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All Industries are Dying – Learn a Practical Skill

It has been a while, y’all. I just dusted this blog off and found that I have a few unpublished posts, so… Maybe I’ll get back into it? But let’s start off with something everybody is already aware of:

I know I’m crazy.

If you know me, you probably put me on the same shelf as the guys with tinfoil hats who are locked in winnebagos listening for signs of intelligent life through static from the stars. (I mean the literal cosmic stars, not the static heard from the reality show kind. We know we’ll never find intelligent life amongst those folks.)

But a time is coming, and it’s already here, where your job will be replaced by a robot.

I don’t even care what you do. You could have some amazing specialized skills or simply flipping burgers, but I’m here to warn you: you’re not that special.

Don’t believe me? Talk to the guys in the video rental industry. Or in fast food. Or appliance repair, magazine publishing, record stores, and even computer programming.

I’m a computer programmer by trade – I have almost two decades of work history that led me to becoming the CTO of a tech startup for a year. I left the company after I completed version 1.0, and instead of immediately jumping into another programming position, I decided to pause and reflect. I released a book, recorded some music, wrote songs, wrote two more novels (this one and this one), and am still trying to figure out what I’d like the next 5-10 years to look like. (I did go back to a programming gig for the next six years, but have quit in order to redirect once again.)

Why? Because even programming isn’t necessarily a sure-fire life-long career. I’m very well-versed in a number of languages that the much of the tech empire is built on. But that’s constantly changing. Even though currently about 80% of the websites on the interwebs are running on PHP (something I’m quite fluent in), the real truth is that most of those sites are on WordPress or other frameworks. The wonderful thing about WordPress (and their competition) is that it’s completely free.

The terrible thing about WordPress – for developers like me – is that it’s completely free.

I’m not knocking WordPress. Well, not entirely. Ok, actually, I am. There are mountains of security flaws and vulnerabilities. Basically every WordPress site I’ve ever worked with has been hacked (including this one). I use it for this blog and suggest it for other instances where a client doesn’t need robust nerdy functionality. But, where I used to be a golden child who waltzed in a room, fixed a crippling bug in 20 minutes, then rode off into the sunset like a mysterious hero (“Who was that masked programmer?”) – eventually my clients only pinged me occasionally because they couldn’t find the right plugin to install.

I know I’m being a little overdramatic (I’m a programmer, that’s what we do); there will always be some jobs for programmers. But like most other industries, programmers compete with their own automation. We’ve built the machines that will eventually overthrow us. At my most recent job, I replaced a ton of terrible, manual systems with automation – and two months after my exit, they’re all still running with basically no human intervention.

Our society has become very focused on paychecks, which has funneled us into whatever the most in-demand job is of the day. And that’s not necessarily good. In twenty years, there’s a good chance that there will not be a single job opening for SEO Guru or Burger Flipper alike.

All this to say, I think everyone should learn a skill. Not a this-is-the-next-big-thing skill, but something old. Vintage, as the kids might say. One that doesn’t necessarily bring a bigger paycheck, but one that lessens the bills you have to pay out and maybe feeds you without punching a clock.

You’ve heard it said that “a penny saved is a penny earned” – or have you? Is that wisdom that was lost in a pre-digital period? The point of it (I think) is that if you decide to refrain from spending your penny on something, it’s a lot like earning that penny all over again. But, technically you already paid taxes on it, so it’s almost like earning two pennies. And I heard a guy on TLC’s Extreme Cheapskates say something like “a penny found is better better than a penny earned because you never had to pay taxes on it.” And it was a reality show, so you know it’s solid truth.

