My INSANE Off Grid Journey!
Phew. I have been thru the ringer, but it really was all of my own accord. I have had a rough go at the homesteading lifestyle, to the point where I actually left my property for the better part of the year.
However, I am back now with a bigger broader perspective of why I chose this lifestyle, and I am ready to share my message with everyone. And that message is, be sustainable, be self-sufficient, be free!
I won't go into mega detail here, but I would like to share some key points in my journey that caused me some pivotal changes and lessons, and maybe you will learn something along my experiences.
On January 2nd, 2021, I broke up with my boyfriend who was also my homesteading partner. Basically, we got into a fight, it turned physical, and he went to jail for a couple of days. There was a no contact order for a couple of weeks.
Within that two weeks, I moved everything out of his RV (which is what we were living in on the property) and I moved into my 9X12 shed.
It was a pretty rough adjustment as living in my shed was fairly primitive. I made due with what I had.
Fast forward to June of 2021. I was out of work and going broke. I was isolating and lonely. I did not feel the confidence that I needed to be a productive homesteader. I felt like my property had become a burden and I went into a mental downward spiral that I was not able to get out of.
So I decided to leave the property. I landed an apprenticeship for network infrastructure and I took it. The job required travel, so I was able to see a good part of the western countryside while I worked and stayed at AirBnBs and hotels, which was a nice change from the primitive shed life.
Things were going pretty decently, but then the owner of the company died tragically in a gruesome motorcycle accident. I did stay on the road and finished the contract I was on, but then we were called back home and the company closed down.
I quickly landed another job as an IT technician for ADOT, (Arizona Dept of Transportation). Although I was a contractor, I had the opportunity to move up into being a full-time state employee, which sounded like a dream at the time. The only hangup was I had to move to Phoenix, AZ, the 5th biggest city in the country. I was excited about this, because I had never lived in a city before, so I thought I would give it a shot.
Everything was going well, really well, and I drank the cool-aid. My goal was to become a full-time employee of the state, retire with benefits one day, and have a little house in the city.
Here I am, in the big city!
But, just when I thought I was in for life, I was let go. I was let go because I did not pass the ACJIS background check (Arizona Criminal Justice Information Systems). This was due to an arrest/no conviction that I got when I was 28, which was 12 years ago.
I was floored and ultra devastated, but I quickly pivoted into building a data center for AWS (Amazon Web Services). I was determined to make a career in the tech industry. And this was my last ditch effort.
My plan was to get in with AWS and move up into network engineering. But there were some unforeseen flaws to my plan. Right about the time I moved into this position, ChatGPT was released. And coinciding that were mega layoffs from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc. Now my position was solid as a structured cabling tech, as I was helping to build a MEGA data center for AWS that was 100% Artificial Intelligence machines.
But the landscape in tech was quickly shifting. From massive hiring to massive layoffs, it became apparent to me that tech would never be the same. AI is going to obliterate hundreds of thousands of jobs and I was trying to break into an industry that is flailing.
The work conditions were deplorable at the data center. Everything was very anti-human. We were searched and wanded every time we went into the vault. There was no bathroom and no water allowed in the vault, so for several hours we would work without any relief. It was like a prison in the vault, no windows, nothing to make you feel good about anything.
I decided that I needed to exit the position and go back to my property. And I did just that. Now, I am unemployed and back in my tiny shed. I have come full circle. The difference? I have a completely DIFFERENT perspective on life!
I realized that I can DO anything. I can build it, dig it, harvest it. I have the strength and smarts to achieve anything I put my mind to.
I also saw the deplorable way people are living in the city. Sure, things are shiny and new and exciting for a while. But the smoke and mirrors wear off and it becomes quickly apparent that people are barely scraping by, living beyond their means with credit cards and debt they can barely manage. And then there are the homeless folks that are broken from addiction. Its very sad and practically unbearable to watch.
I quickly decided that city life is not for me. Its unaffordable, even on a decent wage. There is crime, unhappiness, road rage, and accidents all the time. I much prefer a more pastoral lifestyle where I can live free and in peace, grow my own food, and be the master of my life. I am done being a slave for the man!
So what now? I am building up my own business as I have vowed not to work for another slave corporation ever again. I will never sell my soul like that again.
