The Grid Is For Squares

Thanks for tuning in to The Grid Is For Squares! This week I tried a new microphone setup which turned out to be a step backwards for our sound quality, but next episode we’ll be back to our old soundscape. Thanks for your patience as I tweak our process here.

Everything is kinda going back to normal in Los Angeles, including traffic and smog, which is insane because our coronavirus numbers just keep climbing. We also had an earthquake earlier in the month, which was a little unsettling but honestly not a major cause for concern. Sure, “The Big One” could hit at any time, but a huge seismic event could happen anywhere. If the New Madrid fault slips, it could cause a devastating earthquake in the Midwest… it sounds crazy, but it happened in 1812!

Today’s episode finds us in a bit of an “in-between” zone. Vince went back to Joshua Tree to help more with the skoolie, I called Mariposa County about permits, and plans for our yurt are starting to come together. Baby steps eventually lead to marathons.

On his trip to Joshua Tree, Vince continued to work on the skoolie’s pumped potable water system. He successfully ran a pressure test and all of the fittings were water-tight, which is great! Our friends decided to wait on flushing the system, though, since they’re on a well system and didn’t want to waste that much well water. After a few refills and a little bleach, though, the skoolie’s tank should provide water that’s clean enough to drink.

In RV world, they actually recommend you add a little bleach every time you fill up your water tank. I found similar info while researching survivalism for my novel… the EPA recommends 1/2 tsp of bleach per 8 gallons of water, but please do your own research before drinking bleach! Amounts differ depending on how soon you plan to drink it, what kind of bleach you’re using, and more.

Hopefully our friends will finish the bus soon and bring it up to our property, but it’s their project and we’re in no big rush. And we can certainly empathize with a project taking longer than you hoped… pretty much every single thing we’ve tried to do on the property so far has taken way longer than we planned. It’s just the way these things go. Our land is ready for the bus whenever the bus is ready for it.

It’s tough to take a picture of a phone call. But here’s a pic of the fam, including a small sleepy dog, to get you through.

But the best news of the week is that I fought the Permits Dragon and I won! You may recall that permits are the only thing that scares me more than wildfires. I hate bureaucracy and I hate phone calls. But this week I put on my Big Girl Pants and called the county building department and it was good news all around!

Sure, I was a nervous babbling lunatic, but I managed to ask what kind of permit we’d need to build a shed on our property. They told me that we don’t need a permit to build a shed as long as it’s less than 120 square feet, one story, and has no electrical or plumbing. We can even build more than one! The next thing I asked is whether we can sleep on our property while we work on it, and they said that we can stay on our land in a tent or RV for up to 14 out of 90 days.

Riding high on all this good news, I made the final leap… I asked if we can park a converted schoolbus on our property for an indefinite period of time. And they said yes! They actually said yes specifically to a skoolie. This is such good news! It means that we won’t be facing a future disaster where we’re forced to move our friends’ skoolie off our land while they’re overseas and we’re all totally screwed.

Permits are still a big scary dragon to me, but I’ve gone on my first official slaying mission and triumphed. Hurrah.

In our next episode, hear all about our trip back up to the property and our valiant attempt to finish the greenhouse! Stay safe!

Hey everyone. It’s been a rough couple of weeks for us and the world. We briefly talk about the state of the country, what with secret police throwing people into unmarked vans and all, and how it’s a bummer you can’t rely on individual humans to do the right thing.

Then we talk about the importance of art. I published a novel recently, a weird lil thing I called The Planets, Or: How I Kept It Cute At The End of the World. It’s about a girl with anxiety who survives a nuclear apocalypse on a homestead, and although I did write it before we purchased our property, clearly the subject was already on my mind. Vince also mentions the film The Day After, which reportedly made Reagan depressed for a month and straight-up changed his position on nuclear war. Art matters!

But on to the topic of the day… we recently went to Joshua Tree to help our friends work on their skoolie! If you’re not in the lingo, a “skoolie” is a school bus that’s essentially been turned into an RV.

But our assistance is coming from more than the simple goodness of our hearts. Our friends will soon be moving overseas for a year and plan to park their skoolie on our 10 acres while they’re gone! (Or at least, they were moving overseas before Covid hit… now, who knows? But all we can do is keep moving forward.) Their bus will have solar panels and battery storage, a potable water system including a shower and a washing machine, a compost toilet, enclosed sleeping quarters, and more.