What I’m trying to get at has both right now and future implications – and I actually originally wrote this blog several years ago, before inflation hit a 40-year high (which, let’s be honest, is not due to gas prices). Here are a few options:

Instead of going out to eat every day, learn how to cook. In the right now, you save money on the food. But in the future, you learn a lot and actually get to see what goes in your food, which can lead to a much healthier lifestyle.
Grow a garden – in the ground or with a grow lamp in your kitchen. You’ll literally have some free food, but you’ll also have the skill of knowing how to make some free food for the rest of your life. If you have no space, buy a mushroom farm and put it in an unused corner.
If you have a yard (and you don’t have a mean landlord or overbearing HOA), get a chicken. Hens are quieter than most neighborhood dogs, less pretentious than cats, and if you let them “free range” (meaning they can run around a spacious yard rather than being confined to a tiny cage) they can get a lot of their food on their own from bugs and vegetation. You’ll get eggs frequently (many hens lay about an egg a day), and when they stop laying they’ll end up in your crockpot if you’re not too emotionally attached. And if you also have her paired with a rooster, you’ll have an endless supply of future chicken nuggets. Food that makes food.
Learn how to can and preserve food. You’ll be able to buy food in bulk, so that you can keep eating from the same grocery trip even if your paycheck didn’t come this week. And when you buy in bulk, you can save a lot over time.
Trade other people’s food for something you do/have/make that they don’t. Learn to make soap, repair drywall, or rebuild a transmission. Honestly, most people don’t have many practical skills, so just about anything will be worth something.

Again, if you know me, you know that my desire for amassing these skills is a little more…precautionary. With all of the chaos in the world, I’m not positive that the neighborhood store will always have a cheap-ish gallon of milk, or that gas prices won’t skyrocket further to the point of preventing us from driving there. We have a fairly fragile economy, built on the assumption that we can always ship fruits and vegetables from California to Maine, while our great-grandparents were used to simply going outside for their next meal. Best case scenario, maybe nothing will change, and you’ll just have a quirky talent to talk about at a dinner party or networking event.

But if you do what I advise, you’ll be a bit more ready when the robots come for you.

The Other Brown Flour (Part 2): Baking with Acorn Flour

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Dang, y’all. My last post was from January 7th – over ten months ago… Since you’ve all been nervously anticipating this entry for so long, I’m sure your expectations have been growing with each passing day.

“He must be crafting a masterpiece of a blog post since he’s taking so long! It’s going to be amazing!”

Let’s go ahead and dispel any of those thoughts now. It’s going to be mediocre.

Before moving on, let me tell you why I haven’t posted in a long time: I wrote two more novels! One, The Dirt Walkers, is the sequel to my first book, The Surface’s End. The other, Victor Boone Will Save Us, hasn’t been released yet – I’m sending it to Literary Agents to see if I can get any bites. If not, I’ll self-publish early 2017. I also wrote and recorded a bunch of songs, have gone to a bunch of Comic Cons to sell my books, acted in some short film projects, and probably some other stuff I can’t think of right now.

But let’s be honest – you’re not here to hear about my normal goings-on.

Off-Grid related, I got two more beehives (lost one), sixteen speckled sussex chicks (lost seven), and two dogs (still have both of them). Also did some experiments in solar panels, aquaponics, a mini-foundry, and using a indoor grow light. Hopefully I’ll post about those things soon, especially now that it’s finally getting colder and we’ll all spend a little more time inside.

What You Came Here For

I’ll just act like I needed to let my acorn flour “age,” over the last ten months.

In case you don’t remember where I left off, I made two tiny batches of acorn flour, one processed with the skin on the nut meat, and one without. After looking at them for a long time and realizing just how small of an amount I had, I decided to combine them. I mean, seriously – there was no possible way I was going to be able to do a taste test to tell the difference between which had skins and which didn’t. Besides, the biggest test was to simply see if this acorn flour thing was any good at all. That said, I put them together, ground them again in my designated coffee grinder, and ended up with a whopping 3/4 cup.

Jealous?

I was pretty sad that’s all I came away with, especially because I had grand plans of using numerous recipes to finding the one. Instead, I split it three ways, leaving me with three bowls of 1/4 cup each. That way, I could possibly try three tiny recipes to test it out.

I scoured the interwebs, and unfortunately almost everything I found called for acorn flour AND wheat flour – usually more wheat than acorn. That felt stupid. The whole point of this experiment is to see if man can live on acorn bread alone (which, I already know isn’t true), not simply add a little acorn flour to an existing recipe for flavor.

