I Quit Facebook
By Cam Mather
Facebook sucks!
I don’t even know why I joined, but after being on it for a while, I think it really bites.
Most of all, I’m creeped out by all the data Facebook keeps about me. I have no doubt there are numerous other ways I’m being tracked on the web, but it burns my butt knowing that Mark Zuckerberg is making money off me. Heaven knows it’s the only way the site ever will make money and I think people who bought shares in it are destined to take a huge hit when everyone wakes up to the mass delusional thinking that Facebook has any value.
It’s free to join. A while ago I wrote a blog about how I didn’t understand how it was surviving since it had no advertising. Michelle eventually corrected me, but that just shows you how effective Facebook advertising is. I didn’t even know it existed and apparently paid no attention to it. From time to time Zuckerberg has come up with a way for Facebook to make money, but the Facebook users, WHO USE IT FOR FREE, don’t like his ideas. So they rise up in great protest and he backs off. Great business model. Mark has a backbone like a jellyfish. Come up with a way to make money, then find that the people you give the service to, FOR FREE, don’t like it. Then put your tail between your legs and skedaddle home.
I saw the movie “The Social Network” and like any work of interpretation like this I’m sure there are many sides to this story. But the one thing I got out of it is that I don’t like Mark Zuckerberg. I didn’t like the way he took someone else’s idea, and I didn’t like the way he treated his friends. Many geniuses are social misfits and dickheads. Perhaps he’s a genius. Or just a jerk that got lucky. Either way, I’m out.
I don’t use Facebook because I don’t trust it. I’m always paranoid I’m going to make some comment on someone’s Facebook page and it’s going to go viral and millions of people will take it the wrong way. I write a blog that gets reposted all the time, but Facebook makes me nervous. Who’s reading that innocent comment I just made? And then they changed my profile page to Timeline and it sucks. I kept reading other people’s negative comments that Timeline, and they were right.
So I’ll just leave it to Google and Amazon to be creepy and track my movements on the web.
Facebook records over 47 categories of data on each user. How they could possibly get that much from how little I’ve used it is beyond me, but that’s the amount. This can be up to 1,000 pages of information printed out per person.
Facebook stores 100 petabytes of people’s photos and videos. For free. Not mega, giga or tera, but 100 Petabytes. They have to buy servers to do that. And they have to buy huge amounts of electricity to keep those servers running and keep them cool. And yet, they don’t charge for their services. They just keep hoping they can figure out a way to make money. Buy servers, buy electricity, and then give the service away.
And like the tech bubble when people bought Nortel stock at $124/share and watched it drop in value to pennies, people lined up to buy shares in Facebook. And like Nortel investors, I think they’ll be awfully disappointed. Because Facebook doesn’t really have a sound model for making money and they don’t make anything. They just buy stuff and give it away for free. A company like Apple with a market valuation of $500 or $600 billion actually makes stuff. They make real stuff and they put it in boxes and they sell it. And they make lots of money doing that. That’s a sound business concept. It’s like Warren Buffet buying Dairy Queen. He likes ice cream, other people like to buy it, and it’s a simple concept.
This Facebook vaporware is a grand illusion and the emperor has no clothes. No clothes and no idea to how to make money.
To those of you who read this blog and have become my “Friends” on Facebook, please don’t take it personally. I appreciate you reading the blog. I love you commenting on the blog. I often respond to questions and comments. And blog readers come up with some of our best ideas for blog topics. Thank you.
I convinced Michelle to disable my Facebook account for me, which is only fair since she’s the one who signed me up in the first place. I’ve found a couple of “girl” friends from high school, and linked up with Barry Silverstone who produced the documentary “The End of Suburbia” and I’ve enjoyed following the progress of his house being built on Facebook. But alas, now I will have to email Barry or phone him to find out what he’s up to. Imagine that? Speaking to someone. One day after I presented the Keynote Address at a sustainability symposium in Belleville, Michelle and I went out to dinner with Barry. And we chatted. And we got caught up on what was happening in each other’s lives. Sitting down with someone … Speaking to him or her! The wonders never cease.
I should patent this idea and trademark it and go public with it!
DVDs Still Work for Me
By Cam Mather
I live near the Village of Tamworth, which is home to the greatest video establishment on the planet, “Village Video.” Tim Kidd is the owner of Village Video. I have blogged about Tim before because he is an integral part of our community. He is a volunteer firefighter. This is very important in a small town. Probably THE most important job. After renting videos.
But for me, Tim is awesome because I rent movies from him. Good movies. Great movies. DVDs that work, when I want them to!
This sounds very simple, but I’m finding that technology makes something as simple as watching a movie, which I started doing 25 years ago on a VHS machine, increasingly complex and problematic. The quality of those movies 25 years ago was abysmal, but at least they worked most of the time.
A while ago when we upgraded our satellite TV to high definition, our provider “Shaw” gave us 6 free Pay-Per-View-Movies. It sounded great! Six free movies! What an unmitigated disaster that was! We don’t have our satellite receiver tied into our phone line (because I have enough other challenges with our phone living off-grid) so I had to order the movies over the phone. They charged us $1 for this, so suddenly there was a cost involved with our “free” movies. I had to go through about 57 layers of menus until I could finally start selecting my movie. Eventually when it finally seemed ready to go, the automated voice would say “Please hold while we confirm this order…” and then 10 seconds later another message would come on suggesting that I sign up for the latest “Ultimate Gladiator Fight To the Death Event” for some outrageous price. At that point I assumed that I had successfully ordered a movie.
On two occasions we sat down in front of the TV at their selected time to watch our movie. And then 5 minutes into it, IT STOPPED! One Friday night we had actually made our pizza early so we’d be ready at 5:30 when THEY decided to start the movie. And it stopped! You know those video clips you’ve seen where someone gets pissed off at the TV and they blast it with a shotgun? I was so ticked off I was tempted to do that!
So Pay-Per-View doesn’t work for us. Besides the fact that the ordering system is complicated, time-consuming and ultimately didn’t work anyway, I don’t like being told what time I can watch a movie. And I don’t like it when it stops just after it has started. We managed to watch a couple of “freebies” but we gave up on it pretty quickly. It sucked!
