Henry Brown

There's an income-sharing community starting near MA, in southeast Vermont, that could be a good landing place.  I can reach out if you want info.

I believe everyone is feeling the call, even if they're not articulating it.  We all know it could be easier and better, more rooted and more nourishing.  Good luck!

Good luck!  You can find your unicorn, and you might try /cf4cf sub on reddit.com.  (childfree dating, not an app just a forum like this one.  Lots of people who've undergone sterilization.  Also the childfree sub is a powerful support.

music i wrote (not during the pandemic though haha)

I started to create music during the pandemic, it's not that photogenic but I guess I'll post a jpg for the heck of it.  

And keeping quail in the back porch of an apartment, that was the first animal.  Such an adventure.

There's actually a walker stove in there, my first step toward heating with wood instead of gas, and yes it's butt ugly, but I made it with what I had and to me it's beautiful.  It made dinner.  The tree, looking sad, is a volunteer mulberry that shot up 7' in a year!  showing the power of volunteering.

M4F 46, passionate, somewhat disabled, stubborn, semi-ineffectual permaculturist, writer and composer.  On 4 acres in New England closish to a major city.  I have another profile on permies and for my privacy I prefer to keep my real name private for the moment, it doesn’t seem wise to put one’s real name out there on the internet for dating reasons.

The ugly: I am still living with my ex who broke up with me six months ago.  Disentangling the ownership of the house is beyond our financial capacity, even if we can work as a team on this, and her low energy and mine plus caregiving my elderly mother and other obstacles is slowing things.  And we have not made the separation public yet because of her.  Is this messy? Sure. Is it a red flag? Maybe.  At least a dark pink hue.  But there’s a lot of other green flags around it (scroll down).

I am ethically non-monogamous.  I will not be negotiated out of this.  

I do not want to have children unless very rigorous conditions are met, and it may be a long time; I’m willing to accept just never having children rather than break my boundaries. If you already have a child or children I do not have the capacity to take on a father role.  I do care about children, though, and that’s a big part of why I wouldn’t want to take on a responsibility I couldn’t handle. I can barely handle the homestead.

Being connected to community is important and I would love to say I’m a great community builder—but I’m mediocre at best.  My local townsfolk are generally kind, mostly, but not very collapse-aware or oriented to the big picture issues.  It’s been hard to get people coordinated—especially since my ex is very shy (maybe overly cautious) about having people over.  I see it as our security lies in trying to form a working relationship before times get tough, she saw it differently.

I have a flock, fencing, hugelkultur, some food forest started, calorie nuts, mulberries and stonefruit, mature pruned apples and seed-started on the way,  water is from a well but roof collection supplement for the animals and in drought for plants (the goal is to stop needing to irrigate).

I’m a huge Paul Wheaton nerd, and I agree with most of his unpopular opinions, but I also favor the more purple side of Sepp Holzer and others, and Fukuoka is a beacon.  If you vehemently hate Paul Wheaton, it might be a very toxic interaction.  Exciting but probably not engaged in for the healthiest of reasons.  Also, why not give Paul another chance? I find most people who disparage his views haven’t actually understood his points or tried the experiment.  Let’s have some more listening.

I thrive on community.  I’m either too lazy or too lonely to do a lot of tasks that better homesteaders do, but I will do more if there’s a group to do it for or with.  I will want to have people over for work parties.  Or more people move in to lower costs.  And have dinner with those people often.  But not always.  I will also want solo time.

I don’t always know how I feel about a decision in the moment, so I may say, “ask me again,” and never have an answer.  Which essentially makes it a no.

I’m hard to love but if you’re the rare person who feels it’s worth it then I guess you won’t mind the brambles.

You:
ideally you have some homesteading experience too but more important is the real desire to become self-sufficient foodwise and energy wise, and willingness to communicate, continue growing, and ask for help.  Besides that, a $5million portfolio, beach house in Aruba, and a name on the building of some research university is must. Any university is fine, as long as it is Ivy League, and not Brown.  Brown is. . .Brown is not OK.   And being able to drive stick—excavator that is.  I don’t know, you’re just you.  I guess I’d love it if you’re able to do intuitive work but I find everyone I’ve been in a relationship can, they just may not have tried it for whatever reason and they’re always immediately better at it than me.  That’s where I find really good teamwork can arise.

