I've been sitting on these plans for over a year now. Got so comfortable with 'em under my bum that it feels weird to have 'em hatch and walk away chirping. But here they are (peep! peep!):
I quit my job. I'm still working, but my contract's up the end of June, and I'm not renewing it, and my employer knows that.
End of July, I'm leaving town. Renting the house out. Gonna travel the country by car and bus and train. Gonna visit some intentional communities (housing co-ops, ecovillages, organic farms, monasteries, boats) and see how people live there. Gonna have some adventures. Gonna write about my adventures.
I'd like the adventure-writing to eventually take the form of a book-shaped manuscript, and with a view to promoting such a manuscript, I'll be starting a second, more professional-looking blog in which to record said adventures.* I don't particularly want to conglomerate everything I've written here and the persona I'll be promoting there, so this one will remain distinct, scruffy and personal (and irregularly updated). For friends and e-stalkers only.
I have the roughest of timelines in mind: wandering the West Coast for the first several months, then heading eastward; visiting some places briefly, staying in others for a month or so to get something of a feel for life there. I envision the whole walkabout as lasting maybe two years. But it's all very flexible. I'm entirely willing to get sidetracked by interesting possibilities, and if I get sidetracked by less-interesting necessities, well, that is also an acceptable outcome. And if the book part doesn't happen, that's okay too. At least I'll have had some interesting adventures. Which is really the point. Or one of the points.
(peep!)
So I've been pretty busy lately, working out details of these plans, and also doing the apparently interminable work of downsizing, and also still working full-time and trying to take good care of myself and get in quality time with local friends while I still can. It feels like I'm trying to live in the future and the past and the present all at the same time, and giving all of them short shrift. That's what I've been up to, and it's also my excuse for not writing about this sooner, now that my employer knows and there's no reason to keep it under feathers anymore.
* I've been experiencing some inauspicious writer's block in coming up with a name for this travel blog, or even for the project as a whole. Your suggestions are welcomed.
Showing posts with label simpler. Show all posts
Showing posts with label simpler. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Monday, February 07, 2011
How Much Do I Spend on My Car?
As you may be aware, I've been interested in the simplicity/minimalist/low impact lifestyle movement(s) for a while now. These folks, as you might guess, tend to be really down on automobiles. Aside from the obvious stuff about environmental impact, they point at crazy-big numbers that the average American spends on cars: $8604? $9519?!
I've always scoffed (with insufferable smugness!) at numbers like these, especially now that I live close enough to my workplace to commute on foot. My car is, as of this year, old enough to take into bars with me, so it's all paid for, and insurance is cheap. I tend to stick to my own corner of town, and my occasional road trips rarely take me more than 3 hours away. But recently, as I contemplated cleaning out my filebox to make room for 2011's paperwork, I started wondering exactly how much my car does cost me.
I've always scoffed (with insufferable smugness!) at numbers like these, especially now that I live close enough to my workplace to commute on foot. My car is, as of this year, old enough to take into bars with me, so it's all paid for, and insurance is cheap. I tend to stick to my own corner of town, and my occasional road trips rarely take me more than 3 hours away. But recently, as I contemplated cleaning out my filebox to make room for 2011's paperwork, I started wondering exactly how much my car does cost me.
Sunday, March 07, 2010
Welcome to the Lair.
Slowly, slowly I've been picking my way through the artifacts and paper-clutter that have accumulated in my life's wake. The other day I found the three-ring binder containing my notes from the basic web design instruction I took in 1996, at UHSLIS. My first lessons in HTML markup are all there in my own handwriting, tags earnestly written out for easy future reference, reminders like "Don't use tables if you can help it" and "Shrink graphix w/Photoshop - under 25K!!" And there are all these references to things like Lynx and UNIX commands and explanations of what things stand for (a href = Anchor Hypertext REFerence, if you were wondering) and, awww, it's just so cute to see it from the present day, after we've come so far. Like film footage of myself learning to walk or something. Here's the first page. If you were doing web stuff in the mid-90s, maybe you'll get what I mean.