Here I am now, working hard in the garden!
My primary trajectory is to become a successful content creator with my website, Maximum Off Grid. I've been working on this website since 2018, so I have decent momentum. I also have my YouTube Channel as well.
My secondary trajectory is to build a vendor stall and go to markets, faires, and festivals to peddle my wares.
I also live on very low living expenses and I am practically debt free.
I can make it, I can do this! This is my season of "YES I CAN." I want to thank you for your kind comments and upvoting support ahead of time as I will be bringing valuable homesteading knowledge to HIVE. I have been a member of HIVE (Steemit) for going on 7 YEARS in July, wow! I come and go, but I am ready to come back again and share my knowledge and journey with you.
Regina Cal
Maximum Off Grid
Your story is interesting and inspiring. It's lovely to read, as your mind seems to be in a good place now 🙏
I've seen your note that you have been a member for some years; With all that you've been through, what do you think has led you back to the blogging world of Hive?
Thanks for your nice comment!
I have found that over the years HIVE/STEEMIT goes thru peaks and valleys. I have always thought that one day the platform would just wither away, but somehow it makes it thru every crypto boom bust cycle. I like the small community on here as well.
Overall, its a good platform, as long as you don't mind rolling with the crypto trends.
That's very true! I joined the Hive platform just after the hard fork, so I've only been a loyal Hive "believer". Hive has developed and built it's reputation over the years, and it's now seen as a completely separate entity from Steemit😉 which I think is a positive thing.
In the virtual world, the communities on Hive make it a structured and organised place, similar to that of the real world, which is a huge incentive and advantage.
Yes, that's true. Still, I try to focus more on engagement and interaction on Hive, in combination with my personal blogging, as well as running two communities The Minimalist and Cinnamon Cup Coffee. It's always inspiring to see long-time authors like yourself resume blogging, especially when they "yield" with the times and stick to Hive.
I trust that you're having a lovely weekend, and it would be great to see more of you around here:)))
I joined both your communities as I am a coffee addict and extreme minimalist! I also followed you 😃
Oh I got to see the STEEMIT HIVE split firsthand, wow I didn't think we would survive, but I am glad I went with HIVE, and it is a very positive thing we got away from that whole mess. I have witnessed some serious drama on the platform back in the ol' days of voting bots and whalebots. It was the wild west!
I find that people seem to be pretty well engaged on PEAKD because its still small enough to enjoy, but big enough for some good content. I have always thought about starting my own community but I am already an introvert so it doesn't really appeal to me, but maybe I will entertain the idea again.
Cheers!
Hehe, I'm quite an introvert myself, (maybe more of an ambivert) so I don't think that you should let that stop you. One thing to remember is to always check the rules of each community before posting. That's mainly because communities are independent and community admins make their own rules. The good thing is that the rules are there to guide if you are good at also reading in between the lines 😉
You mentioned AI/Chapta in your post; Yes, in terms of this platform, it's a sure way to kill an account. People fail to realise that no one is here to judge their English or writing abilities, so it's best to give your own, with true personality, as with practise, comes improvement. I think that you'll enjoy your time here again. Thanks for the follow and I will do the same in return, as I already like your off-grid lifestyle:)
Sounds like we have a lot in common! I am also an ambi-introvert, coffee lover, and minimalist!
I think ChatGPT will threaten many social media platforms and even Google, it will be interesting to see where this all heads....
For now I will live my off grid life in peace :)
Chat soon! 🌺
Yes, I agree that we have a lot in common. You've just reminded me to contact my fav aunt. We had not spoken to each other for years, but recently I discovered that she lives on a lake in a tiny house in the US. She said it's just her and nature with a peaceful life. I wasn't surprised at all, because I have tons of aunts and uncles from both sides of my family and I've always thought that I had more similarities to that aunt, even more than my sisters.
It's a great way to live. We thoroughly enjoyed narrowboat life as continuous cruisers exploring over 2000 miles of the English waterways. Eventually, we'll go back to that way of life. We just had to take a pause and venture down another route temporarily.
