u/MangoPeachFuzz

I was recently visiting Mackinac island which was fun, but I learned a nearby island has 100 permanent residents and is only available by a ferry from another part of Michigan and maybe by plane. I don't know anything about these people's lives, but it made me wonder about how they prep for winter. There has to be an assumption that there will be a period of time that the lake is impassible by boat, too dangerous to try to use some kind of snowmobile, and plane flights would be limited to good weather and extreme emergencies. In a cold year that could easily be December through early April. The sheer amount of preparation that has to go in before winter is staggering. It honestly made me think of The Shining when Dick Halloran is explaining to Wendy Torrance how much stuff they had in the pantry for the winter at the Overlook for 3. Also .. cabin fever, supernatural or otherwise.

I kept trying to find resources that would help me calculate everything from toilet paper to flour for a 4 month stay in isolation, but was coming up with nothing. Like I'm not going to volunteer to live on an isolated island for 4 months, but I really want to know how to.

We bought some nice 10' steel light poles at Costco. We mounted one into the dirt which is, sadly, mostly recent fill and not well compacted soil. When we strung the lights across a 25' span the entire pole just started leaning sideways under the tension of trying to keep that light string taut and 10' off the ground.

Looking around at local restaurants with outdoor lighting, they're either using guy wires (not a preferred option) or have constructed large planted boxes filled with sand/concrete, cinder blocks and used a 10 foot 4x4 as the light pole.

This whole thing seems like a physics problem to solve. How much tension is being exerted over a 25' run with the Feit outdoor string lights and how much base weight do I need to support 10' poles with that much tension being exerted? The longest run is 25'. The rest are about 10' runs over the patio.

I did try googling this and read up on umbrellas and pole weights, but this is adding an extra dimension of the tension/weight of the lights. I could build a couple planter boxes to hold the poles, but my backyard isn't that big so 4 large square planter boxes would take up a significant amount of real estate.

Thanks in advance for any insight you can provide. If there is a better google search I could have done, I will even take that as a reasonable answer.

Edit: Thanks so much everyone, I have learned a lot here! Reddit is such an amazing place!