• 2 Posts
  • 22 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 17th, 2023

help-circle



  • Shout out to all my Generation X peeps–the first generation to spend our teenage/young adult years on the Internet. We still laugh at our Boomer parents who don’t know anything about technology. Now we kinda roll our eyes and say “whatever” to all the younger folks who think that we don’t either.







  • This right here. More poignantly perhaps since the Boomers (not everyone in that age group, obviously) ruined Gen X lives first, before they destroyed the futures of subsequent generations, so we’ve been watching this dumpster fire for decades and warning about how bad it could become.

    What might be unique to X-ers is that we witnessed the social fabric in the U.S. falling apart in the 80’s under Reagan–when the likelihood of a blue-collar worker having a solid career at a good company for life, supporting a family on one income, and being able to retire without living in poverty went from being a common thing to more of a lost dream.

    So yes, to be lumped in with the same generation that pulled the rug out from under us is adding insult to injury.



  • Or as we call it in the Southern U.S., “Summer Lite,” where the daily high temps are finally at or below 90°F a good bit of the time. We keep getting teasers of autumn, but it’ll be a week or two depending on where you live. The heat index in Houston looks to be 105°F today, so autumn is still a little ways off. Ouch.





  • My (limited) understanding is that they release only a small amount of CO2, using only solar electricity–no propane in my situation. What’s left is a tiny bit of sterile ash that can be emptied outside or sprinkled in the trash. And composting toilets sounded promising until I really started researching them. Ultimately, dumping out solids all the time was too much of a gross-out factor for me, and dedicating a space for dumping them out was a big issue. I was really set on the Envirolet or SunMar central composting systems for a while, but even they were a much bigger hassle to clean and maintain, and the outdoor tank takes up too much space to be practical for my setting.






  • You could post (good old-fashioned) flyers around the most visible public places nearby (public library, grocery store, hardware/home center, church, etc.), advertising your IT skills.
    Rural folks I know appreciate someone nearby who has even basic IT skills, saving them a trip into the city to a big box store that would charge them an arm and a leg to diagnose and fix the simplest issue.
    If you charge less than they do and are conveniently closer, you could have a decent part-time source of income. Not sure how rural you are, how tech-saavy your neighbors may be, or whether you’re hoping to make a bigger shift career-wise, but it’s an option that has worked pretty well in my rural area.