Always Pay Attention - It's a Good Place to Start

It's been a really, really long time since I paid attention to this blog. I even bought a dedicated domain for it.  But I didn't pay attention, and when it expired, some nefarious shoe seller grabbed it up to sell adidas shoes. Black hat jerks. Stupid me.

In the meantime, I've made some shaky commitment to get back to the writing. I suspect that the domain name was drawing enough traffic to make someone buy it and put up a sneaker store, or maybe, buy it and hope I'll buy it back for some stupid amount of money.  Right now, I'm not going to do that.  I'm just going to try to pay attention to this blog.

I asked Tammy to forward any interesting pins from her Pintrest account.  See the Tammy tab above to visit her boards yourself. Tammy's sick today. In a foggy stupor she sent me a link to "Planning a Small Farm Home." After all, that's how this whole thing started - Tammy & Christy wanted land and a weekend escape.

Tammy wasn't paying attention, I don't think.

See Below:

California Agricultural Extension Service Circular 168, December 1950.
That's what she sent me.
O.K. I can work with this.

What can I learn from a 67 year old UC-Berkeley Publication?

1. Start Small - we didn't do that. We start with 12 raw acres.
2. Be realistic - I think we knew what we were getting into.
3. Take it easy - I'm going to interpret this as "be patient."

Once I read through this little circular, I was struck by the timelessness of its practicality. We've owned our land in Carmine, Texas for over a year. My earlier posts about quixotic jaunts through the dense woods, with a chainsaw, seem downright stupid today. It is unbelievably hard to develop a raw piece of land from your city home.  In short, we've created a world that traps us in really long work days.  We lack spare time.

It would be awesome if we could leave Austin and move to Carmine and live happily ever after. The following image, from page 6 of Circular 168, would have been helpful in March of 2015. Point #1 is so important if you're planning on buying rural property.  So the hippies are very practical on page 6.

Don't get me wrong.  We are not unhappy with our choice. We are just more realistic about the time it will take to make it amazing.  Or let me say that Christy is more realistic. I think Tammy has always understood this.

This idea that city folks are farmers is a little silly

I want to say, right here, that we KNOW how much work goes into "livin' off the land." At this point, our patch of land is a great real estate investment.  We know that it will slowly become a beloved rural get away (I'll go into more detail in a later post, but point #7 in the above image has been the surprise wrench in the cog this year. The Texas drought is over and Noah may rise from his mythical grave to build an ark again.)

If you read this blog because you want a rural property, I want you to take note of my highlights from page 4.

In short, keep your day job.

Gear Down 

We've learned that planning goes beyond the real estate transaction.  I speak for myself here; although we got an amazing deal on what will be an amazing piece of property, I wish I had created a better budget and timeline for getting the place usable. 

It's important to build a network of contractors, get estimates for any work you need done, and sock that cash away. I've been doing that as we go, so we're basically waiting for our turn on each contractor's schedule. And the rain has slowed everything down. 

That is to say, we bulldoze one acre at a time because that's a cash transaction instead of a bank loan. We install infrastructure a little at at time (road, building pad, power source, erosion/pond control, water supply, septic). We take our time planning and buying/building a cabin.

We don't give up.

You can read Planning a Small Farm Home here. If nothing else, it proves that society never gives up on getting back to the basics.

We Got Married

I haven't written lately because we've been busy...





Here's a little recap.
We went to Kauai and got married on Shipwreck Beach. It was just the two of us, and therefore, was an exquisite honeymoon, too!

And this event was DIY all the way. Tammy did most of the groundwork and coordination. She did a fantastic job.  Our trip was pretty much perfect.

My effort was to be the wedding music. Write the song. Sing the song. Learn to play the ukulele.  ...and so you can at least get a glimpse of  our day, I put together some of our wedding photos to the song.  I'm no great player or recording engineer, but I did my remedial best with the little red recorder, a cheap ukulele, a guitar, and a regular old SM58. One day I'll do the recording correctly, but for now, you get to hear the living room version.

Here's to the rest of our lives...

June 26 on Parker Lane

June 26 has come and gone.  We were much quieter than most people.  And there's a reason for that. We don't like attention.  I know that sounds strange since both of us have performed before audiences. That's different. That's not our private life.  So what did we do on June 26?

OTNB, of course

Around here, we have to either wait until the kid is in bed or the kid is away for the night to watch our shows. Whether the governor likes it or not, we've been living like a married couple with a kid for awhile. So on June 26, we opened a bottle of wine that I had saved for a special occasion, and we binged on the rest of Season 3 of "Orange is the New Black" because the real miracle was that we were kid free, and we didn't have to watch re-runs of "The Brady Bunch."

We didn't head to Fourth Street to celebrate with our LGBT community. We just sat on the couch and watched TV.  That's what we did.

Why do you care? Or better question - Why am I telling you this?  Because you may be on the fence, or you may completely disagree with SCOTUS.  You may have your own made up idea about what  it's like at our "different" house. It's not different. It's not salacious. In fact, it's pretty boring.

This is really immoral.  Folding clothes...

We got up early and went to the property to meet the dozer guy

I give up. I am not cutting down any more trees.  It would take us 50 years to clear even one acre, so we called a dozer guy, and we had to get up really early on June 27 to drive to Carmine and meet him. He gave us an estimate to clear that first acre for a cabin site. $1100 for a day of dozer work. 

(And just like you straight folks, I am being constantly interrupted while trying to write this... just so you get a sense of what it's like at our house.  I've been interrupted to watch a video of a kitten jamming to old school funk. Tammy is in constant commentary while trying to hang the bathroom cabinet doors I just painted. We're trying get stuff done so we can all go to a.... yep. kid movie.)

I am not belittling history

Don't go all homo-militant on me. I understand the historical significance of June 26. All I wanted to do was let doubters know that the reason it's so significant, and it's not lascivious and terrible is that we are not any more bizarre and dangerous than anybody else. In fact, we represent the majority of LGBT people. We get up. We go to work. We sit down, as a family, for dinner by 6:30 every night. We do chores. We do home improvement. We make friends with our neighbors. We have  fat dog.

Just like everybody else. 

...also, I had a little time to kill because I am literally waiting for paint to dry. I think I can put another coat on the bathroom cabinets now.  Happy regular old Sunday, y'all.