When we rent a video from Tim, we start it when we want. We can stop it to make dinner or to take a break. And hey, if it’s great, we can even watch it twice! He charges the same price regardless.
People keep talking about Netflix and all these great on-line movie systems. Friends of ours were using it and discovered that from time to time the movie would stop and they would get a “Buffering” error as the internet tried to get caught up to the movie. That’s annoying. Sometimes the movie just never started again. That’s infuriating. I’ve read that some internet providers are actually restricting bandwidth to cause this because they can’t keep up.
Whenever we get together with friends, we often exchange lists of what movies we’ve seen lately, what we recommend and what we would avoid. We find that the friends who use Netflix for their movie viewing never seem to have seen the latest movies. Netflix doesn’t seem to have anything current. They have to wait for a few years I guess until it’s cheaper. You know, wait a few years until you have completely forgotten that you wanted to see it or what it was about.
The beauty of a DVD is that you can stop it as often as you want. On a Friday night, which is our usual movie night around here, we sometimes stop a movie 7 or 8 times. To get another slice of pizza. To get more Dr. Pepper. To get dessert. To have a pee because I drank too much Dr. Pepper. To let the cats in. To close up the chicken coop. To go out and look at the helicopter flying over our house… Being able to start a movie whenever I want, and stop it whenever I want, is a really nice thing. All this new technology that allegedly makes everything seem so great can sometimes be a huge step backwards.
Macleans Magazine this week (http://www2.macleans.ca/2012/05/09/the-dvd-is-hardly-dying/) has an article called “The DVD is Hardly Dying” about how DVD rentals should be over now, but they’re not. Because internet streaming isn’t all that great. And we all know, if we all start watching all our movies on line, the whole big internet is going to just give up and stop working.
There’s a great little video store in Kingston called “Classic Video” which has a huge collection of old DVDs including TV series and documentaries. But the last time we rented some, a lot of the DVDs didn’t work properly. They were too old. You know how sometimes when you take a DVD out of the player and try to put it back into the case you end up dropping it? Well, it turns out that after 7 years of this type of mishandling, DVDs don’t work very well. I rented a DVD called “Man on a Wire” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdNXcAOaFog) about a crazy Frenchman who snuck into the World Trade Towers shortly after they were built and used a bow and arrow to shoot a wire from one building to the other, pulled the wire across and then walked back and forth across that wire. How cool is that? Well, it took an hour and 15 minutes to show all of the background, working up to his walk across the wires, and at that point the DVD packed it in. No really, the only part I really wanted to watch was him walking back and forth and lying down on this wire, 275 stories over Manhattan, but alas, this was not to be. Where did I put the shotgun again?
Which brings me back to my good friend Tim. Tim rents DVDs that work. When I want them to. No bandwidth required. No constant dread of them stopping at a crucial moment. You can stop them when you need to go pee. And you can watch the extra materials, which are kind of lame on some DVDs, but are as good as the actual movie on others. On one of the “Bourne” movies, (Bourne Ultimatum I think) they showed how they filmed Matt Damon jumping from the roof of one building across a street and into glass patio doors in the apartment on the far side of the street. The camera basically followed him right across. It was the coolest thing EVER! It took them two days to set up the shot. I watched it over and over again! Try that with Netflix. Oh wait, you never get that extra stuff… on the movie… that came out 4 years ago… that you streamed because you vaguely remember being faintly interested in it, 4 years ago.
Nope, Tim’s my man. Tim gets all my entertainment dollars. Oh, and if you ever plow your car into one of the rock cuts around here, Tim will probably be one of the emergency responders who show up to help you!
The Greenhouse Dream Fulfilled
By Cam Mather
As soon as I discovered the old barn foundation on our property 14 years ago, I fantasized about turning it into a garden. At the time the foundation was in the middle of a forest. And it had a small forest growing inside of it.
Over the years I took down the large trees around it and used them for firewood. Then I had to tackle the inside. The door openings were too narrow to allow any power equipment in, so I just hacked everything out with shovels and axes. It was a jungle of sumac and other small trees, vines and every other kind of stubborn, deep-rooted native plant. Even though it had a concrete floor, the plants had found many places to get their roots through that concrete, and they weren’t going to go quietly into the night. It’s the kind of activity that has allowed me to eat excessive amounts of Black Forest cake, guilt-free.
As I cleaned it up I scraped up the soil and made several small raised beds. Our heat loving plants do really well planted in the barn foundation since the thermal mass of the concrete absorbs the heat of the sun during the day and then radiates heat at night, especially early in the season when we still have cold nights.
But ultimately I wanted to use part of the barn foundation for a greenhouse. The logical spot was against the north wall, which gets the most sun. The problem was that this wall has 3 window openings where the heat would have escaped. Also, the wall was cracked and listing. Many years ago when the barn was built the concrete walls were just placed in the sandy soil and over the decades they have shifted. For years I contemplated how to block those windows off. Eventually I bought a bag of mortar and learned how to cement rocks into a window. On top of one of the windows there was a large piece of concrete that had broken free and was hanging precariously, held up by the wooden frame. Eventually I borrowed Ken’s tractor and used it to move the slab into a reasonable position and mortared in more rocks.
So after 14 years of dreaming and scrounging any old storm window or patio door that I could beg, borrow or steal from the dump, this was the year. My friend Hans provided me with some glass that he had removed from a house. When he delivered the glass and I shared my greenhouse plans with him, he said “Cam, do me one favor, take some time and draw this out.” Hans doesn’t know how I work. Hans is a talented architect with a fancy drafting table. I use the “hack things together” strategy to plan my projects. My neighbor Ken also frowns on this method of project planning. Alas, I am 52 and not easily taught new tricks.
My greenhouse project is coming together quite well. I have been salvaging glass for years. It’s amazing how much of it people throw away. The roof of the greenhouse is made of aluminum storm windows. The front is made up of patio doors. So far, my only costs have been the square cedar beams that I had Gary Clarke make for me for $40 with cedar from his property. And $10 in screws.
