Hanging Up My Spurs!!!
I’m going to stop traveling to teach these homebrew workshops. You’ll have to come find me in North Carolina after Febuary, where I’ll continue to teach locally, with less frequency.
This is a funny time to be quitting since there’s again a huge explosion of interest from the cheap-fuel side and money’s flying around, but I’m too burned out to keep working on this business, I’m bored with the particular community I’ve been working with, and I can’t stomach continuing to put off “having a life", so I’m scaling back dramatically despite the timing.
I’ve been sick for over a week with something horrible that I caught on the plane back from Fiji. I got to spend an hour in line at the airport listening to a tourist cough explosively behind me the entire time, which is exactly what I’m doing now- explosively coughing every 1.3 minutes, especially at fun times like 3:00 am, 3:02 am, 3:03 am, etc)
A normal person would have just gone home after that trip and would have gone straight to three days in bed. Instead, after I landed in Los Angeles on my way back to North Carolina, I took a giant detour to San Francisco to visit The Boyfriend, instantly came down with the flu the next morning, and spent evening packing my move-east, which was followed by yet another day on the plane home. I was co-hosting a combined delayed four-pack bulk-birthday party for myself and a few other November/December birthday people in North Carolina the next day, and besides the locals, we had out-of-town visitors Frankie Abralind, Matt ‘Farmer’ Steiman, and Forrest Gregg from Frybrid coming to visit us to talk greasy science all party long. There were three other birthday people so I could have just begged out of it, stayed in SF till I got better, and gotten another flight home when I wasn’t endangering people with my little colony of microbes. Unfortunately, I’ve become so cavalier about traveling and it’s effect on my body that I ignored all of that, pushed through, and paid for it later. Needless to say, I haven’t really been conscious since then till yesterday.
Now, back to quitting my job:
I’ve recently moved to an incredible (or is it NCredible?) community in rural NC, into a house with biodiesel enthusiasts, where biodiesel talk permeates everything and I adore my new roommates. The move coincides with the seeming end of my Lyme Disease saga- knock on wood, I seem to have been symptom-free since late September which makes life extremely exciting and the possibilities for what I can now do seem endless. Unfortunately, I haven’t really been there- I moved in about 6 weeks ago and my room still looks like I’m living out of a suitcase, because I still am, and I still am slave to my schedule and my job. It’s stopped being fun doing this since it’s keeping me from more fun opportunities and I don’t need the money anymore, not living in high-rent California.
Everyone I meet in the sustainability circles here in town has read Lyle’s book, so when I’m introduced to them I often hear something to the effect of ‘oh, I’ve read about you in Lyle’s book’ (to which I say ‘Lies! Lies! it’s all lies! or something to that effect, see previous post about what I think of journalists in general, including those who are my friends).
I keep finding myself sounding like some kind of very fake social butterfly in those interactions, though- since I’ve also heard about most everyone in the sustainability scene in town also, I usually wind up getting very enthusiastic and saying something about how interested I am in what that person does (like oyster mushroom cultivation, or raising livestock, or herbalism classes, or other pursuits that some of these people are immersed in). I sound fake, but I really am fascinated by the opportunities to learn some of these things and the opportunities here are endless. I’m getting in shape for the first time in years, and found a few martial arts schools to check out whenever my lungs start to work again, and I have a barn to work in where I can try my hand at a gazillion biodiesel projects. My welder and a shopful of tools is already with me from my trip, so I have virtually no limits on what I can do. I want to make ethanol for fuel use. I want to find a 500-gallon-batch farm-scale biodiesel project, hopefully nearby, to build and tinker with. I want to continue my Fiji experiments. I lie awake at night reinventing the mechanically-automated batch reactor and find myself in the stores seeking out new methoxide mixer parts for the new open-source methoxide mixer. I want to explore the machinist class possibilities at the community college in the next town. I’m curious about the various tinkerer guys associated with the sustainability/offgrid world here, and what I can learn from them. My mind’s on greywater and wood heat and pellet stoves. I’ve put out feelers to a local nonprofit about taking on a glorified janitor job keeping one of their projects looking it’s best. The Boyfriend’s moving here soon, and we’re kicking around a gazillion nonprofit project ideas having to do with starting a research center for some variety of North American Appropriate Technology.
The sky’s the limit. Yet looming over it all is my enemy the Travel Schedule, which says that in two+ weeks I’m leaving again to go teach beginners how to titrate and to answer questions about what car to get.
During last night’s 3 am coughing fit, I decided I’m quitting my job- the boss is too much of a slave-driver and the hours suck. The traveling fly-in workshop was supposed to be a temporary job while I had a hand injury that precluded doing anything else, and I’ve done it for about a year longer than I’d initially intended. While it’s been a tremendous amount of fun to meet many of the homebrewers on the forums, and I’ve learned a phenomenal amount about how people actually do things out there that they don’t talk about on the forums, it’s now getting in the way of having a life a bit too much.
I’m going to schedule a few classes in the far distant future, and teach a few of them locally in NC this spring. In the meantime, my most immediate interest is finding consulting or building work on farm-scale projects, batch systems in the 250-500 gallon batch stage, in the Southeast, within North or South Carolina or Virginia.