“This is Aaron from the DNR Forestry Office in Grand Marais. I wanted to give you a heads-up that there was a fire discovered yesterday just North of your property up by Bogus Lake.”

Things are really happening.
Building an off-grid cabin on our property on Bogus Lake near Grand Marais has been a dream for a long time. While we didn’t build in 2023 as originally hoped, we’ve made a lot of progress and this may finally be the year.

We’ve been an EV-only household for almost six months and would not want to return to driving gas-powered cars except under extreme duress. I’ve only become more convinced that most Americans would prefer an EV over a dino-burner if they had the chance to try the EV. Electric vehicles are better than gas in almost every way (better, faster, and cheaper), but there are a few things prospective EV buyers should know before they make a decision.

When I ask my friends and family why they haven’t bought an EV yet, wanting to do road trips is the one reason literally everyone gives.
But now my wife and I are an EV-only household. We’re going to have to figure out how to do road trips, and this weekend is our first.

The recent price shocks make it easy to forget just how little of our effort we spend in the modern industrialized world on energy. The classic study by William Nordhaus showed that over time the amount of illumination you could get per hour of labor has steadily dropped throughout history, and today is an astonishing 1.4 million times higher than it was about 4,000 years ago at the beginning of recorded history.

Image: Stable Diffusion, “Cheap electricity, photo, realistic” prompt.

One lesson becoming clear from the Covid experience is that there’s a limit to how long people are willing to live under pandemic rules, and that limit is about two years.

Bashing Amazon is kind of fashionable right now, for reasons ranging from how they treat employees to their predatory behavior towards small retailers. But I’m avoiding Amazon simply because even if I can find the product I’m looking for, I don’t trust that I’ll get it for a reasonable price in good working order.

In the first few weeks and months of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a real hope that with sufficient lockdowns, contact tracing, and social distancing measures we might be able to quash the virus to the point where there would only be isolated cases. There was even good reason to think we could eradicate it completely, the way we quickly eliminated the original SARS virus and MERS a few years later.

A year and a half later, with continuing waves of outbreaks despite widespread vaccination in developed countries, it’s fair to say that the window has closed for bringing COVID-19 under control. In hindsight, it now seems like we may never have had a real opportunity to keep the disease from spreading globally.

This is purely an educated layperson’s half-baked theory, and people much smarter than me with more expertise in epidemiology might instantly spot some obvious reason why what I’m about to write is completely and utterly wrong. But with that disclaimer out of the way…

I think there’s a strong chance that Israel reached COVID herd immunity around the first week of March.

What’s more, if that’s true then there’s some useful insights we can probably gain about the course of the pandemic here in the United States over the next few months.

Last Friday night the weather conditions were exactly right at Bogus Lake for growing amazing needles of frost. The ridge was in the clouds most of the night and just below freezing with the slightest breeze bringing moisture up from Lake Superior, over 1,000 feet of elevation below.