It’s not a true greenhouse in the sense that I won’t be able to use it for 12 months of the year. I guess you could almost call it a big cold frame. But I’m still over the moon about this greenhouse. Unlike a plastic greenhouse this has this big mass of concrete behind it to retain heat. I’ll be able to put my peppers and eggplants into the soil a few weeks early inside the greenhouse. One of the challenges here in our growing zone is that we often get a late frost. One year we had a frost in early June. There’s nothing worse than planting your peppers and eggplant and tomatoes late in May and then having them nipped by frost. And at the end of the growing season, we will often have a frosty night or two and then another 4 weeks of reasonable weather without frost. So I’m pretty pumped about this greenhouse allowing me to keep supplying members of our CSA with stuff later than I’ve been able to in the past.
It’s not a huge greenhouse. I’ll only be able to fit about two rows of plants in it. And it’s not really airtight. There are some gaps where the doors and windows meet. I’ll try and fill them a bit but I’m not going to obsess about it. As long as it protects my plants from frost and cool nights I’ll be happy. The windows actually leak, which isn’t too bad because when it rains it’s a bit like a drip irrigation system in a few places.
I have this bad habit when I work on projects like this to spend way too much time looking at them. Admiring them. And why not? Come on, it’s a greenhouse… for $50! And with the stone filled windows and cedar beams, it looks like it should be in one of those fancy century farmhouse magazines. And I could get a really trendy haircut and stand beside it in my khaki’s and leather jacket.
Actually I don’t own either of those things. But now I have a greenhouse that I’m thrilled about. Not only because it will help me to provide CSA members with better produce, but because I built it, and I built it almost for free. And I used what materials I had on the property like rock and soil and a barn foundation. And I used windows and patio doors that were destined for the landfill. There’s just something so cool about taking a product that one person sees as garbage and coming up with a functional way to get more life out of it.
I’ll admit it; I have been spending just a bit too much time sitting in my greenhouse. It’s a pretty special place. Hans and Ken will point out that things don’t line up. I’m good with that. My excuse will be that the concrete wall behind it is split in two and going in two different directions. Oh, and because I didn’t sketch it out properly before I started. I measure once and cut twice. Actually sometimes I cut three and four times, sort of using successive approximations until I get it the way I want it. I used a tape measure and a level, but ultimately, I just kind of hacked it together. And I felt like I was taking crack cocaine the whole time! I was finally building my greenhouse!
Not to brag too much, it’s the finest, most awesome greenhouse on the planet! Probably the world! I built that!
* * * * * * *
If you are planning on doing some gardening this year, Cam’s book “The All You Can Eat Gardening Handbook” would be a great resource! Order it on our website http://aztext.com/ or from any bookseller.
Who Let the Dogs Out?
By Cam Mather
A dog attacked me last week, and well, it was a pretty awesome day! I’m sure it was the adrenaline but it’s amazing what a buzz you get after fighting off a dog that is trying to kill you.
I was picking up a load of straw from a neighbor who is trying to clean out his barn. I had met his dogs before and they’ve always been well behaved. I knocked at the door to thank him for the straw and I heard his dogs barking. He came to the screen door and tried to hold them in but they seemed pretty anxious to come out and see me so he let them out.
I am not afraid of dogs. I like dogs. I’ve often shared stories about my own dog, Morgan, in this blog. So when they bounded at me I was prepared for the enthusiasm. But when I realized that one of them had clamped onto my arm and my hand was going numb, I realized that this was not just enthusiasm. This dog really wanted to do me in. As I was beating it off of me I tripped. They’re pretty big dogs and the ground was wet and I was wearing work boots with no treads left on them and there were piles of construction debris that I fell in to. By the time that I hit the ground, one of them had chomped onto my chest under my armpit. These clearly were not love nips. It turned out that it was the large Lab who was trying to do me in. The Bulldog was kind of freaked out by the whole thing a seemed to be trying to stop the Lab, which just made it harder for me to stand up amidst the scuffle. But the growling noises were coming from a dog clearly bent on destruction.
So as loathe as I am to admit it, I retreated to the house. I wanted to take them on, but I felt it was inappropriate to start beating on my neighbor’s dogs. I figured that my choices were fight or flight, and since there were two of them, I decided on flight, for the first round.
I spend a lot of time in my woods, far from another human being and our woods are full of coyotes and wolves. Some of the coyotes have mated with wolves so they’re pretty big. I’ve given some thought as to how to deal with a wolf chomping on my arm. I had pretty much decided I was simply going to free my arm and then grab the wolf by the throat and strangle it. If it’s him or me, he’s going to lose. This time the door was close at hand and seemed like the path of least resistance.
My wrist was fairly chewed up and kind of tingly afterwards, and he took some major chunks out of my chest near my armpit. My flannel shirt was all ripped and bloodied. How manly is that!
Normally I would have had a t-shirt underneath my flannel shirt, which might have cut down on some of the damage, but loading the straw was a hot job and so I had chosen to go without that extra layer.
The owner of the dog was devastated by the whole thing and was very apologetic. His dog had no history of aggressiveness but I have heard of many similar incidents, and so I wasn’t that surprised.
So why did the dog attack me?
My first theory is that I hadn’t shaved and was wearing some pretty manly work clothes so the dog clearly perceived me as a threat. I have that tough rugged look that makes other guys take a step back when I walk by. I’m sure even Mike Tyson would step back and say “How are you today Mr. Mather?” as I walk by.
My second theory is that the dogs didn’t like my smell. I had spent the entire previous day working hard and had spent some time getting a load of manure from a place where there was a female dog. This dog kept running her nose all over my work clothes. Plus, I hadn’t showered and so after loading the truck and trailer with straw, I was pretty rank. I grew up watching Looney Tunes cartoons. So I’m thinking the dog looked at me and just saw a big porterhouse steak. Kind of served me right, I guess. Note to self; change your work clothes more regularly.
Michelle convinced me to go to the doctors to get the gashes under my arm checked out. There was talk of stitches but my doctor decided it was best to let them air out and drain. I had to be convinced to get a tetanus shot which I haven’t had since I was a kid. I argued that it wasn’t necessary since I’ve been digging around in the dirt cutting myself on sharp objects for decades and hadn’t had any problems. Eventually I relented. And yes, I mostly fought it because I hate needles. I would rather fight a dog than get a needle but it turned out that neither was really that bad.
