Second Week

Feb 18: I BET YOU’VE NEVER DONE THIS

Last time I went to R’s I remembered to take my various clocks from the storage shed. I set them up around the Schoolhouse. Two of them work fine. One of them runs, ticks pleasantly, but doesn’t keep the right time. But, I keep it in the bedroom anyway, just because I like the ticking sound. Just have to remember not to look at it!

Feb 17: LEMON OR LEMONADE?

This morning I got to see the inside of PricyHouse, and meet the owners. I left after the visit feeling quite discouraged and thinking that house probably wasn’t the way to go. The folks are nice enough, but they are pretty mainstream folk, and this isn’t a career rental but rather the house they plan to retire to in ten or so years, so they really want things kept up and more-or-less as they are. Which is fine, I guess, it just gave me an odd feeling. He said “we’ve got a bit of a thistle problem, and I encourage tenants to just go out there with a hoe and get them while they’re small.” Then the wife said “or you can just have the County come up and spray them..” Horrified, I said “oh no, I’d much rather dig them,” but immediately I’m wondering how much herbicide is already in the soil from earlier tenants having chosen the other way. On the plus side, I told them I’d be willing to pay the whole lease’s rent up front, if they’d be willing to drop the rent a bit, and they seemed willing to at least consider that.

The other thing that discouraged me was the interior of the house. It just seemed kinda tacky to my taste (disregard what I said a few days ago about having a tolerance for everything :-). Plastic edging on the wall corners, fake wallboard, and orange shag carpeting in nearly every room (okay, maybe that’s just in the bedrooms, but there’s *some* kind of carpet just about everywhere in the house except the kitchen and the bathrooms). I hate carpet in general, and shag carpet in particular, and I won’t even comment on the orange. If I was buying the house I would tear out the carpet before I even moved in, no matter if it was the depths of winter. But in a rental, you can’t do that. The other thing that didn’t especially warm me to the place was its size. It’s huge. Nice size kitchen, three medium-size bedrooms, two bathrooms, and then two large other rooms. One is certainly supposed to be a living room and I guess the other would be a dining room or family room or some such. The living room and I’ll-call-it-a-dining room are fairly central to the house and you have to go through one or both of them to get anywhere else. I almost got lost in the place.

So by the time I left the visit, I was feeling pretty ‘yuck’ about the whole scene – I mean, if you’re going to pay top dollar, you should get something *more* appealing instead of *less* appealing, right? The current Schoolhouse arrangement that is costing me AlmostNothing suddenly started to seem not so bad, and I could just go visiting friends in another town for a few days during Spring Break when the owner and his family needs to occupy the place.

But… You knew there was going to be a “but”, right?

That afternoon when I stopped by to see KH to see how she felt after having seen the place and mulled it over for a day, I got a total surprise. She’d come up with a compromise idea and was totally excited about it. She was disappointed when I told her how unappealing the interior is to me, but after she described her idea, it began to grow on me. Here’s the gist of it – KH wants to farm. She moved to ThisLittleValley largely so that she could pursue this dream. The kind of farming she envisions is growing part hay and other animal feed, and part market crops. She has some fields associated with her current rental and in fact was reluctant to consider leaving (in spite of some indoor problems with the rental) because she’s excited about the kind of hay production she says she can get off the acres there. She was looking at PricyHouse with the same eye, looking at the fields and thinking about how productive they could be. So here’s her plan: rather than moving in with me, she’s interested in *leasing* most of the acreage from me (PricyHouse has 40 acres attached). She’d stay in her current rental, but she thinks she can grow enough on the fields at PricyHouse to allow her to pay me a modest amount per month. If the landlords give even a small discount for my paying the whole lease up front, and then I add in what KH is offering per month, that brings the PricyHouse cost down smack dab to the same as what I’d expect to pay for *any* rental house in this area. Plus it lets me keep my privacy, or have the option of renting out a room (or even two) if the right roommate comes along. In our area the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management hire lots of summer help, and there are always lots of folks looking for rooms then. Although most of them are young kids, lots of partiers/drinkers that wouldn’t be suitable for me, I can always keep on the lookout for the older/quieter folks that might be just perfect. This idea is starting to grow on me! In addition, KH will help me prune the orchard trees (apparently there are apple, peach and apricot). KH and I will mark off where I want to have my own garden, and we’ll agree what areas are hers. She plans some dryland feed crops that don’t need to be irrigated, plus some market crops that do (strawberries and maybe tomatoes). The key to her plan is something I haven’t mentioned yet – the well that feeds this house holds water that is 126 degrees F in the ground. There is some kind of cooling system so that you get cool water when you turn on the faucet indoors, but if you let the tap run it eventually warms up to about 105F. KH wants to use hoop-rows and drip irrigation and take advantage of the soil that is warmed by such hot water, to grow crops that are not currently or largely grown in this area due to our very short growing season (we get hard frosts well into June, and they start up again in October if not September).