I finally found another brave blogger who apparently had the same concerns I did. As I looked at the first recipe for short bread on her page, I noticed no wheat flour. Success! I was just about to start gathering ingredients, but decided to read down the page a bit.

Good thing I did, because apparently her first recipe ended in disaster. Not like the-kitchen-exploded disaster, but in the sense that the resulting short bread was so bad that she almost gave up on acorn flour in general. Three cheers for my elementary school teachers who always taught me to read ahead.

Luckily, the second recipe – this time for chocolate chip cookies – ended much happier. And so I pressed on.

I wanted to compare acorn flour to wheat flour directly, so I decided to try two batches that were exactly the same except for the two different flours. The recipe (at the bottom of this post) called for an exorbitant amount of acorn flour – 1 cup!

Since I would only be working with 1/2 cup of flour in total (1/4 acorn & 1/4 wheat, separately), I followed the recipe with half-amounts until I needed the flour itself. Since it called for an egg, I literally whisked an egg, poured it into a some fancy Pampered Chef measurement tool, then poured half into my concoction. I threw the other half away, because I didn’t know when I’d ever need half an egg again. After cleaning the fancy measurement tool, I used it again to get half of my overall batter (a fourth of the total) into two separate bowls.

Don’t be fooled by the picture – that’s a close up of a half of a half of the recipe. The whisk is actually tiny – it came from a hot chocolate mix we got from a friend. I use it a lot for individual omelets because it’s so small. Our big whisk basically requires a five-gallon mixing bowl.

Then, enter the two flours plus 1/4 teaspoon baking soda.

The baking soda is the white stuff, in case you couldn’t tell the difference.

Don’t blame my photography skills – the wheat flour is actually out-of-focus by nature.

A little bit of chocolate chips later (forgot to take a picture), the results were on a cookie sheet, ready to bake in my laboratory.

I made sure and wrote down that the acorn cookies were on the left, because I was sure to mix them up after they were done, am-I-right? Also, I’ll be waiting for my advertisement check from Calphalon®, since they’re featured as much as the cookies.

Beside a drastic difference in color, the wheat cookies stuck together much better. The acorn cookies were basically scooped and poured onto the cookie sheet, and spread out evenly without my permission.

Because we have a convection oven, I almost never wait the full amount of time that recipes call for, so ten minutes later…

Consistency wise, the acorn cookies continued to even out as they baked, whereas the wheat cookies rose an kept their awkward shapes. I should’ve spread the wheat cookie batter out a bit, because they were cakier, resembling more of a short bread – but I’m no baker. Or – I guess I am?

But how’d they taste?

Great! The acorn flour brings a mild nutty flavor to them, and one person actually asked if there was more chocolate in them than in the wheat ones. (I think that’s partially because your eyes play tricks on you, considering the only time I’ve eaten similar-looking cookies they’ve been completely chocolate.)

Don’t take my word for it – I had three other people besides myself eat them, and two of them said they actually preferred the acorn cookies to the wheat ones. The other didn’t say they didn’t prefer them – they just had their mouth full.

Overall, I consider it a huge success. I still have a half a cup of acorn flour waiting for more recipes, but I’m already inspired to gather some more acorns and try the whole thing again. After all, it’s been a year, and I’ve forgotten just how much of a hassle the whole thing was…

Chocolate Chip Acorn Flour Cookies Recipe
Originally from Making Our Sustainable Life

6 tbls of soft butter
1/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 egg
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup acorn flour
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

Cream butter, sugar, salt, cinnamon and vanilla together. Add egg and mix until the batter is lump free. Add flour and baking soda and mix just until the flour is completely moistened. Add chocolate chips.

Drop 2 inch balls onto cookie sheets with plenty of room for the cookies to spread out. Bake in a preheated 350º oven for 12-15 minutes.

