We use a combination of Pics and Picardin spray/lotion. Pics work really well if you don't want Deet all over your body. I have put up bat houses, but no bats have taken up on my offer of a free residence. They must think if they all move in, I will begin to charge them rent. When there is a breeze, they are less bad. However, here in the woods, they are ever present. At darkness, 9-9:30 PM depending on the time of year the only thing that stops them is a wall or a window. Until the first frost which happens in late August. The woods are spectacular then....no bugs.
I don't know if it will work for you as a part-time resident, but we have made a world of difference on our farm with bird feeders. It's a good idea to do a little research to learn (a) which locally-dense birds eat skeeters and (b) what will attract them to your place. Our problem was ticks and having resident flocks of birds still leaves them plenty of time and appetite to transform our lives from tick check every time you walk across the yard to surprise once or twice every few years to find a tick.
I've always been intrigued by the idea of bats, and we have a few sometimes, but I've never been sufficiently motivated to put up a bat house.
We have LOTS of bird feeders! Hummingbird and seed feeders! I think bats need the appropriate exposure and area. We are deep in the woods so they become more decorative than anything else. What we really need are more dragonflies.....
Ah, we do have dragonflies, although we do nothing in particular to attract them (the next farm over does have a 7-acre pond). We keep seed feeders filled over the winter and hummingbird feeders summer thru early fall. You have me thinking about bats again though!
I switched from Amazon Prime to Walmart+. Walmart+ online prices tend to be lower than the Walmart store. The reason I switched was Walmart's guarantee of third-party sales. I had a miserable time with Amazon on a defective product from a third-party seller.
We have done some Walmart (charcoal) but I didn't think to check for this particular item. Not sure they'd have it since it might not be their thing. I did check, Walmart had it for $207. Amazon Prime was cheaper by about $50.
Walmart+ has a price match policy with amazon. I prefer Walmart because they deliver to my area within 3 hours. Also, Walmart+ is $99/year. I confess I continue to use AWS. Amazon's cloud services are still the best.
I use Amazon when I absolutely need something I can't get locally, because as a non-credit card owner, I can buy an Amazon gift card (and get gas points!) for cash and apply it to my Amazon account. That said, we live on a farm in rural Vermont and there's not a whole lot we actually need to buy online anyway. Our first choice is always to check out the second-hand stores, we can usually find what we need/kind of what we need/something we can make work.
Much of your experience with rural life (and woodburning stover installs!) mirrors my own. I'm a native Chicagoan but my wife is a Texan so we bought a small ranch in central Texas after we left Illinois. People down here are very friendly and helpful but its a lot of figuring it out as you go. I had to teach myself how to operate a tractor, clear brush, cut and bale hay, etc. And what you said about urban people....... not understanding AT ALL that the entire world truly runs on diesel fuel. Take away diesel and city life ends inside of 2 weeks, because rural life supports and makes possible city living. Every piece of heavy equipment out here runs diesel oil.
I really enjoy hearing about ex-CME and CBOT brethren moving on to completely different and fulfilling lives. Keep up this writing. I'm in Vegas for work in early November, would like to get together to trade exchange and rural living stories if you're around.
Yes can do. We will set it up! Rural Texas is different than rural MN but the same ethos. Agree with your comment about diesel! A lot of people here still grouse about ethanol laden gasoline too
Big Ag owns Iowa. And Idaho. And Nebraska. And South Dakota. And North Dakota. And Indiana. And…. It’s nice to have lots of money to buy lobbyists,
politicians, and indentured servants whose housing, food, and healthcare are paid for by you and me. A giant money laundering operation. Like almost every other agglomerated business interest in this country. Do I sound jaded? I think I’m just being realistic!
