Whilst perusing the cyber highway, I came across this zany photo-graph. Take a gander, if you please.
A few months back I came home to find a nifty book on the front stoop of one of my houses. After becoming intrigued by the title, Little House on a Small Planet: Simple Homes, Cozy Retreats, and Energy Efficient Possibilities, I dove into this tome.
I have to say, I enjoyed reading it a lot. If you have any questions or curiousity about living in a tiny house (or even just a smaller-than-normal house), then I recommend this book. It examines this lifestyle from many different angles, and covered some questions I didn’t even have a clue I had.
I’ll go into some of what’s inside Little House on a Small Planet here, in bullet point form: READ MORE »
That’s right, that’s right, The Great “Off the Grid” Book Giveaway of 2010 is o-fficially over, and I’m proud to present the winner. Drumroll, por favor…
And the winner, by unanimous decision, is… why, I don’t believe this, it’s none other than Bruce Codere, of http://poterprinciple.blogspot.com/!
Mr. Codere, as soon as I receive the pertinent information as to how to relay this book to you, it shall be sent, straightaway.
(FREE book – details below!)
Oh snap! Go vote for this at Care2, por favor!
Around the beginning of August, I was lucky enough to get a free copy of Nick Rosen’s new book, “Off the Grid: Inside the Movement for More Space, Less Government, and True Independence in Modern America“. Nick runs the website Off-the-Grid, and lives part-time off the grid himself.
Basically, its a documentary of his travels around the U.S. as he visited loads of different people who were living off the grid. How “off the grid” they were varied from “off the grid ready” to completely off the water AND electric grid.
To tell the truth, the book didn’t draw me in at first. After a brief introduction to what living off the grid means, and some info about himself, he goes into the history of the electric and water grids. Although the information itself was neat, it was not the most attention-grabbing stuff.
But as I kept reading, I got more and more into this book. We meet different “classes” of off-grid people, from people who have vacation homes that are off-grid (but live on the grid themselves) to people who live full-time off the grids in tiny houses.
It was interesting reading the conversations Nick had with the off-gridders. A lot of them seemed intelligent and nice, but some would come off as a bit paranoid. This is where we get to see Nick’s dry British humor, as he describes what he’s thinking as the person is telling him their strange ideas.
But most of the people did seem “normal”. Many of them moved off the grid to save money, or because they wanted a nice house on nice land, but couldn’t afford it if it was connected to the grid. Some people did it for ecological reasons, some for paranoia, but almost all because they felt a detachment from the consumerism-dominated American culture.
There were two main parts of the book that were my favorite:
The first part was when Nick traveled to two places very close to where I grew up in Asheville — Earthaven and Turtle Island, where we meet the (figurative) mountain of a man Eustace Conway. I haven’t been to either of those places, but after reading about them, I definitely want to go and stay for awhile.
The second part was when he visited the Sultan of Scrounge, Jim Juczak, who lives at the Woodhenge Self-Reliance Campus. This guy sounds like a genuine eco hero. He never pays full price for anything, and gets most things for free, and the rest at insano discounts. His house (which is round and sounds awesome) is built from reused or very discounted materials, and he even gets his food for very cheap. Anyhoo, it seemed like this guy alone could fill a book. Here’s a nice article about him, with pictures of his bodacious casa.
To sum it all up, I’d recommend this book to anyone who’s tired of the rat race, tired of debt, tired of the mindless consumerism that too many people succumb to. In fact, I will send a free copy of this book to the person who:
So that’s that. I hope you give this book a shot. I thought it had great information and was pretty cool, but you don’t have to take MY word for it.
The green movement is making inroads even in the lil’ town of Garner. I was in the library last week, lamenting my near-illiteracy while I looked for the picture book section, when I saw READ MORE »
Hot dang, it’s been nigh on a month since I last posted on here, back when perhaps the greatest human being of all time went to go join the Great Spirit in the Sky.
Anyhoo, some of you may be familiar with the Lorax, a fanciful creature who “speaks for the trees”, straight from the warped mind of Dr. Seuss, PhD. Here’s your chance to get a free PDF of an activity book featuring this true eco-hero.
Just CLICK ON THIS LINK to go and get your free copy of it! Go on, I won’t watch, honest I won’t.
Last, but not least, if you’ve got an attention span longer than mine, you may want to take a peek at this Lorax cartoon, which looks like it was made in the ’70s, based on my expert opinion.
Phone books. You gotta love them. Tons o’ wood used to make tons of paper to be delivered to houses and immediately recycled (or thrown away). How to stop this growing menace?
I thought I’d opted out of phone book delivery last year, but just today I got “The Talking Phone Book” plopped on my front porch.
So, here’s a quick, easy way to stop getting “The Talking Phone Book” delivered to your casa. It takes about 3 minutes, so it’s a very easy way to save lots of paper, ink, and gas (for phone book delivery) from being wasted.
1. Click on the city nearest to you on this page.
2. Call the phone number.
3. Hit “0” when the automated message starts.
4. Ax the operator to kindly stop delivering phone books to your house.
That’s it! Never again will you come home to find cruelly murdered trees in the form of a worthless book in front of your door again. Not on my watch.