Yes, I do hope to chat with you sometime. In the Minimalist community, there's a weekly blog idea called #KISS, but there's also a Daily Blog Theme. Both are pinned in the community. Have a lovely day 🌼
Narrowboat life? I have never heard of that! It sounds absolutely amazing. Where is your aunt located? I am in Southern Arizona.
I run a website and youtube channel on top of homesteading, so I find myself getting very caught up in all the things. My goal is to become an independent content creator and earn a living digitally. It's an interesting path to traverse, I've been working on it since 2018. Steemit was actually my gateway into content creatorship!
Yes, lets keep in touch. I plan to be around here a bit more often 😊
Narrowboat life was an incredible way to live in the UK. My husband has a youtube channel called: Jamcam and Cam - we are cruisin'. It's an old channel of his from his diving in Jamaica and Zanzibar to flying in a gyro in the Philippines. You could check it out. He hasn't been active for a year now, but you get a chance to see some stunning English countryside, and also a high aqueduct in Wales, that we went across.
My aunt is on a lake in New York. It's not commonplace. My sister visited once, but I'll find out the name and let you know.
Hive is a brilliant place for making contacts, more than any other social media that I can think of. If you have the time, it's worth blogging actively here, and also engagement goes a far way:)))
Yes, I will definitely check out the channel! I am so impressed with the lifestyle, not something I have ever seen here in USA before.
AH, yes, my husband had many fans from the US who finds the narrowboat life intriguing, as it's a completely different and unique way of living:)
Working for Amazon sucks all around. Furthermore, from a DevOps perspective (which I'm taking a course in now), AWS is considered the worst of the three major cloud computing services, the others being Google and Microsoft Azure. I feel your pain regarding ChatGPT making so many software jobs obsolete, at least we have other skills to fall back on (I'm a machinist and welder).
Good to have you back!
Wow, it sure does. I have heard about how much it sucks, but I got to experience it first hand. They don't even treat people like a number, we were the dirt under their fingernails. Overworked, but they wouldn't hire us any more help, even though we were building their multi BILLION dollar AI data center!
I am working on building up my hands-on skills that are AI resilient. I love how people keep saying that AI will create jobs, but then no one provides what jobs AI will create, except for "prompt engineer" and LLM developer which is a master's degree level dev. 🙄
I could def use some welding around here!
Welcome back! Glad to see you haven't abandoned crypto or homesteading. I was a bit worried when you went on-grid and off-line.
Awww thanks! I have been known to go dark and worry people unintentionally. Seems like I can't have it both ways lol! Glad to see your still around, you are an OG too, after all these years. I wasn't sure what to expect when I logged in today, lots of familiar accounts still floating around. Wow, HIVE lives on! You actually joined only a month after I did!
My advice, from someone recently coming from the world of perpetual homesteading?
Follow your heart - And I know what you mean when you mentioned that "downward spiral" - a state of mind really, but the one thing we really can't do without (aside from food).
I dunno about living in a shed though, I've done tent, but it doesn't come to mind as being the same thing, regardless of the additional protection afforded by your 10'x12' shed.
At one time I had a 40 acre ranch in the high desert overlooking Joshua Tree and Twentynine Palms - but as rural as it was, and isolated, it was still no different than city life, just a bit more rural. Perhaps someday I can steer you toward a really odd place back in BLM land where, on a single pile rising from a wash on one side where the trail meanders through, the caves with in one area, pictograms, and within 30 feet, petroglyphs, both left by indigenous from two distinct eras past.
When you climb up and into those dens, the thing that first struck me as most odd were the eons of separtion between the peoples who left those communications on the walls, yet the latter for some reason respecting the messages from their ancestors for which they probably had no, or perhaps little knowledge of except in the fables of vocal histories.
I used to visit and just chill there two or three times a month, as it was up above some canyons in a large plane-scape plateau lying within a large valley amongst the outcroppings.
Anyway, That life held little difference between standard residential living in the suburbs, the most obvious of which was the separation of former homesteaded land by vast swaths of distance (not so much anymore, but it's nice overlooking settlements from atop the hills at the end of a half-mile long driveway winding it's way up to your home alongside the cliffs.
Were it not for being evactuated on 20909 during the August Complex, narrowly escaping incineration, I might still be spending all but the deepest parts of the winters up there in the remote mountain wilderness of Humboldt.