Thank you. I enjoyed that. I reminded me of an article about Nobel prize-winning economist James Buchanan that the Dallas Fed published 20 years ago. (during the '90s and early '00s it published a wonderful serious of "Economic Insights" on various topics focusing on free-market economists and economic thought.) I just found it again online here:
Another thing that sets Buchanan apart is his view of the relationship between individuals and civilization. Influenced by what he considered the government’s overreaching in the 1960s,
Buchanan believes the closer a person can come to self-sufficiency, the better off he is. That might seem a strange position for an economist, but Buchanan defies easy classification, even in how he lives his life:
I like space around me. I bought this century-old log cabin and started fixing it up and added to it and so forth. I kept buying more land, more land, more land. I found out something about my utility function as I did that, because I found out that every step I took toward genuine self-subsistence
really gives me a big charge. If I can build a fire in my wood stove and don’t have to depend on electric heat if we have a power outage, then I’m that much happier. Or if I can go across the street to the spring and get a bucket of water as opposed to having an electric pump to the well, that
gives me a charge. Or if I grow my own vegetables or pick my own berries, which I’m doing now. This year there is a good blackberry crop. I became more and more interested
in having at least a backup, so self-subsistent existence really did give me a lot of utility.
there are limits to self-sufficiency, as Adam Smith defined. But as long as people are free to bargain, and free to choose, the free market system will allow you to be more self-sufficient while using the fruits of your labor to pay for things that are better done by other people so you can devote your time to what you choose to do (which might be working, or not)
Growing up in northern WI, and now living in N Idaho, I can relate. Wish I didn’t have to have an Amazon account because I hate funding my own oppression, but most of what I want to buy is never available locally, or if so, very expensive. Last week I needed a new muffler for my truck. $80 on Amazon delivered or $250 and 20 miles to Spokane. Easy choice.
"Unfortunately, it’s the urban people like Zuckerberg who set national and state policies." I hear so many CA or IL people say they are leaving their blue states to a rural red state. We will be safe, they say. But I tell them, be aware, be involved--the city is where they make the laws and the regulations.
Believe it or not, Vermont was a fairly conservative state until just a couple decades ago. What changed? A tsunami of people from urban Massachusetts (lovingly called 'Massholes' in these parts - if the shoe fits . . .), Connecticut, NYC, and New Jersey and they all brought their voting habits with them, along with their preferences for pretty much everything else. Rural Vermonters, the real kind, are still more conservative than not, but sadly out-voted by the flatlanders.
It's great that the USA has both rural and urban experiences. Neither is inherently better than the other, both have made the USA what it is. I find the rural people to be about as ignorant of the urban people as the reverse, even if they're not quite as smug. Should change out the Chinese made Solo for a US made Breeo. Just kidding, maybe, mostly.
I’m in semi-rural NC and my neighbors know quite a lot about the current urban experience and mindset. And they are inquisitive enough to ask me all about my Chicago experiences to increase their knowledge. It’s the old right vs. left argument. People on the right know the arguments of the left backwards and forwards, people on the left live in their bubbles and only have superficial knowledge of the right’s arguments. The left feels no need to learn the arguments of those they consider to be evil.
Meh, I don't see the Atlantic as a great resource to read. When I look at policy, and what politicians say, there are far more Democrats both locally and nationally that favor socialism than there are radically right Republicans. Far more. Who are the RINOs in the Democratic Party?
As with all publications, one has to read critically. The Atlantic has many good articles. And many not so good. That article was just an example.
My reply was about regular people’s knowledge of their political opposites. Lots of studies with similar conclusions. This is an org that focuses on it. https://perceptiongap.us
As far as D RINOs, I think the Ds superficially hang together more than the Rs. Manchin and Sinema (in the past) are probably OK examples. The Ds used to have Blue Dogs, but they seem to have been killed off.
2. How many RINOS are there? I can easily name a lot more than 2. There are no DINOS in the House. I can name at least 10 if not more House members that are RINOS. The Dems do not moderate and if you use your false equivalence, you get a Marxist for a mayor.
I am also telling you that I lived in Chicago, downtown since 2003 but worked there since 1986. Grew up there. I know the liberal mindset. Conservatives used to keep their mouths shut and just take it. Now that they are speaking out, the liberals don't like the pushback. I don't have asymmetric information, I have lived information.
