Off Grid Off Road Trucksteading in The Desert Heat TPS-0005

Depending on what measure you might use, more or less, I can say that I did survive the summer, the most extreme desert survival summer experience of my life.

There could be more heat waves, and I could feel like everything I just survived was like nothing compared to what I'm about to have to survive.

I'm gonna pray that's not true. I'm gonna pray that this beautiful morning that I woke up to after what feels like an eternity...I’m actually using a blanket in the morning.

I'm, I'm a heat lover. There are people who can't stand the cold or can't stand the heat. Different types of people. I'm definitely somebody who loves the heat and really does not like the cold.

I'll hopefully survive long enough to talk plenty about cold climate survival.

I don't know what the winter is gonna be like, I can say for sure, this summer was the most grueling experience of surviving summer.

I’m not gonna say it's the hardest thing I've ever done, or the worst experience, or anything like that. It's been beautiful. It's been amazing. I've learned a lot.

Though it's a really a lot of pressure in pushing you to wits end and really having to adapt to survive the extreme conditions. It's helped me understand how I would wanna better define insanity and the different degrees of it.

People toss words around like losing your mind, going crazy, going psycho, going insane. There are so many different things that can distort what you think is normal and what other people certainly just think is normal about the way your mind works.

I'll get into a little bit of that, but I'm just super grateful that even if this isn't the worst, at least, there was a bit of a rain and when the rain comes down, even if it's baking hot, blistering hot, even while it's raining...it does cool you down a little, and it’s super magical to see sun and clouds at the same time, rain clouds and sun shining.

But it was just so long, with so few even cool breezes and such unforgiving baking heat. It would go from crippling to more crippling back to a little bit less crippling, but still crippling heat, 24/7 for months.

I'm not complaining. I'm not lamenting, people have it worse. I'm glamping for all intents and purposes compared to people who are dealing with severe natural disaster, displacement or who are environmental refugees.

I'm voluntarily putting myself into a lifestyle, one I've had for many years, but this is the most extreme iteration of it.

But there's a big difference between me choosing to do this and having the means to retreat back to some form of air conditioned, plumbed, power grid supplied, fully administered, apartment existence somewhere, or even warehouse existence somewhere.

I feel like I've had almost every extreme across the spectrum.

I've lived in quasi-mansions. I've slept in dumpsters, slept on the sidewalk with a skateboard as a pillow and no blanket, and everything in between.

I don't feel too sheltered, but I'm at a point where I could give up and go and pay a bunch of money to the man to rent some place, and then have all those amenities, but not without getting all the toxic fumes from the carpets and the paints and even the water.

I’m just trying to go off grid, wild West cowboy style, kind of rustic, and really trying to get into a certain aesthetic and be in a certain character and a vibe, it's very intentional.

It's an intentional community of one. The intention is to avoid the worst of COVID and try to start to eliminate toxic inputs into my life, into my body, into my eyes, into my ears, to my brain waves.

And if that for me has meant a situation where there just happens to be record breaking heat waves, well, I can say I wish that I was able to start this journey sooner, and that it didn't just so happen that the only time I could really break free to this to this extent, the world would be heating up this fast.

In the words of Michael Reynolds, when he went off grid into the desert and started building his experimental earthships…It was really impactful when he said he looked around at his life, and he was like, I am free. And this look on his face when he says that in a documentary, Garbage Warrior, that always stuck with me.

Of course we want to be sustainable. Of course we want to do things like homestead and grow your own food, but it's the way he said that, it's really struck a deep chord.

I've never been able to get as free as he is, as free as I wanna be. Where you don't have to go back for anything, maybe ever, or at least for a very long time. At some point you're not doing supply runs anymore.

You are supplying yourself, because however many months or years it took to go back and forth to make supply runs to your very free and off grid existence, eventually, you're recycling your nutrients, you have zero waste. You're not producing any trash. You're reusing and recycling everything. And you're producing food and medicine.

I would love to think that someday all of my mechanical devices, electronic devices, can just break down and I’ll properly dispose of them, but not replace them, and eventually be a hundred percent organic.

Become a rustic, almost an anachronistic society.

There’s a beautiful film I just watched, the 1982 chinese kung fu film just simply called Shaolin Temple.

They have all of the hand made brick work and woodwork and gardens and fabrics and dyes.

All of that was before toxic, hyper chemical, toxic petroleum, plastic, everything.

The intention is to start move in that direction.

