Randy Eggert

Nancy Reading wrote:

Randy Eggert wrote: I envision a warm room where you're comfortable sitting naked, but not so hot that you sweat. Then you use a bucket of hot water with a rough cloth or sponge to soap and scrub your body, ending by pouring the bucket over your head. I suppose that it could double as a sauna, but most of the time it would just be used for cleansing at a much lower temperature-

This sounds a bit like a 'wet room' where the whole room is lined with waterproof materials - Usually there is a shower fitted - no shower tray as the whole floor is the tray - but no reason it couldn't have a seat and a basin. It would need to be heated for me too though!

Thanks, Nancy. I didn't know this term, but long ago I used one when visiting a friend in Denmark. Their room was larger than I want for my room and heated the same as the rest of the house. What I envision definitely needs to be lined with waterproof materials and have a drain in the floor, but also have a stove to heat the room. So maybe a cross between a wet room and a sauna?

A few people have mentioned saunas and sponge baths. Among the desiderata for my dream home would be something like a small Turkish bath (the scrub-room part, not the steam-room). I envision a warm room where you're comfortable sitting naked, but not so hot that you sweat. Then you use a bucket of hot water with a rough cloth or sponge to soap and scrub your body, ending by pouring the bucket over your head. I suppose that it could double as a sauna, but most of the time it would just be used for cleansing at a much lower temperature--when I take a sauna I feel the need to shower after.

I'm not aware of anything like this, but it seems like it would work well where water is scarce and winters are cold (in the summer, an outdoor, sun-heated shower is great). Does anybody use something similar?

Emery Brown wrote:Dig big hole with shovel in a wet winter, put pole in, backfill with clay that I've dug up from the ground, stomp down hard.
How naive am I being?

There are cedar fence posts (thin juniper logs) near our property in the Utah Desert that date to the Taylor Grazing Act (1934). The barb wire is gone, but the posts are solid.

Christopher Weeks wrote:It’s been a while…

Christopher, thanks for posting these. I always enjoy them, and I think this may be one of your most interesting sets. (I also like that your sets have no discernable theme, but I still try to puzzle out whether each set has a theme that I can't see.)

Trace Oswald wrote:

Randy Eggert wrote:... (You can see pictures on my website randyeggert.com) ...

Randy, your place is awesome.  I love to travel Utah, someday maybe I'll get to see your place when I'm passing through.

You're welcome to visit. Just let me know when you're coming.

It's not a homestead per se, but my family built a log cabin when I was a child in the 70s. It was off-grid by necessity, and we used hand tools for everything (though I do recall in the 80s Dad used a chainsaw to widen the doorway so we could replace the old door). We used a pit outhouse. We used a Monarch woodstove to cook (in the summer we might use a white gas Coleman stove) and another stove for heat. We had kerosene lamps for light. We tried using an oil lamp, but we weren't adept at it and it always sent out black smoke. Down the draw from the cabin a couple hundred yards there is a perennial spring, so we ran a pipe to it (the trench for the pipe was hand dug) and hooked up a hydraulic ram--that way we had running water. Well, we had running water as long as the temperatures stayed above freezing (the pipe wasn't buried deep).

We never lived there (except for the summer after college graduation when I did), but we went there frequently for a few days or up to a week. In the summer we could drive to it, but in the winter we had to ski a mile and a half in. Mom cooked amazing meals on the Monarch stove, including Christmas turkey with all the trimmings and waffles for breakfast. I learned to make sourdough bread in that oven.

Over the years we added conveniences. We swapped the pump lanterns for propane. We replaced the Coleman stove with a propane stove. We brought up a car battery to run a boom box. As the spring's flow went down, we replaced the hydraulic ram with a pump run on old bike parts, and eventually we had to install a cistern that we fill with water from town. A couple decades after we built the cabin, my parents added an indoor composting toilet and solar panels; my brothers and I advocated against both, indulging in nostalgia for our childhood.

By our standards, it feels pretty plush to go there now. We have water year round. We don't have to go outside to use the john.  We have electric lights and a fan. My parents even watched dvds up there sometimes if the batteries were charging well enough. We have a cell phone signal booster, which has its advantages in a connected world, but cell phones mean nobody is ever bored, and boredom prods us to interact more, exercise more, and read more.

Yeah, I'm old now, and I miss those days when our cabin felt like it was from the turn of the twentieth century.

I've been working on our land in southern Utah over the past nearly ten years. I only get down there a few weeks a year, so it's slow going. I have a cob privy, an open air sleeping shelter, a storage shed, a ramada, and a partially complete earth-sheltered bunkhouse. (You can see pictures on my website randyeggert.com) It's more and more comfortable to go there now--I even have solar panels and a small battery. Cell service is surprisingly good. It now feels more like glamping than roughing it. Eventually, we plan to build an honest-to-goodness house on the property. It will be off grid, of course, but, as Burra said, off grid doesn't mean what it used to. As technology advances, it's hard to see that it will feel a whole lot different from any other house.

Madeleine Innocent wrote:You can't standardise anything as we are all very different.

I've been thinking about nutrition lately, and I've come to the conclusion that this really is an area where you have to proceed with an n=1 model. In other words, each person has to experiment and figure out what works for them. Personally, if I don't consume a lot of carbs, I have no energy (I read an interview with a world class cross country skier who was persuaded to try a high protein/low carb diet and discovered he no longer had enough energy to train). The mere thought of fasting for more than a few hours during the day is inconceivable to me: I become stupid when hungry and can only think about finding food. On the other hand, my wife, who is equally active, eats probably half as many calories. We both tried to follow Ramadan once in solidarity with friends; she lasted until the end, I lasted until lunch.

My uncle was a sports nutritionist (he invented the first energy gel). He worked with scientific precision with individual athletes to figure out what worked for them. His scientist friends complained that what he was doing wasn't scientific because his sample sizes (n=1) were too small to extrapolate over a population. His response was that individual athletes don't care about what works for other athletes; they care about what works for them. So if you can generalize over n=1, then you've solved a problem for that individual. After that, you can solve it for the next individual, and so on.

Barb Allen wrote:Thanks for sharing your journey with your cob privy as well as your health.  We are planning a similar thing on our land, and I am dealing with a similar physical journey as well, so I found it interesting, inspiring and useful.  Thanks for taking the time to share it.

Thanks, Barb. Let me know how things go for you.

Fox James wrote:Oh no that is not the best result considering all the effort you put into your stove!
You may find my latest videos of some interest to you, it has taken me several years but I have managed to get my 4” vortex working on song.
However there are some details you may not be able to adapt and your 6” may behave differently anyway.

Could you post a link to your videos?

Derek Thille wrote:From a short dive into the rabbit hole, it seems there's disagreement.  Some governments and wildlife authorities consider it to have been distinct and consider it extinct while others consider it to have been a population of grizzly that has been extirpated from the plains range.  Accounts suggest it was larger than most grizzlies suggesting more food supply or easier conditions.  Apparently accounts from Lewis & Clark refer to two different bears that weren't the black bears they would have been familiar with - one referred to as brown and the other, larger referred to as white (like silvertip grizzlies) and they avoided the latter unless they had at least eight marksmen at hand.  Apparently a pelt wound up somewhere in the Smithsonian collection, so if it could be located, with today's DNA analysis, they could settle the question.

It was apparently recent as well - in Saskatchewan, it was believed hunted to extirpation in the late 1890s/early 1900s although some accounts suggest a remote population lasted into the 1930s.

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Thanks for going down that rabbit hole for us! You saved me some time this morning.