It has been a bit since we ventured to Georgia to visit Jules' people. He moved from Georgia up here to the Pacific Northwest a few years ago and now we go back every year to see family. To write about the experience is a difficult thing because of how very dichotomous the state is. The same is true for here. Mindsets run from completely conservative Republican in parts to "bleeding-heart" liberal (as my father says) in others. This dichotomy is not something only true to Georgia, but perhaps due to living here I don't notice it as much.

We always begin at Jules' parents in extremely rural north Georgia. Young Harris has only one stoplight and it is a blinking four way stop. According to the 2000 census 604 people lived in the town, completing 74 families. We are talking tiny!
Set up in mountains filled with National Forest, the area is beautiful in a way that only the Appalachians can be. The green "mountains" are so much more elegant and graceful. Here there are jagged peaks which are stunning and majestic, but not soft in any way. Ours are beautiful in their snow capped regality which demands a form of awe. The awe from the Appalachians is a much more storybook.

With Jules' mother experiencing some health concerns, and the desire from both of us to move into the middle of nowhere, moving to Georgia's mountains became a topic of some serious discussion. For one, the land is cheap. Land there is only about 10-20 thousand dollars an acre. That would be an outhouse here! There is a lot of land which buts up to, or is surrounded by, National Forest where logging isn't an issue and recreation is incredible. For not much we could buy a few acres and homestead with contact to other "back-to-the-landers." Secondly, the land is incredibly arable. The Appalachians are some of the best farmland around. Everywhere you drive out in north Georgia you will see people with farms growing and fruit stands propped up. Lastly, with a couple of Mennonite communities, a few Amish farther North in Tennessee, and the wealth of resources provided by people coming to exhibit at the Georgia Mountain Fair, finding others who are knowledgeable about many of the areas we wish our life to venture into would be easy to find. The Foxfire series we have slowly been accumulating originated in Ruban County. Small pockets of the area still teach old world skills to younger generations. The oral history is beginning to completely die out, but small amounts are being preserved by older generations which are seeing life change in negative ways. Quilting guilds, knitters circles, canning displays and soap making are still common in some places in these rural areas. Most importantly, the desire to teach such skills to younger people who are wanting to learn still seems to be desirable. The Barracuda got to use a corn shucker, watch the water wheel spin to move an old grind stone and transform the corn into grits, meal, and flour. He sat with four other boys on an old cider press as a man explained how he had done the same thing when he was their age and continued to talk to them about apple cider, apple sauce, and apple mash. A teenage boy, in a Bruce Lee T-shirt and designer jeans bashfully answered our questions about shingle making the way his grandfather had taught him. He used a froe and deftly split the wood into exceptionally thin sheets. We flew home with much to think about and a stack of real-estate books.

The problem became three fold: 1) we LOVE our house and the area we live in 2) just as there are pockets of Georgia where it is beautiful and such activity is supported, there are those who live in the same places excited that Wal-Mart, Lowes, and a Chick-fil-A are going to open in less than a month devastating the local small town businesses and 3) The Spicy Barracuda is not normal; sporting a blue mohawk and enjoying rap music, dancing, and sparkly purple are not appropriate boy/child behaviors in a rather judgmental area. Like or not, the cultural acceptance of our son is a primary concern. Jules and I both know the brutality of being different in a small town.

The entire situation was bothering me to a large degree. I am a muller, a planner, and have an obsessive need to begin setting out an orderly route for things even if they are about three to five years in the future. It doesn't matter to me if we necessarily follow the plan laid out, but more that a plan exists should we need one. My mind doesn't like to stop until such a logical, reasonable plan exists. So many a furrowed brow and much befuddlement ensued. This seemed to be a place where there was no win: Great liberal area, no space or Great space, no liberal area. That is until in the middle of making a pizza at work the light dawned in my head! The main reason to move to Georgia would be to have enough land to be able to really grow our food, have small stock (chickens, a goat or two, bees), some wooded areas for firewood collection, and to remove ourselves from the grid. Honestly, the issue with staying was that it didn't seem we would have enough space on our 1/10th of a acre to be able to accomplish what we wished to.

Everything else is amazing. We love the area here. The Barracuda fits right in when you first see him (after a discussion or two he is still not normal, but people find it fun and cool here not something to be ostracized about). Jules has a job in a district with seniority at a school he has found a place. Most importantly, we would get to keep our house that we both adore and might later regret selling.

Eureka! We would just begin to change our perceptions of space! More than anything, we needed to re-think our ideas about space. The average square footage of an American house in 1950 was 983 square feet. Basically the size of our 1950's house. It is more than enough for us, yet to many it seems so tiny. The same might be possible for land, I was just thinking about it in the wrong way.
The city ordinances here declare no more than three chickens, rabbits, or pygmy goats. We could have chickens and we don't want a rooster. Our shed outback now houses an abundance of tools (junk) we really don't need and could easily be converted to a chicken coop. The garden could be doubled without much yard loss if we just utilized the space, and our far corner is perfect for a house of bees. The flat top roof could be converted into a solar dehydrator and is ideal for photovoltaic cells (if we dramatically cut our electricity usage). Next year's tax return will bring a solar water heater which almost pays for itself in state, NGO, and federal rebates.