The stakes are high to go off grid now. If there was ever an argument to be made to stay, plug into the matrix and to stay sheltered, if you can not lose your mind around COVID restrictions...

I certainly had to question myself, are you serious about this?

This is your rhetoric. This is what you asked for. You prayed for this.

You wanted this your whole life. If you turn around and you go back with your tail between your legs and go rejoin civilization after all of the trash talk you've done, and now you have the means to do it.

It's not a question of going back and quitting.

I live in a bamboo hut on a pickup truck. I call it trucksteading and I'm probably not the one coining that term.

I’ve lived in two door cars, four door cars, vans, trucks, etc. For me, the sweet spot of my whole life has been this last couple years of being a nomadic, a permaculture designer, landscaper, working on crews, doing my own gigs, from design to install, where there's a versatility of a truck versus a van.

If you need to load things, load mulch, bag things up, load tools, you can be a lot more of a Swiss Army knife with a truck than with a van, or obviously a car, even though I've done epic stuff for years and years with all of the above.

I've always wanted a truck, and it was a gift for me to have a truck and a really sacred gift from someone who means a lot to me and really knows what I would do with it.

So my homie, who's a welder, I give him some beers and some money and some joints and we hack up this old ladder rack and turn it into a corrugated sheet metal roof solar panel mounted, bamboo fence walled epic tiny home. Wind flows through you can hear things, it’s private enough and it's secure enough with bamboo fencing that it doesn't feel you’re getting baked like a potato the way you would in any other fully enclosed type of normal camper where you're surrounded by metal walls, for extra weather proofing and security.

But I learned years ago that I could be happy if I could just be dry, and I could be secure with just bamboo fence walls and a tarp for roof, which is now upgraded to a corrugated metal roof.

That's pretty much putting me in league with people all over Southeast Asia, people all over the so called Third and Fourth World.

Still compared to them, I'm glamping because I have my computer and my phone and, and a job. I've had many jobs, and now my job is to participate in securing various crypto networks and keep myself out of trouble, do some permaculture gigs, landscaping gigs and.

Not working for the man anymore, livin the dream.

I love the design and architecture of people throughout the tropics who have bamboo everywhere and everything is bamboo.

From the people in China or Hong Kong living on boats their whole lives, that whole boat village concept, and then the people who live on bamboo hut piers all throughout the islands of Southeast Asia.

That's my dream, to eventually have no technology and to be fishing and foraging and living tribal in a village of that type.

Whether it's possible to sort of synthesize that, to transpose or extrapolate from that in the US somehow without expatriating...I'm gonna, at least do my best to try to push myself to those limits of austerity.

There's no crew that’s waiting to come and pull me out. If I mess up I'm dead. I don't have that village, I don't have anything to buffer and offset, being injured or having heat stroke or any kind of medical issue.

Though this is less brave and courageous than anybody who hikes any of those long trail hikes. I've never done that kind of backpacking but I've lived out of backpacks being homeless. But I see them as being even more epic and they're facing the wild and the unknown and being tactically disadvantageous, you're not really obliged to be armed in a lot of different places.

Doing this solo off grid experiment...I'm not complaining that it happens to be such a hot experiment, such a hot time in the history of the world, but I know what I have to do to adapt to it.

I finally have my own land. I’m no longer at the same risk of having the rug pulled on me while gardening someone else's property, or gardening the community garden, or whatever it was.

The rug always would get pulled. It's just a weird form trauma that makes it very demoralizing to always be starting from scratch and having the best years of your life and the best years of your back.

I wanna plant so many trees, though I planted most of those trees for other people on their properties, and I don't have much to show for it.

I have a lot of mileage on me, and a lot of back pain from working those long shifts and working in that productionist mindset of you don't get to stop working, if you’re in pain and you want to keep your job, you have to just suck it up and suffer. Otherwise you'll be replaced. There's no mercy in the workaday world.

So all I'm saying is that I'm extremely grateful to have what I have.

I’m not thinking the grass is always greener.

I'm thinking, okay, if I'm doing extreme heat wave, climate change, survival training, exposure, then so be it. I will learn from it all, adapt to it.

I'm not, not at all wishing that it would have happened differently.

Though if I were to just happen to have had that transition happen a couple of months earlier, let's say, in the winter or the fall rather than it being late winter, practically spring. When I got here it started to quickly become too hot to do anything at all. Including even all night.

I got in maybe a few weeks of basic base camp setup and basic just getting into a flow of surviving off of preps and experimenting with a little bit with a little a nursery.

