Moving Day The Second

Compared to yesterday, today was easy – two trips from the schoolhouse to the rental – all small stuff – houseplants, clothes, dresser drawers, some kitchen and foodstuffs. No help, but no help needed. The landlords were still there when I arrived with the first load, and we reviewed a few more things, and they even helped me move the fridge into place. They were gone by the time I arrived with the second load. Luna got to go inside for the first time, and run around and sniff all our stuff – I think she might know now that’s where we’re going, because there are piles of familiar-scented stuff there. Even though it was an easy day, relatively speaking, I’m still pooped. Mainly my back is tired – I’m having to be really careful now with lifting anything, to make sure not to outstretch my hands with any weight in them. First hot bath in the new house (tomorrow night) will feel so good!

Moving Day The First

This morning I faced a doggy dilemma: when I go to R’s today to load up some things from my storage shed and transfer them to the new house, do I leave the dog behind at the ranch, where she might quite possibly decide to run off again as she did just yesterday? Or do I bring her with me to R’s; surely a confusing experience for her, since she spent three happy years (of her six) there and certainly has no way of understanding that we don’t live there anymore. I admit that a small part of me also wanted to deny R the pleasure of seeing her – I envisioned it as a ‘lesson’ that when one decides one is unwilling or unable to do the ‘work’ part of a relationship, one no longer can really expect to continue the good parts of it either. This is incredibly petty of me, I know, and that is part of why I decided to bring the dog with me. I also think it will be good for her to see the new house another time, to speed her acclimatization to that place as new ‘home’. Even though she’ll be waiting in the car as I unload things, since the fence is not built yet.

So, mid-morning, I set off for R’s. Through the freshly fallen snow… (I guess I’m just a Murphy’s Law magnet). Fortunately it was just a dusting, less than an inch. I got to R’s, had a nice visit, loaded up the truck with some boxes from my shed, and headed over to the rental. There I unloaded my things, signed the lease, and gave the visiting landlords a check for half of March, all of April, and a “last month’s” deposit. As I was unloading, my friend Emily showed up to help with the heavy stuff, which I hadn’t brought yet. So she rode with me back to R’s, where he had already put the trailer on his truck, and filled the truck bed with bulky-but-lightweight things like garbage/recycling cans, the wooden food dehydrator we scavenged from the dump, etc. With Emily’s help, we loaded the heavy and awkward stuff into the trailer and into my truck, then all headed back to the rental and unloaded. While there, KH stopped by, and she got introduced to the landlords and talked over with them her plans for the subleased fields. Other than the sauna apparently being out of service (I knew the hot tub wasn’t working but I thought the sauna was functional) everything seems in order for me to move in. A sauna and a hot tub sound so extravagant, and definitely not in the spirit of the Riot for Austerity, but I could see using it a few times a year as a treat without going too overboard on electricity usage. Soaking in hot water (indoors in the bathtub, usually) may not be a NEED but it’s right at the very top of my list of WANTS. It’s a reward, a relaxation, a warmup, and a physical boost to my bad back muscles, all rolled up into one. Elsewhere in the house, the woodstove has been repaired and is ok for me to use (and there’s a propane heater backup). I don’t have much firewood left, but KH still has lots of downed limbs in her yard.

Yes, when we arrived back at the schoolhouse, Luna looked confused for a few minutes.  When she was let into R’s while we were there, she made a beeline for where her food and water bowls had been.  R gave her water, but I felt bad for confusing her.  Familiar place, but no food in the usual place, no bed in the usual place, etc.  Poor pup…

Tomorrow – more moving, but not nearly as strenuous – no two-person things, just lots of boxes and jars from the kitchen, clothes, etc. I’m starting to feel better about this, and definitely looking forward to feeling settled and to putting my day-to-day life in order.

What’s That Saying about Good Fences and Neighbors?

