Angst at the Intro and Other Confessions!

Because of a transaction error message this post was posted twice.
I encourage Steemit to address this issue, quickly.
I apologize for the duplicate but when you get an error message and no confirmation of success you tend to try again.
Yulem

Hello World,
How hard can an introductory post be right?
If you’re an IT security type it’s REALLY hard! We’re not naturally a paranoid group but over time we come to realize that EVERYTHING put on the Internet is subject to being sucked up and squirreled away into vast storage facilities around the World.
Neither are we naturally vain to think that anyone would actually care about us or our data. But again, we come to realize that data in aggregate becomes information; and information is often sold to the highest bidder.
It is the never ending sucking sound of every bit of information which characterizes us being stripped from our person that drives us to distraction, or worse! But always and forever, the relentless swarms of bots, with little regard for robots.txt, crawl the Internet with virtual impunity under the control of their overlords. The only things more disturbing are the phone apps which cajole us into freely giving away our information, or sometimes they just steal it.

But this is an introduction and I really want to share, probably too much! Like the photograph below. That’s us. Actually, it’s just a representation of us at a single point in time and space.

You just up load the file right? Wrong, if you’re me! You first have to strip it of any and all EXIF, GPS, IPTC, XMP, JFIF, GeoTIFF, ICC Profile, Photoshop IRB, FlashPix, AFCP and ID3, as well as the maker notes of many digital cameras’ meta-data. It’s fine for everyone on Steemit to know when and where it was taken, but I’m not sure I want to grant EVERY BOT access to that information. Did you realize that many images are given a UNIQUE ID? But not to fear, if you use Linux, you can install “exiftool” (sudo apt-get install exiftool) and mostly sanitize them before posting.

But with great effort I return to our introduction.
We’re simple folk (well, except for maybe the security thing!) and try our best to keep things simple.

• We speak English (most dialects ;-) and Chinese (Taiwanese and Mandarin)
• We practice a healthy, minimal living. We appreciate what we have but do not lament what we lack.
• We read and believe the Bible, but we carefully analyze and reject the teachings of men.
• We defend the rights of others to live their lives, peaceably, as they chose.
• We eat “right”, exercise, and manage our stress.
• Our interests include nature, new food, travel, hiking, art, growing organic food, and living a sustainable lifestyle.
• We have embarked on a journey to restore a 20+ acre farm/homestead to a sustainable ecological balance and profitability.
• The remaining time we try to travel; we still have much to learn from others.
• We enjoy the Visual Arts and seek it out wherever we are. We even make some of our own.

We promise to share photographs and write from experience as we weave a path called “our lives.” I believe the simplest experiences that we honestly share become the most valuable to others.
So we’ll begin here with just a few photos:

We have an ornamental cherry tree that blooms every Spring. We also have a variety of other fruit trees, including cherries, apples, apricots, pears, paw-paws, peaches, and plums.

To reconnect with whatever we hike. This is a waterfall behind the house that we often explore.

One old building was dangerous so we salvaged the lumber and stacked it for further cleaning. While I was working on one pile I made a new friend! He was NOT happy that I had removed his shelter from over him but I explained that it wasn’t really a good place to make a home.

We agreed that I would leave him alone if he would leave me alone. That worked well so we took leave of each other as friends.

Growing up in the the southern US we didn’t get the Spring blooms that occur in other regions. It is always a delight and an education to watch the procession of Spring here in the mountains. My challenge is to photograph and identify them all.

I’m not sure what Joe is doing but the weevil is probably hungry.

Mushrooms! Another immense dimension to explore. I’m looking for someone local who has the experience to identify the myriad of mushrooms we have; especially the edible ones.

When we acquired the property is had been severely neglected, both the buildings and the land. Our long-term project is to restore both. It is a HUGE undertaking. I will try to take photos and post about our progress, setbacks, and experiences in general.

This is just a teaser of the type of work we had to do just to get the cabin livable. We’re not particularly interested in “going off the grid” as it’s become rather trendy these days. But I think it’s important to be “free” of the grid in it’s more general definition (and the systems behind it). We prefer to focus on independent, sustainable living. What I mean is that if there’s electric in the wires we may or may not use it. However, if there’s no electric in the wires then that’s OK because we can live without it. Apply that to all the necessary areas of our lives and you get the idea.

To shorten this post I’ve not included areas like The Bible, Travel and Art which are to be addressed other times in other posts.

Y’all are invited to follow us through our adventure,
Yulem