First thought: judy, our truck that pulls the heavy loads, stopped functioning. We had to tow judy into the turtle lot a few weeks ago.
judy getting towed
judy at work
top-left is boots in judy headed out for a task
Last year Judy spent more time in the shop than getting work done. And the mechanic said she is done and to never bring her back. We did have a fella (Jim) who was here last fall and he managed to get judy running again.
The day that judy died, stephen said it was time to get something to replace judy. Something reliable. I wanna get an electric truck, but they are mighty expensive. 95k right now. Maybe 75k in a couple of years. Maybe even less in five years.
We bought judy used, but we have probably spent 4x that on repairs, and the amount of off-line time has really slowed some projects.
So replacing Judy is the biggest purchase I am trying to figure out right now.
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Next, yes! The BEL is probably the most important thing. It makes it so that boots will share pics of stuff, and get some jingle in their pocket. I think it is one thing that makes the bootcamp appealing.
In a similar vein, I am exploring the idea of what I call "the ringer program". I like the idea of bringing in a new ringer every two to four weeks. Somebody with skills to get shit done. Let's finish some of the big projects here and share these skills with the boots! I like the idea of sweetening this pot a bit and getting the ringers to spend more time here and maybe bring in more ringers. Get more done - which leads to more videos/movies/books - which leads to more world domination! I wanna get allerton abbey done and get started on the annualized thermal inertia tests. I wanna get our four willow feeders upgraded to 100% so we can explore movies and books about willow feeders. Maybe we want to bring in a series of super-gardeners to get some excellent GAMCOD demonstrations.
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I asked stephen what would we need that is less than a new truck. He said snow tires and chains for roy would be good.
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About a year ago we explored the idea of getting a big chunk of money and what is the best way to spend it to:
- accomplish progress on world domination, and
- the spend brings in money that would fuel even greater world domination
After weeks and weeks of discussion, the best I could come up with is: the ringer program leading to future kickstarters which re-fuels the ringer program which leads to more kickstarters.
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There is an idea that the more videos we put on youtube, the more traffic we get at permies. So we need more videos. I feel like we have enough cool stuff here for 500 new youtube videos. But everybody is too busy to take the video ... to stand in front of the camera and explain each bit. I set up a patreon thing for this and thought that if I got real money in the patreon thing (per video) then i could pay a lot more for taking the video and for getting the video edited. So this would lead to a dozen videos per month instead of one or two. Instead, these efforts just have me going to a money loss. Although when we did do a big video push, we did see overall traffic to permies break new records! 2.6 million people in may 2024!
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So there ya go. A glimpse into money stuff. Of course, there is a lot more to say. Things are complicated. All day every day is about navigating all the comedies and using the phrase "make the best of it" about 30 times a day.
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