It was really weird but on the drive down to the doctor’s office, all of these dogs kept looking at me funny. A Saint Bernard (i.e. “Cujo”) that had been sleeping on a porch jumped up and leered at me as I drove by. A little further along a puppy stood in the middle of the road barking until I stopped. I kid you not. It was tiny. It finally sauntered away. It was like when one dog gets a piece of you they put out this radar thing and the rest of the dogs just know “Hey, that’s the guy we should try and take out. He’s vulnerable.”
So what did I take from all of this?
#1 The last time we renewed our home insurance our agent told us that one of the most common incidents that result in claims is for dog bites. That seemed weird to me at the time. Now I get it.
#2 That my wife is stoic in the face of health issues. She went through breast cancer, biopsies, surgery, poking, prodding, radiation and she never once said a thing. Never winced. Never complained. Ever. When she suggested that I should get a tetanus shot she had to drag me out of the corner where I had curled up into the fetal position sobbing uncontrollably.
#3 I’m going to take my oldest, bulkiest winter coat, cut off the sleeves and wear these when I approach a house with a dog. “George, there’s some guy at the door with leg warmers on his arms. Should we call the police?”
#4 That I need to practice having acts of violence being perpetrated on me. Cops who spend their days breaking up bar fights are used to this stuff, but I’m not. I live in the woods, miles from humanity. I have no recent experience in this area. I got punched in the face as a kid, but not recently. I think criminals get the upper hand in most situations because of the element of surprise. I’m going to hire a personal manservant like “Cato” like in the Pink Panther movies who was instructed to attack Inspector Closeau unexpectedly from time to time. I need practice with this element of surprise and shock so I’m not immobilized when things happen.
#5 Next time a dog decides he wants a piece of me, I’m going to open a can of whoop-ass on him, and have him running for cover before he knows what’s hit him. Come on wolves, bring it on! You do NOT scare me now.
Then I’m going to join a “Fight Club.”
Our dog “Morgan”
The Extreme Sport of Running a CSA
By Cam Mather
Over the years I have been reading about CSAs. “Community Supported Agriculture” or CSAs deliver a basket of produce to people once a week during the growing season, so the members share in the harvest. They take the ups with the downs.
Now as I reach back into the recesses of my brain, and think of what I’ve read about CSAs and the people who run them, I remember that every CSA I’ve ever heard about has been run by young people. They are generally about 25 years old and what they lack in growing experience they make up for in enthusiasm and youthful energy. Many of the CSAs have been run by groups of people, growing together. This means there are many hands to share the work. I have this image of a photo of a CSA with 4 principal owners; 2 young men, 2 young women, with lots of piercings, dreadlocks, and those cool multicolored hats like you see in Bogota.
Which brings me to the idea of me starting a CSA at the ripe old age of 52. No really, what am I thinking? I don’t even own a tractor. While Michelle is always an integral part of everything we do, she is still focused on running Aztext Press, shipping books, doing web work (i.e. she posts all this stuff) etc., so the majority of the gardening responsibility falls on me. I’ve always been the vegetable gardener, with Michelle focusing on flowers.
So now I’ve committed to growing enough food to make 12 local families happy. I’ve grown food for 35 years, but this will be the first year when there really is pressure. I’ve always been marvelously talented at giving my produce away for free. It’s a skill I have. And last year after a morning selling at our stand in town, I often ran around delivering the leftovers to our friends, for free. Nothing lost other than the time I’d invested. As it was, the stand went very well which inspired me to go to the CSA format this year.
Cam’s Award Winning Veggies
But really, it’s quite terrifying. I’ve always experienced pressure in earning an income, but this year is different. It’s personal. These are people I know. They are friends. And neighbors. And I do NOT want them pissed off at me.
I think of what many 50-year-olds do during their mid-life crisis. Many buy a motorcycle and pretend they are free spirits, but 2 (or 3) wheels simply don’t fool anyone. Neither does the mandatory black leather gear and grey goatee. Sorry. You aren’t a member of a biker gang; you’re just a bunch of lawyers and accountants out for cheeseburgers on bikes that get the same gas mileage as my Honda Civic.
Others do the rock-climbing thing. But more often the rock wall kind of thing. Usually those rock-climbing walls are made out of fake rock, like something at a theme park. Oh, and sometimes the fake rock walls are on a Disney Cruise. Oh, and there’s always a safety rope in case you fall.
Nope, if you want to try something really extreme, try running the marathon of an organic CSA for 5 or 6 months of the year. No safety rope. No automobile association for when the bike stops. Just you and an acre of soil and some seeds.
I get a little bit stressed out every spring. I never seem to get stuff in to the ground early enough. I always get distracted on some other project that keeps me out of the garden when I should be in it. Some years I was distracted putting up a wind turbine or a solar tracker, and some years it’s garden related. Making gardens bigger. Building cribs to get the rain barrels up higher. This year I’ve been building a greenhouse. And making gardens bigger. And spreading hay for mulch. And planting 20 new high-bush blueberry bushes that won’t be producing for years. And 120 new asparagus roots that won’t be ready for a few years. And…
So now I’m finally trying to focus on getting seeds in the ground. The bizarre warm weather that we experienced in March had most gardeners thinking it was time to pull the trigger, but last week we got 3 nights of -5°C temperatures, which nipped a lot of stuff that is usually pretty frost hardy.
I’m now focused on planting every day. I’ve planted a whack of onions in an area of the garden that I call “The Holland Marsh.” The real “Holland Marsh” is a boggy area north of Toronto that Dutch farmers drained decades ago. It has some of the darkest, richest-looking soil you’ll see anywhere. They grow a variety of things like carrots and onions there. At certain times of the year, as you drive past the Holland Marsh on Hwy. 400, the aroma of onions in the air is overpowering. My “Holland Marsh” is near my dug well where the concrete cattle trough is. Many cows spent a lot of time there many decades ago and left behind some pretty awesome soil.
I’ve put in a crazy number of peas, and since I put up chicken wire fences for them to climb on, it has been way more work than usual. I’ve started putting in lettuce and spinach too, always in much larger quantities than ever before.