But realizing quickly that just evaporated, I've never encountered heat like this, except for the times in places like Vegas or Arizona, where you just don't go outside.

I remember in Vegas going from a condo to a car, it feels like you're getting hit by a freight train of heat that is all absorbing and just starts melting your brain out.

I couldn’t have imagined then that I’d be living in that heat 24/7.

I’ve had to do triage with water, pushing the limits of the one gallon per person per day survival rule.

I was drinking up to two gallons a day, averaging about two gallons a day, just trying to make sure you’re still able to urinate.

Having to monitor the thickness, the duration, the frequency, the color, the smell, the sensations that change...

Learning and knowing the thresholds between heat exhaustion and heat stroke...

It's a beautiful thing when you encounter a medical situation, hopefully not emergency, but a situation and, or emergency, anything on that continuum and you’re studies magically appear in your mind to help remind you of what to do or not do.

They remind you don't cut corners on doing that first aid on that wound you just got, don't let it get dirty, pay attention to the signs of infection.

You might always do it right. But then one time you just get in a rush, or it’s absent mindedness...but to study survival medicine in advance, you have that guard rail, that's really powerful.

I don't have military training formally. I’ve had a lot of people who have come out of the military and trained me in various types things.

I have some second hand paramilitary training, nothing to put on a contract or resume and try to get hired but definitely some exposure to that.

I just try to be a Swiss Army knife.

I’m not the most highly skilled survivalist, but I’m not the least either. I’m not living a blissfully ignorant, carefree life where everything is administered, everything is convenient, you just kind of get everything supplied to you.

I’m not living a life with no redundancy, no resilience, no backup plan, no forethought to things not being the way you take them for granted, then you are the most vulnerable, and you're gonna panic the most and suffer the most, and maybe die depending on situation.

Whereas if you became some level of a civilian Rambo, wanna be A-Team, Macgyver, whatever it is, there's not really a cultural reference like a prepper cartoon, you just have GI Joe saying that knowing is half the battle... might pick up a few things from all of that influences.

But as far as I know, there hasn't been any sort of positive, empowering movie about peppers.

I think a simple place that anyone can start with prepping is what I call the prepping pyramid. To have what you carry in your pockets and on your person at all times. That's often called everyday carry, the zone of your person.

Then you have the zone of your 72 hour emergency kit back backpack, your go bag, bug out bag, rucksack, whatever you wanna call it. That's like the zone two.

Then zone three is what you pack into your vehicle,

Then after that, you've got your workplace, and then your home, and then your survival retreat.

And beyond that, of course, the wilderness. There's like a scale or a fractal, in every one of those zones. So as you come down every level towards the most solid, broadest base, that's like your survival retreat in the wilderness. But for every one of those zones, it has basically some fractal version of your tool shed, your bathroom, your medicine cabinet, your kitchen, your closet, even your junk drawer.

So when I build out a bug out bag, I'm often compartmentalizing things. Basically miniaturized versions of the different sectors of an average person's home, where they've got these different functional areas. It obviously makes it easier to sort and find things when you need them.

I would love to see more examples of people who came to an environment and brought everything they needed to not have to suffer, to be appropriately prepared to face the elements and the dangers and opportunities and everything for that mission. Whatever the clothing requirements are, whatever the hydration, whatever it is, tools, maps, etc.

The trope of surviving anywhere with nothing except your wits is well established in media which is great.

For me, the whole point of prepping is so that you don’t end up with nothing but your wits. If you're prepared, it shouldn't be a lot of deprivation.

It should be, I prepared, I applied the formulas. Sometimes things break, or under-perform, you learn the hard way, and it can cost you your life.

Luckily, the body is very resilient. But I will say, definitely, it's been extremely humbling. I will just describe a little bit about this journal that I kept of what I experienced, that I had never experienced before.

I didn't come out here with no shade, or nothing to block the sun, no sunglasses, no shade hat, no long sleeves...

I came out here with everything that even the average desert hiker/explorer/ adventure person would have.

But then again, you could fall short because of unexpected extremes.

And then what do you do? Then you have to hack things together.

Then you have to improvise. Then you really see, what some limits are that you only read about and soon realize this could be it.

I'm just gonna monitor my condition, go by the book of, try to stabilize and just look for signs and monitor and make sure core body temperature is okay...that you haven’t stopped sweating.

There were some gruesome things. Some people feel that they're gonna lose their minds because you can never feel really clean even if you rinse and scrub and that can really change your mood.

