Gray Henon

I am usually in favor of low tech solutions (ie dogs), but I am interested to see where tech can go…

https://www.reuters.com/technology/meet-swagbot-ai-powered-robot-cattle-herder-preventing-soil-degradation-2024-12-12/

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Been distracted a bit by hunting/butchering season but things should pick up soon;)

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Got a little more spread.  Still a bit to go.

Did the long hair experiment once, never again.  

Some endurance has faded, but I’m better at some things than I used to be.  Try not to think about it too much.  When you do, make a joke about it.  Set new achievable goals.  Save enough money to buy work saving equipment like woodsplitters, tractors with loaders, etc.  Transition into teaching and mentoring vs doing the work yourself.  Don’t hold yourself to the standard of your younger self.

A few pics

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Was planning on taking the fall off for hunting, festivities, and holidays, but hurricane Helene had other plans.  We lost around 30 of the larger white pines and a few yellow pines.  Immediate business was getting them off of the fences. After that, we started opening travel lanes.  

We had our family reunion a couple weeks after the storm, and I “Huck Finned” attendees into a small burn of mostly yellow pine that yielded 60 gallons.  Further burning was stalled by 4+ weeks of no rain after the storm.  Finally got enough rain last week to burn again.  We burned two large piles of white pine branches and one pile that was around half, by volume, white pine branches and half yellow poplar that we split over the summer.  The pile with the split wood produced much more than the other two.  So far we have spread the reunion pile and one of the white pine piles.  Still have two to go.

It is still early, but this tech has a lot of potential for restoring grasslands, sequestering carbon, improving soils, etc.  I am hopefully watching.

Resilient designs that rarely need repair.  I use very little duct tape.  I can only think of one place where I used it to cover some sharp edges.  There is also a very small amount of electrical tape. It seems to hold up fairly well.

Always glad to see social media being used for good.

I’m currently purging the “that might be useful someday” pile so I can access the basement walls and add more insulation.

Wife wanted me to build a new shed for my “spares”, but it made no sense to consume a pile of building materials to house what amounts to a pile of marginally useful items.

I really like the idea of the “Craigslist (or thrift, marketplace, etc) Closet”.  Many household items, recreational equipment, tools, building materials, etc are so plentiful, that you can sell your unused items to the “closet” and then buy them back if you ever need them again.  Guess what, many of them you never miss.