I actually still use HTML tags with some regularity (the content management system at work requires a lot of cleaning up after), so this stuff isn't wholly obsolete. But the whole concept of writing it out by hand has gone by the wayside. If I need to check proper tag usage, I'm not going to reach for a 3-ring binder, I'm going to google the answer. I've adapted to this so thoroughly that it's mind-boggling to think of how completely outside my experience that was at the time.
Behind the seven pages of HTML notes are six pages of URLs. Yes, six handwritten notebook pages full of URLs, 98% of which are (I'm guessing) long since defunct. Because back then, kiddies, there were no websites set up to mind your links for you. And even if there had been, they would have been terribly inconvenient because there was no tabbed browsing, and the more browser windows you had open, the slower your computer ran. So if you found a website that you wanted to find again, your options were limited to a) browser bookmarks (useless if you're browsing in a lab), b) writing it down on paper, or c) e-mailing it to yourself, a strategy I adapted after that sixth page.
What's most interesting about this, to me, is that I had such a hunt-and-gather approach to the Web, like I had to discover and collect it all. I was immediately hooked on the boundless possibilities for exploration, and would think up obscure topics to research just to see what was out there. What does the Internet have about Ben Folds? Celtic folk music? Arthurian legend? At this point in internet history, it was easy to think of an exhaustible topic, i.e, you could conceivably read through all the sites known to Webcrawler/AltaVista/Yahoo on (say) Tove Jansson's Moomins in a single evening. But seeing it all wasn't enough. I had to hold on to that info, to walk away with something to show for it -- even if that was just a line of scribbled characters on a sheet of paper, a ring of keys meant to unlock doors to which I rarely if ever returned.
I'm glad I don't feel the need to do that anymore (or worse, print out all my "important" e-mails... professors actually advised us to do this! I'm happy to report that I gave up on it pretty quickly). But there was something much more active about how I interacted with the 'net back then: it was all me doing the pursuing. Now that I have various online services trained to bring me what I'm interested in, my primary mode is just keeping up, rather than going out on the hunt. In some ways, that's less satisfying.
That class I mentioned required me to create my own homepage, so the other interesting thing in that binder was a set of printouts of its code. My first homepage! I called it "Lindsey's Lair", hah. The bulk of it was a series of links to things like my online assignments, homepages of friends and classmates, and randomly relevant links (another mind-boggler: at the time it apparently seemed like a good idea to link to my credit union?). I tried to include a new quote and a new poem every week (not my own, and with utter disregard for copyright), as well as a small but cheery block of welcome text. Here's one of those, for your amusement:
I actually still use HTML tags with some regularity (the content management system at work requires a lot of cleaning up after), so this stuff isn't wholly obsolete. But the whole concept of writing it out by hand has gone by the wayside. If I need to check proper tag usage, I'm not going to reach for a 3-ring binder, I'm going to google the answer. I've adapted to this so thoroughly that it's mind-boggling to think of how completely outside my experience that was at the time.
Behind the seven pages of HTML notes are six pages of URLs. Yes, six handwritten notebook pages full of URLs, 98% of which are (I'm guessing) long since defunct. Because back then, kiddies, there were no websites set up to mind your links for you. And even if there had been, they would have been terribly inconvenient because there was no tabbed browsing, and the more browser windows you had open, the slower your computer ran. So if you found a website that you wanted to find again, your options were limited to a) browser bookmarks (useless if you're browsing in a lab), b) writing it down on paper, or c) e-mailing it to yourself, a strategy I adapted after that sixth page.
What's most interesting about this, to me, is that I had such a hunt-and-gather approach to the Web, like I had to discover and collect it all. I was immediately hooked on the boundless possibilities for exploration, and would think up obscure topics to research just to see what was out there. What does the Internet have about Ben Folds? Celtic folk music? Arthurian legend? At this point in internet history, it was easy to think of an exhaustible topic, i.e, you could conceivably read through all the sites known to Webcrawler/AltaVista/Yahoo on (say) Tove Jansson's Moomins in a single evening. But seeing it all wasn't enough. I had to hold on to that info, to walk away with something to show for it -- even if that was just a line of scribbled characters on a sheet of paper, a ring of keys meant to unlock doors to which I rarely if ever returned.