Suddenly the ugly carpet seems so trivial! If KH does this, it will inspire me to plant “for the market” as well as for my own use too. I do have some more questions to ask KH about her plans (I think it gets pretty windy there, how will her hoops hold up? and more along those lines) but the idea of pushing into the future of a local food economy *definitely* sounds like something I want to be a part of, even if there are some risks involved. KH has already talked to several local restaurants/caterers and they are interested in using local produce if they can get it. Our farmer’s market is pitiful (half an hour max, once a week for just a few summer months, usually only 3-4 vendors with just a few items because they know they only get a few customers) and any produce KH or I can offer there would be a big boost. Can you tell I’m excited about the possibilities? Oh yeah, and KH would probably *not* put her horses there, unless she needed to separate one for illness or something. But in the summer when school’s out (she’s a teacher, currently, at the high school over the hill in CountySeat) she would put some goats in a movable pen there. She’d come by every day to move the pen. This would give her some extra feed for the goats once it’s run out at her place, plus help dramatically with the thistle problem the landlord referred to at PricyHouse.

Okay, I need to settle down and just mull this over for a few days, see if it still feels like a good idea. The landlords seemed pretty willing to rent to me, though they were worried about whether it was too much for me, both in size and in price. If KH can show me that she’s prepared to deal with my concerns like wind, etc, then I think the price is not a problem anymore. And as for the size of the place, I’ve already started to envision – close off all three bedrooms and maybe the back bathroom (I don’t think I have to worry about frozen pipes with hot water in the lines, but will have to check on that). The dining room becomes my office, and the living room becomes my bedroom/living room. Instant cozy cabin with three storage rooms – er, rental rooms – er, root cellars in the back! Say, does anyone have any good ideas about workable coverings for shag carpet? I have a dog and a cat (and might add kittens) and we all shed. Including me… :) I’m thinking throw rugs, big enough to cover some ground, but light enough to be taken outside and shaken out every few days. Too bad I can’t just plank over the floor and then remove the planking when I move out…

 

Feb 16 FIREWOOD

Today a local gadabout and all-around Helpful Fellow (as far as I know that’s all he does) named JA went with me to KH’s house, where there are lots of downed tree limbs 6-8” in diameter, including some that blew down across a fence she needs to repair. He chainsawed up some of them and she and I split the pile for firewood. Mostly box elder, we think. I haven’t burned that before, will see how it goes. It’s very dry, so should be fine. I bought him lunch at the WiFi Cafe after. Then she and I headed over to PricyHouse to look around. The owners weren’t there even though we expected them to be around this weekend, cleaning up after the last tenants left. But just walking around the outside and chatting with neighbor BH who stopped by when she saw our cars, KH was encouraged, looking at the fields and fences, and the road, which she’d been worried wasn’t good for her low-clearance sedan, but turns out it is not a problem.