When I look at how large the gardens are and how much is still left to be planted, I freak out. How am I going to plant this much stuff? And water it? And weed it? Really, what was I thinking? Where are all the helpers that most CSAs have? Well, I guess that’s my fault because I don’t play well with others. I like to stick to myself and while our experiment with having WWOOFers last summer was great, I’m simply not that sociable to want to have volunteer helpers living here with me all summer.
It’s my own fault. I got myself into this situation and I’ll get myself out. It’s been a theme since we moved off grid. And I’m already visualizing delivering that final box of veggies next fall. And I’m pretty confident that somehow, people will feel they got good value, and I’ll have a major buzz on that will last the winter. Can’t get that on a Harley.
Oh listen, I hear the marathon starters’ gun about to go off. Tighten up that bungee rope around my feet. I’m about to jump off the bridge into the abyss. Look out below!
Editor’s Note: If you are looking for the best gardening book, check out Cam’s “All You Can Eat Gardening Handbook.” Available at our website www.aztext.com or through any bookseller.
And Then I Put a New Engine In It….
By Cam Mather
I’ve always wanted to be one of those “guys” that just “swaps” out an engine when it’s giving him trouble. Kind of like the NASCAR pit crews after a big wreck of a crash, who are able to rebuild the car in minutes and get it back on the track after only missing 2 laps. But alas, I am an electronic publisher with no real skills in this area. How does one become one of “those guys” with real skills?
Well I had no such skills, but moving off the grid and meeting a great coach like my neighbor Ken has given me a newfound confidence to try things I’d never have tried before. Building walls, putting in a new bathroom upstairs, putting up a wind turbine…
Last year I bought a new rototiller because my old one was giving up the ghost. I kept the old one for back up and it kept coughing and sputtering along. It’s handy for me to have a second rototiller because the berry gardens are a long way from the main garden, so it’s nice to leave a tiller over there and not have to drag the machine that far. One thing technology has taught me as well, is that a backup is always a good idea.
The old tiller was a Troybuilt, made in Troy, New York. My mom bought it secondhand 15 years ago and had it tuned up. She even managed to get the manual with it. Judging by the black and white photos of guys with long sideburns and narrow ties in the manual, it was made in the late sixties or early seventies. So it didn’t owe me anything. I got my money’s worth from it. Everything worked fairly well except for the motor.
Canada has a chain of discount hardware stores called “Princess Auto.” They sell stuff, cheaply. Amazingly cheaply. One of the reasons that so many Canadians have such well-stocked garages is because of Princess Auto. Michelle won’t even go into a Princess Auto store because the smell of new rubber tires and other caustic odors grosses her out, but I kind of like it. It’s the smell of things being accomplished in shops.
Recently they had a 6.5 Hp horizontal shaft motor on sale for $120. It was a savings of $120 off the regular retail price, which is about 1/3 of what you’d pay for a new Honda engine. And yes, it’s not a Honda engine, but if it works… even for a while, is it worth the gamble? I really like having a back up plan, and a back up rototiller has taken on new importance with us running a CSA and growing produce for 12 families this summer.
So I took a shot and bought a motor. I decided that for $120 I’d risk it, and it didn’t fit, I’d leave it in Ken’s garage because sooner or later he’d find a use for it.
A couple of days ago I got out all my tools and took the old engine off. I’m good at that. In fact in Grade 9 Autoshop class I was excellent at completely dismantling our Briggs and Stratton lawn mower motor. But when it came to getting it back together… not so good. “Mr. Smith, it’s okay to have parts left over, right?”
I lucked out and the new engine fit the mounts perfectly. I took the pulley of the old crank shaft and put it on the new one, got the belt repositioned, tightened everything up and lo and behold, it worked! It’s like a new rototiller only this one doesn’t belch out all that blue smoke when the going gets tough. Yes Greenpeace, you can revoke my membership now.
My new Troybuilt rototiller I bought last year (with a Chinese-made engine) cost me about $900. My pretty good back up rototiller cost me $120, less the amortization on the tools I used to replace it.
I believe capitalism is ultimately responsible for the destruction of the planet we are experiencing right now. It’s this relentless march towards making more stuff, cheaper, that’s going to do us in. And while most of the time I try to remove myself from the lemming-like plunge off the consumer cliff, I joined the hoards this time and bought a new engine. A gasoline-powered one at that. I can rationalize it ‘til the cows come home (and since we don’t have cows this could be a while) since I’ll be using it to grow food, local food, that will reduce the carbon footprint of food brought from the southern U.S., blah blah blah) but I’m part of the consumer machine regardless.
Which brings me to the miracle of the whole episode, which is how do you make a motor like this and sell it for $120? The mind boggles! Look at this motor! It’s has steel that took energy to make, and to reheat and form into the engine block, and it has steel for crank shafts and dozens of other parts, and it has plastic that was oil and it has new paint made from petroleum. And someone had to design it all, very precisely, and ship all the parts from different places. And people had to put it all together, and test it. Oh, then they had to buy a cardboard box made from trees, and this box even had two chunks of Styrofoam in it that came from oil. For $120? How is this possible?
When I do this kind of consumer analysis I always think about the documentary movie called “Manufactured Landscapes,” much of which was filmed in Chinese factories. You see the people lining up in the morning from massive dormitories before work, and then the mindless, repetitive assembly work taking place on miles of workbenches. The scale boggles the mind. I’d last 3 days before I threw myself off a building.
And yet here I am with my new motor. Well to my fellow homo sapiens that made this marvelous machine I say “thank you.” I appreciate your hard work. I appreciate your craftsmanship and your efforts at building such a machine that will my life easier. I will use it wisely to try to ultimately grow enough food that many of us will live a little lighter on the planet.
I’m not sure what else to say. Sometimes we are caught up in a machine and a force that is far greater than us. I try to resist but often I’m just dragged along behind it like everyone else. The irresistible force paradox asks “What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?” If capitalism and consumerism is an unstoppable force, apparently I am not the immovable object I like to think I am!
Cam’s Note for Tim at the Video Store: Yes Tim, I am wearing that sweatshirt formerly owned by my mother-in-law with the pastel woodland scene on it! But I can wear stuff like this ‘cuz I can swap a motor out!