I'm glad I don't feel the need to do that anymore (or worse, print out all my "important" e-mails... professors actually advised us to do this! I'm happy to report that I gave up on it pretty quickly). But there was something much more active about how I interacted with the 'net back then: it was all me doing the pursuing. Now that I have various online services trained to bring me what I'm interested in, my primary mode is just keeping up, rather than going out on the hunt. In some ways, that's less satisfying.
That class I mentioned required me to create my own homepage, so the other interesting thing in that binder was a set of printouts of its code. My first homepage! I called it "Lindsey's Lair", hah. The bulk of it was a series of links to things like my online assignments, homepages of friends and classmates, and randomly relevant links (another mind-boggler: at the time it apparently seemed like a good idea to link to my credit union?). I tried to include a new quote and a new poem every week (not my own, and with utter disregard for copyright), as well as a small but cheery block of welcome text. Here's one of those, for your amusement:
Welcome to the Lair (or welcome back, as the case may be). Things have been pretty quiet around the old place lately; you'll seldom find me home, because I'm out stalking my prey of Learning and Achievement. (I like them served with Cheese.) Still, the door's unlocked and you're always welcome to wander in.O Internet! So much has changed! Or has it?
Tuesday, March 02, 2010
Geek-stalgia Alert!
I recently learned of the existence of a couple of sites devoted to old PC games: Abandonia.com and DOSgamesarchive.com. Many of the titles listed on both are "abandonware" and therefore downloadable, free and legal, along with whatever copy-protection, manuals, maps, etc. accompanied the original.
[This is the part where I gesticulate excitedly while stammering.]
I can't explain the significance of this discovery without going into a little personal history. If you are not prepared to indulge me in reminiscence, feel free to move along.
My teen years revolved around PC games, from the day my mom and I got our hands on a pile of 5.25" shareware floppies in the mid '80s. Those first games were terribly disappointing. There was the one with the parrot, mostly designed to show off the amazing 16-color capabilities of the IBM PCjr. If you pressed certain keys, the parrot would shriek, "Awk!" and "Don't touch me!" in a jarring digitized voice. Then there was Donkey: you are driving a racecar down a two-lane road, bird's-eye view, no scenery. You cannot alter your speed; the road blips past one slow pixel-chunk at a time. All you can do is change lanes. Left lane, right lane. Occasionally, there is a donkey in one of the lanes. The goal is to not hit the donkey, and also, to not die of boredom.
The old Speak 'n Spell looked pretty exciting compared to these. But better stuff was out there, and it was just a matter of time (weeks, actually, if memory serves) before it would start trickling down to us.
The shareware library of the local IBM PCjr Club brought us many treasures: Snipe and 3-Demon, free clones of Space Invaders and Tetris. And of course there were the text adventures, even the simplest a dazzling improvement on those disappointing Choose Your Own Adventure books. I never solved a one of 'em, but I loved the exhilarating feeling of exploring new worlds.
But things really got exciting when Mom and Dad okayed actually spending money on games. I scoured the computer magazines and studied game reviews like I'd be tested on them. Adventure games were my passion, entered through that blocky King's Quest portal and pursued through numerous clunky titles, all the way to the pinnacle of that lost genre, The Secret of Monkey Island, and beyond. And there were delights and marvels to be found in other genres, countless gleeful hours spent playing Pirates! and Lemmings and Wing Commander.
These games were where I lived, during the endless torturous years of adolescence. Riding the bus, sitting through classes, eating dinner, I was playing them in my head, trying to work out the next puzzle, having conversations with their characters. They eased my teenage malaise, but yes, Mom and Dad, they also taught me some really useful stuff. From SimCity I gleaned rudimentary but valuable lessons in urban planning, and from Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego I learned what the World Almanac is for. Rocky's Boots taught me boolean logic more clearly and memorably than any math class ever did, which saved me a lot of grief in library school. And what I know of Caribbean geography, I owe to that Pirates! map.
