Good Job, World! Solar is the New Cordless.

Solar hen house vents. Solar fence energizers. Solar everything.

It seems that at some point in the past few years we've reached a point where solar isn't an "alternative" power source, it's just the easiest way to do something. Why would I, for example, want to deal with a battery charger to keep my electric fence charged? Why would I want to run wiring to the roof of the hen house or greenhouse to power the ventilation? I don't. I'm a lazy man. It makes me wonder at what point it's going to be cheaper and easier to wire houses for solar and wind instead of dealing with hooking them to the grid. It wasn't long ago that the cool kids were wiring their houses with Cat-5 ethernet for their home networks. Then wifi became ubiquitous and that's just a mess of useless cable now.

In other news, we finally got real growlights installed for the seedlings. I ordered them over the internet. I'm hoping that the cheerful vegetables clearly visible from the outside of the house will at least give pause to the paramilitary DEA agents as they conduct a no-knock raid on my home in anticipation of finding a stray, growlight-enable mary-g-wanna plant.

On a related note, craft distilling is a lot closer to legal in Washington state. There is a lot of tremendously good work being done around food and small farming by Washington regulatory agencies.