In general, we see communal living as the future. Both Vince and I are introverts who are protective of our personal space, but we’re gonna have to get over that and embrace communal living because it’s the only real viable solution to late-stage capitalism. These days, few people (particularly few millennials) have the resources to truly be self-sufficient. The only way we’re going to beat capitalism is by banding together and pooling our talents, pooling our resources. So this bus is a big step toward that model of living… our friends have a bus full of amenities but nowhere to park it, and we have 10 acres of land but very few amenities. It’s win-win.

So while we were visiting them in Joshua Tree, Vince helped set up the skoolie’s pumped potable water system. We also had some grown-up conversations about rights, responsibilities, liabilities, etc… our property is more valuable than anything we’ve ever owned and the bus is probably more valuable than anything our friends have ever owned, so we want to make sure we’re all on the same page before anything happens. There’s a lot to discuss: security and theft, accidental damage, regular maintenance, wildfires, and permits (the only thing that scares me more than wildfires!).

Once enough work has been done on the bus in Joshua Tree, our friends will move the skoolie up to our property in Mariposa! Exciting!

Hi again, friends. We’re back with a new episode of The Grid Is For Squares. Hope you’re staying strong in the face of all the darkness out there. ❤️ 

Over the 4th of July, Vince headed north to work on the property. It was 100 degrees in Mariposa that weekend, so I was happy to stay at home with the dog while Vince kicked ass under a bright full moon.

He discovered that most of our plants died because of the heat, including most of the food we planted. But somehow the poison oak came back! Oh goody. Worst. Plant. Ever. But we’ll keep fighting it. We just need to find the right time to pull it and the right thing to plant in its place. It’ll be an ongoing battle and that’s ok.

And speaking of the heat, it got up to 142 degrees in the greenhouse! Not great. It feels like we’re always a season behind… we needed this greenhouse in the winter, but now that we have it, it’s way too hot. But seasons cycle around, it’s what they do. And we have plans for how to mitigate the temperature once everything is in its finished state.

The greenhouse thermometer. Current temp: 115. That day’s high: 142. 🌡️

Vince also did a bunch of brush clearing with the weed whacker, and on the last morning he surveyed our future yurt site. I am doubling down on this yurt project, people. I want a yurt by April. But Step 1 is designing the thing, so now that Vince surveyed the site and took pictures, I can really begin the process. Yay.

WHAT WE BUILT:

• A capillary-action watering system for Judy’s Ming Aralia using a jug of water and a string. At least one plant didn’t die!

• The finished greenhouse is in sight! The floor will eventually be (in order): hardware cloth, sand, zigzagged tubing for heating/cooling (Pex is the standard, but we’re using medical tubing as an experiment because we have a ton of it already), more sand, and finally bamboo mats. We’ll also have drainage pipes and aluminum boxes covered in mesh at floor-level for ventilation. Homemade bricks will line the outside of the greenhouse to hold the exterior hardware cloth in place.

• Vince tripled our bricks, from 5 to 15! We’re using all local aggregate, formed as we bust up boulders in the dugout. It’s important that we perfect our concrete mix now, because although these bricks only need to hold hardware cloth in place, we will need load-bearing bricks in the future.

  • Our bricks are 16”x8”x2”… more “paver” size than traditional brick size.

  • Vince’s concrete mix was: 60 pounds of aggregate (a mix of sand and gravel), 30 pounds of cement, and 15 lbs of water. He made his molds from chalkboard material and 2x4s, corners sealed with silicone. We also really need to get a concrete-mixing drill bit so Vince doesn’t have to mix concrete by hand anymore.

There’s still a lot of work to do. Like, so much work to do. But every time we go up, we get a little closer. Baby steps!

We talked about water in our last episode, so this week we thought we’d talk about fire! 🔥 As we’ve mentioned in the past, wildfires are a grim reality here in California and as we go on, we’ll have to think very seriously about firescaping.

But first, we talk a bit about moving Vince’s mom Judy out of her house in Napa. She lived there for quite a few years and, along with some good times, we also had some really scary anomalous times up there. We were there for the 2014 Napa Earthquake (which Vince initially thought was an alien invasion!) and, more relevantly to this episode, we also helped her evacuate during the 2017 NorCal Fires.