Likewise with me. I lived urban or suburban until I retired. Not only that but I worked in the belly of the beast-education. So I understand the urban Left very well.
I don’t buy this. If you had a Time Machine and went back 50 years and showed the current platforms of each party to an average voter from each party, the Republican from 50 years ago would recognize 99% of the current Republican platform, and the Democrat would be gobsmacked by how radical the current Democrat party is.
No non-Democrat today is overestimating how radical the current Democrat Party is currently.
Cthulhu always swims left. The Republican from fifty years ago would notice many things that today’s GOP no longer fights for. The conservative evolves by subtraction while the progressive evolves by addition.
I'm telling you, with mosquitos, this thing is the bomb. It works on solar and kills the eggs with sound. I even ran over the solar cord and he could ship me another cord (for a charge) and I could plug it back in. https://www.newmountain.com/ Set up a couple by your cabin. I bought two for my sister-in-law and it really helps with their cabin in VT on the waterfront of Lake Champlain. Very rural, right by the Canadian border in Alburgh.
Here is a peer reviewed article on its efficacy. This is a peer reviewed article comparing the SIRENIX to a competitor. This was done by the Anastasia Mosquito Control District in ST Augustine FL where they tested 100 units in a community. https://doi.org/10.32473/jfmca.70.1.133840
Sirenix suppressed Aedes between 75 and 85 %. Aedes is the Dengue, yellow fever transmitter (among many other diseases).
As far as wood stoves, we had a gorgeous one and shipped it up to VT to my husband's brother. It was gorgeous, bright blue, but we live in the suburbs. Not sure how long they are even going to allow us to have a wood fireplace. They are actually trying to phase out gas here. By the time they do that, I'll be retired to a red state down south, where we can throw the bums out if they try.
I am just beyond the exurban areas of Mpls/St Paul, so rural but I can see it ending. Not sure what to do when I get a bit older. My preference is for rural, but my body (at my age, 68) may not be able to do all the things I need to do to live here. That said, however, this is country-gentleman rural, not out-in-the-effing-boondocks rural like Grand Marais or much of northern MN. Good on you for making it work.
NB I wouldn't be without gas (propane or natgas) as a backup unless you rarely go to the cabin in winter. Natgas is better because northern MN can see temperatures as low as -44F; the point at which propane becomes liquid. It's rare, but it has happened. Lighting a fire under your propane tank to heat the cabin seems dangerous.
We're in a protected "rural buffer" between a hideously woke university (metastasizing sprawl) and the county seat (small town), with the more rural part of the county stretching significantly north past the small town. we don't have the isolation downside but LOTS of "city/blue"-driven bad policy downside.
For instance the next county over has small industries, economic growth, and kids' sports leagues; we have empty electric buses and drag for kids in public libraries.
I lived in a small town in OH with 400 registered voters. One general store in town, a couple of restaurants, convenience stores, and bars, a beauty parlor, and a pizza takeout place (which later burned down and was not replaced). One blinking stoplight.
After we left, most of those needed stores were gone. I suspect that Amazon does a brisk business. Now, for those denigrating Amazon, I should mention that one of its most useful aspects is the use of local businesses to handle distribution through Amazon (which takes its cut, but the connection also allows those businesses to continue operation).
We use a combination of Pics and Picardin spray/lotion. Pics work really well if you don't want Deet all over your body. I have put up bat houses, but no bats have taken up on my offer of a free residence. They must think if they all move in, I will begin to charge them rent. When there is a breeze, they are less bad. However, here in the woods, they are ever present. At darkness, 9-9:30 PM depending on the time of year the only thing that stops them is a wall or a window. Until the first frost which happens in late August. The woods are spectacular then....no bugs.
I don't know if it will work for you as a part-time resident, but we have made a world of difference on our farm with bird feeders. It's a good idea to do a little research to learn (a) which locally-dense birds eat skeeters and (b) what will attract them to your place. Our problem was ticks and having resident flocks of birds still leaves them plenty of time and appetite to transform our lives from tick check every time you walk across the yard to surprise once or twice every few years to find a tick.