Yesterday I went to the rental house with a friend who is the wife-half of a fence-building business (they also happen to be the daughter and son-in-law of the couple whose herbal business I work for).  We walked around the yard and assessed dog-constraint options.  I hate the idea of having to fence the dog in when there is plenty of room between us and the neighbors, with only forest behind the house.  But Luna (my 6-year-old lab/chow/misc mix) has shown me plenty of times that she can’t be trusted to stay home when she’s in a wandering mood.  Case in point: today, for the second time, she and Ellie (caretaker’s dog at my current abode) showed up near my work, over ten miles from home.  A friend saw them at about 9:30 am, stopped, and got Ellie into his car, but Luna wouldn’t let herself be caught (even by someone she knows).  He came to my work and told me, I drove out to where he said he’d seen her, stopped the car and called for her, and she came bounding up from behind a dune and jumped happily in the truck,  all out of breath.  She had to wait in the truck all day until I got home at 6pm.  I took her out of the truck on a leash a few times to offer potty breaks, and gave her just a tiny bit of water to drink, but otherwise shunned her all day, with several stern “Bad Dog” refrains said to her in the first few minutes after I picked her up.  No way to know if she got the message or not.

Friends keep warning me that ranchers shoot free-roaming dogs out in these parts, and it makes me even more grateful that she has, so far, managed to be found by friends.  But once we are in the new house we will be in unfamiliar territory, with only one of the neighbors being known to me at this point.

So, it looks like I’ll be shelling out some fairly hefty bucks for a fence to be built.  (Actually, more than half the fence posts are already in place, but strung with barbed wire which won’t contain a dog — so they’ll be doing a fair amount of merely adding field fence to an existing fence.  Even with that ’shortcut’ this will still be a chunk of change.

Financially, I’m both worried and not worried at the same time.  I’m not worried about running out of money in the short term — I’m extremely fortunate to have enough savings to tide me through these transition costs.  On the other hand, my feeling of financial security stems from having that savings cushion, and that comfort zone recedes as that money is spent.  On the THIRD hand, given what’s happening with the plunging value of the dollar, I might as well turn as much as I need to into useful stuff like rolls of fencing and fenceposts, which will at least hold its value, as opposed to dollars, which don’t seem likely to.

Also today, two things happened which hold potential for increasing my financial situation.  One is that I was informed of an upcoming vacancy at the local Post Office, by a postal employee who thinks I’d be good there.  I would indeed enjoy working there, I think, and in this locale there is hardly a more stable employer than the US Postal Service.  I informed the right person that I’m interested.  She is still waiting to hear what kind of position she’s permitted to hire, and once that is known, I’ll analyze the facets of the job (how many hours, which days, pay scale, etc) and see if it still seems to work for me.  I don’t want to quit any of the jobs I already have, but if they REALLY don’t compare I might think about it (the library, for example — while I totally love working there, my shifts add up to a grand total of five (5) hours per week, unless the other employee is sick or out of town.  The library is only open twelve hours per week, so that plus about an hour of administrative time is the maximum I’d ever get there.  Plus, the pay is not very high.  Frankly it might not take much for any other job to out-compete the library, but I do really love working there.  So we’ll see.

The other financial plus thing that happened today is this:  I’m pursuing the possibility of buying a Geo Metro from a friend.  He still has to get it up and running and pass the smog test, but I’ve told him that if he can get it that far I’ll buy it.  He had offered it to me together with a refurbished 50,000-mile engine, plus two “parts cars” (other Geo Metros with dead engines but with most other parts working, that could be used for parts to repair the working one) for a set price.  Today he said he’d like to keep one parts car plus the “new to him” engine, and would reduce my purchase price accordingly.  This works fine for me, since I’m not a mechanic and only half interested in having the parts cars anyway (dead cars plus rental house do not happy neighbors make). 

So, I have a job possibility to pursue, and I’ve just saved $500 on a car purchase which, itself, will halve (roughly) the amount of gasoline I’ve been using.  All in all, not too bad an equation.