But my early experience with computer games always had a flavor of scarcity to it. We had to wait for shareware to trickle down to us through people with modems, we had to wait until the prices of new commercial games dropped, and we had to wait for Mom to soup "Junior" up with yet more power and peripherals to keep up with the software. That machine got more tricked out than its creators ever imagined possible. Even so, the acquisition of a new game was often followed by howls of frustration: "Mommmm! It doesn't worrrrrrk!" ...whereupon she would, more often than not, drop everything and go poke around in DOS until the software would either behave properly, or be declared a lost cause. What with one thing and another, games were, in those days, rarely easy to come by.
And therein lies the irony. Now, thanks to the Internets, I have an endless wealth of games freely available to me, including the stuff I played way-back-when, including the stuff I wished I could play way-back-when and couldn't, including two decades' worth of shinier, newer things. And now, spending time on these things seems not like a welcome relief from a drab existence, but like a terrible waste of precious free time that could be spent on more fruitful pursuits. My adolescent self would not get this.
Seeing as how so many of my old favorites are now freely available, I have finally faced the box of "classic" games and pared it down to a few essentials. Now I have a stack of old PC games that are about to be homeless, and should theoretically run just fine with the help of an emulator. If you're geeky enough to have read this far, who knows, you might possibly be interested in what I'm getting rid of! Or... not. But I hate the idea of throwing old treasures away when there's a chance someone I know could use 'em. So if you want any of these vintage delights, just say the word and they're yours. I might even ship 'em if you ask nicely.
Pirates! Gold 3.5" floppies, DOS, in box w/manual.*
Lords of the Realm II CD, 95/DOS, in box.
The Lost Treasures of Infocom 3.5/5.25" floppies, DOS, in box with maps, guidebook, hintbook.**
(Contains Zork 1-3, Beyond Zork, Zork Zero, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Planetfall, Stationfall, Enchanter, Sorceror, Spellbreaker, Moonmist, Witness, Deadline, Starcross, Suspended, Suspect, Ballyhoo, Lurking Horror, and Infidel.)
Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail CD, 95/DOS, in box.
Tropico CD, 95/97/2000/ME/NT4, in box.
Tropico 2: Pirate Cove CD, 98/ME/2000/XP, in box.
Ultima Collection CD, 95/98/DOS. No box, but map book/reference card.*
Grim Fandango CD, 95/98. CD case only.
The Manhole CD, Win?, CD case only.
Goblins Quest 3 (a.k.a. Goblins 3) 3.5" floppies, DOS, no case (manual & discs only).*
SimCity for Windows 3.5" floppies, Win/DOS, no case (manual & discs only).*
Tetris/Welltris/Faces-tris 3.5" floppy, DOS, no case (manual & discs only).**
* This game is available to download for free on Abandonia.com, so yeah, you probably don't need the hard copy either. Sigh.
** Some (not all) of the games in this set are available free on Abandonia.com.
[This is the part where I gesticulate excitedly while stammering.]
I can't explain the significance of this discovery without going into a little personal history. If you are not prepared to indulge me in reminiscence, feel free to move along.
My teen years revolved around PC games, from the day my mom and I got our hands on a pile of 5.25" shareware floppies in the mid '80s. Those first games were terribly disappointing. There was the one with the parrot, mostly designed to show off the amazing 16-color capabilities of the IBM PCjr. If you pressed certain keys, the parrot would shriek, "Awk!" and "Don't touch me!" in a jarring digitized voice. Then there was Donkey: you are driving a racecar down a two-lane road, bird's-eye view, no scenery. You cannot alter your speed; the road blips past one slow pixel-chunk at a time. All you can do is change lanes. Left lane, right lane. Occasionally, there is a donkey in one of the lanes. The goal is to not hit the donkey, and also, to not die of boredom.
The old Speak 'n Spell looked pretty exciting compared to these. But better stuff was out there, and it was just a matter of time (weeks, actually, if memory serves) before it would start trickling down to us.