I've always been intrigued by the idea of bats, and we have a few sometimes, but I've never been sufficiently motivated to put up a bat house.
We have LOTS of bird feeders! Hummingbird and seed feeders! I think bats need the appropriate exposure and area. We are deep in the woods so they become more decorative than anything else. What we really need are more dragonflies.....
Ah, we do have dragonflies, although we do nothing in particular to attract them (the next farm over does have a 7-acre pond). We keep seed feeders filled over the winter and hummingbird feeders summer thru early fall. You have me thinking about bats again though!
I switched from Amazon Prime to Walmart+. Walmart+ online prices tend to be lower than the Walmart store. The reason I switched was Walmart's guarantee of third-party sales. I had a miserable time with Amazon on a defective product from a third-party seller.
We have done some Walmart (charcoal) but I didn't think to check for this particular item. Not sure they'd have it since it might not be their thing. I did check, Walmart had it for $207. Amazon Prime was cheaper by about $50.
Walmart+ has a price match policy with amazon. I prefer Walmart because they deliver to my area within 3 hours. Also, Walmart+ is $99/year. I confess I continue to use AWS. Amazon's cloud services are still the best.
I use Amazon when I absolutely need something I can't get locally, because as a non-credit card owner, I can buy an Amazon gift card (and get gas points!) for cash and apply it to my Amazon account. That said, we live on a farm in rural Vermont and there's not a whole lot we actually need to buy online anyway. Our first choice is always to check out the second-hand stores, we can usually find what we need/kind of what we need/something we can make work.
Much of your experience with rural life (and woodburning stover installs!) mirrors my own. I'm a native Chicagoan but my wife is a Texan so we bought a small ranch in central Texas after we left Illinois. People down here are very friendly and helpful but its a lot of figuring it out as you go. I had to teach myself how to operate a tractor, clear brush, cut and bale hay, etc. And what you said about urban people....... not understanding AT ALL that the entire world truly runs on diesel fuel. Take away diesel and city life ends inside of 2 weeks, because rural life supports and makes possible city living. Every piece of heavy equipment out here runs diesel oil.
I really enjoy hearing about ex-CME and CBOT brethren moving on to completely different and fulfilling lives. Keep up this writing. I'm in Vegas for work in early November, would like to get together to trade exchange and rural living stories if you're around.
Yes can do. We will set it up! Rural Texas is different than rural MN but the same ethos. Agree with your comment about diesel! A lot of people here still grouse about ethanol laden gasoline too
Ethanol gas is a useless waste in sooo many ways….
Driving through Iowa, it's on all the pumps......you can buy lower octane ethanol cheaper than non-ethanol. Ain't subsidies grand?
Big Ag owns Iowa. And Idaho. And Nebraska. And South Dakota. And North Dakota. And Indiana. And…. It’s nice to have lots of money to buy lobbyists,
politicians, and indentured servants whose housing, food, and healthcare are paid for by you and me. A giant money laundering operation. Like almost every other agglomerated business interest in this country. Do I sound jaded? I think I’m just being realistic!
Big Ag is the strongest lobby in the US. Own both sides of the aisle
That’s what the military industrial complex, big tech, and Pharma want you to think!
Great read as usual.
Pro tip: Cover open stove pipe with throwaway shower caps.
JLM
www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com
We used tin foil so I can come up with some really good conspiracy theories now.
