power

[dragonlady7]

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ok so last Sunday, right, I had hoped to spend the day doing construction on my tiny house, but I also knew BIL was probably exhausted and that’s his sole day of rest. So I said to him, you know, you probably want a day off? if you’re free I’ll absolutely be there for working, but if you are tired, Middle-Little could really use help, so I’d go there to help her instead. And he sort of sagged gratefully and said I’m fucking exhausted and while I do enjoy working on your cabin I really also want to spend time with my kid today, and I was like I had thought as much, so I went over to M-L’s.

Dude told me the rest of the story, though. When I got back that evening, BIL was like “oh I emailed your dude and he wrote back to me and we had a great conversation!” and then got his number to text him a follow-up question, and I was like sure okay?? why??

but as Dude tells the story,

So it’s a Sunday afternoon. I make myself a margarita and put it in the freezer, and then go over to Chipotle, and get myself a giant burrito, and then I come home, having spent the day cleaning off the sunporch. [ed. note: we have an enclosed porch, or “Florida Room”, which we use as an office/dining/living room in the spring/summer/fall, and it gets rather grungy; when I got home I was astonished to find it spotless and also with the furniture entirely rearranged.]

So I settle in on the back porch with my burrito and my margarita, and I take an edible too, for a really mellow evening, the weather’s gorgeous… and as I’m about to tuck into my burrito, this email arrives, from BIL, and it’s full of technical questions about how to get Internet connectivity out to your cabin.

I’m like fuck and am scrambling to compose a coherent reply before the edible hits, and I do an okay job, and then I’m high and he’s texting me follow-up questions, fucking hell

Well, I told him, BIL was impressed by how cogent your response was, so.

BIL to me was like “so you’re not going to want to be out there without electricity, at least for lights, and I’ve been trying to work out how best to do it–” and I’m like? ?? I lived in the yurt for three summers or so, the first one with zero power at all and the second two with a 100-foot extension cord I unspooled nightly and spooled back up in the morning, into which I knew I could not plug more than a couple of lightbulbs and a laptop charger and the laptop charger was on thin ice, and that was fine? We had several times discussed that if we did get power out there, it’d be fine to just run maybe two outlets in conduit along the wall, no big deal.

Even an Internet base station could be plugged in 100 feet away in the greenhouse, which does have power. Like, that’d be fine. Stick the thing in the greenhouse on a shelf. Maybe give me a power strip to leave my battery pack plugged in there, and I can run over and get it on my way to bed or whatever.

But my ideal is yeah to have a couple of power outlets– I’m getting a propane tank so I can run a heater and a stove burner off that, those are the big power drags. Other than that– okay I would like to be able to plug in a sewing machine and a serger but I won’t use them at the same time. And I’d like a light switch so I can walk in the door and turn it on. But I don’t need that– I got very conditioned by the yurt to always have a flashlight so that i could find my way around when I got there.

Anyway i thought it was sweet that he’s already so concerned with it. And he wants Dude to come next time I do, solely to help him set this up. I was trying to talk Dude into coming because older sister will be there and this’ll be one of the three times we’ll see them this year. Maybe this’ll be a he-comes-for-the-weekend-then-goes-back-on-the-train situation. Or maybe I’ll get to go back on the train, that’s always a treat.

I am considering taking the train more this year because gas is so expensive, but the problem with the train is that then I have to handle my luggage like a normal person, and I’m so spoiled by just throwing everything I own into my car. But I could just… not do that. if I have. A tiny house. Where I can leave my farm clothes. OMG. anyway.

also yeah i should do a chapter update today but I have a feeling it’ll be Monday, I’m so fucking useless. I hope my lifehack of traveling during the week worked though and I’ll be coherent over the weekend. We’ll see. I was a fucking zombie yesterday but like it doesn’t take a ton of brain cells to do a bunch of video transfers. (Your picture was not posted)