 

Feb 14 IT’S JUST NOT RIGHT

No one should have to spend Valentine’s day moving their stuff out of their ex’s house. I’m just sayin’…

 

Feb 13 ABUNDANCE – OF COMMUNITY, OF OPTIONS

Today I am in awe, of a couple of things. I am in awe of the support I am receiving from my community, and I am in awe of the apparent abundance of housing options that have started to appear out of the woodwork, when three weeks ago it seemed there were only three houses available for rent in all of ThisLittleValley. The “moccasin telegraph” has kicked in big-time around here. That’s the term (from some movie I saw not long ago but have already forgotten which one it was) for the local word-of-mouth news-spreading ability. It seems that half the town is looking for rentals for me. Yesterday there was a message at the herbal shop to call friend SS because she knew of a mobile home for rent (turns out it’s one I knew about already, but still…). Then today I get an email from BH, who I had not told of my plight yet, saying she heard a rumor I was looking, from KnittingTeacher over at the weavers/yarn shop (who I *had* told), and there’s a dandy ranch house available across the way from her, and she would sure love to have me as a neighbor! Now, I’ve seen BH and her husband several times recently, since they are regular library patrons. But I have a sort of special relationship with BH and I was reluctant to appear too ‘drama queen’ to her, so I hadn’t told her yet. The special relationship is that BH runs a graphic design studio and has provided me with several proofreading jobs over the past year or so, ranging from a postcard, to a brochure, all the way up to a full-length book. She’s also very active in local community government, and overall just a very appealing, stylish, dignified kind of person. Not someone I want to whine to about my woes. On the other hand, I really *did* want her to keep her ears open for me, plus I also wanted her to know that I’m trying to increase my income, just in case she has any potential jobs for me. I was just waiting for ‘the right time,’ as they say, and I waited a bit too long and the local gossip – er, I mean moccasin telegraph – got to her first.

Anyway, the house available near her, which is quite big (and pricy) for one person, brings up an interesting dilemma for me. I have two personal attributes – positive ones, I think – that are coming into play as I try to decide on a place to live. The first attribute is a very large flexibility/willingness to accommodate a living environment that others would find unbearable. Construction, for example – when I lived in my fixer-upper over in CountySeat ten years ago, there were unfinished floors the whole ten years I was there, except when I finally finished them right before I put the place up for sale. Lack of visual aesthetics doesn’t bother me much – I don’t much care if the walls are OSB, or the windows are missing their trim, or if the siding looks odd, or even if it’s a trailer with zero aesthetic appeal. Er, well, I suppose I *do* have a threshhold there somewhere, because the plasticky interior of most trailers does turn me off. But for the most part my tolerance for fixer-upper-ness (or, let’s just call it what it is: decrepitude) would incline me toward seeking out the absolutely cheapest rental I can find that meets my other needs (basically, my “other needs” are: reasonable proximity to the places I go, safety for the cat & dog – ie a fenced or fenceable yard if near traffic or neighbors – and room for a garden). But the other attribute I think I have is a high ability to set a personal goal and meet it. I don’t mean magic airy-fairy stuff like winning the lottery, but if I were to commit myself to, say, increasing my income by $x per month in order to pay for a fairly high-priced rental, I’m quite confident that within some reasonable timeframe I could accomplish that. So *that* would incline me to take the most *appealing* rental regardless of price (within reason) and then make it my focus to increase my income so that I can afford it without dipping into savings any further.

Right now I’m most tempted to take the latter option, get into a nice place, and then focus on the money. But that’s not the frugal path, it’s a bit of a “buy now, pay later” attitude and I want to be very cautious. I also want to not forget the other attendant expenses I need to be thinking about, such as utility bills and heating costs. Part of me thinks it’s not a sufficiently frugal attitude. Another part of me totally relishes the idea of setting an income goal and moving towards it.

When making a decision like this, I always think about the worst-case scenario. What’s the worst that could happen? The worst that could happen if I rented PricyHouse, is that I might fail at increasing my income sufficiently, which would mean the difference would come out of my savings. Or, I suppose if it really turned out to be a mistake to have gone there, I might have as much as a year’s rent at risk, if they required a year lease. Although a year’s rent at their asking price ain’t nothing, the thought of possibly forfeiting that amount “if the worst should come to pass” isn’t making me less interested at this point.

