cat. I forget how much work and money a pet takes. I forget that a pet will tie me down. That I can forget about hiking or travel. And sometimes, when I’m snug in my cabin, I think why do I need to go anywhere? I could just stay here, build my cob house, plant a garden and have a pet. Sounds nice. But I know the need to roam will rear up in me after awhile and I will be antsy for adventure.
First snow.
Snow
The first snow of the winter is here. My wood is covered with tarps. It looks a little shabby, but it works. Some day I hope to build a wood shed. The weird thing is, I always seem to know when I should tarp my wood even without a weather forcast. I just get up one day, go out and throw tarps over everything. Then I think, “it must be going to get wet, Pat’s tarpping her wood.”