The shareware library of the local IBM PCjr Club brought us many treasures: Snipe and 3-Demon, free clones of Space Invaders and Tetris. And of course there were the text adventures, even the simplest a dazzling improvement on those disappointing Choose Your Own Adventure books. I never solved a one of 'em, but I loved the exhilarating feeling of exploring new worlds.
But things really got exciting when Mom and Dad okayed actually spending money on games. I scoured the computer magazines and studied game reviews like I'd be tested on them. Adventure games were my passion, entered through that blocky King's Quest portal and pursued through numerous clunky titles, all the way to the pinnacle of that lost genre, The Secret of Monkey Island, and beyond. And there were delights and marvels to be found in other genres, countless gleeful hours spent playing Pirates! and Lemmings and Wing Commander.
These games were where I lived, during the endless torturous years of adolescence. Riding the bus, sitting through classes, eating dinner, I was playing them in my head, trying to work out the next puzzle, having conversations with their characters. They eased my teenage malaise, but yes, Mom and Dad, they also taught me some really useful stuff. From SimCity I gleaned rudimentary but valuable lessons in urban planning, and from Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego I learned what the World Almanac is for. Rocky's Boots taught me boolean logic more clearly and memorably than any math class ever did, which saved me a lot of grief in library school. And what I know of Caribbean geography, I owe to that Pirates! map.
But my early experience with computer games always had a flavor of scarcity to it. We had to wait for shareware to trickle down to us through people with modems, we had to wait until the prices of new commercial games dropped, and we had to wait for Mom to soup "Junior" up with yet more power and peripherals to keep up with the software. That machine got more tricked out than its creators ever imagined possible. Even so, the acquisition of a new game was often followed by howls of frustration: "Mommmm! It doesn't worrrrrrk!" ...whereupon she would, more often than not, drop everything and go poke around in DOS until the software would either behave properly, or be declared a lost cause. What with one thing and another, games were, in those days, rarely easy to come by.
And therein lies the irony. Now, thanks to the Internets, I have an endless wealth of games freely available to me, including the stuff I played way-back-when, including the stuff I wished I could play way-back-when and couldn't, including two decades' worth of shinier, newer things. And now, spending time on these things seems not like a welcome relief from a drab existence, but like a terrible waste of precious free time that could be spent on more fruitful pursuits. My adolescent self would not get this.
Seeing as how so many of my old favorites are now freely available, I have finally faced the box of "classic" games and pared it down to a few essentials. Now I have a stack of old PC games that are about to be homeless, and should theoretically run just fine with the help of an emulator. If you're geeky enough to have read this far, who knows, you might possibly be interested in what I'm getting rid of! Or... not. But I hate the idea of throwing old treasures away when there's a chance someone I know could use 'em. So if you want any of these vintage delights, just say the word and they're yours. I might even ship 'em if you ask nicely.
Pirates! Gold 3.5" floppies, DOS, in box w/manual.*
Lords of the Realm II CD, 95/DOS, in box.
The Lost Treasures of Infocom 3.5/5.25" floppies, DOS, in box with maps, guidebook, hintbook.**
(Contains Zork 1-3, Beyond Zork, Zork Zero, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Planetfall, Stationfall, Enchanter, Sorceror, Spellbreaker, Moonmist, Witness, Deadline, Starcross, Suspended, Suspect, Ballyhoo, Lurking Horror, and Infidel.)
Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail CD, 95/DOS, in box.
Tropico CD, 95/97/2000/ME/NT4, in box.
Tropico 2: Pirate Cove CD, 98/ME/2000/XP, in box.
Ultima Collection CD, 95/98/DOS. No box, but map book/reference card.*
Grim Fandango CD, 95/98. CD case only.
The Manhole CD, Win?, CD case only.
Goblins Quest 3 (a.k.a. Goblins 3) 3.5" floppies, DOS, no case (manual & discs only).*
SimCity for Windows 3.5" floppies, Win/DOS, no case (manual & discs only).*
Tetris/Welltris/Faces-tris 3.5" floppy, DOS, no case (manual & discs only).**
* This game is available to download for free on Abandonia.com, so yeah, you probably don't need the hard copy either. Sigh.