The Other Brown Flour (Part 1): How To Make Acorn Flour

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This post is a looong time coming. So long that I’m trying to piece together my pictures to remember what happened.

Last fall (2014), I gathered some acorns and pretty much just wasted a bunch of time. All of them turned out to be garbage, with worms laughing in my face. But, I’m stubborn, so I wasn’t going to give up that easily.

Last Christmas, my brother gave me a book about eating things in the wild, and wouldn’t you know it; there was a whole section on acorns! I had a renewed sense of hope in acorns now that I had a mentor on paper.

Apparently, the first time I tried it I went about everything wrong. All of my instincts led to the acorns that were definitely bad.

I went out entirely too early, which means I was only gathering the rejects rather than waiting for the fully matured ones. (The tree releases an acorn if it knows that it’s no good, rather than waste energy on a dead seed)
I was mainly picking up acorns that still had the tops attached, but it turns out that’s actually a sign that they’re bad. (When an acorn matures it loses the top)
I was grabbing them willy-nilly, rather than checking for the super obvious hole in the shell (which means a worm has already eaten the nut meat and skipped town)

So, this time around, armed with new knowledge and a slight confidence, I filled my pockets once again. The results were much better.

Many of the acorns I gathered at first were green. I don’t really know what that means, but I expect that they were slightly under “ripe.” Some that I let sit for a few days darkened up, but most of them I just cut into fairly quickly. Unlike before, when I had what I thought to be a 10% “success” rate, the first acorn that I cut into this time around was perfection.

Now, I ran into plenty of non-perfect acorns in this batch, mind you. But what I thought were my keepers before were ones that I threw away pretty quickly this time. If it had a small trail of brown that I could cut out, I’d keep it. Otherwise, it would be a lot quicker to just go outside and find some more acorns rather than trying to butcher the save-able “meat.”

I shelled a bunch, and then came the fun part. In the book, my new mentor said that “some people insist that you must remove the skin from the nut meat.” But he didn’t follow it up with, “but it’s ok if you don’t” or similar, so I figured I’d better do it then, if some people insist.

That. Took. For. Ever.

Left side is skinned, right side is shirts.

Early into this part of the process, I was no longer having fun. I think that small amount of acorns took me about two hours to skin. It’s not like a peanut, where you can just twist or squeeze the skin and it falls off – these little jerks have wrinkles and folds where the skin would be clamped into. The mentor said it would be easy, and said I could just dip them in some water if I had any trouble. I started thinking my mentor was full of crap. I also seriously started wondering if it was worth it to skin all of them, or if I should just take my chances with the skins.

After the horrible part was over, I tossed them into a coffee grinder. It quickly ground the nut meat into “flour.” I had to take some time scooping everything out of the grinder, because the oils in the acorns were keeping some clumped at the bottom.

Unfortunately for me, acorns contain a large amount of tannins, which is used to tan animal hides. It also makes the acorn very bitter, and you can get sick if you ingest too much of it. The process of removing it is fairly simple, though (again) tedious.

There are two ways to get the tannins out of the acorns, according to my mentor: Hot and Cold Leeching. For Hot Leeching, you just boil the acorns in water for a while, then drain. I think you can even leave them whole if that’s the case. However – apparently that process removes a lot of nutrients from the flour – and who needs those empty calories?

For Cold Leeching, you just soak it in water then drain it until it stops tasting bitter, usually 6 to 20 times. I’m no expert on this part, and I really didn’t want bitter acorns on my first go ’round (especially since I’d already invested so much time into it), so I let them sit for days, and did the whole process eight times.

I think the above is was just the first time. Surprisingly, the color of the water changed drastically each time. Not to say it was getting darker or lighter – it just changed back and forth, so I don’t know what to say about it.

After I decided each leeching session was done, I would strain it through cheese cloth and do the whole thing again. After it wasn’t soaked, but still moist, it caked together just like wheat flour.