One more thing here – I have indeed thought of, and am even pursuing, the idea of renting PricyHouse and then *sharing it.* I fully know, as we’ve been discussing over at the Riot for Austerity among other places, that sharing homes may well be the way of the future. There is one girlfriend here, KH, who is looking, and I’ve told her about this place, and she’ll check it out and see if she’s interested. But I gotta say, I *TOTALLY* hate the idea of sharing my home space with someone who isn’t “family”! Just hate it! KH is the only person I know here (who’s looking) who I think I’d even consider sharing with. In fact, I know a few other people who are looking – a somewhat elderly man who just lost his rental in a fire (and who is just getting to the point of it not being such a good idea for him to continue living on his own anyway), as well as a young girl barely 20 who works at the local cafe. If I were a really good sustainable community citizen, I’d offer them each a room in PricyHouse, but I just don’t think I could handle it. It’s one thing to wave at someone when you pass on the street, or to chat with someone a few minutes each week; it’s another entirely to find out that they smoke, and how much they drink, and what kind of junk they eat, how late they like to stay out at night and what kinds of friends they bring over. This sounds horrible, I know, and the kind of thing that we’re all going to have to get over, soon, when few of us can afford to live alone any more. But as much as I’d like to be an “early adapter” in that regard, I just don’t think I can do it quite yet. Maybe I can share with KH. Maybe. Or maybe I’d rather have my private space even more than I’d like to have half the rent and the ability to say I’m a good sharer. Hmm…

 

Feb 12: THE “P” WORD

I had a flashback to someone *else’s* high school experience today. A woman who is more-than-an-acquaintance-though-not-quite-a-friend was offering me encouraging words about my search for a house. She was assuring me that I’d find something soon/good, because, she said, “you’re very popular.” You could have knocked me over with a feather! Immediately I was back in high school, roughly the last time I heard anyone use that word to indicate anything meaningful. But if you’d asked people who knew me in high school, you would have found some people who said I was ’smart,’ even a few people who thought I was ‘nice,’ but you would *never* have found anyone using the “P” word to describe me. It just wasn’t my path. What an odd feeling to hear her say that, and know that she meant it as a compliment, and it might even be true in the sense that she meant it, but – it’s just a concept I’d long ago stopped thinking mattered. No way to stop that flashback, though….

 

Feb 11: MY FIRST STASH

I opened the knitting care package my mom sent a few weeks ago, that I’ve been saving to open “in a good space.” She sent me a bunch of knitting needles and yarn she had stored away from back when she used to do that kind of stuff.

Thanks Mom!

First Week’s Posts All At Once

Written Feb 10:  BRRR… (SORT OF)

My first night here at the Schoolhouse, a week or so back, the temperature dropped below 0F.  Just what you’d want for your first night in an unfamiliar house, using an unfamiliar woodstove, and burning an unfamiliar kind of wood.  Fortunately the woodstove is good, as is the insulation here, plus there is the nice benefit of 70F water running under the concrete bedroom floor, keeping it – while not exactly *warm*, definitely *not cold*.  That’s a very nice touch.  Since that first night, the temperatures  have warmed up from such extremes.  Yesterday the weather was downright mild.  So much so, that I headed off to town in late morning for my final knitting lesson without even a jacket!  As afternoon turned to evening it got chilly, but there was cloud cover, which would keep it from getting really cold overnight.  It seemed mild enough that I decided to see if I could get away with not building a fire last night.  I’m rather short of firewood since the move, and having a hard time finding anyone with any to sell in the middle of winter.  There is some firewood available here on the Ranch, and some I can, if absolutely necessary, take from R (once the roads are not so muddy) but in both those cases I want to deplete as little of that as possible.  So, I didn’t make a fire last night.  Unfortunately, I hadn’t figured out the oven yet and so didn’t have any major baking or other toasty oven-cooking planned, which would have helped heat the house “surreptitiously.”  No, I had a salad and a bean/rice burrito for dinner, which was made from leftovers and only required reheating the beans briefly.  I’m not even sure if I made any tea last night.  I just bundled up under blankets on the sofa, reading, eating, listening to the scratchy radio broadcast of that darned pledge drive.  Eventually I switched from under the sofa blankets to under the bed blankets.  And I found that I got unbearably sleepy, before 8 pm even!  Now, I can think of a variety of reasons why I might have needed an extra several hours sleep – stress, a few nights recently when I didn’t sleep too well, even the fact that I have no clock in this house to help me keep my usual time context, (not to mention no internet, which is how I usually spend my evenings getting slowly sleepier as I make my rounds) all might have contributed.  But the cold and the bundling up sure seemed to be a part of it.  So I gave in and shut down barely after 8pm, and actually went to sleep.  And slept most of the night soundly.  I guess I really did need the extra sleep.  And as expected, it was CHILLY in here when I got up in the morning!  And Murphy’s Law strikes again, for the first time since I’ve been here, I’m having trouble getting a healthy fire going.  Looks like I finally got it, but it will be mid-day before the house is toasty warm again.