I have to ask though, when I lived in the desert for several years raising and homeschooling my daughter, I was completely unsuccessful at growing tomatoes to fruition of ripeness - Those wild and zaney lizards seem to bring their juveniles to feast on the succulence of that fruit, just prior to the time where you can begin to harvest them, with no amount of netting or caging being successful. Some neighbors a few miles away in Johnson Valley had The Jennifer and myself over for a few afternoon barbeques, and shared their solution with me.
Although their innovation was a visionary improvisation that repurposed the old analog Satellite dishes that dotted the landscape, unused and attesting to an earlier era of satellite television that now only had commercials for Dish and DirecTV, I couldn't bring myself to disassemble my backup TV system for the sake of vain nostalgia - it still spun about and locked on the the aging satellites themselves still in operation at the time.
Basically, they built tubular stands with a large diameter ring at the top where they would set the upturned dishes in place, fill with substrate, and.... Glorious, delicious desert sun nourished tomatoes.
Later, during my sojourn high in the mountains of Humboldt, I had other thieves to concern myself with. My confidence was shaken during my first spring there. Everything had thawed, the rains largely subsided, and I was irrigating a small collective orchard scattered around the hills and valleys, the favorite of which were my plum trees.
Like the lizards before them, I woke up one day knowing it was time to hike up a hill to where my plum trees were and begin harvesting plums in earnest, to which I could gorge upon, only to discover that when I arrived the deer had decided it was the perfect time too and had decimated all but the highest fruit in those ten foot trees. I did manage to overcome their ability to rape my garden though, but it took a magininal line of discarded debris resembling the beaches of Normandy of twisted steel and wire fencing that if they did continue to jump over my ten foot fence, would certainly impale them or break their bones. I lost about 15% or arable square footage, but hey! It was 160 acres of nothing but me and foxes and skunks', racoons, big cats, and bears (Oh, and one feral cat, Jonesie, that had adopted me), so I just substantially increased the perimeter. problem solved!
I'm assuming your largest problems on that front are from birds, especially road runners, and coyotes? Well, lizards too, which is why I want to see how you handle that without losing all of your tomato plants lolz.
But I digress. Going back to those earlier desert years...
Then I returned to the beaches of Los Angeles where I enrolled my daughter as a sophomore into my old high school. A good decision I think, as there's a point where children need some exposure to socialization with others in society other than the company their parent keeps.
I recently returned to civilization, the world of air-conditioned high rises and concrete bunkers that I had known for most of my adult life as a systems administrator and network engineer, but I completely relate to your aversion to being like - the Man in a Box (Sorry I couldn't resist the temptation of the STP reference, lolz). I find that I too, am no longer interested in that freakin' hamster wheel, and with what little actual work I secure nowadays it's still on par with what I used to draw down, albeit, with about 1/4th the weekly investment of my time.
Okay, it was nice reading your article, and it looks like you've got a few more that I'm going to circle back around with. Yet it is an odd coincidence that just earlier today I was bashing YouTube vloggers and streamers claiming to be homesteaders, who amazingly have enough wherewithal to purchase and have state of the art off-grid systems delivered, assembled and installed/constructed by them, from the PoV of the camera crews following them around - POSEURS!!!
Obviously, you are NOT among those poseurs, and I applaud your spirit and determination.
The only advice I can offer you however, is when you start getting down, just remember, all of the sustaining features you have incorporated are making your existence attainable, so perhaps turning around the perspective of, "Am I getting from my homestead what I need?", to that of, "Am I giving to my homestead what it needs to sustain me?"
I know that often helped me a lot during those extended weeks where I didn't see any humans.
Well, considering you're in the desert, perhaps you might consider investing in planting cottonwoods - they are hardy trees and grow quickly. If you're 40 now then by the time you're 60 you'll have a lush canopy affording you with much comfort, and as you well (no pun intended) know, there's plenty of water in the desert to attend to the voracious appetite this species has for water - you just have to catch and contain it. The rest should be easy for you, since based on your website, you're already well versed in harnessing solar power for irrigation systems.
I'm extremely impressed with what I've seen of your garden so far too! Interesting in following that progress.
Wishing you all the very best, in health and happiness, for you and yours,
Kindest regards,
#tallship
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