The Self-Sufficiency Challenge
The Self-Sufficiency Challenge
We are setting ourselves a challenge to be self-sufficient by Thanksgiving 2010 and we are going to chronicle our progress here on this blog. There is nothing like going public to add incentive to a goal.
Hunt camp junk yard 
This room resembled a torture chamber
We are here to prove to ourselves and others that two sixty-somethings can go off the grid and establish a self-sufficient and sustainable lifestyle and, if we can do it, anybody can. We are here to demonstrate that the real promise of our advanced technologies is to allow any of us to become independent of the corporate megalopolies that rule our lives. This is our personal declaration of independence.
Our First Night
As we awaken and look around, only a clean piece of plastic and some clean linen separate us from our makeshift bed frame of moldy furniture supporting a stained slab of foam for a mattress. We realize that the vision of mice zig-zagging across the walls last night was not a nightmare but a reality. We had survived our first night in our hunt camp home!
Self-sufficiency: the definition
Our challenge is to be self-sufficient in every important way by Thanksgiving, 2010. This begs the question of course, 'what is our definition of self-sufficiency?'. Now, you may have your own ideas about what it takes to be self-sufficient so, by all means, let us know, but here is our definition based on our circumstances:
We based our definition on the basics of human survival ie. food, water and shelter. To these we added some kind of heat source because we live in a place that gets darn cold and energy to provide some light because we live in a place that gets darn dark and maybe some refrigeration because when its not darn cold its darn hot.
We definitely need a new roof!
More specifically then, in our particular circumstance, this will require the following components:
Uggh!
Tediously, as the hours turned into days, weary and exhausted, we are face to face once again with this insurmountable pile of squalor and debris outside our front door. This is the Mt. Everest of refuse that was once the entire contents of what is now our hunt camp home.
last of the old furniture up in smoke
Change your life; Change you mind
Changing lifestyles can bring with it some interesting consequences. In our case it changed our way of thinking about a lot of things. I'll give you a couple of examples:
In our other normal middle class kind of life with the hydro bills and mortgages and such, we had an awareness that there was too much packaging, too much waste and that our consumer lifestyle was not sustainable. We had that awareness then but didn't do much about it besides some recycling of bottles and cans. What changed when we began this new life is that we decided to do something about it. But it's not like we sat down and had a big discussion about it and made some grand resolution.
recycled plastic bowl and garbage can into a washing machine
Change your life; Change your diet
As I mentioned in my last blog, when you change your lifestyle you start to see and think about things differently. We have drastically changed our buying habits and our work habits but we have also changed our eating habits.
our Sawdust Toilet
Time to get down to the nitty gritty. This little project was necessitated by the inevitable freeze-up of our very cute rainwater outhouse. We reached out the the homesteader community for help and they generously offered suggestions in one of two categories: 1. things we should have done so we wouldn't have this problem in the first place, and 2. things we could do now that we did it wrong in the first place.
our sawdust toilet 
Stackwall and Timberframe
In addition to fixing the roof that caved in on us...well, not on us since we weren't there at the time...we plan to do some other renovations and eventually an addition to our hunt camp home. Since we are on a budget of $5000.
The Real Promise of Technologies
We are squandering the real promise of today's advanced technologies. Instead of using these technologies to better our lives, we have allowed them to control our lives. Marshall McLuhan said, "We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us." The digital technologies we use today are disintegrating technologies...they separate us. Walk down any street in the world today and you will see it for yourself.
Can We Live on Twenty Gallons?
The answer is plain and simple...we had to. Our water supply options, when we first arrived here at our hunt camp home, were: a steep hundred-foot climb up from the lake hauling water by the bucket or a half-hour drive out the half-mile logging road and into town to fill up at the town water tap. Preferring wear-and-tear on our 4Runner over wear-and-tear on us we chose the latter.
