I’m tired. I’ll be glad when my wood is all in, my supplies all bought, and my time is all my own.  Nothing to do, all winter, but watch Netflix movies, surf the Internet, read, go for walks, live my life without interruptions; never, having to go to town.
Category: General
Good luck will rub off if you shake hands with me.
Afraid that I might not have enough firewood, I drove up to a part of my property that had been touched by a forest fire a couple of years back. The dead pine up there was in good shape and small enough that I wouldn’t have to chop it. I got covered in soot: my clothes, my shoes, my lungs. The back of my pickup was a big sooty mess. I don’t think I’ll go up there again, this year anyway.
I went to town and bought tarps to cover my wood piles because the weather forecast is calling for snow tomorrow.
Winter is here and I’m not ready.
It got down to 11 degrees ( -11 C) last night. Snow is forcast for lat
er this week.  I’m not ready for winter.
I’ve been trying to get a propane stove. The shop in town had one. I spent two days trying to find the hoses and regulator I’ll need for it. Finally I found a guy who would make me the correct hose but he wanted me to take a picture of the stove fitting. I went into the store to take the picture and they said that they had sold the stove. Maybe next year.
Every thing I try to do up here seems to take so much effort. It took me a year and over 1500 dollars to get a phone.
Hermit woman dies, but doesn’t notice.
There was a cabin in the north. In the cabin lived an old woman. She did not like to cut firewood. Instead of cutting her fire wood she watched Netflix movies and looked around the Internet. Winter came. It was bitterly cold. The woman ran out of wood. After suffering for a long time she froze to death. She didn’t realize she was dead. She just kept doing her chores and activities, day after day. Till one day someone entered her cabin, worried that they hadn’t heard from her in awhile, and was shocked to find her dead on her bed. They screamed. She looked down and for the first time noticed her dead body on the bed.
My hot water system.
My winter hot water system is the pot from the 8 gallon turkey fryer that I bought at Costco, for 99.00 dollars. It comes with a large colander. When there is snow I fill the colander with snow and drop it in to the partially filled pot and it instantly melts. It also stores heat from the stove. Whenever I need hot water, I dip it out with a small pan hanging nearby. The only drawback is it takes up most of the room on my stove. There is just enough room left to squeeze my backpacking pot in.
During the summer I use the propane burner that it comes with to heat my water.
Wake up!! It’s 37 degrees!!
I bought a digital thermometer that tells outside and inside temperature. It has this “featureâ€? where it sounds an alarm every time it gets to 37 degrees; I don’t know why I need to be woke up every time it’s 37 degrees. So in the middle of the night, I fumble with buttons trying to silence it, and I guess I turn more alarms on when I do, because then it will wake me up 5 or 6 more times. Sometimes I just grab it and sleep with it so I can find it when it rings, again. I’ve read the instructions but there doesn’t seem to be any way to turn the 37 degree alarm off. From the photo you can see that it’s already 27 degrees; maybe I will get to sleep through the night: if it doesn’t warm up.
Related post and how I solved this problem: It’s thirty seven degrees and all is quit.Â
Self reliant medicine.
I have an interest in wilderness medicine, so when I come across some remedy, I save it. Here are a few that I have found.
Snake bite
“I asked her to prepare a poultice of warm ashes and vinegar, and I applied it to my leg, which was already much swollen. The application gave me some relief, but the swelling did not abate. The dread of being disabled was greater than the physical pain I endured.
My friend asked an old woman, who doctored among the slaves, what was good for the bite of a snake or a lizard. She told her to steep a dozen coppers in vinegar, overnight, and apply the cankered vinegar to the inflamed part.”
“The poison of a snake is a powerful acid, and is counteracted by powerful alkalies, such as potash, ammonia, &c. The Indians are accustomed to apply wet ashes, or plunge the limb into strong lie. White men, employed to lay out railroads in snaky places, often carry ammonia with them as an antidote.�
(I would think baking soda would work, too, and it could also be used for brushing your teeth, bathing, and indigestion. I would also think that taking some antihistamines might be helpful.)
I copied the following from a book that I read on the Project Gutenberg DVD.
Appendicitis
“I have appendicitis; what shall I do to be saved?
_Don’t eat anything until well. Use a stomach tube and wash out the stomach; then use a fountain syringe and wash out the bowels; take a hot bath as hot as can be borne, and stay in the tub until all the pain is gone, or as long as possible; then go to bed, put ice on the bowels and keep it on until the temperature is reduced to 101 degree F. then apply hot applications or poultices and continue the poulticing until the bowels move, and the bowels will not move until the abscess breaks.Use an enema every night as a routine, and drink all the water desired, when there is no nausea.