** Some (not all) of the games in this set are available free on Abandonia.com.
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
A Tiny Bit More Info.
RowdyKittens gives her own review of the Tiny House workshop here. I heartily second all her enthusiastic comments.
Also, this month's Small Living Journal (online and free) is titled Bureaucracy, Regulations, and Small Living. It features a series of essays addressing a persistent obstacle to small-dwelling life: local laws and codes. Worth reading if you're wondering what you can get away with. With Portland's recent passing of green building code amendments, it's probably now feasible to make a case for small => green => variance-friendly. (Well, easy for a conventional-looking middle-class white person, anyway. *squirm*)
Also, this month's Small Living Journal (online and free) is titled Bureaucracy, Regulations, and Small Living. It features a series of essays addressing a persistent obstacle to small-dwelling life: local laws and codes. Worth reading if you're wondering what you can get away with. With Portland's recent passing of green building code amendments, it's probably now feasible to make a case for small => green => variance-friendly. (Well, easy for a conventional-looking middle-class white person, anyway. *squirm*)
Monday, February 16, 2009
Tiny Steps.
Last summer (as some of you may remember) I wrote a post gushing about tiny houses. I am still totally sold on this idea, and the New Years' resolution I didn't tell you about was to research it further: investigate options for tiny-house living, develop skills and resources to make it happen, and figure out how to prepare for the transition.
This is a progress report.
How Tiny? The fine folks at Tumbleweed have finally posted images of my favorite model: the Fencl. At 130 square feet, it is the most spacious of the trailer-based options. I have yet to actually set foot in a tiny home, but the layout of this one seems both practical and comfortable.
Where To Put It? Even though it doesn't look like something you'd take camping, a house on wheels like this one is classed as an RV pretty much anywhere in the United States. I have learned that it is illegal to live in an RV in the city of Portland (outside of a trailer park) for any significant length of time. On the one hand, this is daunting; I like to do things the legal way, and I'm certainly not interested in exiling myself from my favorite city on the planet. On the other hand, this law is enforced only when neighbors complain, which rarely happens, so it would be easy to, um, ignore it. Which I am not above doing, especially not in the case of a law that seems to be doing more harm than good at a time when housing costs are soaring out of control. But if you have previously made noises about possibly letting me rent a corner of your property, this is something you should be aware of.
(Technically, trailer parks are also an option, but one I find it hard to get excited about, for reasons that may be obvious if you've ever spent any time in a trailer park. Besides, they're expensive, and pretty much all located east of 205, which is really not where I want to be.)
To Green or Not to Green? I recently took a class via PCC about water management options. Most of what I ended up learning about, while interesting, was not at all relevant to tiny house construction. However, in the process I did get a clearer idea of what might be readily applied to a small mobile dwelling (e.g, composting toilet) and what might be a little too tricky for me (rainwater catchment, graywater reuse).
Which End of the Nail Do I Hit, Again? While reading up on women who have built their own homes, I discovered that Habitat for Humanity has a volunteer program for women called Women Build. This sounds like a great way to gain some construction experience in a supportive environment. I located the H4H area schedule (which was hard to find, and you have to sign up to view it), and I'm monitoring the RSS feed faithfully. WB events fill up fast; so far I haven't been able to get into one that fits with my schedule. But I will. If spending a Saturday building a house appeals to you too, and you possess the requisite set of ovaries, let me know and I'll give you a call when something opens up.
How Will I Fit? I have a lot of stuff. I don't think I have as much stuff as the average American woman of my age, but I definitely have more stuff than I need, and a lot more than would fit into a tiny house. Some of this stuff will be easy to let go of when the time is right: utilitarian stuff that I haven't put a lot of thought or effort into acquiring. Other stuff is going to be trickier. I'm going to need some lead time to minimize the trauma.
I have about 600 books. I also have a library card (and I work in a library), so I really don't need to own anywhere near that many. I expect to eventually whittle the collection down a lean core of around 100 volumes, but this year my goal is just to cut it in half.
That's all. Just get rid of... 300 books.
Oh boy.