When Baseball Ruled My Life
By Cam Mather
I recently watched the movie “Moneyball” and I thought it was a great movie. I really like Brad Pitt. I think he’s underrated as an actor because he’s so darn good looking. Sometimes we assume that good-looking people aren’t as intelligent or as talented as people who are less attractive, which is something I can empathize with… …. I’m just kidding, honestly.
If you haven’t seen Moneyball yet, it’s about the Oakland A’s general manager’s attempt to put together a baseball club on a budget. I have a weird relationship with baseball. For the last 14 years since moving to the woods I have had absolutely nothing to with it. I haven’t watched a single game. I haven’t even watched a sportscaster reporting on the scores.
But 20 years ago it ruled my life. I started Aztext Electronic Publishing with my cousin Dave who was more interested in sports than I was. We were approached by a customer about running a computerized “fantasy baseball” business. He had entered into an agreement with a company in California for the Canadian rights to their game. People had been running fantasy leagues for decades but they had been very basic. “Scoresheet Baseball” was much more sophisticated. Customers joined in leagues and held a draft, where they picked their dream lineup from players in the major leagues. Each week they sent us their batting and pitching lineup. And each week we downloaded the stats from Major League Baseball and the computer “played” games for them. The computer program looked at each batter and pitcher lineup, and based on their actual performance that week in the big leagues, determined the likely outcome of the match up.
Customers loved it. When we first began running it, Dave was able to complete the work involved in a few hours. But as more players joined it became more and more work. Dave eventually left Aztext to pursue other opportunities, which left me running Scoresheet Baseball on my own. Well, not exactly on my own since I often convinced Michelle to help me to input the lineups that we received each week from the players.
Then on Monday nights I would download the stats and run the games. This was often problematic with lots of errors and stress. Once the games were finished I had to print out the results for each customer. Each set of results was about 7 pages long. We printed these on a dot matrix printer. You might not remember dot matrix printers, but they were loud and they used a “tractor feed ” and continuous feed paper. Tractor-feed printers have two sprocketed wheels on either side of the printer that fit into holes in the paper. As the wheels revolve, the paper is pulled through the printer. In other words, they often got jammed!
Eventually we needed to have two printers going for 18 hours straight, which meant that they had to print all night. If I got the games printing by 10 or 11 pm I was lucky. At first I was running the business from an office 10 minutes from home and so I often had to get up in the middle of the night to drive in and check the printing. Too often I would discover that the paper had jammed, or run out, and I couldn’t afford to lose too many hours of downtime because our customers were so crazy for their results that we’d hear about it if they received their printouts later than usual. Once all the games were printed we then had to separate the results into a report for each player, tear off the tractor feed strips from each side, fold them and put them into an envelope. We also had to stick an address label on the envelope and run them through a mailing machine. I’d have several boxes of these envelopes to take to the post office where I would try to get them out in Tuesday’s mail.
Like so many things I do it was a stupid amount of work, and an enormous amount of stress. But I continued to convince myself that someday there’d be a big payday with this concept. We added a fantasy football game and a hockey game to try and increase revenue but eventually I realized that it was way too much work for the payback and so I sold it back to our partner for a ridiculously small amount of money, given the amount of work that I had put into it.
Eventually I had moved the business back into the house and I can still remember laying in bed on Monday nights only half asleep so that I’d be able to hear when one of the printers firing away in the basement had stopped. Business people do some pretty stupid things sometimes with the hope of a payback down the road.
I think this is why my lack of interest in baseball has become so complete. I was traumatized by the whole experience. It seemed great when I was involved in it. We even went to a couple of major league games. As I recall we had great seats right beside the field for a Toronto Blue Jays/Kansas City Royals game and when a foul ball rolled right by us my 7’8” cousin leaned over the boards and grabbed it. Of course as soon as he grabbed it we were mortified thinking maybe it wasn’t foul.
The compelling thing about “Moneyball” is that the character played by Brad Pitt decides to try a new approach to managing the Oakland A’s on their limited budget. He is mocked and criticized but he doesn’t back down. His job is on the line but he stays committed. As he says to his Assistant Manager, they’re “all in”.
It seems to be the way my life has worked out. While running Scoresheet it dominated my life. When we moved off the grid, there was no going half way. There was no electricity grid to fall back on if things didn’t work out. Sink or swim, it’s amazing what you’re capable of when you remove the safety net.
And now at 52 I’m gearing up to run a CSA and supply a dozen local families with produce from my garden this summer. It’s not like selling vegetables at a stand in town. Last summer, if people didn’t buy my stuff I just took it home, no harm done. With a CSA there are expectations. It’s quite terrifying actually. But after dealing with civil servants recently I’ve seen what happens when there is a disincentive to accomplish anything. Stuff just doesn’t get done. If there’s a fallback position, it’s way too easy to bail. When you’re “all in” success is the only option.
If I were smart I’d just keep doing electronic publishing, putting together corporate reports and doing company’s websites. I can do that. I have those skills. And working on my computer provides a nice break from the heat of the day. But the real challenge lies out in the garden. There’s never a dull moment at Sunflower Farm!
For more information about our CSA this summer, please visit; www.sunflowerfarm.ca
Putting Down Roots With a Sign
By Cam Mather
Michelle and I spent about five years looking for our place in the country. In our book, “Little House Off The Grid,” we share our experiences looking for our place and we also describe the many “coincidences” that seemed to confirm that we were meant to find this place and live here.
For a number of years after moving here I still drove back to Burlington (our previous home) periodically to see our customers. The days when I had to head back were depressing, stressful days, but as we all know, it’s just one of those things you do to earn some money. Michelle went back a couple of times a year to visit family and friends and she says that very shortly after moving to our place in the country it started to feel like “home” and it didn’t take long before the city felt foreign and unwelcoming. It wasn’t that easy for me because I still had to make those periodic trips back to suburbia from whence I came.
Over time the trips became fewer with more time in between them and when we finally decided to go full time publishing books, it finally sunk in for me, this place was my final destination. Every year we’ve done more work and put more of our imprint on the place. Michelle loves sunflowers and we call our place “Sunflower Farm.” We’re not the only Sunflower Farm out there. But that’s okay. It seemed like a natural fit for an off grid house that is “sun powered.” And sunflowers actually move during the course of the day to follow the sun, just like our solar trackers. (Michelle wrote about that here.)
