It turned out to be a beautiful but cool summer weekend to have my head in the clouds, both figuratively and literally floating in the East Canada Creek and doing a lot of reading and thinking with smoking Tropical Skittlez and 5 hour energy shots.

I won’t argue that was the healthiest combination 🥓 but the same can be said about Mariaville Farm bacon frying the produce I got from Samdills Farm. 🍆 Still it was good to be away, fully off the grid for three days with no cell service or radio Thursday evening through Sunday. 📱 Riding down to Stratford on Saturday I could have momentarily turned on my phone to see if I had gotten any messages but I didn’t care want to know. 💓It was a fun weekend and so far my heart hasn’t given out even if my doctor 🧑‍⚕️keeps reminding me I need to get a stress test with family’s history of cardiac arrest.

Did I smoke too much 😄 and listen too much Grateful Dead 🎸? Absolutely but it was my last full long weekend fully away from it all through November. Now it’s back to work, 📧 I have several emails to get through. But I enjoyed a weekend of floating ⭕ and riding my bike. Reading 📖 a lot and thinking. No house listing’s to review 🏡 no constantly thinking about my future. Just a moment of Zen. 🪷 Rode down to Stratford on Saturday afternoon, via Old Stage Road then through the hamlet and back up Piseco Road. Nice ride but I had to carry the bike over down trees 🪵and rougher sections of the road.

That said it was a fun weekend 😶‍🌫️ with the Grateful Dead, Tropical Skittlez and 5 hour energy shots. ☕ A good satvia really can make the world a fun place, full of laughter, forgetting about all of the problems for a little while. Plus the Grateful Dead song, Dire Wolf 🐺 is so much fun when you are stoned. 🤭 I beg you, don’t murder me! Plus riding the mountain bike after dark 🚴is so much fun when your pupils are dilated and you can see the woods so while, noticing every shadow and so many things you would not ordinary see.

Did a ton of reading and listening to audio books 📖 including listening to Peter Grinspoon’s Seeing Through the Smoke and Leslie Iverson’s Science of Marijuana. 🪴 I’ve been intensely fascinated about cannabis both it’s health ☺ and legal ⚖ upsides and downsides and how it works. There really is a whole culture around smoking pot and a lot of fascinating science and it touches on everything from psychology to personal values to politics. Then I also read a book on being a homeowner, 🏡 one on farm life on a small beef cattle operation in Southern Ohio, 🐮 and one restoring old houses. 🛠 Also spent some time writing 📝, thinking 💭 those high thoughts and putting them on paper.

You know it’s weird to think this was likely my last trip to Piseco Powley for the year 🏕 and soon here in the Adirondacks it will be another autumn 🍁 then winter. ❄ Seems like it happens so quickly but with Big Red getting old and me still looking at houses and land who knows if I will ever get back here again. I get it that owning a home doesn’t preclude all vacations and travel though it would consume a lot of time and resources, livestock certainly would. 🐐 I’m well aware the current situation is unsustainable. But I also have gotten so much enjoyment out of the Grateful Dead this summer. 🎸

This afternoon I paddled out on Lily Lake from the Stewart Landing Dam for a few hours. 🛶 I didn’t make it all the way to West Lake but I wasn’t far from that. Very nice day, the lake was quite calm. Now I’m heading out on the bike from Fonda to Canajahoharie or as close as I can get as allowed by time. I want to be on the road heading home by around 7 pm so I’m not driving home most of the way in the dark. 🦌 Not to mention, Friday morning before work I’m heading up to Perkins Clearing to set up camp 🏕 and remote work that day.

I talked to banks about getting a mortgage and started down the road for pre-approval. I talked to my friend who has the 10 acre old homestead in Greenville, how he got there. I looked at several houses, toured one in June asked questions about one to a realtor. I read books about buying a house and building your own. The houses and properties I actually liked where much too far from work. Many had other issues, some would have been a cash purchase and needed to be built from the ground up, prefab or otherwise. Most much where too large.

The banks were happy to steer me towards a conventional 30 year mortgage for $2,000 a month. It would finance up to $275k to $300k, probably more house then I would need and want but actually not an unrealistic budget when a lot of ready to move into, nicely maintained but older houses are in the quarter of a million range. Of course, most that the banks really like are your very typical and boring house in suburbia. And I would be paying that through my 72nd birthday, assuming that I didn’t refinance and didn’t pay it off early.

It’s really hard to find a house under 750 square feet. Some people are like don’t you want to heat and clean an extra room or two as a home office? Plus storage for tons of crap you’ll most certainly secure as a homeowner. No not really. Honestly, I thought that 700 sq ft house I toured was bigger than I liked. Plus it had a dirty old oil burner and no wood stove. Plus I guess running water, flush toilets and an indoor shower are great in the winter and for reasons of convenience but it just seems like a lot of crap to break.

What I really want is the simple, small hunting style cabin that is common in the Adirondacks or the more remote parts of Pennsylvania. I’m not saying that I wouldn’t have some solar panels, gravity sink and hand pump, outhouse and outdoor heated shower. Propane range for cooking. I get such living is harder than the current suburbia way of living but I despise the shinny trash everything every other week and replace of suburbia with the shiny and new.

I could have looked harder this summer gone by, had I not spent so much time up in the woods, reading, smoking pot, riding my mountain bike, floating in the tube and finding distraction in my kind. I could have moved Zillow back on my phone as soon as I killed my phone and aggressively persued every listing I could find that sort of made sense to me. But I did not, preferring to spend as much of my summer up in the wilderness, high as a kite while I kept sending my landlord $800 checks as he hammers and grinds along the unit next door as a gentle reminder that time is not long for my current moldy apartment.

I mean this summer is not unlike other summers. Big Red brought me to the wilderness for many nice nights though the cannabis and the Grateful Dead records were a friendly addition. Maybe it was much too ordinary of a summer with a little extra sparkles. But if I had been a little more aggressive I could have my own land at this point, be growing my own cannabis and having livestock, or at least clearly leading to that point. And I’m now a full director in my office, this should mean I should have moved out of just out of college apartment.

Truth is that I’ve not found what is right for me. I’m not going to waste my money on a big house in the suburbs that I despise and don’t care about. A house might be a good decision if you care about the building and where you live, but I don’t want some place out in the suburbs with vinyl siding and carpeting that I don’t give a rats ass about and wouldn’t care if the roof collapses or the building burns to the ground. A house is not a good investment if you don’t care about it and would be just as happy with it not long in the world.