After using the cheesecloth a handful of times, I noticed I was losing a lot of flour in the layers of the cloth. That sucked a lot, considering how much work I had already put into what was going to amount to very little acorn flour. And not only that, when I tossed the cheesecloth to the side, waiting to be used again, it still had junk in the folds. It ended up getting really nasty and moldy, so threw it away.

For the next several batches I used coffee filters, which took forever to drain. I mean, I’d let it sit for hours and it would still be letting just a single drip through. With the cheesecloth, I would be able to squeeze the water out to speed up the process – but if I did that with the coffee filters, I would bust a hole and everything would fall out, which meant I would have to start the draining process all over.

I had an accident

I was still losing a lot of flour with each drain, too…

Anyhow, after all that – which took a couple of weeks, by the way – I spread my findings on a plate to let it dry out.

And after that, I did another batch with skins on them, so I could find out if I would be one of those crazy people who insists that they be removed. After they completely dried out, they turned pretty dang dark. And the saddest part was that there’s maybe a 1/4 cup that made it through each process…

I haven’t actually made anything with the flour yet, so unfortunately this is where I leave you. Will I cook something that cures ebola? Will I find that I’ve actually made gold? You’ll have to wait until next time…

Keep the Change, Ya Filthy Animal

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I love raccoons.

I grew up in the country, and just like every other average American kid I had my share of pets. There were dogs, cats, fish, hamsters, squirrels, a leopard gecko named Yoda, and more dogs and cats.

Oh, yeah, and raccoons.

Don’t all kids have raccoons? They’re absolutely awesome, so all kids should have them. They purr a lot like cats, and are much more social. Cats are jerks, and only care about you when they want to. I don’t remember our raccoons ever walking just out of arms length, then sitting down to mock us while we stretched out to try to pet them.

I think my dad isn’t smiling because he’s super embarrassed by how short jean shorts were in the 80’s.

I don’t remember the timeline, but I had pet raccoons at several different points in my childhood. At one time, we had four that were fairly young. They were in a cage that my dad built, and we’d have to move the cage every once in a while because they would start digging their way out. One morning, though, they were gone. My mom said that she watched the mommy or daddy raccoon come several mornings to try to dig them out, and she was watching the day that they got away. She said she felt so sorry for that raccoon mommy or daddy, knowing how hard it was trying to get it’s babies back, so she let them go.

Apparently my mom even took a picture of the four little rascals getting away!

I was so mad!

Forget the precious momentary connection between and human and raccoon parent, and the unrelenting love for their furry children… I wanted my pets!

I got over it eventually, though – probably because we had another pet raccoon soon after.

I got a little raccoon crazy around that time, doing a school project on them, which included going to school with a tail and mask. I thought I remembered a random fact from third or fourth grade – that raccoons have no salivary glands – but I just googled it and found it to be false. Don’t judge – we didn’t have the internet back then. They often dip their food into water, but apparently that mostly only applies to raccoons in captivity (which ours obviously were). The German word for raccoon is Waschbär, which literally translates to “Wash Bear.” I also did a school project on Germany. And on UFO’s, but that’s beside the point.

Anyhow, this is all a really long setup to a much different, darker story.

A couple raccoons have been hanging around our house at night, eating our cat food. You might wonder how I knew it was raccoons that were eating the food… I know because we would flip the lights on and stare at them from a foot away through our kitchen window, and they would just look at us like we were waiters asking how their meal was going. “Needs more water,” I could hear them say.

My wife didn’t like it one bit because she has a soft spot for our cats. Because of this, I’d try to sneak out a different door with a BB gun to scare them off. Usually, they’d hear me approach before I had a clear shot and would run off – but there were the occasional times that I unleashed the fury of my 1991 single-pump Daisy. The gun is apparently strong enough to kill woodpeckers (oops!) and carpenter bees (that’s right – they call me eagle eye), but it’s only enough to freak out an unsuspecting larger animal.

They’d usually just come back thirty minutes later or so, after all the lights went off in the house.

When they really started bothering me, though, is around the time my chicks started disappearing. It’s one thing to eat our cat food; it’s quite another thing to eat our chickens. I wouldn’t have have minded it as much if they just ate our cats instead – those guys are freeloaders, and don’t give me any eggs.