Judy was at work when she received the evacuation order and wasn’t allowed to go back to her house for a single sock, a single photo, a single document. So for weeks, she lived in hotel rooms while we studied online heat maps to figure out if her house and everything she owned had burned to the ground. After weeks of not knowing, we finally learned that the wildfire had burned down her shed and licked her siding, but her house survived. Whew.

All that was left of her shed…

Vince says the idea of property matured for him during this time. He realized that if Napa, one of the richest and most developed areas in the world, can be destroyed by wildfires… then nowhere is safe. On the grid or off, we’re all at the whims of Mother Nature. So we might as well figure out how to protect ourselves and take ownership of our own safety and security.

Then we chat for a bit about what causes wildfires and how we deal with them. They’re a natural part of the ecosystem in the West, but humanity has made them worse through climate change, overly suppressing fires in the 20th century, and PG&E, THE WORST COMPANY OF ALL TIME. PG&E was found responsible for the 2017 and 2018 wildfires (along with many other deadly disasters), and they were also caught rerouting money for safety repairs to executive bonuses. And yet, they’re still in charge of our energy infrastructure. This… this… is the grid? Fantastic.

“Defensible space” is the recommended approach to firescaping, but we can’t really cut every plant in a 200-foot diameter cause that would leave a giant barren scar through half of our property. So in addition to brush management and smart planting, our main wildfire plan revolves around dugouts. Let the Earth protect us! But we don’t have much built up there to protect yet, so it’s an evolving discussion. There’s no guarantee of security in the grid, so it’s about taking control of our own safety and our own destiny.

WHAT WE LEARNED

• In addition to digging up some specific stats about fires and PG&E, we also learned that Los Angeles allocates 2 billion (that’s half!) of its yearly budget to the LAPD. Why don’t we spend that money on firefighting (or anything that actually makes us safe) instead? Let’s all vote please!

• We also learned that CA employs 2,000 inmate firefighters. They only make $2/day for fire suppression and $1/hour for actively fighting fires, but it’s still one of the most coveted prison jobs. Even with all that training and experience, though, felons can’t get jobs as firefighters or EMTs after they get out of prison. They’re good enough to pay 1 dollar an hour, but can’t get those jobs legitimately as free citizens? Again, let’s all vote please!

As always, you can find more photos and info on Instagram.

Today we’re posting an episode that we recorded back in mid-May, but that doesn’t mean we’ve moved on from talking about social justice. It’ll be tempting for white allies to refocus on coronavirus and the environment and everything we have on our plates in the coming months, but it’s vital to remember that racism and systemic injustice won’t go away just because we stop talking about it. So let’s keep marching, and donating, and pressuring our elected officials.

Onto today’s topic… water!

Vince has worked in greywater basically the entire time we’ve lived in California. He reached out to his current boss 6 years ago after watching a video on YouTube, and he’s still working for the same Los Angeles greywater company to this day. And even throughout coronavirus, business has been thriving… people are spending more time at home and in their gardens, which apparently means that even more Angelenos are seeing the value of greywater. Which is good, because the way that LA gets its water is unsustainable AF.

His job is a combination of plumbing and landscaping. They don’t touch “black water” (sewage), but there’s no reason to send all the water from your laundry, bathtub, and dishes into the sewer. Give it to your plants instead! Keep it local! He also installs rainwater tanks… not only does a major rain event overwhelm the city sewer system, but keeping all that water local is also a step towards refilling our depleted water table. The future is about mitigating extreme weather events and keeping everything local.

We also talk about division of labor and taking ownership of projects. I appreciated his help designing my SunShade, but it also made me feel a little bit like I’m not competent enough to take full ownership of a project from start to finish. But, as Vince points out, I hadn’t really worked hands-on with PVC before so I needed to be co-pilot on one mission before flying solo. Hopefully now I can be more self-sufficient on other PVC projects in the future.

Finally, the debate over the pronunciation of “potable” continues. (I’M right. It’s “pote-able.” One day Vince will see. One day…)

WHAT WE BUILT:

• Amy’s SunShade: a shaded box built from 1/2” and 3/4” PVC pipes, a bed sheet, and lace curtains.

  • Vince also had a neighbor growing up who built hoop greenhouses out of PVC. Our enthusiasm for PVC continues.

