Off The Beaten Path

I’m a scrounger. I’ve mentioned that before. I dislike the rampant, exploitive consumerism of our current society. I dislike plastics and disposables, dislike the trend to toss away something that has broken. If it can be fixed, I prefer to fix it, or repurpose it if it CANT be fixed, but still has usefulness in…

Not every day can be exciting. Some days, we raise a roof. Other days, we get yelled at by a baby goat while we do dishes and sweep floors. The little jobs still have to be done. The wood hauled. The toilet bucket emptied. The water jugs filled. Dishes. Cooking. Sweeping the floor, feeding the…

Yesterday, we did our weekly laundry-and-showers journey. It is always a lovely thing to wash off a week’s worth of smoke and sweat from hair and clothing. This time, we took an extra ‘person’ with us. Dulcinea. Being as Maggie learned abusive behaviour from Lucy, and is displaying it to Dulcie, we can’t pen them…

It always takes a while for the new to become the now. Today marks a week since we moved into the barn. It is beginning to feel less like camping and more like being home. The rooster still crows at inconvenient hours, but we are learning to sleep through it. Maggie still does parkour and…

When last we left our intrepid heroes, night had fallen and everyone was settled for the day. And it was good. …so here’s what we learned the first night – real beds are a vast improvement to air mattresses and camp cots. The kiddos all slept soundly. – goats don’t sleep for long stretches. I…

Mother’s day is an interesting day for me. Both good and bad. In the early years of our marriage, I lost three pregnancies inside a 2-year period. I could GET pregnant, but I couldn’t STAY pregnant. It was a devastating time, and unless a person has walked the ugly road of infertility and loss, one…

Hard days/weeks/seasons happen. It’s life. It’s a thing we all deal with. And sometimes, those seasons are so intense, or so long, or both, that remembering a time when things WEREN’T like that is really really difficult. And from there, one can easily spiral into hardcore depression. No one wants that. No one has time…

So….let’s get real for a minute. This lifestyle choice is HARD sometimes. Especially when you are responsible for small children and live in a 7×30 ft space. There is absolutely nowhere to break apart. And some days, you just can’t hold together. This was one of those days. And this was a snatched moment while…

The goal is to be moved in by Friday Night. To that end, one of my tasks today was doing a burn test on the stove. So I partially filled the reservoir (because you can’t run it dry without damage), …and it promptly leaked all over the floor. So, I hauled that outside (that sucker’s…

Now that Husband’s car is free from the ground, and the driveway is not squidgy, he got to drive himself to work like a big boy yesterday. It was quite nice to not be tied to that clock. I did go out — the hardware store again. They know me there now. Got the locking…