The antonym of self-sufficient

Wedged underneath my kitchen counter, shifting spanners in hand, I’m trying to tighten a compression fitting at a stupidly impossible angle. (eventually I end up dismantling the entire sink) At this point I’m still hopeful though… which means I slip and gouge a nice concave chunk of meat out of my knuckle against the wall.

It’s a Friday night and I’m (as an additional handicap) deep into the first tranche of (man) flu. The part when you’re freezing cold and near crippled with body ache. This is the last thing I want to be doing… and in all honesty, the feeling (as an alternative) to just lie down and die is quite strong.

The kitchen faucet decided to commit suicide. Gently at first. And then all of a sudden quite violently. This endeavor ends up taking up most of my weekend where I stubbornly refuse to be defeated by something as (supposedly) mundane as plumbing, no matter how many trips to the hardware store it takes. (it turns out to be quite a few)

It becomes a personal crusade. Albeit one where I crawl into bed between bouts and codeine myself into a short lived hazy respite. But the parts where I’m vertical I like to think I put some non-believers to the sword (its entirely possible that I’m having hallucinations by this point).

When AI ‘realigns’ work and all the (until recently) sententious white-collar workers (and I include myself in this) suddenly find their career industries no longer require inefficient meat sacks I definitely DO NOT have the prerequisite skill-set to do THIS instead I decide. At least not professionally. Well, unless you want me camped out in your kitchen for three days while I vocalize my inner turmoil in such a virulent manner so as to make the princes of hell blush.

Which gets me thinking… really, as someone likely past their prime, what real life skilz do I actually have?

I decide I have no skilz (certainly not in the Mike Rowe sense) and would likely perish quite soon without access to a supermarket.

As an added imposition on my feelings of self-worth, we didn’t have power for most of this week.

Well… kinda.

The Cape has been battered by winter storms lately, pulsing up out of Antarctica, one violent front rolling in after the other in perfect cadence. The ground has now decided it has absorbed about as much water as it possibly can and everything else needs to find an overland route to the sea. Add some gale force winds to the mix and things start falling over.

We lost four high voltage pylons up in the valley. An inhospitable area of gradient, rocks and (now) mud where a heavy vehicle would, on a good day, struggle. Four towns along and across the bay lost power on Wednesday morning at 1am.

By Friday morning, people were ready to hang the mayor up with a length of rope if only they could find a sturdy enough tree. A chain of reasoning I find fascinating, since it wasn’t her fault, and really, under the circumstances everyone involved was doing a decent enough job to get things up and running again. (at least according to me)

Interesting how peoples rage funnels them into a deep psychosis in almost no time at all I ruminate… as I toggle my headlamp back onto bright. Not me of course. I’m as stoic as they come. (har, har)

We have solar. And while not off-grid, I would’ve said, up until last week, that one more battery would likely get us there. (I have 20x 545W Panels and couple of 5.5 lithium) And really for two years, its all worked out well for us, gives me that little bump in the libertarianism and five points into overall smugness.

Except when we don’t have sun for a week…

To be fair even if its cloudy we can (usually) generate about 1.2Kwh of power. Which will at least charge the batteries and give us lights and Wi-Fi.

The grid was always my ‘redundancy’ back up and having that taken away from me has really messed with my overall prepper-lite vibe that I’ve been cultivating (albeit in a totally spurious manner)

My working knowledge of electricity is even worse than my ability to plumb. So even if I had a generator, hooking it up to my inverter, I’ve realized, is a technical impossibility for me.

For a whiIe I thought about running a bathtub of self-pity and then just wallowing in. But I think I am sufficiently disgusted with myself that I might actually take this on as some sort of self-improvement pursuit.

Being the meme of the new age millennial male is awful. Need to get better at this sort of stuff.

By next week this might have all passed and I’ll be back to my sipping my lattes (pinky finger extended) and deeply considering the selection of conveyor belt sushi at my local.

Right now though I’m motivated enough… to… eh… blog about my shortcomings.