It's so interesting to think about how madness can creep up on you if you're not careful.

It's good to have some experience of being in extreme survival situations, so that you can start to really assess where your character can start to distort from these compounding frustrations and discomforts.

It puts 50 years on your life, 50 years of acceleration on your mind, and you end up just cranky and grumpy, to say the least.

I've been a trucksteader for quite a while now.

I've been spoiled with the most palatial bathrooms, with the biggest tubs and most fancy everything and because I was spoiled with that stuff, I know that if I have to go without it, and I gotta go be cowboy ninja commando off grid...

I’ve rigged up different types of cold showers or solar water heated showers. I've done a bunch of those different types of things too, including the camp shower where you heat up water by putting it at an elevated point in a bag.

There's a bunch of different hacks like that, but that's assuming you got water to spare.

My situation has been, mostly a working houseless trucksteader, cutting out the middle man of paying rent.

For the most part for quite a number of years, it's been a life of living outside.

In Southern California, you're not crazy to aspire to do that. I'm not the only person. It's not a taboo to live a so-called van life. Now it's hip to live in tiny homes.

I'm not ashamed of it and I do it my own way. I make it a work of art. I live in a work of art and I expose myself to the elements because I like the elements.

I like to be moderated by the climate. I’ve learned to like the cold, it forces me to cuddle more with myself or with others, to bundle up more and to surrender it and to let go of the workaholism. Stay in bed, read a book, sleep longer, get up when it's warmer and enjoy my dreams more.

There's a reason to be exposed to the elements, not just to see if you're gonna die or not, it's just to be humbled by them and to let them, take you for a ride, let them be sort of a psychedelic experience.

So this time I got taken for a ride, and it wasn't always pleasant.

I'll share some unpleasant things first, and then I'll share what I'm grateful for, the things that were very pleasant, over the summer, and surviving this relentless heat.

There were unexpected emergent properties after having adapted to what would you call sponge bathing.

I have found my sweet spot is just a spray bottle with a very natural very biodegradable soap and that can be composted...just tiny amounts of that, just a few drops of that liquid soap in a water bottle.

Staying damp with a spray bottle to reduce the extreme heat, you're not gonna mold anything. It's gonna evaporate soon enough. .

I've kept myself clean enough.

There are people who over-wash and use chemicals that destroy the balance of good bacteria on their skin.

I've discovered that my skin is actually not supposed to have a chlorine blasting shower everyday.

I love the experience of that and when I had the facilities to spoil myself with long showers every day, certainly after hard days of work, that was the highlight of my day. However, I did learn that's not always best for the health of your skin.

Now I’m bathing out of a spray bottle, using rags and just minimizing the use of water and figuring out how to life hack micro use of water for laundry.

Maybe we don’t need to spend all that water doing that stuff.

There are a lot of life hacks that people do.

Desert rats, they call us.

We may not be the sweetest smelling folk, but we're probably in some ways healthier and probably in many ways more resilient and more capable of dealing with different types of shock to the system.

After this summer, I not only psychologically know what to expect but I'm also that much more acclimatized and that much less afraid.

I confronted grotesque medical issues like no matter what I did, I was just shedding dead skin. In certain places, it started to look like psoriasis. And I don't have psoriasis genetically.

It was different than just having dry air give you cracked skin.

Then encountering what I now know to be a very normal and expected thing called heat rash.

I would get heat rash places like where your boots are, anywhere, where you've got sweat accumulating, or skin in contact with anything, the belt line...you're working, sweating, of course you're gonna have heat rash.

But I was getting heat rash all over my arms and torso, and it wouldn't go away.

It doesn't wash off, you can't scrub it off.

It's like hair folicules being congested.

I realized with the unrelenting heat and moisture, I’d become a fungal target.

Luckily a couple of years earlier I’d kicked all added sugar and gone a hundred percent paleo diet.

If I was out here eating any kind of sugary, corn syrupy, food, I’d be falling apart with fungal infections.

A lot of people take the surface level concept of the paleo diet, no grains, no beans, no dairy, and find ways to push the limits of excess sugar with sweets and dessert dishes. But a paleolithic approach to concentrated sugar is to be very careful with even things like dried fruits and fruit juices. The whole fresh foods may be paleo, but too much concentration can be problematic.

When I started with the paleo diet, I was still eating excessive dried fruits. One summer when I was working a lot of landscaping gigs, I got foot fungus, crotch rot, even fungus on my hands under my work gloves, to the point where I was doing super dangerous landscaping work barefoot without gloves because my skin was just falling off because of the fungus.