• Vince scored a discarded water heater off the curb here in LA, which he plans to use for heated non-potable water storage. Eventually he plans to use black tubing, a circulating pump and a temperature mixing valve to create our own heated water system. He even wants to create heated floors. We will update you on our progress!

WHAT WE LEARNED:

• I learned a lot about water, from mysterious shit-drying fields in the desert to why urban wells aren’t a solution to our water shortage.

• Vince estimates that we may ultimately want up to 1000 gallons a day of non-potable water, which is about an acre-foot of water per year. That’s one tenth of our property, one foot deep! So much water! But if we can catch all of the water that falls during the rainy season, that should actually be doable. We just have a lot of work to do on reservoirs, holding tanks, pipe runs, and more.

It’s our 10th episode! 🎉 Time is always weird, but it’s been especially weird in the last few months, so it’s hard to gauge whether it “feels” like 10 episodes. But if you’ve been listening to the show, we’d super-duper appreciate it if you’d leave a rating or review. Thanks very much, friends!

Our biggest current project isn’t something on the property… it’s moving Vince’s mom out of her house in Napa so we can all save enough money to make our homestead a reality. It’s a little scary because we don’t have a set plan for where she’ll live next— we’re thinking she can stay in the greenhouse during the summer and then maybe with us in LA for the winter. But sometimes you have to make a bold leap and hope that things work out.

So in this episode, we talk about moving her stuff into a storage unit in Merced and how coronavirus has complicated every little thing you want to do in this world. Then, just to make things extra exciting, Judy’s car abruptly broke down and we had to call a tow truck… at 5PM, on a Saturday, in a town we didn’t know, during a pandemic. Fun times!

Then we talk about the seasonal changes that have been happening on our property. Spring has sprung! Wildflowers are in peak bloom this month. We’ve also noticed a major increase in the presence of mice, rats, beetles, lizards, spiders, mosquitos, scorpions, and other perhaps less desirable forms of life that still are part of Nature’s miraculous tapestry or whatever.

We also met some of our new neighbors for the first time! Vince was busting up rocks at the dugout when some folks rolled up on us unexpectedly. It was a little unnerving for all parties at first, but it was good to start meeting some of our neighbors.

WHAT WE BUILT (OR PURCHASED):

• I’m designing and building a SunShade (out of PVC, natch). More updates on the SunShade next time!

• We brought a trundle bed up to the property for comfy and convenient sleeping in the greenhouse. Our sleeping situation is becoming real legit!

• Vince has purchased some new electric tools for his growing Milwaukee collection: a string trimmer and 18-inch chainsaw. Vroom vroom.

WHAT WE LEARNED:

• Mice are chewing up everything we leave out, from stuff we did expect (like cardboard boxes) to stuff we didn’t expect (like the linoleum glued to the floor of the outhouse). I actually like mice and kept them as pets in college, but the destruction they’re wreaking is Not Cute.

• Vince and I cannot agree on the pronunciation of the words potable and nonpotable. One day, one of us will prevail… but today is not that day.

As always, you can check out more pics on our Instagram.

It’s been a little over 6 months now since we purchased our 10 acres of undeveloped land. So on this episode of The Grid Is For Squares, we thought we’d discuss what a typical day as a homesteader looks like.

We battle daily with rain, cold, heat, poison oak, mice, time, and space, but we persevere. And damnit, we enjoy it.

Side note, we still need a name for the place! Vince pitches “Night Sparkles,” which I mock because that is clearly the name of a goth unicorn. When the right name comes to us, we’ll feel it, but let us know if you have any brilliant ideas!

WHAT WE BUILT:

• The “Galvie Box”: a 45” x 40” x 20” metal storage box made from rust-resistant zincalume. Vince also added a layer of tar around the seams to make it even more waterproof.

• We fixed our tent’s broken front door zipper using 2-inch-wide strips of industrial velcro and screen door mesh.

• Maps: in addition to property lines, elevation contour lines, and seasonal waterways, we’ve started adding named landmarks to our property map. As we’ve mentioned before, even without WiFi or cell service you can use GPS to add points to a Google Map.

• After we forgot to turn over our wheelbarrow before we left one weekend and it filled to the brim with water, Vince had the idea to create a catchment pond using a tarp and a hole. We caught 40 gallons of rainwater!