Third (and Final!) Bulk Post

Mar 5 OMENS

I’m struggling these days with some really mixed feelings about the new house, and it’s got me thinking about those little voices inside our heads that tell us “this is the right thing” or “this isn’t the right thing.” I’ve never had a comfortable relationship with those voices. I don’t think I’ve *ever* been on a plane when I didn’t have the voice in my head saying “I just know this is the time it’s going to crash – maybe you should treat the mere fact of having had that thought as a sign not to get on the plane.” I’ve never gotten off the plane or cancelled a trip due to those thoughts, but I have them, every time (fortunately I rarely/never fly anymore). On the other side, when something is happening that is good, the voice returns with “ooh, this was meant to be!”, and all sorts of situations present themselves just begging to be interpreted as signs of such fate. (One recently-joined couple I know apparently found the fact that the anniversary of HER sister’s death is the same date as HIS birthday, to be compelling evidence that their relationship was meant to be) So, I find that I’m anxious and worried with regard to the new rental arrangement, and my internal voice is trying to tell me “this is a sign, it’s not a good plan, go somewhere else.” But when I stop and think about it, I just don’t really buy that those things constitute some kind of mystic palmreader – rather, I think, there are just a few specific things I’m worried about (keeping the dog sufficiently constrained, making sure KH’s projects don’t turn into problem livestock, broken fences or neighbors annoyed at the noise or smell) and a few specific things I don’t find especially appealing (orange shag carpet, not to mention the general concept of renting someone else’s house as opposed to owning my own) and then there is the baseline bad vibes of the moment having to do with the end of a relationship, anxiety about the world crashing down around me, etc. It may or may not turn out to have been a mistake, but I prefer to make my choices by weighing the pluses and the minuses and identifying what risks are acceptable, rather than by guessing when the universe is or isn’t sending me a sign. And in this case I’m sufficiently interested in being a part of promoting a shift to a local food economy (which is what KH’s projects in the fields are generally about) that I’m willing to risk spending some time in a situation that I might end up changing again in six months. Besides, none of the other rentals I found had any lesser downsides. OK, I feel better now.

Speaking of runaway dogs, about 2pm this afternoon the herbal business where I work received a call from a neighbor, telling us that Luna (my dog) and Ellie (the ranch caretaker’s dog) were at their house. That’s about twelve miles from the ranch! I’d watched the dogs carefully when I drove off at 7:30 in the morning – I even closed the gate behind me, which is unusual, because MB (the caretaker) had left earlier on an errand and it was a situation the dogs weren’t used to, for him to leave first and then me to leave, with them remaining home alone. I certainly didn’t see them following me, and when I talked to MB later he confirmed that the gate was still closed when he arrived home a few hours later. So apparently, the dogs went out through the back meadow, which is fenced only for horses/cows with typical barbed wire that doesn’t even slow a dog down. How fortunate that they ended up at someone’s house where they were recognized! It all ended well – I went and retrieved the dogs and they sat in my truck for 2 hours until I returned home – but it did add to my anxiety about making a new place work for a dog. When I first got Luna, the issue of how to keep her contained in the yard was a big deal for me – I had fence built at two different houses, and at both locations it would generally hold her but she would occasionally escape and run playfully around the neighborhood, not hurting anyone or anything but thinking it was a game to not let herself get caught. And she’s good at that game! It was such a relief moving out to R’s where there was no one else for miles around; no need for a fence. And even there she ran 3 miles to the neighbor’s house on several occasions when we were both away from home. I definitely have more to learn about keeping a good dog-house!

 

Mar 4 I GOT THE HOUSE!

I never did like calling it “PricyHouse”, even though that’s an accurate description – it just didn’t feel nice. Anyway, now I’ll get to call it “Home” instead – I heard from the landlords and they’ve agreed to a six-month lease! In the late afternoon, KH and I walked around the yard and talked about which fields she plans to use for which purposes. She’s getting more and more excited about doing a small-scale CSA. She also has a friend with six “pet” cows that might end up on one of these fields. I’m not thrilled about cows, but I have to remember not to lump everything into such black and white terms. This *is* cow country out here, and I’m well aware that six “pet” cows is not the same as “running cows” and trampling and trashing the whole landscape. As long as she is responsible for the fencing and other aspects of the project, I need to just pretend that the fields are leased outside of my control. This is simply part of what’s involved in making the house affordable.

 

