You know, I really do make an honest effort not to be stupid.
I often find myself stupidly, stubbornly pursuing an idea or practice beyond reason. A classic example: I’m always reluctant to heat my home with the wood I’m gathering for winter. That’s what it’s there for, of course, but I become miserly as I try to fill the wood shed, unwilling to burn any of it even as the days grow cooler.
With this in mind, I tried to be careful about our electricity.
I’ve used the word “homestead” in quotes through most of this blog’s six years of publication. I do it to point out that The Federal Homestead Act is no longer the law of the land. I felt this particularly important as an Alaskan, as the myth persists that one can still “prove up” homestead land in The Last Frontier. To date, this blog’s most viewed post seems to be Free Land in Alaska? in which I address this issue at length.
For that reason, I’ve conscientiously tried to enclose the term homestead in quotation marks, including the title of our book about homestead life, Sacred Coffee: A “Homesteader’s” Paradigm. I find it tedious, and I don’t always manage it.
To liven up the post, here’s a totally unrelated photo of some killer whales that passed by our homestead earlier this week (Photo: Mark A. Zeiger).
