Fruits, vegetables, whole grains and beans! Doesn’t have to taste bad – you just need to experiment with spices and cooking it appropriately. After a few months, eating things without much fiber becomes so bland and uninteresting as you grow to love food with texture and structure! Chewing is good.
The other day I had a piece of white bread – yuck when you’re not used to eating things like that. I want my food to have flavor and texture!
People talk about smoothies with all that added sugar being good. I guess in fifty years when I’m in the nursing home in my last few hours on a feeding tube they’ll be good but I’ll have an apple or carrot today while I still have teeth.
When I own land, I want as simple and small of home possible, as I want to spend my money on the land and not the building. Acreage is more important then square footage, and indeed a small home would be easier to clean and more difficult to accumulate things. If you don’t have room, you can’t buy it. While certainly a hot shower, refrigerator, gas stove and oven, and wood fireplace are essential, I am willing to give up most other things within reason. Obviously I would want room to have a table where I can walk on my laptop, some place to get up and stretch on a rainy or cold snowy day, and a relatively comfortable bed.
A smaller building is easier to heat and maintain order in. Less distance for things to break, and I really don’t want to have utility electric or internet service at my building. I’d rather be a long-ways back from the road, so I have my privacy and not be causing a nuisance with neighbors with my music or fires. I want things as simple as possible, both for low cost and sustainability. I want to make as few trips as possible to the landfill, use as little coal, oil or propane in support of my home. Have some solar power, but not a large set up — just enough to keep a few LED lights on, have fans for cooling or moving heat around, charge my phone, laptop and other USB appliances.
I do think many of the tiny homes you see online are pretty gaudy with stainless steel refrigerators, fancy woodwork and paint jobs. Or they are so tiny, something easily moved on wheels. That’s a bit too small for me, but a nice hunting-cabin style property would be nice, especially way back off a road, only accessible by four wheel drive, quad or snowmobile. I don’t need a lot of space, but I do need something that is decently well insulated and dry to make it through the inevitable rainy and snowy periods. Better insulation is more wood saved, less wood to split and feed into the stove and fewer carbon emissions, after all.
Natural wood is good as is natural materials. I don’t want to pollute my own land and I don’t want to haul much waste to landfill. While natural products can be less efficient and suspect to rot and degradation, they are obviously much preferable to the synthetic plastics that are common on modern houses. I remember years ago when I was a children, when my neighbor got a new double wide delivered — and they burned the scrap vinyl siding. Nasty! There is definitely a balance to be struck, and it all depends on what the property I like ultimately has on it.
But it’s not tomorrow. I have a few years to continue to think about it all. I have time to continue to read and learn, and research into solar and batteries by scientists across the world is only going to produce better, more reliable products that will be cheaper. They’re is a lot of benefit to all this research going on in reducing carbon footprints, as it also means better products will be coming on the market for off-grid homes. Time is on my side.
I did not sleep well last night. More dreams about the west and knowing it will be another weekend stuck at home as the rain and snow comes roaring in tomorrow. And even next weekend looks like crap, and who knows if I’ll have Good Friday off as the budget seems to be stuck. Not that I don’t have to be back mid-day to go to Mom and Dad’s 50th anniversary party.
Truth is I dosed off riding in, my mind a-drift as I was listening to the audiobook about soil health and I hit the curb and flung myself into a rock rip-rap. Banged up my right need and slammed my helmet into the rock but I did not rip my jeans and I’m just a bit sore. Totally my fault, I wasn’t paying attention to the trail, I was drifting off-to-sleep. I got so little sleep last night. Work was fine, it was a very quiet day in the office as nothing really is happening, I did some data cleaning and approved a few things, but nothing major.
Maybe I’m just bothered by the news. Not that any of it really effects my own life, but I don’t like the direction our country is going. I spend too much time on NY Times, CNN, NPR and Twitter tracking the news. The economic news is so worrying, even though it will work out in long term, but I don’t like the idea of both bond rates going up while stocks fall. How much more am I going to end up paying at the gorcery store? And maybe its all those cabin videos I watch and the crap properties I keep seeing coming up in Zillow. I do need a home, but I don’t want something that so large and so close to other people. Mainly I want land and something that keeps me dry in summer and warm in winter that is fairly durable and doesn’t require tons of energy to heat and light – preferably generated on site.
Truth is the one thing I need is a night in a wilderness. It’s terrible how much time I read books and watch videos about building a cabin in wilderness, in the vast spaces out west and in Alaska. I know such places exist, I’ve been to Pennsylvania and West Virginia, the world does not end at the borders of New York. Yet, I feel so trapped by making money and fear of the unknown. It’s fine, soon I’ll be back out in wilderness, having fires and looking up at stars from hammock, but it’s just been a tough spring.