Mar 1 PUTTERING DAY

I suffer from that unnamed (but common, I think) ailment described partly by a feeling of perennial lack of time on a busy day when I leave early for work and get home with just enough time to unwind but not enough time or energy to accomplish many home chores. But the counterpart experience that defines this ailment is that, on a day when I actually *can* stay home all day, nowhere I need to go, plenty of time, theoretically, for all that knitting, reading, paperwork and bread baking that I never seem to have time to do on other days – on those stay-at-home days, I somehow feel so aimless, almost depressed, that I rarely have the energy to do any of those chores. Recently, I’ve dealt with this ailment by mostly just accepting it – allowing myself to wallow a bit, rewarding myself for every little chore I do. My reward is, sometimes, a little time I allow myself to sit and read, or play some computer solitaire or just listen to the radio. Last Thursday I got *many* chores done in the morning and mid-day, so my reward was that I allowed myself to go to town for a few hours in the afternoon and sit at the WiFi Cafe with my laptop, checking email and generally doing the online surfing thing. Today is another one of those days, except that I don’t plan to go to town today *or* tomorrow, and maybe not even Monday. We’ll see, though – three days of puttering in my current limbo situation, without internet access, might just be too much. However, it’s not like there’s a shortage of things to do at home. I have a stack of unread magazines about two feet high (mostly some recent issues of *High Country News*, my favorite publication, and some back issues of *The Sun* which a friend offered me). I have about a month’s worth of expenses to record, and two months’ worth of Riot for Austerity data to consolidate so I can report to the group. I also have about three rows started on my first knitting project, not to mention all the ingredients needed for some trial loaves of bread. I could be planning this summer’s garden, even though I don’t know for sure where I’ll be planting it. I have, in short, no shortage of home-things to do. Not even counting computer journalling or blogwriting (which often overlap but are two separate documents).

 

Feb 29 PENDING

No reply email from PricyHouse owners yet. I’ve double- and triple-confirmed with KH that she’s still enthusiastic, and that she’s willing to pay X per month to lease the fields, for a year at a time if that’s the lease the owners want. She says yes, she’s in. I’m still wary of all the things that could go wrong with her plan – anything from deer or wind making the growing impractical (I think these are the most likely situations), to there being something chemically unsuitable in the well water (it’s hot, and sulfur-y, that’s known so far), to her getting a great job somewhere else and moving away, or otherwise abandoning the project for personal or financial reasons. I’m prepared to continue with the lease even if that happens, but I like the prospects of her plan enough to accept those risks. There are plenty of personal gardeners in these parts, and a handful who grow to sell at the farmer’s market or to friends, but I think we would be the first attempt to seriously think about the need to expand the local food economy for reasons of future necessity. KH used the phrase “CSA” this afternoon in her description of her plans. It sounded like it was a new idea to her, and she was exploring it – having her potential customers pay her in advance in exchange for fresh produce throughout the season. And on such a small scale of only a few such ‘customers’, she’s talking to them ahead of time and finding out what they like as a part of figuring out what to grow. I keep thinking that I’ll identify a few veggies that she is NOT growing for sale, and perhaps try them out myself. Beets, maybe, and chard? Those grew well at R’s, and I can’t assume the soil is the same (R’s place is essentially on ancient lakebed, PricyHouse is up against the base of the mountains), but it’s a place to start.

 

Feb 28 WINTER READING/DECLUTTERING PROJECT

One project I started several months ago was a winter reading/decluttering project. My goal was to read twenty books off my shelf that I would want to get rid of afterwards. I’d long ago decluttered by getting rid of what books I had that I simply didn’t want anymore. And, of course, this is all separate from the books I have that I think are worth keeping – either as a helpful library for the future, or that simply mean enough to me to be worth the space they take up. After the latest decluttering, I realized that I had a pretty large stack of books that I was pretty sure I wouldn’t feel the need to keep, but didn’t want to get rid of them yet, as I’d not read them yet! (Over the past 30 years, I’d rarely passed a used-book store without finding at least 1-2 treasures to buy. But I hadn’t read my gems at anything approaching the same rate. So the unread pile is still rather tall.) So I decided in late fall that I would undertake a winter reading/decluttering project by reading twenty of those books, and then, unless in the course of reading them I decided I wanted to keep them after all, then those books would be passed on to others – either given away to individuals or donated to the library. Of course this project got delayed by the unplanned happenings of this winter, and it may well turn into the spring reading project, or even the 2008 reading project, but I don’t plan to abandon it. So far I’ve read and decluttered two books (titles already forgotten) and am in the process of reading numbers three and four: (*On The Shred Of A Cloud* by Rolf Edberg, and *Second Nature* by Michael Pollan).

 

Feb 26 DECISION

Finally emailed the owners of PricyHouse and told them that if they’d agree to a six month lease, I’m ready to commit to the house. In truth I’m ready to commit to the house even if they insist on a yearlong lease, but I’m hoping they’ll be willing to start with the shorter commitment. Now I just need to hear back to know it’s a done deal!

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.