The homestead:
It’s too expensive, it’s a good stepping-stone homestead for building some equity and getting out of the city, having a roadside farmstand and that sort of thing, but then it’s got too high a toxic load, too high taxes, too much house, too much regulation, etc., that anyone would really try to forever homestead here.  Unless of course the system collapses and then all that changes—but it would still be pretty flat, which makes it more valuable for a lot of other uses than permaculture.  It’s a compromise house, in other words, and after it’s been owned 5 years it should be sold to another group exiting the city.  (If you’re  a part of that couple/thruple/group but not interested in going on a date with me, also please get in touch).

QUAIL WARS
A New Poop









A little while ago in a galaxy not all that far away. . .
. . .in fact maybe on my back porch. . .


bababaBA BA bababaBA BA


QUAIL WARS


SLANTY SUBTITLES: The Empire had trapped six resistance fighters in a hardware cloth box made with 1 by and some legs so their poop could fall down through the wire onto soil.

RESISTANCE QUAIL FIGHTER: The Empire has forgotten to feed us!

SLANTY SUBTITLES: The resistance fighters had begun to organize.  

(Quail sit around staring in different directions).

EVIL MUSIC: ba, ba, ba, ba-ba, ba, ba-ba.

DARTH QUAIL: Luke, I am your father.  I think.  There were a lotta hens around, and we really didn’t keep track of which egg rolled out of which hen. . . so. . .ah. . .well this is awkward. . .Luke, I MIGHT be your father.

They fight.  Peck, peck, peck.  

DARTH QUAIL: babaBA!

QUAIL STORMTROOPER: Your Jedi mind tricks won’t work on me, old man.  I don’t have a mind, I’m a quail! My brain is the size of a pea!

CQuailPO: babaBA!

RquailDquail: baBAbababa babaBA woaoao!

CQuailPO: You know, you sound more like a chicken when you do that woaoao sound.

PRINCESS QUAILA: Here are the plans to the Death Star.  We’ll break in here to liberate the Grubblies.

LUKE QUAILWALKER: What happened to your neck feathers? Did the Imperial Stormtroopers…?

LEIA: Hey, stop pecking my neck, Luke. Ooh, food!  (Peck peck peck)

RESISTANCE FIGHTER: Let’s focus, quails.  We need a diversion.  Here’s the plan, we’ll poop in our water, that’ll show the Empire!  Then, we’ll drown ourselves in it, get mysterious illnesses, fly straight up and hit our head on the ceiling for no reason, and poop in our water.  Look, our water froze over! It’s a sign! Now we can walk on it and poop on it more easily!   Luke Quailwalker, looks like you’re up.

LUKE QUAILWALKER: Just like hunting larvae on Gramulon 5.  Only problem, sir, I can’t really control my bowel moments, they just come at random.

RESISTANCE FIGHTER: A Jedi quail must learn to trust his feelings.  May be Grubblies be with you.  babaBA!

Oops, sorry about that.  Here's all 12 eggs for real.

OK, here's my quail eggs and the quail they came out of.  Actually, this is a male, who just happened to walk into the nesting box when I took the picture, but I swear the hen was in it two seconds before.  They don't hold still.  We have three layers, on this side of the divider there's just one male and one female. The female lays "blue" eggs, which are slightly bluish and very unusual.  Most quail eggs appear like Dalmatian fur, big black spots.  The other ones we got from another person full-grown (because we had only one layer), and they lay the Dalmatian-style ones.  But weirdly, the spots are not dark black on ours, just faint blue.  Is it because we feed them live food (maggots and black soldier fly larvae and mealworms and whatever invisible bugs are in their dust baths?). is it because I ferment their feed? I don't know.  The blue eggs are smaller than the others but the shells are firm on all of them, in fact they're kind of hard to crack when you're trying to eat them.  Fun fact, people usually use special quail-egg-cutting scissors for these, but I haven't made the investment.  (By the way, I would NOT recommend raising quail to any die-hard permaculturist, except for learning purposes or unless you can re-wild them in your landscape somehow and make a deal where they drop off a few eggs for you.  They're too wild to free-range (they'll escape) but too dumb to take care of themselves and come home at night.  If I were really going to go this route I'd try and cross them with wild birds somehow, but these are Japanese animals and so they're not likely to do that.  Unless I find a way to crossbreed them with a duck.  Or a zebra.  THey're a ton of work for relatively low return, and they have an uncanny ability to be male and even be male without seeming to be male.  One didn't start making sperm till it was 10 weeks old or so, much older than it's suppose to, so we thought the fucker was a female.  He/they were so cute though.  And we eventually got our 12 eggs.  

Chickens: because we're smart, we eat all your kitchen scraps, your mice, and your ticks, we till your soil and aerate your cow pies, we come home to roost, and we lay big nutritious eggs right in our nesting boxes.

Quail: because buhbuhBAH!