I have been working the past two weekends to get all the little design elements complete for our new blog, and I can finally say that it’s pretty much done!
Check it out: http://ourfarmadventure.com
We’ve been planning this site for months and now it’s coming to fruition, at last. This is where you’ll find a detailed account of our plans and progress on building the house and starting the farm in Georgia. We’ve only just begun the actual process but we’re learning a TON. Not only is the site an account of how the project is going, but also a central area for all the resources and information (it will grow over time) that we’re utilizing. Our goal is to inspire and teach people about what we’re doing, and also keeping our parents up to date. ;)
I may not write in here as much as I normally do, so check out the new site if you’d like to keep up with what I’m doing.
Yay!
Remember this?
“I wonder. What will my life be like in one more year?”
One year from that post I was in Toccoa, Georgia, chopping my way through BG’s land with a machete and a heavy head, thinking as I chopped. This is abnormal work. And there is nothing here but us, machetes and thorns everywhere… for 50 acres.
The air was crisp and the sun was warm, and at night all we could hear was everything nature-made. I want to say it was a tough few days because we had the bare minimum equipment and camping gear, and the fire ants got to the food (and to me), we sweat a lot because it was still quite warm out and we had long sleeves and pants on… and no showers for four days. The chopping was tough, for hours on end, and when we would turn around to see our work there we saw just fifty feet of a trail that took us three hours to work on.
I mean, it started out that tough, for me anyway. I was afraid, actually. Afraid that this was too much labor and that I might just be a little bit lazy and a little too weak. Am I committed enough to this person and these ideas to see it through and keep a level head?
What we are essentially doing is saying a big “fuck that” to what the majority of our society is doing and inevitably we have endless questions: How much money do we need to build this house? Can we actually build this ourselves? Is it ok if we don’t work for a year to do this full-time? How long before we can start the farm? How are we going to be affected if the stock market crashes? What happens if we need to go to the hospital? We will have no insurance… Where can we place the house for maximum solar exposure (for the panels), and how can we find that place when the land is such a mess? How sustainable are we if we hire someone to come in with a machine to clear some of this brush? Have we thought of everything?
Endless.
So there’s me, chopping my way through, over analyzing everything. And along comes the BG, curing my pain, silencing my thoughts and clarifying everything… by asking me to marry him.
Yeh. ;)
“I am so sick of wasting my hard-earned money on your
shitty machines. You should seriously consider a refund policy for people who get screwed thinking their clothes are properly washed only to find that the spin cycle hasn’t completed and everything is sopping wet, forcing them to spend another ridiculous $1.25… IF they happen to have the extra quarters on-hand.
If I go out of my way to submit a report for a machine and the repair person comes to find that I am correct and that the machine does, in fact, need the specified repair, I should indeed get my money back.
I would be willing to discuss this over the phone if you care to call.”
I haven’t stopped thinking about my goals list from my last post and I’ve starting prioritizing them…
Right now, though, I’m packing up the bare essentials to head down to Toccoa with the BG to spend the next five days on the land trying to cut out some trails, find the perimeter markers and possibly figure out where the house might go. No phones, no internet, no laptops, no cars, no bikes… just BG, me, the tent and some equipment.
YEA!
Many months ago I found
43things with
m and the two of us were like, where the hell as THIS been all our lives? I wrote up about 25 original goals I wanted to achieve and since then maybe completed half of them. Most of the others on my list have either been deleted or are still sitting there with zero progress, OR are real long-term goals that I’ve not been able to make any steps toward in Raleigh.
In the shower just now (where I do all my best thinking), I decided that one reason I sometimes feel like total ass is that I’ve forgotten my personal path. It’s tough for me to remain on this path when I’m in a relationship and I won’t go into all the details of why this occurs except to say that when it does, it takes me months to realize it. (Probably because of that whole “honeymoon” period in a new relationship people refer to… Yea. It happens.) I thought about where I’m headed personally, when I feel best and what I’m interested in playing around with that I haven’t yet. This isn’t to say that I don’t, on a daily basis, remember the things in the near future I’d like to do, like meet new people and practice yoga, etc. But there’s so much going on in my head at any given moment that things become disconnected, and in addition I have this really horrible habit of waiting around for BG to do certain stuff which simply wastes time, so I’ve decided to revisit my master goals list, organize it and re-commit.
After all this thinking and excitement in my shower I came back to the compy and did my daily search on delicious’ popular links to find this, which summed up all of why I get sidetracked and more.
Back soon with the list… :)
Two weekends ago I took Amtrak to PA to visit friends. YAY. I spent the weekend with
m and we went to j’s party together where we… played beer pong (???) and sat by the fire until 3am. It was awesome. Really, the entire weekend was pretty great.
I went to visit my parents for the day on Sunday and things were kind of rocky between my mother and I. It seems clearer to me now more than ever that there are some traits I’ve carried from her that I really dislike. But now that I see where it comes from it’s easier to identify what needs to be changed. That sounds really cryptic. Let’s just say I had a *major* revelation that Sunday and since then I’ve had an entirely new perspective on my life.
Lots of exciting things happening lately: Work is going well, my freelance business is picking up, BG and I are hitting a one-year-since-I-moved-here anniversary, yoga is kicking my ass (lovingly), and I’ve been seeing my boys more often. I think I can honestly say that I don’t hate Raleigh any longer. Yea. I said it.
Eeeeeeeeee! :)