On another note, MB (the ranch caretaker) stopped by, our first chance to visit since I moved in, and he explained to me that the oven actually was working all along!  It just wasn’t making the sounds or sights I thought a propane oven was supposed to make, so I was turning it off after a few seconds, thinking it wasn’t working right.  So today or tonight I might just try it for something.

 

Written Feb 9:  MURPHY’S LAW

So, I’m living in this neighbor’s guest house and trying to get adjusted to new routines, you know?  I’m feeling a little lost, because I don’t like upheaval in general, and all my comfort routines have been disrupted by this change.  I’m used to getting up the morning, turning on NPR (which, as far as we knew at R’s, we were the only people in the valley to be able to get – there is no local translator and his house was just at the exact right magic location to get the feed anyway – even our neighbors two miles away couldn’t get it), powering up the computer and going online, making my rounds of email, discussion groups, blogs, news sites, etc.

Probably the hardest adjustment for me in my situation is the fact that there is no internet service at the Ranch – supposed to be within a week or three, but not yet.  I’m using to spending lots of time online, and it would be a big source of distraction/relaxation/comfort to me right now if I had it available.   But it’s not, and I’m trying to adjust, so that’s ok.  I even realized that going without internet would mean I’d have more time for reading (which I’ve felt a real lack of lately), more time for knitting (which I just learned), and more time for baking (which I want to do but haven’t put much effort into in the past since we didn’t have a convenient oven).  Those opportunities are appealing to me, but still, I’m feeling out of sorts about the disruption of so many routines/comforts all at once.

So, you can imagine my pleasure when, after spending a lot of time making really minute adjustments in the tuning knob on the radio in the guest house (and ignoring all the country stations and right-wing talk stations which abound out here), I discovered that I am able to receive an NPR feed from Oregon – an entirely different feed than the one we received six miles north of here at R’s place…  How sweetly comforting to hear the familiar music at the beginning of the news and know that I’m not entirely cut off from my familiar world out here.  The background static is loud but I can make out the words just fine.  So, you ask, what’s the problem?  Where’s the Murphy’s Law?  Well, of course, the very day I discovered that I could tune in Oregon Public Broadcasting, just happened to be… …the first day of their winter pledge drive. :o  So, I found my news station, except that for the next week I’ll get 5 minutes of news for every 25 minutes of pledge drive.  Or so it will seem.  Oh well, such is life.  At least I can hear the familiar music.

 

 

Written Feb 8:  THREE WORRIES AND SOMETHING NICE

I’m not usually a highly-stressed person; I’m generally pretty mellow – maybe too mellow.  But earlier tonight, all at the same time, I had three stresses going – an upset stomach of unknown cause; a big piece of wood in the woodstove that made me *sure* I was going to have a flue fire (my first ever); and the dog was outside somewhere in the dark in a fairly unfamiliar yard and wouldn’t come when I called her.  Eventually, of course, my stomach settled down, as did the fire (and warmed the house, nice side effect :), and, well, there is just something inordinately comforting to me about the sound of a snoring dog…

 

Written Feb 7:  LIMBO

That’s the way life feels to me these days.  I’m not a fan of being in limbo; in fact I really hate it.  My limbo consists mostly of living in a “temporary” location, knowing that by the end of March I need to be somewhere else.  There are some possibilities, but none of them are very appealing or workable.  There is one rental possibility that seems just about perfect, but the person offering it to me has kept his offer tentative, and it will remain tentative until mid-March or so.  So, unless I find something wonderful in the next few weeks, I will remain in limbo until my tentative offer either materializes, or disappears, in which case I’ll be scrambling to take one of the unappealing offers.  [Update: it appears now that if I don't have a place to go by late March, I may not need to be out of the Schoolhouse yet, though I will possibly need to vacate it for a few days while the owner and his family converge on the place for Spring Break.  The idea of moving myself and the animals and an undetermined portion of my 'stuff' out of a house *just for a few days* and then back is not, understandably, very appealing, so I will still strive to have another arrangement by then, but just in case I don't, it doesn't seem I'll be out on the street.  Er, except for those few days of Spring Break :)]

 

 

Written Feb 6:  WASTING ELECTRICITY!