Our city has also declared no swine, no roosters, no livestock within 50 feet of a residence and that includes goats. So goats are out of the question right now because we are surrounded on all sides by other residences. However, if we don't sell our house, it allows us to increase the amount of land we own around us as the nieghborhood changes. Goats may not be out of the question forever.

It is possible to stay here and still remove ourselves from the grid in a slow methodical fashion. It is possible within the urban setting to do much which I have always been considering "country behavior." When I look around at what we have already accomplished, it is so funny to think I retained prejudices about city life being restrictive. It is true that we cannot own acres of land and wide open spaces in our current status. We will always be surrounded by people by living in an urban area, but this can also be seen as a major plus to staying. Community means support. There are so many organizations and non-profit groups around this area to foster not only knowledge, but helpful monetary incentives to increase our abilities. Not only this, but it provides an area for The Spicy Barracuda to grow up seeing that we are not necessarily weird, un-normal, or isolated. The community outreach and local social support is an aspect of the urban area which we haven't experimented too much with, but will definitely be branching out into this next year.

So, for now, we are staying. The potential for our very own space merely needed to be seen. I will still dabble at looking for land in the middle of nowhere, (who knows I might stumble onto something which just couldn't be passed up) but more so as a fun pastime than anything serious. There will always be greener grass on the other side of the fence, we have decided to stop worrying about it and put our energy into our own lawn.

Well, our Wall of Wood just keeps getting bigger. The porch now stands with four racks of wood all full, leaving our little overflow rack left to hold the kindling. Grandparents take The Spicy Barracuda every other Saturday and ever single Wednesday. These have become wood cutting days in our house. The racks have rapidly become occupied and the neighbors are increasingly thinking us insane. We are now all set for the winter to bring what it may. (Though you would never know it was coming with 104 degree heat waves!)

This last month was our fourth trip and we have now developed quite a system. The effectiveness of the day has hinged on this learning curve and proven to be incredibly useful in allowing us to still enjoy the process of wood cutting. We can go and get the firewood while still maintaining some time at home to stack before having to pick the Barracuda up. The entire trip usually takes us four hours and it is about a 45 minute drive each way. That leaves about 2 and a half hours for us to cut 1/2-3/4 of a chord of wood. By making the process quick, firewood has become a very pleasant "date" for Jules and I.

As Robert Frost so eloquently stated "The woods are lovely dark and deep, but I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep." This is a bit what firewood cutting is for us. There are so many wonderful things to see in the forest. There are dried river beds to explore, and shelf fungus to discover, and trees so ancient it boggles the mind how majestic they are.












But we have promises to keep and much work to be done, so the wonders of the forest are set aside for a different time. This is not to say that the giant snail we saw crawling along a log a few trips ago wasn't interesting enough to watch for a bit, or that the crazy colored bug which crawled across my splitting wedge wasn't cool enough to take a moment and inspect, but in general we try to work the entire time at quite a quick pace. This makes the time go rather quickly and exercise to be had without a gym membership.

The first time we went out, we were duphuses at this whole process. I would stand and watch Jules cut wood not knowing what else to do. He would try to cut things that pinched the chainsaw or didn't give it enough gas and the motor died repeatedly. I tried to split wood at the same time he was and felt like a complete failure because it took me so much longer than it did for him. It was the heat of the day because we didn't get up early enough. Horseflies were everywhere. Sheesh! We were a mess. What follows is the system which we have figured out and works for us. I think everyone needs to find their own rhythm and style, but sometimes seeing what others do can aide this significantly.

We divide the labor in overlapping chunks so that neither Jules or I is ever idle. The work runs very fluidly and seems to really minimize either of us getting overly tired or overly worked. The only portion not shared by the both of us, is me crawling into the bed of the pickup to finish the stacking. Due to size and the camper top being on, it just works better for me to sit inside the truck bed to stack.


Our National Forest has specific rules for firewood harvesting. For this reason you will not see us felling any trees. Currently, you can only cut fallen wood or trees which the Forest Service has felled in order to do road maintenance.

After finding a spot to do some cutting, we carry up all of our tools and decide on a path to carry out all of the wood. We try to keep our impact on the ecosystem to the most minimal possible and usually carry in the same way we carry out. This is also the reason we use only our hands for this process. Somehow using a wheel barrow or other method for wood removal seems disrespectful for the forest. We wish to work for our wood and give full respect to the amount of time and energy it took the tree to grow.

From left to right we have: the hatchet, my ax (wooden handle), Jules' axe (yellow handle), and the maul.

After everything has been carried in we survey the logs and decide just what we should cut and what we shouldn't. This normally has to do with the accessibility of certain logs, the type of trees (creosote content), and the level of decay. From that point, Jules puts on his very stylish safety goggles and we both insert our ear plugs. First he cuts large sections of the log into chunks to split. I help by supporting various logs, or shifting their position so that he can cut them clean through.
One of these sections is reserved as a chop block for Jules to split the wood. The rest start to be split by me.