Thank you. I enjoyed that. I reminded me of an article about Nobel prize-winning economist James Buchanan that the Dallas Fed published 20 years ago. (during the '90s and early '00s it published a wonderful serious of "Economic Insights" on various topics focusing on free-market economists and economic thought.) I just found it again online here:
https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/economic-insights-federal-reserve-bank-dallas-6360/james-m-buchanan-creation-public-choice-theory-607558
This is the passage I remember:
Another thing that sets Buchanan apart is his view of the relationship between individuals and civilization. Influenced by what he considered the government’s overreaching in the 1960s,
Buchanan believes the closer a person can come to self-sufficiency, the better off he is. That might seem a strange position for an economist, but Buchanan defies easy classification, even in how he lives his life:
I like space around me. I bought this century-old log cabin and started fixing it up and added to it and so forth. I kept buying more land, more land, more land. I found out something about my utility function as I did that, because I found out that every step I took toward genuine self-subsistence
really gives me a big charge. If I can build a fire in my wood stove and don’t have to depend on electric heat if we have a power outage, then I’m that much happier. Or if I can go across the street to the spring and get a bucket of water as opposed to having an electric pump to the well, that
gives me a charge. Or if I grow my own vegetables or pick my own berries, which I’m doing now. This year there is a good blackberry crop. I became more and more interested
in having at least a backup, so self-subsistent existence really did give me a lot of utility.
there are limits to self-sufficiency, as Adam Smith defined. But as long as people are free to bargain, and free to choose, the free market system will allow you to be more self-sufficient while using the fruits of your labor to pay for things that are better done by other people so you can devote your time to what you choose to do (which might be working, or not)
Yes; plus, as an econ prof of mine at Chicago once noted: "I would never presume to pass judgment on someone else's utility curve."
Growing up in northern WI, and now living in N Idaho, I can relate. Wish I didn’t have to have an Amazon account because I hate funding my own oppression, but most of what I want to buy is never available locally, or if so, very expensive. Last week I needed a new muffler for my truck. $80 on Amazon delivered or $250 and 20 miles to Spokane. Easy choice.
"Unfortunately, it’s the urban people like Zuckerberg who set national and state policies." I hear so many CA or IL people say they are leaving their blue states to a rural red state. We will be safe, they say. But I tell them, be aware, be involved--the city is where they make the laws and the regulations.
Right. I hate when the blue people move rural and then demand that the rural live by their expectations...
Believe it or not, Vermont was a fairly conservative state until just a couple decades ago. What changed? A tsunami of people from urban Massachusetts (lovingly called 'Massholes' in these parts - if the shoe fits . . .), Connecticut, NYC, and New Jersey and they all brought their voting habits with them, along with their preferences for pretty much everything else. Rural Vermonters, the real kind, are still more conservative than not, but sadly out-voted by the flatlanders.
It's great that the USA has both rural and urban experiences. Neither is inherently better than the other, both have made the USA what it is. I find the rural people to be about as ignorant of the urban people as the reverse, even if they're not quite as smug. Should change out the Chinese made Solo for a US made Breeo. Just kidding, maybe, mostly.
I’m in semi-rural NC and my neighbors know quite a lot about the current urban experience and mindset. And they are inquisitive enough to ask me all about my Chicago experiences to increase their knowledge. It’s the old right vs. left argument. People on the right know the arguments of the left backwards and forwards, people on the left live in their bubbles and only have superficial knowledge of the right’s arguments. The left feels no need to learn the arguments of those they consider to be evil.
Don’t fall for the illusion of asymmetric insight. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/liberals-conservatives-wrong-about-each-other/620996/
Meh, I don't see the Atlantic as a great resource to read. When I look at policy, and what politicians say, there are far more Democrats both locally and nationally that favor socialism than there are radically right Republicans. Far more. Who are the RINOs in the Democratic Party?
As with all publications, one has to read critically. The Atlantic has many good articles. And many not so good. That article was just an example.
My reply was about regular people’s knowledge of their political opposites. Lots of studies with similar conclusions. This is an org that focuses on it. https://perceptiongap.us
And this is a good one on the dangers of the illusion of asymmetric insight. https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/misreading-others-minds-asymmetric
As far as D RINOs, I think the Ds superficially hang together more than the Rs. Manchin and Sinema (in the past) are probably OK examples. The Ds used to have Blue Dogs, but they seem to have been killed off.