Later I went on this date, and this woman, she had a bit of eczema.

She had been reading up on this no sugar diet. I was looking at this book of hers, and realized this is the way to go.

I even brought her some of my trail mix that had an imbalance of excessive dried fruit and she said oh, this is so good, I shouldn't be eating it.

And I say, what but it's dried fruit? It's no sugar added.

But that's still too much, she said.

That really clicked for me, and I'm glad it did because if my destiny was to go be a desert rat, the way I am now, had I not kicked all that stuff earlier, I’d be in big trouble.

I would have had life threatening systemic candidiasis so bad, it may never go away. Even worse, it probably would make me immuno-compromised and more subject to COVID.

It’s a health issue that accelerates the progression of all different types of diseases. Between poor hydration and systemic candidiasis from overeating sugar, those factors are underlying so many health problems...all kinds of yeast infections, that's just the surface of it.

It can get dug in deep, all throughout your body. I've had extreme acute systemic candidiasis. I remember it like it was yesterday, because when I was about 25, I tried the master cleanse with lemon juice, cayenne pepper and maple syrup.

Of course, I had no moderation, and I broke the formula with the maple syrup, I just thought, oh, this is good for you, it gives you energy.

So I was supposed to be cleansing myself, and what I ended up with was this extreme candidiasis. It didn't kill me, but it was lots of rashes and aches and things.

Fungus is trying to eat you all the time, and you make it easy by giving it sugar, moisture, and heat.

The skin issues luckily were manageable and not life threatening this summer, but hydration was the more deadly factor.

Sweating profusely 24/7, not urinating normally, having everything you drink come out your pores and not your bladder…

There was a several week period with some real intense arcs within them where not only, was I sweating 24/7 but it was so much that I was soaking the beach towels I was laying on.

I couldn’t afford the water to wash them so I had to disinfect them by putting them out in the sun and just letting them bake.

They’d get a little stiff but it broke microbial growth cycles and kept them clean enough to not make the skin rashes worse.

The next horror was how difficult it was to sleep at night.

It worked for me to use the same spray bottle I bathe with to try to reduce my body temperature several times throughout the nights.

Ideally I’d have enough water to have a misting system, though it will be critical to have the water treated naturally in a way that doesn't make it a vector of pathogens.

That's a whole other thing that I have to be learning and thinking about and strategizing for, legionairres disease.

Basically water in certain temperature ranges that is stagnant in your off grid survival water tanks...there’s outbreaks that in the news periodically. Sometimes it's really bad it affects the elderly the most, but basically it's a nasty kind of pneumonia that can kill people.

It's just a bacteria that tends to go crazy growing in pipes and in stagnant water.

It's all throughout nature, but in natural aquatic ecosystems, it has some competition, it’s balanced by other things.

My kidneys have not collapsed, although there were times where I felt like I might be on the verge of passing stones, but it never happened that I’m aware of.

If it was a survival show and I had doctors standing by I would love to have had x rays, and diagnoses from someone who would be able to troubleshoot what I was experiencing.

I was just looking at anatomical maps, reading articles, trying to figure out, what I should be watching out for. Dehydration is hell on the kidneys because whatever deposits of minerals would have been more easily flushed out by more abundant flow of fluids...if that's limited, obviously it's gonna be problems compounding rapidly.

It gets bad fast and it can be irreversible damage.

I definitely went through some recurring, semi-constant pains in my lower left back abdomen, and it was just confusing. It could have been anything from kidney stones or kidney problems caused by dehydration or by contaminants in the water as I went a couple of months with sub-standard water filtration systems that I soon upgraded.

Luckily the pains disappeared once the water got filtered more effectively after the upgrade.

I knew better, I should have upgraded sooner but I had to learn the hard way. I did suffer excruciating pain, and also the psychological pain of not knowing, have I really done it this time?

It’s also a big part of my shift from plastic water containers to glass and metal, I had to worry that the previous contents of a food grade water container, may be leaching chemical funkiness that in conjunction with the heat was compounding against me as well.

It was such a relief once the pains went away. I learned my lesson was not afraid of my water ever after. Neither were the flies, moths and all kinds of insects, that would be all over me day and night. I was a lake for them. Luckily, not too many flies, but I really have become this moth reservoir, I didn’t mind the moths.