• Vince has started some composting projects. More info on “Hugelkultur” to come!

WHAT WE LEARNED:

• Silica beads in organza bags can help keep your stuff dry. They turn green when they’re full of water and you can “recharge” them (dry them out) in the oven.

• One secret to staying warm when you’re sleeping in a tent is to ensure you have enough layers underneath you. We start with a Mylar survival blanket, yoga mats, and two comforters.

• Poison oak is an insidious bastard. Be so so careful if you’re dealing with it and consider using IvyX Pre-Wipes and Post-Wipes. But conveniently (if anything about poison oak can be called “convenient”), the plants connect to a shared mother vine that often grows only a few inches under the surface. If you’re tricky (and again, so careful), you can yank up the whole kit n kaboodle.

As always, you can find more pics on Instagram!

If you’re planning to spend more than 24 hours outside, you need to account for 2 essential things: 1) a place to sleep, and 2) a place to poop.

Sanitation is the backbone of modern civilization. No cholera here, folks. We don’t have a septic system or sewer connection yet on our property, so a composting outhouse was the one of the very first things we built. Honestly, it makes a lot more sense to shit in the carbon cycle instead of the water cycle anyway.

In its simplest form, a compost toilet is just a 5-gallon bucket and some sawdust. But our outhouse has been an evolving project and now that we’re done, it’s a pretty swanky bathroom (while still being, at its spiritual center, a bucket and a bag of sawdust).

WHAT WE BUILT

• Well, an outhouse, obviously. But the components include…

  • A 5-gallon bucket and a bag of sawdust

  • A plastic toilet seat

  • A 3’x2’x2’ box made out of 3/4” MDF (Medium Density Fiberboard), with a hole in the middle for the toilet seat and an open back to remove and replace the bucket. I also covered the box with contact paper for aesthetics and waterproofing.

  • An outhouse structure made from 3/4” PVC

  • A white linen curtain, sprayed with Scotchgard for waterproofing and with heavy bolts sewn along the bottom edge to keep it from blowing wildly in the wind

  • A platform made from 2x4s and plywood, painted on all sides with FlexSeal and with a square of linoleum glued to the top using PL375 Construction Adhesive

  • A tilted roof made from plywood and anchored to the PVC with metal J-clamps

WHAT WE LEARNED

• If you want to keep precise track of where you’re burying your compost, consider setting a stone totem or other marker on the site. Choose a site far away from where you might eventually want to grow food.

• Again, we’ve had great luck using PVC as a building material. It’s cheap, light, and modular. It also allows you to create nifty accessories (like, for example, a toilet paper dispenser).

• If you need to drill more than 2 holes with the same spacing, consider making yourself a jig. It’ll let you drill your holes faster and more precisely.

Some in-process photos are below, and for even more pics, follow us on Instagram!

Today is a very special episode on 2 counts… 1) We welcome our first guest on the show, Vince’s mom Judy, who has been a part of this journey from the beginning. And 2), we recorded directly from our property for the very first time! I forced everyone to pile into the tent and record from there. You know, because of acoustics. I’m a very professional producer. I record in tents.

We didn’t want to discuss the pandemic, but let’s be real: it infuses every thread of our fabric of reality right now. We discuss how Judy lost her job at an elective surgery center in San Francisco, which means she’s either going to move down to LA to live with us… or move directly to the property! We’re not 100% sure what’s going to happen next, but either way, we’ve entered an exciting/terrifying new phase.

But we also chat about life on the property: completing the greenhouse, spotting local wildlife, and doing prison labor for fun.

WHAT WE BUILT:

• We mentioned this last episode, but this time we finished our Grandio Ascent Greenhouse. Hurrah.

• We’re also casting our own bricks with local aggregate. More on that in a future episode!

WHAT WE LEARNED:

• Our TracFone works! If you buy rural property and struggle to get service on your normal phone, try a TracFone because they can pick up service from any carrier. (And bonus, you’ll be gtg for your new drug dealing enterprise.)

• A level pad and drainage is so important. It’s been raining buckets on the property but the greenhouse is fine because of all the hard work Vince did to prepare the pad. Go Vince.

• Don’t forget to wear goggles (and keep your mouth closed!) when you’re busting up rocks with a sledgehammer.

For more photos, check out The Grid Is For Squares on Instagram!