2. How many RINOS are there? I can easily name a lot more than 2. There are no DINOS in the House. I can name at least 10 if not more House members that are RINOS. The Dems do not moderate and if you use your false equivalence, you get a Marxist for a mayor.
I am also telling you that I lived in Chicago, downtown since 2003 but worked there since 1986. Grew up there. I know the liberal mindset. Conservatives used to keep their mouths shut and just take it. Now that they are speaking out, the liberals don't like the pushback. I don't have asymmetric information, I have lived information.
Likewise with me. I lived urban or suburban until I retired. Not only that but I worked in the belly of the beast-education. So I understand the urban Left very well.
I don’t buy this. If you had a Time Machine and went back 50 years and showed the current platforms of each party to an average voter from each party, the Republican from 50 years ago would recognize 99% of the current Republican platform, and the Democrat would be gobsmacked by how radical the current Democrat party is.
No non-Democrat today is overestimating how radical the current Democrat Party is currently.
Cthulhu always swims left. The Republican from fifty years ago would notice many things that today’s GOP no longer fights for. The conservative evolves by subtraction while the progressive evolves by addition.
I'm telling you, with mosquitos, this thing is the bomb. It works on solar and kills the eggs with sound. I even ran over the solar cord and he could ship me another cord (for a charge) and I could plug it back in. https://www.newmountain.com/ Set up a couple by your cabin. I bought two for my sister-in-law and it really helps with their cabin in VT on the waterfront of Lake Champlain. Very rural, right by the Canadian border in Alburgh.
Here is a peer reviewed article on its efficacy. This is a peer reviewed article comparing the SIRENIX to a competitor. This was done by the Anastasia Mosquito Control District in ST Augustine FL where they tested 100 units in a community. https://doi.org/10.32473/jfmca.70.1.133840
Sirenix suppressed Aedes between 75 and 85 %. Aedes is the Dengue, yellow fever transmitter (among many other diseases).
As far as wood stoves, we had a gorgeous one and shipped it up to VT to my husband's brother. It was gorgeous, bright blue, but we live in the suburbs. Not sure how long they are even going to allow us to have a wood fireplace. They are actually trying to phase out gas here. By the time they do that, I'll be retired to a red state down south, where we can throw the bums out if they try.
Hmmmm. I bought some stuff at Costco for grins. It's a solar powered thing by Pic. Doesn't work but it does provide a nice light.
I am just beyond the exurban areas of Mpls/St Paul, so rural but I can see it ending. Not sure what to do when I get a bit older. My preference is for rural, but my body (at my age, 68) may not be able to do all the things I need to do to live here. That said, however, this is country-gentleman rural, not out-in-the-effing-boondocks rural like Grand Marais or much of northern MN. Good on you for making it work.
NB I wouldn't be without gas (propane or natgas) as a backup unless you rarely go to the cabin in winter. Natgas is better because northern MN can see temperatures as low as -44F; the point at which propane becomes liquid. It's rare, but it has happened. Lighting a fire under your propane tank to heat the cabin seems dangerous.
Never come in the winter. I have several internet cameras around the property so I can enjoy it from afar.....
We're in a protected "rural buffer" between a hideously woke university (metastasizing sprawl) and the county seat (small town), with the more rural part of the county stretching significantly north past the small town. we don't have the isolation downside but LOTS of "city/blue"-driven bad policy downside.
For instance the next county over has small industries, economic growth, and kids' sports leagues; we have empty electric buses and drag for kids in public libraries.
I lived in a small town in OH with 400 registered voters. One general store in town, a couple of restaurants, convenience stores, and bars, a beauty parlor, and a pizza takeout place (which later burned down and was not replaced). One blinking stoplight.
After we left, most of those needed stores were gone. I suspect that Amazon does a brisk business. Now, for those denigrating Amazon, I should mention that one of its most useful aspects is the use of local businesses to handle distribution through Amazon (which takes its cut, but the connection also allows those businesses to continue operation).
I like the double walled stove pipe too.
Love having firewood.