We got this roll of magic space fabric.  It's "48 in. x 125 ft. Double
Reflective Insulation Radiant Barrier" and it's awesome.  Basically it's
a strong bubblewrap sandwiched between a couple of layers of
mirror-bright metallic something.  It's nearly impervious to infrared
light, and a little bit insulative against heat conduction too.  This is
the kind of thing that, if you went back in time ~150 years and showed it
to someone, they would think you were a spaceman (or time traveler, or
witch, or something.  They'd be impressed, is what I'm saying.)  It's
like magic.  (Although I understand how it works, more-or-less.)  It's
also very light.  I can lift the whole roll (500'²) with one arm!

One of the things I wanted to mention in connection with this is that it's
a great example of using high-tech materials and technology in select,
specialized roles.  I don't want to role-play at being a settler in the
wilderness in 1839, eh?  I want to use local materials and resources, and
naturally produced, as much as possible, but it's not a inviolate rule.

This radiant barrier is cheap (it should be 1/100th the price!  It's
bubblewrap and a spritz of aluminum for goodness sake, there's less
aluminum in these five hundred square feet than in a single soda can,
eh?), it's durable (if you don't abuse it it should last for a decade or
more), kinda recyclable (You could melt it down and recover the aluminum,
the rest is just plastic, polymer), and its function cannot be easily
replicated by natural methods.

With this in hand, I'm actually pretty excited to get back up to the land
and make a simple temporary "cold room".  If you double up the width to
8' you have 62.5' to work with.  Let the roof be 8' x 12' so the
perimeter is 40', plus 12' for the roof panel gives 52', leaving 10.5'
excess to play with.  Just a sketch.

There's a IBC tote up there already.  I'd like to make a five-sided
blanket for it out of the stuff and cover it during the day and uncover
it at night.  I bet it would get nice and cold, eh?

The other idea I had was to cut the roll into five 25' segments and
attach them along the long sides to make one 20'x25' panel, a super sun
shade to go under the tarp sun shade (with some space between them) to
make a nice large "living room" section.

I forgot to mention, it's completely passive (which is good in the sense
that it uses no energy to work), and it's easy to manufacture (once you
can make a square inch you can make a square mile.  It's a simple
nearly-2D cellular pattern.) And if you use recycled aluminum, it's low
embodied-energy (it doesn't have an out-sized impact on environmental
services, in theory, if you're not mining the chrome.)

I guess that's all I had on that this morning.  I'm pretty stoked on this
material.  It really makes me feel like we can beat the heat in the
immediate short-term so I can get to work this summer (the other
alternative being to get a job and wait until cooler temps in the Autumn
or even winter.)

The main goal this summer (assuming the well works and the sun shade
works, etc.) is to get up all the random piles of chunks of wood and
branches and stuff, and trim the trees and bushes, etc. to clear out as
much of the fire fuel around our initial camp site as I can.  I want it
to look like a park.  The small wood gets chipped for mulch and the
chunks can be made into little hugelkultur mounds.  By mulching with
wetted wood chips and keeping it shaded from the sun there should develop
an area that is "just moist" as contrasted with the surrounding "hella
dry" motif, (I plan to selectively cover the ground with greenhouse
plastic, and I have enough to make walls for a pretty large greenhouse
too.)

The idea is to change the regime of moisture over a large area, and then
to expand that area, enclosing larger and larger spaces in membranes to
retain moisture and modulate the heat of the sun and ambient air.  The
thing that makes this not insane is climate change.  I have no idea how
the climate will change over the next few decades, nor when it will
settle down again, if ever (in my time frame.)  So I want to grow lots of
different plants from lots of different biomes/climates at the same time
in the same place, so that already implies large covered areas,
greenhouses and conservatories.