A goodly number of these books will go to PaperBackSwap, and LibraryThing's Member Giveaways program, and the nice ladies I swap clothing with once a month. But lately it has occurred to me that I'd be a fool to give all of them to strangers without letting my friends have first dibs.
One thing I've noticed about letting possessions go is, it's a lot easier if you know it's going to benefit someone else. So if you're into books, have a look at the contents of my shelves and let me know if I have any titles you wish you owned. You'll actually be helping me out. Some of them I'm not ready to part with, and if you request those I'll tell you as much. (Also, if I tagged the book "borrowed" or "@wpc" or "family treasure," I can't give it to you.) But others I'll be only too happy to place in your hands. Or mail to your hands, if necessary.
This is a progress report.
How Tiny? The fine folks at Tumbleweed have finally posted images of my favorite model: the Fencl. At 130 square feet, it is the most spacious of the trailer-based options. I have yet to actually set foot in a tiny home, but the layout of this one seems both practical and comfortable.
Where To Put It? Even though it doesn't look like something you'd take camping, a house on wheels like this one is classed as an RV pretty much anywhere in the United States. I have learned that it is illegal to live in an RV in the city of Portland (outside of a trailer park) for any significant length of time. On the one hand, this is daunting; I like to do things the legal way, and I'm certainly not interested in exiling myself from my favorite city on the planet. On the other hand, this law is enforced only when neighbors complain, which rarely happens, so it would be easy to, um, ignore it. Which I am not above doing, especially not in the case of a law that seems to be doing more harm than good at a time when housing costs are soaring out of control. But if you have previously made noises about possibly letting me rent a corner of your property, this is something you should be aware of.
(Technically, trailer parks are also an option, but one I find it hard to get excited about, for reasons that may be obvious if you've ever spent any time in a trailer park. Besides, they're expensive, and pretty much all located east of 205, which is really not where I want to be.)
To Green or Not to Green? I recently took a class via PCC about water management options. Most of what I ended up learning about, while interesting, was not at all relevant to tiny house construction. However, in the process I did get a clearer idea of what might be readily applied to a small mobile dwelling (e.g, composting toilet) and what might be a little too tricky for me (rainwater catchment, graywater reuse).
Which End of the Nail Do I Hit, Again? While reading up on women who have built their own homes, I discovered that Habitat for Humanity has a volunteer program for women called Women Build. This sounds like a great way to gain some construction experience in a supportive environment. I located the H4H area schedule (which was hard to find, and you have to sign up to view it), and I'm monitoring the RSS feed faithfully. WB events fill up fast; so far I haven't been able to get into one that fits with my schedule. But I will. If spending a Saturday building a house appeals to you too, and you possess the requisite set of ovaries, let me know and I'll give you a call when something opens up.
How Will I Fit? I have a lot of stuff. I don't think I have as much stuff as the average American woman of my age, but I definitely have more stuff than I need, and a lot more than would fit into a tiny house. Some of this stuff will be easy to let go of when the time is right: utilitarian stuff that I haven't put a lot of thought or effort into acquiring. Other stuff is going to be trickier. I'm going to need some lead time to minimize the trauma.
I have about 600 books. I also have a library card (and I work in a library), so I really don't need to own anywhere near that many. I expect to eventually whittle the collection down a lean core of around 100 volumes, but this year my goal is just to cut it in half.
That's all. Just get rid of... 300 books.
Oh boy.
A goodly number of these books will go to PaperBackSwap, and LibraryThing's Member Giveaways program, and the nice ladies I swap clothing with once a month. But lately it has occurred to me that I'd be a fool to give all of them to strangers without letting my friends have first dibs.
One thing I've noticed about letting possessions go is, it's a lot easier if you know it's going to benefit someone else. So if you're into books, have a look at the contents of my shelves and let me know if I have any titles you wish you owned. You'll actually be helping me out. Some of them I'm not ready to part with, and if you request those I'll tell you as much. (Also, if I tagged the book "borrowed" or "@wpc" or "family treasure," I can't give it to you.) But others I'll be only too happy to place in your hands. Or mail to your hands, if necessary.
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