Living in a house that’s powered by microhydro has some important differences to R’s off-grid system, which was powered by solar photovoltaic panels and a windmill.  The important thing there was to fill the battery bank by sundown each day, and then be careful not to use up too much before sunrise the next day, when power input resumed, in the form of sunlight on the solar panels.  The windmill was mostly for backup on cloudy days, though we did get enough wind for it to make a big difference lots of times.  On the other hand, hydro power comes in 24 hours a day (er, as long as the creek doesn’t dry up…).  So while both systems have similar limitations against high-draw electrical devices (no electric heaters, for example, and items like power tools are used only with careful attention to not depleting the batteries), the need to avoid small power draws doesn’t exist here.  It’s ok to have an electric clock, for example, or to leave a laptop or radio plugged in even when they aren’t on (using a tiny amount of electricity, generally referred to as a phantom load, since the device doesn’t *appear* to be on, but it’s still using some juice).  It just feels so decadent!  Why, last night I had *two* lights on most of the evening, *and* the laptop *AND* the radio!  What luxury!  What – I won’t call it “waste”, since the electricity is being produced by the turbine in the creek anyway, and it will either be used by some device here at the Ranch, or it will be diverted away and “wasted” anyway.  I realize that for Riot reporting purposes, I won’t be able to track my electricity usage while I’m here, since the production and overall usage on this Ranch, even if I had access to that data, are not proportional to my personal usage.  Not to mention that I’ll be doing laundry at a friend’s house, using the laptop at the wi-fi cafe, and all sorts of other situations where I’m deflecting some of my usage onto other systems.  I think the most I’ll be able to do is to estimate based on my experience at R’s, where we produced (and thus used) about 1.5 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per day in the winter, and 2-3 kWh/day in the summertime.

 

 

Written Feb 5:  INTRODUCTIONS

I suppose I ought to explain about the name of the blog.  It goes back to when I first got introduced to yahoo’s political chatrooms, about two elections ago.  The way chatrooms work, for anyone who isn’t familiar, is that there is a chatroom window open on your computer screen, and each time a person posts to the chatroom, their name and then their comment appears at the bottom of the page.  When there are many people in the room, the page can scroll pretty fast.  Sometimes there are several unrelated conversations going at once.  It sounds confusing, but you get used to it fast.  Of course, you never want to use your real name in chatrooms, so you make up a name and get a yahoo ID in that name and use that to log in to the chatroom.  More than you ever wanted to know about chatrooms, right?

Anyway, one of the first chat names I used was “untied_dyslexic_church_of_dog.”  It fit me in many ways — I’m irreligious, I love dogs, and I love puns.  But that sure is a handful to type, and pretty soon it turned into just the nickname “Dog.”  I even took pleasure in the odd-ness of a woman intentionally using a name like that — really caught lots of people by surprise!  I took the pun-ness part of it to the extreme, often posting comments like “I believe in Dog” and “there but for the grace of Dog go I”, etc.  It became a big part of my identity, always on the search for more/better Dog jokes!  And there are still certain friends from the chatroom who call me by that name, in person even!  (A story for another time is when three of us met for dinner and persisted in calling each other by our chat names in the restaurant — Dog, Bird, and Fly :-)

Anyway, put that history together with my seach for a place to call home, and “Dog’s Little Acre” just seemed a good fit.

For a little further introduction,

this: 

is Bear, 

and

this:

 

is Luna.

They are my family of the moment.

 

Written Feb 4:  

 

WELCOME!

So, I thought I’d give this blogging thing a try.  The list of blogs I enjoy reading is getting longer and longer, and through my participation in the Riot for Austerity (explanation below, and links to come, soon as I learn how to do links in a blog) and the great people participating in it, I’ve come to realize that a blog is a very fun and convenient way to keep track of what’s happening and how things are going in someone’s life.  So when I found myself in a Very Interesting Situation, it occurred to me that a blog might be a useful way to share it as it unfolds.