So, one night I again went out with my Daisy BB gun, this time staying far enough back to make sure I could get a good shot off. I assumed that if I could shoot it square in the face, it would be a little less brave approaching our house. I stood on a chair to line up the shot and…

Bang – right in the face. And it was the cutest thing ever.

The raccoon looked up in my direction; it couldn’t really see me because the light was in it’s eyes and I was still in the shadows. It raised it’s hand and rubbed it’s head in a “Why would you do that?” kind of way.

Unrelated “First World Problems” meme – this is how the raccoon looked while rubbing it’s head

But it didn’t run away. So I pumped again, and shot it once again. Still, it just looked out in the shadows, wondering what in the heck was going on. I shot it again and it finally ran off. Cleary, the Daisy wasn’t packing as much of a punch as I thought.

I went inside, and less than ten minutes later the little punk was back. Usually, I would give it a little grace, but this one was just mocking me. So I pulled out the big guns.

Well, by big guns, I didn’t actually get a gun. In order to take a shot, I’d have to aim towards the house, and I’m not that confident in my middle-of-the-night-with-the-house-as-the-background target skills. So I got the next best thing: my crossbow.

The murder weapon

I got in the exact same position and kind of took aim. Because it was dark and I was fairly close, I couldn’t really use the electronic scope. There are three red dots in the scope, and choosing the wrong one would definitely embed an arrow into my shed or my exterior wall, so I just judged where it was aimed as if I wasn’t the one holding the crossbow. X/Y axis sort of thing. Squeeze the trigger, and…

Bam. Perfect shot.

The raccoon looked up when it heard the trigger, otherwise my arrow probably would have been a direct hit to the face. As it was, though, it went through its chest, then through it’s gut and out its butt. It was obviously a little terrified and jumped off the shed attached to the house like it was committing suicide. It ran out in the woods, limping and scraping the arrow on the ground.

Then I realized that it still had my arrow.

I started following it, knowing that if I lost it in the moment, some other animal would drag it and my arrow away before the morning light. I used my phone as a flashlight, and following the sad sounds of a dying raccoon, its eyes reflected back at me in the distance.

About the same time, my wife came out to see if I’d gotten it – and I realized there was no possible way I could finish the little dude off with my crossbow – so I sent her to the garage to fetch an axe. She came back with it, and I traded the crossbow for the axe and made my way into the underbrush.

The… other… murder weapon

It was freaking out, and I felt bad because it was definitely suffering. Still holding the phone-flashlight in one hand, I try to finish the job with a swoop of my axe. Unfortunately, a one-handed axe swoop while the other hand holds a flashlight is not very accurate, and I pretty much just chopped at it enough to insult it. So I turned the axe around to bludgeon it until it was gone.

It was sad, and I felt pretty bad because I like raccoons. I was also sad because the meat was so messed up that I wasn’t even going to attempt to clean and eat it. But something enjoyed it, because the next day I came out there and all that was left was a puddle of fur. (I should have gotten a picture of that, but didn’t think about it until later)

The other raccoon learned its lesson, apparently, because it stayed away for a long time. It has recently been showing up again, though. Which stinks, because I really do love raccoons.

Dark Times: A Hen’s New Outlook on Life

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I should be updating my blog a lot these days, because I have fewer obligations – but I seem to be filling my time with other on-grid things. I need to remedy that. But this time, I’ll again share a guest post from new notes that I found scratched in my chicken coop:

Day 437

I won’t lie. I’m glad the chicks are gone. They were really annoying, and sometimes they’d try to eat their own food. I’m bigger, so of course I should have first dibs on anything they would want to eat or drink. Anyhow, they disappeared – one by one. I’d go to my perch for the night, and I’d wake up with one less annoying cheep cheep rattling between my ears. Eventually, there was only one, and Farmer thought it would be a good idea to put it in here with us.

We showed Farmer who’s boss. We’ll never tell him what really happened to it.