*I just logged into my blog account after not using it for several months only to find this unfinished blog post waiting to be published. I seem to recognize this ever-hopeful young man who is writing, but feel like he is a few decades removed from where I am right now!
Needless to say I will work on a "getting up to speed" blog post to cover the time in between yurt life and our current situation, but I thought that I would still post this for humor and reminiscence...
Enjoy!
--
As I write this the wind is blowing about forty miles an hour and the windchill is around -40. I am sitting on the couch across from a warm woodstove with a cat asleep on my lap. Not bad for the moment!
If you would have told me a year ago that I would be sitting here right now, I would have told you that you were crazy, but here I am. Around this time last year I was sitting on the beach in Goa, India watching cows graze across the sand and crabs burrow into it. Since that time my life has known little stability, except in moments, and I feel like Rose and I are finally making arrangements to provide the stability that I seek and the lifestyle that we have been chasing.
Part of our arrangement to encourage a more stable lifestyle has to do with a previous potential arrangement to move onto the homestead of a few friends of ours in Grand Marais. In exchange for this privilege we will help them with their community supported agriculture garden, maple syrup production, firewood splitting, producing bio-diesel, and other farm related developments. Considering that these are all things that I want to be doing anyway, I feel that this is a pretty good arrangement!
The people that we are going to be "re-homesteading" with are old pros with much of the details that make homesteading up here possible. They produce a good chunk of their electricity with solar panels, they have built their entire homestead around passive solar principles and seek to be as easy on the land as they can be while extracting as much of their living from it as possible. This sounds as close to an Ox Cart lifestyle as possible for right now.
Rose and I have been making the comment to one another that we would like to live in a yurt for a while, both as an experiment and as a life choice, so we have been exploring that. I built a 20' square floating (meaning it doesn't have sunken foundations) platform for the proposed yurt and was going to get to building it as soon as possible when we found this 24' yurt for sale on Craigslist! We talked it over and decided that even though it would be a little more expensive than building a yurt if would be worth it to just be able to set it up and then it would be an asset we could move around no matter where we end up. So we bought it.
Now we are homestead sitting for our friends while they are sailing down the Baja coastline (rough) and working on getting the yurt set up while trying to re-incorporate ourselves into the community in meaningful and productive ways.
Overall our lifestyle seems to be getting closer to the ideal that we originally planned for and although there will be significant trials on this path, the investment of energy will yield great results both for our family and for our future. When we get the yurt set up we would love to host anyone who would like to visit. Let me know and we can set it up!
All of the best from the North Woods! It isn't that harsh up here by the way. The weather may be cold, but our hearts are warm!
Needless to say I will work on a "getting up to speed" blog post to cover the time in between yurt life and our current situation, but I thought that I would still post this for humor and reminiscence...
Enjoy!
--
As I write this the wind is blowing about forty miles an hour and the windchill is around -40. I am sitting on the couch across from a warm woodstove with a cat asleep on my lap. Not bad for the moment!
If you would have told me a year ago that I would be sitting here right now, I would have told you that you were crazy, but here I am. Around this time last year I was sitting on the beach in Goa, India watching cows graze across the sand and crabs burrow into it. Since that time my life has known little stability, except in moments, and I feel like Rose and I are finally making arrangements to provide the stability that I seek and the lifestyle that we have been chasing.
Part of our arrangement to encourage a more stable lifestyle has to do with a previous potential arrangement to move onto the homestead of a few friends of ours in Grand Marais. In exchange for this privilege we will help them with their community supported agriculture garden, maple syrup production, firewood splitting, producing bio-diesel, and other farm related developments. Considering that these are all things that I want to be doing anyway, I feel that this is a pretty good arrangement!
The people that we are going to be "re-homesteading" with are old pros with much of the details that make homesteading up here possible. They produce a good chunk of their electricity with solar panels, they have built their entire homestead around passive solar principles and seek to be as easy on the land as they can be while extracting as much of their living from it as possible. This sounds as close to an Ox Cart lifestyle as possible for right now.
Rose and I have been making the comment to one another that we would like to live in a yurt for a while, both as an experiment and as a life choice, so we have been exploring that. I built a 20' square floating (meaning it doesn't have sunken foundations) platform for the proposed yurt and was going to get to building it as soon as possible when we found this 24' yurt for sale on Craigslist! We talked it over and decided that even though it would be a little more expensive than building a yurt if would be worth it to just be able to set it up and then it would be an asset we could move around no matter where we end up. So we bought it.
Now we are homestead sitting for our friends while they are sailing down the Baja coastline (rough) and working on getting the yurt set up while trying to re-incorporate ourselves into the community in meaningful and productive ways.
Overall our lifestyle seems to be getting closer to the ideal that we originally planned for and although there will be significant trials on this path, the investment of energy will yield great results both for our family and for our future. When we get the yurt set up we would love to host anyone who would like to visit. Let me know and we can set it up!
All of the best from the North Woods! It isn't that harsh up here by the way. The weather may be cold, but our hearts are warm!
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