Want to read something frustrating about living more sustainably? Want to read why, when people ask the hardest part about what I do, I say it's the friction from people? I'm not saying I'm anything special, just that I've done things as experiments that work out. People say living more sustainably is impossible. When I tell them I'm already doing it, like that I dropped my impact ninety percent, they say what they just was impossible is easy, devaluing any struggle I put into it. I generally find the activity intrinsically rewarding, so I value the struggle, but I don't like being patronized. When I suggest if it's easy, they can do it, they say it's easy for me but hard for them. I don't…

After three or four days at least overcast, often raining, I got to charge outside today. Since I've also been charging through my window, today was my first time outside in longer than just since those rainy days. Unfortunately for me, it was 40F when I went out (4.5C), rising to 43F (6C) when I went home, but more challenging for charging was the wind. Panels are like sails in the wind, expensive sails that can break. But those challenges paled compared to the advantages of spring. The sun is close enough to overhead that I could lay the panels flat on the ground and the angle is close enough to right that the charging rate is fairly close to maximum without the wind blowing…

Until I learned that "the electric refrigerator was made and marketed as means of supporting the physical properties of fossil fueled power plants," I thought electric appliances were designed to save us time and effort. Some may, but our lives have less leisure time than our ancestors before agriculture, as well as many indigenous people today. No wonder, I realized, when it hit me that the industry didn't begin to help us but to sell products to sell more electricity. Oh yeah, generating all that power pollutes and depletes, which power companies don't make a point of publicizing. We've bought into what they told us to sell us that we don't realize we're not benefiting. I never would have noticed this pattern except for hands-on…