We recently decided that it was time to put up a sign at Sunflower Farm. A sign that says, “We’re here, this is our place.” We mentioned our plans for a sign to our friend Heidi and she volunteered some letters that she had. So she brought over the letters and I got a big piece of cardboard and scoped out the design. I was fine with laying out the letters, but we also wanted a picture of a sunflower on the sign and that was out of my league. I tried cutting the petals out of wood but that’s not as easy as it sounds. I thought I might use a hockey puck for the middle of the flower, but the creative juices just weren’t flowing.
Our friends Hans and Carolyn offered us their old “Bon Eco” studio sign to use as the backing. After asking a few times how the sign was coming along, Heidi finally volunteered to make the sign for us. I’m not proud. I knew from how long it was taking me that I just didn’t have it in me to produce the sign that I envisioned. I thankfully agreed to let Heidi work her magic.
And magic it is! Heidi created a work of art! I just love the sign. In fact, I was thinking of putting it up in the living room! Why waste it on the road? I think it’s beautiful and it bugs me that I can’t see it from the house!
Heidi and Michelle suggested that I should just attach it to our gate. So at first, that’s what I did. But I didn’t like that location. First off, it looked like an after thought. Oh here, I’ve got this sign, what should I do with it? Oh, how about I just tie it to the gate? Yuck! Also, I was paranoid that someone would steal it. Sure it has our name on it, and who would want a sign with someone else’s name, but I know someone could pry those letters off. It’s a work of art.
So as far as I was concerned, the sign could not stay on the gate.
I had actually purchased some tall cedar posts to put the sign on, so rather than take the easy route, I decided to get those posts into the ground. Of course I chose a cold, rainy day and as usual, I had to walk back and forth from the road to the garage and wood shed about 150 times as I kept discovering that I needed different tools for different parts of the job.
I got the first hole dug just fine. This can be a hit and miss thing on our property since there are large granite outcroppings everywhere. Sometimes I get lucky. For example, when I put in the first solar tracker I was able to dig a hole 8 feet deep. I wasn’t so lucky digging the holes for my sign. For the first hole I was able to get down 3 feet and thought I was in the clear. Then I dug the next hole and hit rock about two feet down. As I enlarged the hole I realized that it wasn’t just a rock, it was a rock outcropping. Eventually I got a piece of reinforcing rod and a hammer and just whacked away until I found a place I could put the second hole. Of course by then my plans had changed and I had to re-dig the first hole. And clear out more brush.
But it was worth it. I absolutely love our new sign! I walk out to the road at lease once a day to look at it. I love the fact that right now without leaves on the trees, when you stand in just the right spot, you can see the sunflower (that Carolyn Butts made us) on the guesthouse, right behind the sign. It’s so awesome!
I’ve never owned a place that required a sign. I didn’t even have a name for my 40’ x 108’ lot in the city. My garden is now about 8 times the size of that lot, and it’s not just vegetables that put down roots into the soil. I have put down roots into this land and I’m not leaving. Not in the human form anyway. Michelle will find me keeled over one day in the potato patch, will burn me in a used fridge box and put my ashes in the grove of big pine trees. Really, why waste good wood?
When you get connected to land like this, it seems fitting to name it and put up a sign to celebrate it. We often say we don’t “own” 150 acres; we say we are the temporary caretakers of it. It will be here long after we are gone. I would say with the quality of Heidi’s amazing sign, it looks like it’ll outlast us too!
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To read more about our adventures in off-grid living, read our new book “Little House Off the Grid” available on our website and at bookstores.
Spending Time Together, 24/7
By Michelle Mather
A couple of months ago Cam wrote here about how hard it is to get back into the “working for someone else” mode. He had been temporarily working down the road at our neighbour’s woodshop. When he first floated the idea of working for our neighbour for a few weeks I thought I would enjoy the change of pace and the chance to be on my own. I was wrong.
Cam and I have been self-employed together for 25 years. We didn’t plan on working together – it just sort of happened. Before we had our own daughters, I worked as an elementary school teacher for about 3 years. We both knew we wanted children. I come from a big family – I am one of 8. But after a few years of teaching I told Cam that if we planned on having our own family we should start sooner, rather than later. I felt like my lifetime allotment of patience was going to be used up teaching other people’s children.
At that time Cam was selling computers. We had agreed that once we had children one of us would become a stay-at-home parent. I just knew that I didn’t have it in me to teach all day and worry about who was raising my kids. We had our first daughter and I took the 6 month paid leave that was allowed at that time, and then I extended it by another 6 months of unpaid leave. So I was able to stay at home with my firstborn for her entire first year.
By then Cam had decided to start a desktop publishing business. Needless to say it took some time before the business was turning a profit and we were able to take any sort of salary. So when my first daughter was a year old I reluctantly headed back to the classroom. First we found a young woman, with a baby of her own, to come in to babysit. That didn’t last very long. We ended up having to find a home-based caregiver and so Cam dropped our daughter off every morning and I picked her up on my way home from school. I don’t have fond memories of that time.
Soon I was expecting our second child, the business was finally profitable and in my mind there was no question of going back to work when I had two children at home. I had another 6 month paid maternity leave and then another 6 months of unpaid leave. After that, when I requested to extend my leave, the school administration gave me two options; come back or resign. I chose the latter.
Cam had started our business in our home but quickly decided to move it out into an office building. Then he got tired of spending so much time away from us (his line in the previous post about the definition of an entrepreneur as being “someone who is willing to work 80 hours a week for themselves rather than 40 hours a week for someone else” wasn’t too far from the truth) and so he moved the business back into our basement. The four of us spent our days together. The girls often spent their time at a small table set up in Cam’s office where they did their drawing and colouring. Cam put up a sign overhead that read “Art Dept.” By this time I had been drawn into the business, first tackling the accounting side of things and eventually taking on more and more of the desktop publishing work.
The girls attended a co-op preschool, and then went on to a local elementary school. Even when they were both in school full time it didn’t occur to me to return to teaching. My life was full and busy and it was enough to juggle the demands of motherhood with my work in our business.
