2022-09-01 - Life - ROOPHLOCH - Of Minds & Meds

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Time…

…keeps flowing like a river: to the sea. Thus we are assured to stoically bear up. But I can’t help but find shock in September already around again. This means ROOPHLOCH for our dear Smolnet. I feel somewhat ridiculous participating, as nearly all my posts year-round qualify: far off grid and powered by sunlight. But it’s a fun tradition I enjoy supporting.

Med on Solar

I have lately turned narcoleptic and had a good score IQ points deducted by a new med. Said drug is meant to address a moderate ailment physick. As such it’s meet to here say some words on managing medical logistics and tech in a frontier setting whilst enduring a persistent daily brain fog.

Treatment of ailment required a study in which I wear a biometric monitor for a solid month. This device blabbed via Bluetooth (not an ISM band) to a recording Android cellphone which must be on person constantly. Said phone was then set to constantly relay the vitals information to a medical contractor via cell network. I don’t have much equipment to sniff packets on either side, but did prod it a bit. Nothing on my BLE scanner. The tech trained to fit me with this monitor could not assure me the information was e2e encrypted, and seemed nonplussed by the import of the question.

At most rates, the question was moot. The phone continued to poll the cell networks, utterly unavailable technology where I now haunt, burning amps at a devilish rate. Because infotech is now geared toward user hostility, the phone OS provided nearly no settings accessible outside root. Since it was a medical device for a pressing issue, I was understandably reluctant to root-kit the thing. So I had to endure the amazing heat it inducted by unsafe levels of microwave screeching. There was simply no way to turn off the cell radio. This provided a serious logistical issue, as any jaunt of more than an hour away from a USB socket made the thing tired. I often would find it had silently switched off.

Speaking of USB, while the physically attached monitors governed their power consumption extremely well, yet for some obtuse reason required a USB charger with non-standard pins or voltage. As this “property of medfoo” charger was hard wired for AC power, it was not the sort of thing I could tenably keep on constantly as recommended. My current solar power budget is fine. But at night, my 72Ah AGM battery is starting to be miserly. This, despite both cell packs being only 3 years old. Several is the time I’ve forgotten to disconnect the portable inverter-battery-controller I use to isolate touchy infotech, to find the main bus controller shut off discharge for the main battery bank.

Mind on Solar

Gripes, I know. But logistically they are informative & beg a question I’d hitherto paid skimpy attention: how to best provide for medtech given a modest solarpunk lifeway? I was somewhat shocked to discover that medical providers rely on infotech of such low consumer level quality for vital studies. As these devices now assume constant broadband via wifi or cell network, we can yet again see store-and-forward provisions atrophy in dev priorities. It’s one thing to grumble about the corpo propaganda of “the cloud” in regard to chat or games. It’s quite another when this malarkey begins to impinge on medical necessity.

I worry for winter in this respect. I recently got another panel, one which I can tactically reposition through a day toward our Friend Sun. This brings my total to 300w, with an additional 60 deployable if need be. That exigent would be pushing the luck of my main bus controller, however, which is rated for about 350w. But in midwinter, with my rooftop only slightly canted to south, it would likely be safe to bring the total to an auspicious potential 360w.

A stern battery stir in midwinter is one nicety for which I’ve yet to solve. Nothing known to me really does as well as disconnecting the batteries and hauling them somewhere, somehow, somewhen to get pumped with a good 24h of shore power. I’m loathe to do so at that season for practical reasons; my batteries are wedged in back-cabinet shielding boxes and I’m often wedged in snowdrifts besides.

(I use fuses and cutoff switches on all lines for safety management. But the batteries do have quick release clips on their insanely thick 8 AWG wiring for when a pack does die. I generally know when this starts to happen by several wall mount volt/amp meters.)

Eventually all this argues for quicker access, natch. But a tiny camper doesn’t afford enough room on the bow tongue betwixt propane tank and prow. I know, I’ve checked, even bought several metal ammunition cans trying to finagle the project. The space was made for a single ~36ah battery pack nakedly installed. No one in the early 80’s could have conceived the extensive modifications I’ve made to this old rig for full-time living.

I’ve thought to mount an ammo can horizontally under the camper frame. This I shall likely someday do. But I’ve not yet found a way to DIY this, lacking tools and skills for steel welding a cage for said box. I am loathe to drill and bolt the thin struts for good reason. And while it would be nice to drop that substantial weight closer to Earth gravity, a box fit to hold 100+ Ah there would be subject to hazards of brush, gravel, and water when moving. It would need a robust coating of ute bedliner (which I often use for undercarriage rust and hazard protection). It would also need sturdy gasketting, a creative venting system, and some kind of one-way roadproof draining. All this is rather much to ask of an autodidactic hermit on a shoestring.

My recurrent fantasy is a good 300wh of hardy, deep cycle, lightweight, automotive lithium ion battery via an MPPT true sine controller. This is well beyond my current affordance. A minimal setup would be shoestring, miserly with amp hours, and north of 1000 USD. But oh, how nice it would be! Someday.

Islands in the Heat

That is what we are.

The oddest frustration about medicine induced narcolepsy is that one can’t see it coming. Like a babby, I suddenly fall into it unawares, to shake myself awake with a vexed growl a few seconds or minutes thence. No naps alleviate. One must power through and hope that one’s CNS can soon accomodate the meddlesomeness.

Summer’s loagy hours increase the new med’s slumbersome effectiveness. I’ve not paid deep attention to climate forecasts lately. Really, there’s been little need. The instabilities manifest with more bizarre surprise each summer. This summer a vast, long monsoon battered much of western North Americay. One might hope that fall brings relief from both Sun’s punishment and storm. But here we are in September with another anomalous high pressure bubble parked overhead. It feels like being the doomed ant under a sadistic child’s focussed sunlight. But in this case, the ants themselves hold the lens.

I gripe about winter weather also but the truth is I often long for the bracing cold. Provided I can bundle up with alacrity when night casts down, I’m content to fend off chill with inner warmth or wood. I’ve done so hither and yon, even in the northern prairies. Cosy is achievable.

Summer is a saltier pickle. Water budgets continually overrun. Despite allocating some bleach, jugs become algae infested. None have made me sick thus far. It’s a difficult dance of logistics: no bleach or stabilizing tablets and one gets guts full of random critters. Too often so treated, and dead clean water can create health issues for kidney or worse. Only high summer really creates this conundrum.

And then there’s sweat, the dubiously intelligent baseline for human cooling. I loathe sweat with a moral outrage. Always have. The sticky, the salt, the dehydration and desalination. The stinging eyes. The body-wide affliction of grey dead skin and slimy sebus to be scraped off each night. Sweat is vilest animalism.

There seems little option for a solar spinster to consummately confront the travails of a swiftly boiling planet. We are all coming to the point where we either change everything or everything changes us. For my part, I miss the milder summers of Earth’s high latitude yore. Monarch butterflies and chill shadows and breaths of low carbon air. Posterity, if they long endure, will marvel at the paradise we blithely squandered.

Happy Coda

Meanwhile, until the Anthropocene ecocide has run its course, we ought enjoy what we yet have, I reckon. This is really the best response I can ontologically muster to summer’s taxation. I love the clouds and birds on wing. I try to summon curiosity instead of ire when pestered by flying bugs. I savour the long daylight, wondering how my aging eyes and clumsy fingers shall do worthy needlecraft in winter’s dark embrace. There are consolations in every season. When I get grumbly, as I am to-day, it is meet to remind myself of what is still in the glass.

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