Don’t manipulate the forming abscess, nor allow anyone else to do so.
The bowels will move in fourteen to twenty eight days from the beginning of the attack. Then the fast can be broken by giving a glass of hot milk, which is to be chewed well, or given in the form of junket; this is to be repeated three times a day for a week, or give the milk twice a day and a plate of mutton broth for the third meal. I do not give solid food because there is a large abscess cavity opening into the bowels, and if solid food is given before it has time to close, it is liable to find its way into this cavity, thereby preventing healing, and bringing on a chronic condition that will ultimately end in death. The less food taken for one week after the discharge takes place, the better. Any rational individual should see that withholding food is the proper treatment. Milk should be thoroughly mixed with saliva or not taken at all. Remember that if milk is not taken with great deliberation, and great care given to _thoroughly insalivate each sip, then it amounts to the same thing as eating solid food.”
Antibiotics
“Observations of cow tongues have recently revealed the presence of natural antibiotics on the tongue. The antibiotics are peptides that can prevent infection of cuts in the mouth by resident bacteria. Similar antibiotics are presumed to be produced by the human tongue as well.”
Honey is a natural antibiotic, as well. I read about a man that was treating people with infected wounds by dissolving sugar in honey and then packing it in to the wounds. The wounds were healing with very little scaring.
Two of my favorite books for learning self reliant medical care are: Where There Is No Doctor: A Village Health Care Handbook
Related Post: Free, do it yourself medicine booksÂ
Efficient or just lazy?
I got the wood all cut up. From the picture you can see that there is a large pile of wood very close to the cabin. Instead of hauling the wood over to the stacked wood, and neatly stacking it away from the house, I was thinking of just throwing a tarp over the pile and leaving it where it is: close to the cabin.
Wood pile.
This is my wood pile. A friend of mine said that I should have three times this much.
autumn collage
Bitter Eulogy.
The thing that to this day stands out as most remarkable is the smell: the awful gassy smell of decay. It would get in my nose and would stay long after spending only a few minutes; just enough time to pack his wood in and have the obligatory cup of tea. At first I thought it might be dead mice because sometimes I saw dead mice in traps. But then I started thinking it might be a propane leak; I told him to turn off the tank. Finally I got the odd idea that it was a body decaying under his house. Only I didn’t know who it could be, dead and stinking under his house.
I hadn’t lived in the area long; I had bought the property in the spring, gone away for all summer and came back in the autumn.
I tried to help the old man but I grew to resent him. He was always talking about suicide and playing all kinds of mind games with me to make me feel sorry for him and to feel guilty if I didn’t help him all the time. He lived in a stinking, dirty, rotten, cabin with an old, short, obese, sick, dog that would cough all the time and shit right out side the front door.
He wanted me to cut all his wood for him on my property and then haul it up to him and split it and stack it and then every day come up and pack it in to his stinking house. Now, I was at first willing to help the old sick man: until I grew to hate seeing him. His wood usage was insatiable, I realized he was using, and I lie not, about 3 cords a month! He wouldn’t ever put on a sweater; he just sat around in an 80 degree, leaky cabin all winter long, shoveling his neighbor’s wood into his stove.
He had a catheter with a bag full of pee strapped to his leg that he showed me more than once. Also he took out his partial, once, just to show me. When he would blow his nose he would talk about what was coming out of his nose. And often talked of constipation and how once a nurse had to stick a finger up him to help him shit. Sometimes, when I would come to pack his wood in he would come to the door in his underwear: briefs. God, I hated going over there.
And maybe I could have over looked everything if it wasn’t for that smell that would stay with me and make me feel like I had been permanently damaged by it. There was also the awful feeling, that a drowning man had grabbed onto me and was pulling me under.
Soon I got so I couldn’t stand to go up there. I would time my walks so that I could be pretty sure that I would not run into him on his frequent drives to the mailbox. Every time that he drove to the mailbox he would pick up my one piece of junk mail, put it into a plastic Wal-Mart sack and tie it to my gate. My gate was locked and I parked my vehicle right in front of it, the walk up to my cabin was long, steep and icy, so I was fairly sure he wouldn’t be coming up.
One day I saw him on the road. He said the doctor told him he had 6 months to a year to live. So he was going to have hydrogen peroxide injected in him to cure him of the cancer. You’d think that I would go up there and help him out….but I just couldn’t ….I just couldn’t stand to be around him.
Last time I saw him he had the catheter tube coming right out of the fly of his pants and the bag just hanging there. He said he was moving to Palm Springs.
The other day, I heard he died. I felt relief.
Inside sunset