When our girls were 8 and 6 we decided to begin educating them at home. The reasons for this are too numerous to outline here. Needless to say my life got even busier! But through it all, Cam and I were working side by side, even if he was more focused on the business, and I was more focused on our children.
When we made the decision to move out here to the country, it was with the assumption that we would continue to work together in our home-based business. And that’s what we’ve done. At first we continued to run our desktop publishing business. Cam tended to do most of the actual graphic design/desktop publishing work and I did some of the smaller publishing jobs and looked after the accounting. When we published our first book (The Renewable Energy Handbook for Homeowners in 2003) I worked on editing the book, Cam did the layout and then I looked after fulfilling orders and counting the pennies.
Eventually the book business took over our lives and so we gave up most of our clients and we began to concentrate on promoting our books and DVDs and writing and producing new ones. I work on my laptop in a small area upstairs in the house and Cam prefers to work on his laptop in an “office” out in our guesthouse. We eat breakfast together, have a tea break, see each other at lunch time and at numerous other times during the day. Both of us like to break up our days by performing numerous odd jobs inside and outside the house. As gardening season arrives, Cam will spend less and less of his time at his computer and most of his time in the garden.
All this to say that the two weeks that Cam spent working down the road were brutal! We missed each other horribly and even though I have one dog, three cats and four chickens (now a rooster too!) to keep me company, it just wasn’t the same. I don’t know which one of us was happier when Cam’s short stint as a woodworker was over! I know many of my friends can’t understand the concept of living and working with a spouse 24/7 but once you get used to it, it’s hard to change!
For more about our move from the city to the country, be sure to read our book “Little House Off the Grid” available on our website www.aztext.com, and from other booksellers.
Zen and the Art of Splitting Firewood
By Cam Mather
First off, my apologies for using the word “Zen” in the title of another post, especially since I readily admit I am not really sure that I get what “it” is. But since the blog usually chronicles my attempt to attain this Zen-like state, maybe I do.
Years ago I read a John Irving novel called “Widow for One Year.” I’m pretty sure there’s a scene in it (and John Irving fans will correct me if I’ve got the wrong book) where a woman comes upon a man splitting firewood. It is a fairly long section because she seems quite enchanted with this process. There is a real rhythm to it. A purposefulness.
I think of it often as I split wood. I am finished for this year. All my firewood is ready for next winter. This is an OCD sort of thing for me in which I like to have all of my firewood ready to go for the following year, by the end of the current winter. Perhaps I was a squirrel in a previous life, but I find it comforting to know where my heat is coming from next winter. Oh sure, I could go out into the woods at any time, but I much prefer to have it done in advance.
This also allows me to fill up the woodshed so that the firewood can dry well over the summer. I think of my woodshed as a big firewood kiln on those hot summer days, extracting moisture to make it burn even better.
I still split most of my wood by hand. This year it was about 90%. I did borrow Ken and Alyce’s gas-powered splitter for some of the tougher, gnarlier stuff. I used to do it all, but I guess I’m getting smarter in my old age. Ken suggested I should be splitting more with the splitter, but I reminded him how much I like dessert, and if it’s a choice between giving up dessert or splitting firewood by hand… hand me my axe. I have NO willpower.
I also like to split my wood by hand, because I absolutely love doing it. It is one of the few activities that allows me to be totally focused on the task at hand and zone out of all the clutter that bangs around in my head. And best of all, I can take a pile of unsplit wood and turn it into fire-ready split wood that I can then step back and admire. When I’m done I have a concrete scorecard of my accomplishment. “That’s 2 weeks of heat next February!”
After my talk at Transition Cornwall, one of the audience members came up to me and told me the dimensions of the woodshed he had just built and shared how many cords of wood he is able to store in it. There is a kind of unspoken bond that only people who cut and split their own firewood have. It’s kind of like those aging lawyers and accountants with grey goatees and wearing full leather biker gear who ride around on motorcycles giving each other their cool “biker” wave as they pass on the highway. The “firewood clan” members are actually accomplishing something, unlike the middle-aged bikers who burn lots of gas in a fruitless quest for the rebel past they’ve always dreamed of.
Our daughters were home over Easter weekend and our youngest, Katie, brought home a pair of her steel-toed workboots. She wanted me to teach her how to split wood! Needless to say, I was over the moon!
Katie works doing archeological digs in the Toronto area. Some of the digging involves moving soil with shovels, which she does well, but often they encounter roots, which need to be dispatched with an axe. This is something the males on the crew usually accomplish, but Katie wanted to practice her “axe” technique so that the next time they encounter a root, she’ll be able to deal with it herself. And really, what father doesn’t want his daughter to be handy with axe?
She did great! She’s not as good as I am yet, but I have about 4 decades of practice behind me, so it’s not a fair comparison. And as a feminist, I believe that a woman can do anything as well as a man, and in fact, much of it better. I also believe that like most species on the planet, males have a little more upper body muscle that makes splitting wood easier for us. I expect the local women’s boxing club to arrive shortly and pummel me until I admit this is factually incorrect.
Katie persevered and split a lot of wood. I think the challenge for her was hitting the target, because a lot of the wood that I provided to her was some fairly small ash that splits nicely, but makes for a small target. And until you get into the groove, there is always this instinct to hold back in case the axe goes awry which impedes a good clean chop.
When I have some nice easy to split stuff, like poplar or well-dried ash, I like to line up about 10 or 20 logs and then go down the row, splitting each log as I go, like a robotic splitting machine! This is probably part of the male destructive tendency. It’s like those images of little boys building sand castles and then stomping on them like Godzilla. I’m like that, but with an axe.
Of course I prefer to think of it more as a creative destruction process. Yes I am raining terror down on these defenseless logs, but I am in fact changing their physical manifestation to make them burn more efficiently.
I can analyze it all I want, but I just love getting into that “zone” where it’s just the axe and the log and me. No malls. No traffic jams. No unfunded retirements. Just the act of splitting wood. And every time I walk past one of my woodpiles this summer or next fall I’ll enjoy the wonderful “energy” that they give off. Those piles say, “Look at me! I did this! I split this!” And next winter I’ll be toasty warm with sustainably harvested and completely renewable carbon-neutral firewood. It’s a pretty big deal! Pass the cake – I’m celebrating!
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