Welcome to Thunderbird Disco

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We’re a family of four livisng outside Charlottesville, Virginia, trying to keep ourselves sane during quarantine and finding homesteading to be a solid solution.

I spent more than a decade researching doomsday prepping and communal living for a climate change scenario in my novel We Can Save Us All, but after the novel was published, I realized I had few of the practical skills I’d been writing about. I wanted to change that.

So, The Project: to transform our home, property and lifestyle into a safe and sustainable ecosystem that can survive a grid-down situation. One we can understand and build ourselves, with the help of friends and experts; one that offers the chance to learn new skills and teach our kids and connect with our neighbors and renew our appreciation for the land and its resources.

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After a period of planning, our goal is to collaborate with our neighbors and skilled friends and local professionals (as much as social distancing makes possible) to take on 10 categories of homesteading projects:

  1. Power (fossil fuels and renewables)

  2. Food (animal and vegetable)

  3. Drink (water and booze)

  4. Shelter (building and repairing)

  5. Plumbing (drainage and sanitation)

  6. Medicine (herbal and chemical)

  7. Mechanics (simple machines and engines)

  8. Security (deterrents and weapons)

  9. Communications (short- and long-range)
    and, perhaps most importantly,

  10. Community Culture (arts, education and spirituality).

We’re just getting started, and the point of all this is to do it collaboratively, not wall ourselves in a bunker. We hope you’ll join us on this experiment! START HERE.