on second thought, today is canadian cannon fodder day, and i don't expect them to be open. we're shutting down in seconds...

ww1 was awful for canada, and ww2 was only better in the sense that we pushed back a little. every time that the brits needed to march some people into the ocean, they picked the canadian regiments. we were the most expendable, and the most wasted.

some historians will try to save face on this. we were great soldiers. we were brave! we defined ourselves...

this is nonsense.

we were ritually slaughtered. by the thousand...

my favourite fact about world war one was that it preceded the franchise for workers. lest we forget? we choose not to remember this. but, your relatives that died for democracy in the great war were actually probably unable to vote for the people that slaughtered them.

and, that is what can never happen again.

for now, let's try to fix one thing at a time.

i was getting absolutely brutal migraines before i turned the fan on, remember. it might have been the gas, and it might be a little better now, but who wants to run that experiment? i'm not really convinced.

i had a few dollars left on an amazon gift certificate, so i just bought a cheap usb fan to replace the one i have on my desk. they're claiming it should be here by wednesday. and, they're claiming it runs on 2.5-3.0w. i'm going to guess that the honeywell that's been running more or less nonstop (except when it seized) is more like 40 W, and i think it's roughly 20% of my bill. really. i think the two of them together are about 40% of it.

19*1.55*.6 = 17.47

is it that easy?

so, i got a $10 solar usb charger, too, which should power the fan, even if nothing else uses it. the only thing i'd power through usb is an mp3 player i bought in 2006. so, we've at least got the desktop fan off the grid, now...

if that $16 gets me back to saving credits, great.

for now, i'm going to keep the desktop fan on and the bathroom fan off for a bit and figure out what the statistics say.

i need to call the board this morning, so we'll have a bit of a delay in shutting things down, but we're going to need to do this for a few days, at least, until i'm able to understand what's happening better.

i wanted to be done the liner notes today. i can probably get a start on it when i turn the modem off, but i think i'm only going to get 2-3 hours on this battery before i need to shut down.

so, is getting off the grid with solar technology financially viable for a renter, yet?

we're on the cusp. really.

i can't get the appliances off, yet. so, whatever i do, the stove and washer and fridge are going to stay on the grid. the lights are going to stay on the grid, too.

but, it is almost realistic to get everything else off. and, i'm thinking about it.

if i spent all of this time typing on a modern phone, i would both use a lot less power and have more efficient charging options. they actually have chargers for around $20 that can handle anything with a few watts. that would be a very smart investment, if i was a completely different person.

but, as it is, i have four laptops and three desktops that i need to run down here at various frequencies, along with a wide assortment of recording gear. i need the ac out, one way or another.

to run one computer and some peripherals in this room at the same time, i would need something like 100-150 watts of direct power. the usb chargers (5-20 W) aren't enough, but the standard consumer line (400-1000 W) is way too much. so, i'm looking for a kind of niche product, and the price is less than optimal. but, i could work this out for around $200. that's a lot on first glance, but if it saves me $15/month, and the price of electricity continues to go up, it's not long before it pays for itself. if i could figure this out for something more like $100, i'd do it on the spot.

i would probably want to get a second or third comparable station down the road, rather than wait for the price of the big stations to come down. i probably couldn't really charge a 400 wh battery in one window, anyway. so, why not get one for each window and break the circuit up?

the obvious next question is "how long does the battery last, though?" and that's kind of fundamental. is it going to last more than a year? if not, i'm not saving anything.

but, it's getting close. phones can be off the grid at this point - it's feasible and financially viable to do it. laptops should be next.

i just need the alternating current. that's the problem.