• mood: frustrated
• listening: the humming of my LOQ's fan

I went on a very Country Bat-themed rabbit hole today. it's obvious I've gone on kind of a Gribble-y survivalist kick lately, at least with regards to my tech. I guess that's what happens when you replace your smartphone with a push-to-talk military-grade candybar phone and stop using mainstream social media except for mutual aid and cultural networking. anyway, my YouTube algorithm has noticed, and responded by giving me a lot of off-grid content. sign me up! why not? I already have an acre and live far enough from town that it's vaguely the country. so I said, why not? let's learn about solar power today. I asked my quite good friend who lives off-grid and they recommended I check out using solar panels on-grid.

unfortunately, here in Indiana, the political landscape is extremely hostile to solar power. in my county, there is a big public outcry against it from people who believe that it threatens our "rural way of life", which is wild because I've always associated solar power with rural living. (after all, urban apartment dwellers don't have enough room for panels.) you can't really "sell power back to the grid" here in Indiana like you can in other states--yet, if you want to stay on-grid and go solar, you have to adhere to all these restrictive regulations imposed by the grid. this makes on-grid solar power an incredibly impractical choice for most Hoosiers. naturally, though, Project Sunroof and about a half-dozen other solar calculators all say that our roof is an absolute disaster for solar energy. awesome. so there's really no way for this to be cost-effective for us.

I requested a bunch of quotes from sites for both just solar panels (so, like, we'd have to install them ourselves, which is way unlike anything we've done, but we're smart) and for panels plus installation, so we'll see what the pros say, but I'm not hopeful. I'm mostly just irritated and frustrated at having to be dependent on the grid, not because I'm a big survivalist or anything--I'm definitely getting there, but I'm kinda not competent or motivated enough to truly be a survivalist--but because this is such a great example of enshittification. the company locks you in because they know you have no choice, then they begin abusing you by preventing you from making any changes to your relationship with them. with big tech wanting to run trains on my state and sprout AI data centers all over the place, I want to just be done with the grid, but I'm not made of money.

ugh. anyway, I don't wanna go to bed mad. here are some funner things of a survivalist-y nature I can look forward to teaching myself instead:

• vacuum sealing my freezer preps. this one is right on the horizon, because I found a secondhand vacuum sealer for $30 do you fucking die?! and I bought it some compostable freezer bags
• making my own broth from vegetable scraps. yes, I understand that this one is easy from a skill level, but I have contamination OCD bad and the idea of saving scraps and reusing them to make broth has felt wild to me, especially since we recently had a roommate who tried to do this but just generally had lousy kitchen hygiene and it skeeved me out a lot
• home canning. this one requires more skill
• I think maybe I want to start an indoor herb garden over the winter as a trial run for an actual garden in our yard in the spring
• having my own chickens for eggs and to slaughter
• pantry storage (I need to figure out this one; would we get a shed? how would we climate control it?)