Week21: Tug-O’-Hide

I have to say right off, I don’t much feel like blogging today. I usually post my week summary on Saturday night, and I didn’t. So here I sit, Sunday Morning trying to barf this up for you, reader. I don’t much feel like writing because I have had a lot of trouble sleeping as of late. Since I moved out Penny Scout and I have slept outside on a thin ground mattress and due to my bike accident a few years back, I cannot sleep on my left side. I also have muscle pains and circulation problems that cause me to toss and turn all night long. Take away a comfy mattress and all hell breaks loose. You can’t really call it insomnia, since I know why I can’t sleep (if only I had a nice, thick, civilized mattress)! But I feel the same effects as insomnia. Thankfully I drank some Lemon Balm tea yesterday and felt comfortable enough to have an afternoon nap.

So yeah. I moved out of my house again. Penny and I now live out of the back of her car:

Archery Range Breakfast

Willem’s Backyard Dinner

We have had difficulty setting up new routines. You don’t think of all the things that come with rent, and the routines you have wrapped up in them. To name a few:

* Electricity
* Cooking stove
* Showers
* Laundry machines & dryers
* Storage space
* Privacy & Security
* Refrigeration/freezer

All of the above involved alleged “labor-saving” technology that has plagued the civilized for a long time. Long enough to have us addicted and unsure how to go about living without said technologies. I can’t help but think how these technologies become unnecessary with a change in social capacity; everything becomes easier with a group.

For example, refrigeration didn’t exist 100 years or so ago. Oh my god, how did people live!?! Well, they fermented and dried food and they had root cellars. Of course, only a hand full of people remember how to ferment or dry food and I don’t know anyone with a root cellar! What do freezers really do anyway? They preserve food for you to eat at a later time. I think about the deer meat I have frozen right now. I can think of two reasons why we did not dry it; we don’t know how, and we didn’t have time. I think the important reason for this example involves not having the time. These technologies save us energy right? They give us the time we need to do things. Penny and I could not have dried all that meat alone. We could not have skinned and tanned the hide while cutting and drying the meat. Perhaps, if we had the training and experience, we could have done it all at once. But we couldn’t… so we froze it, to give us more time to do it. Imagine instead if we had two more people, or ten more people, to cut and dry the meat. It would happen fairly quickly right? If we simply change our social capacity and add more people to the mix, and have a friend show us how to do it, refrigeration becomes meaningless, cumbersome in fact; not just a storage space, but an energy-consuming storage space!

I find this exemplified best with the cooking stove. I have found it hard to gather enough firewood to keep up with the cooking. This would not exist if we had several people collecting firewood, and we conserved the energy by cooking on the same fire together.

Security would come even easier. With a large group, someone has always got their eyes on the gear and goods. One or two or three people would have a hard time having to watch all their stuff all the time, but in a larger group, personal safety and security of gear come with the number of people invested in the group.

All of the routines that use these technologies have a better, social-routine replacement. More on all of this later…

The hide working continues; egging, stretching, more scraping, more soaking, more egging, more stretching… I finally finished tanning one hide last night. The other one I tanned that didn’t come out soft I’ll egg tan again this week and then smoke them both at the same time. I want to get these done as soon as possible. Why? So Penny and I can have matching buckskin short shorts to wear at Rabbitstick Rendezvous.

Now Let’s take a look at Week 21’s Weekly Laundry List:

Bike/Camping trip up the Spring-Water Corridor
Schedule Tattoo appointment
Tan hides using eggs Half done!
Smoke Hides
Celebrate Penny’s B-Day with a wild foods potluck bash
Experiment with flint-knapping bottles without Shaun
Complete Penny’s Buckskin Short Shorts
Continue experimenting with Nixtamalization
Get/buy/make a food dehydrator
Gather and dry more fruit and berries for the winter Penny did a lot more of this than I.
Move out of my house and into the street

The Back-Burner:

Urban Scout Buckskin Short Shorts
Make Rose Hip Jam
Fire Penny’s Clay Pots
Carve Bow
Carve Arrows
Learn to dry and store meats

Didn’t get much done from the Laundry List this week at all! Moving out and working on the hides took up most of my time. I did write a blog on the calming effects of Lemon Balm, and I did write a blog tearing some preachy jerk an new asshole. I have revised the Laundry List a bit for week 22:

The new list for week 20:

Bike/Camping trip up the Spring-Water Corridor
Schedule Tattoo appointment
Tan other hide using eggs
Smoke Hides
Experiment with flint-knapping bottles
Complete Penny’s Buckskin Short Shorts
Continue experimenting with Nixtamalization
Get/buy/make a food dehydrator
Gather and dry more fruit and berries for the winter
Blog about routines of social capacity rather than technology
Experiment with drying meat

The Back-Burner:

Urban Scout Buckskin Short Shorts
Make Rose Hip Jam
Fire Penny’s Clay Pots
Carve Bow
Carve Arrows

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