What, you might ask, is this Very Interesting Situation?  Well, you might say that I’ve been in a Very Interesting Situation for several years now.  That’s how long I’d been living off-grid in a tiny house in the high desert with my boyfriend R.  For him, “homesteading” (which for the moment we’ll define as a household more-or-less independent of “the system” — no electric grid, no municipal sewer system or water system, no next-door neighbors to borrow a cup of sugar from, etc. – and where one generally creates one’s own solution to problems, rather than “purchasing the solution” ready-made as the world of marketing would have us believe we are obligated to do).  For R, this kind of homesteading was a lifelong dream that he slowly moved closer to over the course of many years.  For me, it was a sudden immersion – just over three years ago, I quit a career-level job with the US Forest Service and moved out to this little isolated valley in the Western Great Basin (roughly at the Oregon/California/Nevada junction) to live with him.  I found a few part-time jobs, more for fun than for income, since I had very few expenses – no mortgage, no utility bills, mostly just gasoline and food.  I began learning to split firewood, to garden, to find useful things at the dump.  We were already, based on our worldview and personal preferences, fairly focused on minimal-impact living.  Then came Peak Oil, and after that came the Riot for Austerity.  But I’m getting ahead of myself: as R and I learned about Peak Oil (which I use as a catchphrase for the coming economic collapse, which may well be caused by Peak Oil itself, but which might just as well happen even sooner due to effects from the housing bubble collapse, or the dollar devaluation, or shenanigans in the Middle East, or…  well, you get the point) – as we learned about Peak Oil, we began to feel more urgency about preparing for whatever changes come.  We were already more independent of “the system” than many people, but there were several arenas, most particularly having to do with growing/preserving food, where we were not well prepared at all.  We bought some tools and some seeds, dug a root cellar, planted a garden, as well as learned a little about politics, about the fiat dollar, about the geology of oil fields and the obfuscation capability of the US Government…  We slowly became more prepared to weather an uncertain future.  OK, on to the Riot.  Last year when the Riot for Austerity began (again, links as soon as I know how – for now just google it, or search Yahoo Groups for “90% reduction”) I joined up eagerly.  Partly to offer my perspective as someone who is already living a pretty low-impact lifestyle.  Partly to get motivated to move further in those areas where I’m not much if any reduced from average (gasoline and food, mostly).  Suffice it to say that the Riot for Austerity is about reducing one’s resource use (proxy for carbon emissions) to 10% of that of an “average” American. Hence the “90% Reduction” name of the Yahoo Group where we encourage and support each other. [Update: Link to the Riot Yahoo Group is now in the sidebar!] <<–  Woo hoo, look at that, I made a link!  Yay me!

Fast forward to a week or so ago.  R and I have now decided to split up.  Although we agree on many aspects of basic worldview, we have differing ideas about what is needed to make a relationship work.  So, here I am now, looking for a place to live, seeking a place to be “settled” before the world comes crashing down.  And I realized that I don’t want to abandon my attempt to keep my ecological footprint low just because I’m dealing with lots of stress and changes.  And *then* I realized that someone dealing with all these changes while still trying to keep a low footprint (and possibly continuing to lower it further) might make an interesting story.  Hey, I should keep a journal.  Hmm, how about a blog?

So, that’s the background.  The nutshell of my current situation is that I’ve found temporary housing, “for a month or two”, at the guest house (known as the Schoolhouse because it used to be one) of a microhydro-powered ranch 6 miles down the road from R’s place.  I’m seeking a cheap place to buy (get real, Sue!) or a reasonable place to rent, in this remote valley with little of either to offer.  I’m attempting to expand my work enough to cover my increased expenses.  This includes increasing my hours at my current local jobs (library assistant, herbal business office help) as well as establishing some regular clients for my freelance proofreading and transcription business.

There is no internet service out at the Ranch yet (satellite service should be up within a week or so), so I’m writing posts offline and uploading several days’ worth at a time when I’m online in town.  Bear with me.