The idea behind doing the Off Grid blog [stuff] is to catalog my experiences building an off grid home for my family and developing as close to a self-sustainable life style as practical. Being a pragmatic kind of guy, I realize that this process will take a long time, really a lifetime. My hope is to be much further down this road by the time we retire and in many ways this is our retirement plan.

As this is a long term deal, and I’m still very much in the planning stages, the posts on this blog [about Off Grid] may be few and far between until that ball begins to roll a lot faster. My other blog [this blog obviously :-)] FlyBoyJon.com is there to share my aviation world pursuits [really, I’ll be posting a variety of stuff here] which are moving forward as I get closer to my A&P certificates and I move closer to my education goals. Those areas, aviation and education, are where my focus is at this point. Once my certificate program is done in June 2013 my focus will shift to wrapping up my AA and getting a day-job going.

With all of that said, I am always thinking about getting closer to that independent dream. I am regularly looking at alternative building techniques and various old world building techniques. What little recreational reading time I have is spent on researching building trades or traditional home-trade skills.

It has been a while but I have brewed beer and mead before and they turned out quite well. Furniture making is not a skill I have spent a lot of time on but it is not a stranger to me. Gardening/farming is a skill set that has eluded me though I will to keep trying. I have minor dalliances with several other craft trades and I am always open to learning more skills. One that has only recently come into my interest is cheese making, which seems odd since I have always been a huge fan of cheese.

The diversified interests in all of these trades and skills are what make me confident in the families abilities to go off grid. There is a line in “Six Days, Seven Nights”

Aren’t you one of those guys? Those guy-guys. Ya know, those guys with skills. You send them out into the wilderness with a pocket knife and a q-tip and they build you a shopping mall.

It may sound a bit egotistical, but I like to think I am one of those guy-guys. That’s why I’m always looking to upgrade my mall building skills.

Until next time…

* This post moved from FBJ Off Grid on 2013-02-12