I mentioned this before – my neighbor Sebastian said in an email that in September he’s going to put up his own website and write about the joys of living off the grid.

Now if our situation is any indication, he’s putting the cart before the horse, meaning, he should wait until he experiences some of the joys. Doing what we have done takes a lot of time. And time spent being joyful is time taken away from some mundane task or another.

An example: Pete spent most of the day working on the shanty addition in the Playground of Higher Learning. It’s yet another pallet shed (our friend Bill called our place Pallet Town, a most apt descriptor).

He took a break around 5 p.m. and went riding with me. Then he came in and made dinner while I picked raspberries and saskatoon berries. When he saw that I’d picked four gallons, he said, “looks like I’ll have to make jam.”

And so, after dinner, at 8:30 p.m. he arose (this was during dinner) and poured all the berries into a large pot. I didn’t ask, but I think his reasoning was that if he did this then, he’d finish the task earlier.

It is now 11:02 p.m. He is now canning the berries. I am upstairs. It smells quite good in here. Now we will be able to add canned jam to the list of growing, local produce.

We have neighbors who rent a place and have a sharecropper garden. We have other neighbors who weed there in exchange for produce.

All this to say that Pete didn’t get a break all day. He was going dawn until dusk. Me, I got horses out because I needed to take advantage of the better weather. Was this a break? I’d say that riding horses is on my part an activity borne of necessity, which means that in this respect it fits the definition of work.

True, it’s work that I enjoy. Riding four horses isn’t an activity that lends itself to hanging out and reading a book or drinking a beer on the porch.

Next: 226. 8/16/21: Swimming Against the Tide