Washing dishes, homestead style.

Since I don't have a fully functional kitchen (stove works, but that's it), I wash the dishes outside on a table with a jug of water and a tub. 

Every morning, I put yesterday's dishes in the tub on the ground to soak. (There are more dishes than normal in this pic, it's been snowing so I haven't done the washnh in a few days.) Around noon I go out and scrub them, and toss the dirty water. Then I rinse them with the jug water, over the tub, so I can reuse the rinse water for tomorrow's soak water. They dry on a rack the fits into the nonfunctional kitchen sink. I use about a gallon of clean water a day. 

When it's nice out, it's actually kind of fun; and very very "green". When it's cold, though? That sucks. One day I added hot water to the jug and soak water, which brought it from frozen to slush. Luckily slush makes for excellent scrubbing! Unluckily it took about two hours for my hands to return to a normal color. 

Looks like the snow may finally be over. Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against snow... but it's unpleasant at best when you live in a glorified tin can that can't run heat without sunshine. 

Lumberjacks

Today was supposed to be a quiet lazy day for me. 

Currently, the trailer is in what will be Rob's build site, which obviously isn't ideal for his future home. It might kill the lines to have a trailer sticking out. So, we have picked a new, more permanent home for the trailer. Unfortunately there was a couple of dead trees where Tim decided the trailer needs to live. 

I say "was" because... 

The wood is unfortunately too rotten to be used as firewood this winter, so I expect we'll have a lot of small bonfires to get rid of it all. 

Hopefully I can get it all done and we can move the trailer tomorrow. I'm going to go full redneck fancy and make Tim build me a little porch for the trailer! Poor old Zoe has a hard time getting in and out at this point, she needs better stairs. 

We have lived here for three weeks as of yesterday. 

Arizona, so far.

It has come to my attention that some people aren't fully aware of what exactly is going on here, and I've been asked to bring this old blog back from the dead. Well, here goes. 

The short version is that we bought a bit of land outside of Flagstaff, Arizona, and sold our house in Austin to relocate here. The long version is, well, longer.

As just about everyone knows, Tim and I share a pretty serious wanderlust that has led us around by the nose since we met. First the five month long epic honeymoon, then the summers in the trailer, and all the side trips and short journeys in between... Somewhere in there, we fell in love with Flagstaff, and Tim being Tim couldn't help but scan the real estate listings after everyone else went to bed. About two years ago, he saw a particularly attractive and size able lot (25.49 acres, to be exact) that we could never afford. Fast forward a couple years, to the discovery that Tim's dream land had a few major hurdles that were keeping it from selling. Turns out, most people (sane people) don't want to buy land that is so securely surrounded by national forest land that it has no legal access! Also, the land was completely raw. No power, no water, no gas, no nothing. Lots of huge pine trees, though, and we sure do like pine trees, so we made the admittedly ill advised to buy that very pretty but tricky piece of land. We sold our house in Austin, packed our stuff and took off. Several years were taken off of Rob's life driving the Penske (but hey, they're probably bad ones anyway, buddy) and we all hated each other a lot more than usual at the end of the two day drive, but we made. Rob had to fly back to Austin to finish up the duplex he's building, but once that's done he's joining us here to start construction on our homes, assuming I can get legal access and permits and all that fun stuff, which is so far so good. 

Tim, Havoc, Zoe, and I are living in the trailer again. We have our trusty old solar panel and a water tank, but trust me when I say the conveniences aren't exactly convenient! I'll post more about the day to day aspects of homesteading later, for now I just wanted to catch you guys up on what's up. The posts will get more entertaining soon, I promise! 

Here. Have a bee on a thistle.