Month: June 2026

Power Awareness

On June 3, 2026

If there is one thing that living off grid teaches you that we can be blissfully oblivious to living on grid, it’s about power. Not the Nietzschean will to power master of the universe type power, but actual power. Energy.

Like this rather ugly mistake of a plastic cat fountain above that I had a moment of weakness for and bought on sale, but my cats loathed and ignored and I have attempted to salvage by turning it into a hummingbird fountain to see if it might be of interest to them with the dry heat up here. I got my long suffering dh to cart this up when I met him at Scout camp back in May, and was all excited to plug this into our Jackery, which runs on solar power, and watch all the hummingbirds in the neighbourhood flock to the latest bougie bird spa in the sound. Welp, not only did the hummingbirds completely ignore it—they didn’t even sit on a branch! This innocuous looking beast actually completely drained my power bank running for a few hours!

Zero percent! So this isn’t like some of the gargantua solar setups like some of the neighbours have around here who have luxuries like four solid walls in their lives. No. It’s a Jackery Explorer 2000 V2 that can handle surge to 4400 W and ran our hammer drill just fine when we had to drill holes in the local granite bedrock. It also has been (up until now) a reliable power source for our Dometic cooler. But plug a ridiculous little water fountain into it, and you will drain its lifeblood in no time.

So it looks like the Desolacium Found Bird Spa is offline due to technical difficulties and the hummingbirds are going to have to wait some more for me to build their watery oasis of their dreams. I will look into some solar bird fountains and see what I can come up with next, but since it’s going to be raining for the next week, I think the birds will have so many options they wont need my services in the meantime. What do you think? Should the search to build the ultimate bougie biophilic hummingbird spa continue or should I drop this errant quest? Please let me know in the comments!

The Grind

by Mari

On June 2, 2026

In Desolation Dispatch

I recently learned that the people who were going to help me on my first shed build are not going to be able to do it in June like I had thought. So, I’ve been drowning my sorrows in throwing boards with a lot of nails in them around for the last couple of days on part of the site where a previous cabin was destroyed and left to rot. Here is a “before” shot of the site.

The site of a previous cabin that was torn down years before and there are piles of wood and debris strewn about in the woods all over the place.

That was Sunday May 31st at 7:30 pm right before I started the job of sorting and organizing the wood, the salvage and the waste. It was up to 34°C during the day, so I decided to wait until it was cooler to do such a dirty job involving heavy lifting. The story I heard about this land is that there was someone who had built a cabin here, but someone ended up squatting on the property, so it had to be pulled down. Such a pity. Such a mess!

I worked until 10 pm and then into the next day, and had to stop when I got to the big structural beams that were feeling too heavy for me to lift on my own. So, here is the “after” picture of where I’ve managed to get it to so far.

The post on the concrete block in the foreground was completely buried in the previous picture. Earlier today I started loading the garbage on the site and the wafer board that is visible in the bottom left quadrant of the above photo into garbage bags. There is a special place in Hades for this material. It was so friable it was disintegrating in my hands as I was trying to pick it up, and sending up gnarly clouds of dust (yes I had PPE) and yet the stuff wont rot because it’s laced with industrial chems to prevent it from doing just that. So, it gets all over and contaminates everything in a situation like this where it was just left on the site for years. You can’t burn it either because is illegal as it would release toxic formaldehyde gas and dioxins. The only option is to take it to the dump. This is one of the reasons why I will try my best to avoid such products as we go into our own building phases. Full cycle cradle to cradle LCA all the way. At least to the extent that is possible. It’s a work in progress.

Today the wind is picking up. This is my weather forecast for the next week.

I’m really in for it. A week of rain! Seven whole days! And the wind is shifting. Like in Mary Poppins, when the wind shifts around here, you know there is some kind of mischief or drama afoot. When it comes from the NW, you can chill. But when it shifts to the SE, then you’d better batten down the hatches if you are camping with tarps or else you could be in for some really nasty surprises as I have learned the hard way in the past.

I bought some new tools that I was hoping to use up here, but power tools and rain are not a great mix either. My first thought when I woke up this morning, knowing the forecast, was maybe it was time to throw in the towel. It just wasn’t going to work out for me this trip. But then, I had my breakfast of champions below…

…(which, if you know me is very anomalous, and this is not an ad, but I picked up the creatine and the magpop in Powell River on the advice of Claude when I asked what I should get for extreme muscle soreness and fatigue lol). After that I did a walkabout on the property, and decided to try and install some tarp shelters that I could potentially use as a makeshift shop to do some work while it rains.

There is a high chance with the winds around here that this is going to be an epic failure like my episode with the “tarp dragon” when I was camping with my lo two years ago, but hopefully I learned something about what not to do from that, and I will head higher up in the trees where it is less windy to stake out my spot and start mounting the tarp after I finish this post.

Dreams about Whales

by Mari

On June 1, 2026

In Desolation Dispatch

When I was a child I had a strange dream. I was standing out on a pier, similar to the one at Huntington Beach in California, and there were several tourists casually milling about. Someone over by the side gasped and yelled about something in the water, and everyone, including myself, went over to look. I climbed up and leaned over the railing and looked down. The sea was a this kind of deep turquoise, milky and luminous at the same time. Through it I could see the shapes of several large forms slowly gliding through the water.

It was so amazing. So many sea creatures! So many fish! Sharks! Whales!!! I wanted to get a better look so leaned out juuust a little bit more, and then before I knew it I lost my balance (or perhaps I felt a little push?) and was falling—-right down towards the water! Panic ensued as I tumbled through the air and down down down, sploosh! Into the sea. I plunged down deep, almost to the bottom, got my bearings and then looked around. The water was this amazing azure colour with sunlight streaming through and I could see the forms of the whales going by, feeling massive, like enormous dirigibles. My panic subsided as I realized nothing was coming to eat me, and I soon realized that I must be breathing underwater since I didn’t feel like I needed to go to the surface. I started to swim upwards and towards the whales as if pulled by a magnetic draw and as I got closer I felt like they were sending me this deep feeling of peace. I felt like I belonged there and they wanted to show me something, and so I started to swim with them to wherever they would take me. And then my mother woke up and I was terribly upset with her for ruining only the best dream of my life. But luckily for me, a week, or a month, or a year later (I don’t recall now) I did have the dream again. And then again. It was one of just a few that was recurrent.

And so it was that I felt like, after many a long year of not having this dream anymore, that at 11:11 am last Saturday, when I took this video standing on the land and looking out at the Inlet, I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming of swimming out to sea with the whales once more.

How many orcas do you count? It seems to me at least three? And is that a baby orca I spot with the little fin? 🥹 It would be great to know which pod this is and which individuals.