A little over a week ago there was a lightning storm here (which happens almost every night now that the rainy season is advancing). One of the lightnings apparently hit the creek where our microhydro turbine is and the electric surge traveled in the cables to our inverter, which shut down. After about 10 minutes to the blackout Mayapur went to turn the invereter on, and it hit big spark and said “boom”.
So we were out of electricity. Not too bad, though, considering the climate. We read and did mantra meditation in the candle lit cabin in the evenings and mornings, and it reminded me of my family’s summer cottage in my childhood days. There was no electricity and in the evenings my dad would tell us some quite entertaining bedtime stories of his own invention, in the candle light. Now my bedtime stories are the events of Caitanya-caritamrta, quite entertaining as well.
The only real bummer was that the fridge didn’t work. We would just use up what ever milk we got the same day (by the evening it would turn into yogurt by itself) and didn’t buy anything that would get spoiled easily.
A self-sufficient lifestyle requires a real jack-of-all-trades attitude, which I don’t naturally possess at all. But when you get three electrical parts from the US that you have to replace in the inverter or otherwise you won’t have electricity for months, there are no options other than to figure things out. We did eventually fix the inverter, although there were all sorts of complications from heavy rainstorms to bad test batteries, and as we finally got the thing working long after the sun had finsihed her duty for the day, and in relief got to the cabin, ready to crash after an exhausting day, we find out that there’s no water…
We fixed that too this morning, but that’s another story.
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