I’m sure indigenous people’s had figured out all kinds of creative ways to mitigate the natural threats. For me it’s been a decisions like, if I can survive without it, I wanna survive without it. I don't wanna have more gadgets and gizmos. People survived without ice makers.





Part of me just says, if I can survive without another modern device to be another crutch, another prosthesis to the system...

I’ll just be humbled and bedridden, trying not to get bed sores, rotating, figuring out how to get airflow where skin meets, figuring out postures to be in all day long, even all night long, to where there's no part of my body where two pieces of skin are touching, because that becomes a swamp and it's also a waste of water.

Back to the sleep disruption. Interrupting the REM cycle, I see how that can be compounding and lead to insanity.

Cannabis has been a big help, edible medicated oil by the teaspoon. It makes me not as agitated about the heat. I’d notice if I don't have that medication and I'm dealing with the heat, then it's like, this is so wrong. Feeling this gooey and nasty, it’s just so uncomfortable.

The best analogy I can make to how crippling and demoralizing the heat can be is when...if you’ve ever drawn a bath, you're so excited about it, there's no way you're gonna go back and forth and wait for it to cool down or add cold water, you just get in too soon and it’s like, ten times what a sauna would be.

Just that experience of, it feels very uncomfortable.

It's not that it's burning you it just feels like it’s melting your brain. So imagine that feeling 24/7, that's what it's been like for me.

If I knew I was gonna be living in a reality where there was no escape from that and I was gonna have to function, and do everything it takes to live and survive...including administrative stuff, business and finance, personal finance, try to actually do anything of sort of building this project out, under that state, I would have said, no way.

There's no way I would be able to do anything. It's too debilitating. It's too crippling. It is like a form of drunkenness, it's definitely a form of impairment.

It does not go away all day and all night.

If I had enough extra solar panels maybe I could get a tiny ice maker. Then I could make a cold wrap, just take a piece of fabric, dip it the ice water, then ring it out, and wrap the neck.

Wrap the neck, wrap the groin, and wrap the armpits, because that's where the main blood flow is where you wanna cool the blood. Cooling the blood at its central access points.

That’s a very interesting, heat treatment life hack.

It works best if the water is cooled, though it will have a potentially life saving effect even if it’s not cooled water. For me this year it was a trade off given a very limited water supply. I should have budgeted for more water. I had been spoiled at the previous rural land site I had been on which had irrigation pipes so infinite water was on tap. I realize I should have practiced living on a water budget even when I didn’t have to, then I would know how much more I’d need to store in tankage.

Since mid March, I have been fully off grid with nothing to lean on other than what I pack in here.

So I pack in my own solar power system. I packed in water, I've captured a few drops of rainwater, and I've optimized for more, and I'm ready to capture more.

What I really hope is that I capture enough rain water that that I have enough to spoil myself with...to have even more frequent spray bottles, bathing, etc.

If I can dunk my clothes, even if the water is warm, just the water being in contact with it does definitely help with cooling the body temperature in dry heat.

Eventually I will be able to have non-plastic, large volume rainwater catchment systems to where the in rainy season, having that in place, I won't have to import sketchy water with sketchy chemicals and sketchy pharmaceuticals.

As far as I know rain, rain water is not highly contaminated with forever chemicals and everybody's pharmaceutical backwash.

I hope that rainwater is not, coming from down wind of a smoke stack.

I'm still obviously filtering that. I pray the rains come and they don't wash me away or kill me, but they allow me to wash myself a little bit more, to cool down, in a more intelligent manner by dunking clothes in water that I can spare for that purpose.

I wish I did capture more of it. I'm never gonna have too much rainwater catchment capacity. I'm only gonna wish I had more.

Before next summer I’ll experiment with a practice called of natural climate control, natural A-C by running tubes underground, burying them several feet deep over at least a one hundred foot stretch of pipe...You have an intake and a fan to blow air underground through the pipes where it gets naturally cooled.

I've experienced it. I know what can happen in a baking desert when you, when you bury underground ducts where the soil temperature is buffered from extreme cold or extreme heat.

Ideally I will be able to pipe cold air into an above ground, small dome house.

My mindset has been, our ancestors didn't have that stuff. But they would have had wise ways to beat the heat as well.

I’ve learned some of my limits. I know that it’s best to avoid any exertion in the heat, but if once in a while I have to go into beast mode, I can do it for short durations if I’m very cautious about losing balance or consciousness.

If I fall or lose consciousness out here I will wake up with ants tearing my skin off and the sun baking me to death.