After about five to seven sections have been cut by Jules (and my assistance with logs is not longer needed) I start to roll the sections to a relatively flat spot to begin splitting them. When we first began, I used the hatchet to make the initial cut into the chunk I was splitting and then used it again to hammer the splitting wedge into place. As I have gotten stronger with each trip, I can now make the initial incision into the chunk of log with my axe. This cut is make as deeply as possible, as close to the center of the log as possible. I then knock the axe out of the log (because I always get it stuck) and begin hammering in the splitting wedge. The splitting wedge is a fickle instrument. It never likes to stay put. I hold the wedge in one hand and use the back of the ax to hammer it into a place where it will stand by itself. The tricky part comes in the initial hit on the wedge with the maul. You have to smack it dead-center really, really hard. There is no tapping involved. This is whomping. This whomp drives the wedge in to the point it will hopefully not flip out with consecutive hits. Once the maul drives the wedge in completely, the log will split in half and is then stacked for Jules to split it further. By having me begin using the splitting wedge before Jules has finished with the chainsaw I can get a little bit a head on splitting. Jules can cut the halves into pieces much faster than I can split them in half. So I start splitting and making a pile of pieces for him to split up when he finishes with the chainsaw. With the pile waiting for him, I can hopefully half the logs continually without him needing to stop and wait for more to cut up.

When Jules is done with the chainsaw, he takes off his exceptionally fashionable safety goggles and sets the chainsaw aside to cool. This is a very important. I mentioned we were duphuses when we first began this firewood thing. Well, due to not letting the chainsaw cool and then grabbing the manifold Jules gave himself one righteous burn resulting in a heck of a scar. Another interesting safety tidbit is about ear plugs. Earplugs are nice for the noise from the chainsaw, but what I really like them for is the sound of the splitting wedge. The loud "Pink!" of metal on metal is so very a foreign sound that it cuts right through my head. We leave our earplugs in the entire time until the end when we are only carrying the wood out. But I digress.

Once the chainsawing is finished, Jules begins splitting the halves into smaller pieces. He has gotten quite a good at this and splits them rapidly. He says that if you treat the large piece as if it were a wheel and cut your sections like pie wedges, the grain helps with splitting. I have not yet graduated into doing this as my arms weren't as strong as his were and my aim was a bit awkward. I looks to me like if you cut your wood at angles around 35 degrees, they split the best. Whatever the case, the split pieces are then thrown into a large pile for us to carry out of the woods.

When Jules first starts his splitting, I'm still using the splitting wedge and the maul to give him more material. When there are no more chunks for me to split in half and stack, I begin to carry out the large pile Jules as split up. He continues splitting the wood into nice burnable pieces and I start a pile down at the truck.

Carrying firewood out is different for Jules and I. I'm not a sprinter and he definitely is. To me, I'd rather carry a few pieces with minimal strain and carry more trips. Jules prefers to carry larger loads fewer times. Most importantly, wear long sleeves. It seems so funny to now write, but wood is covered in splinters. COMPLETELY COVERED! They are small and invisible, but incredibly annoying to find all over your arms, chest, stomach and everywhere. Long sleeves and an extra shirt to put on for the drive home will do you wonders.

Whatever the case, the wood all gets to a pile outside of the truck and I can shinny my little self (I'm 5'2"; Jules is 6'4") nicely into the back of the pickup to begin stacking all the wood for us to carry out. At this point we have a pretty good idea of how large of a pile is needed to fill up the truck. The first couple of times, we would stack and then realize we needed more wood and have to go back and cut. But eventually it all fits in, we load up the last of our tools (now having let the chainsaw cool before handling) and head back home. Jules' truck is a Toyota Tacoma and with the camper top on it can hold somewhere between 1/2-3/4 of a chord of wood depending on how big we make the pieces. It does us quite nicely, but you can definitely feel it on the way home. We surely won't be stopping too quickly and might possibly need new shocks in a couple of years!

Culturally, this cutting our own heat is a bit of an interesting conversation issue. Jules and I are both forest lovers. The harvesting of trees for timber usage is something I personally have spent time working to prohibit around our parts. Many hours have been put in with a local grassroots environmental organization to stop the decimation of our national forests for timber usage. As much as I have had friends appalled at the idea of us "killing a tree" the other option for our household is Natural Gas. The natural gas company is trying to permanently destroy over 40 miles of old growth forest in our area for the usage of cheaper energy. Our removal of two trees from the National Forest to heat our house for over a year seems so very, very small in comparison. Secondly, by working for this wood, by seeing exactly where our heat comes from, our consumption is dramatically lower than it would be by flipping a switch. Both Jules and I believe in pristine wilderness areas which are not touched by the likes of man. However, we both realize there is enough room for all of us if we control our usage and sustainably plan our forestry.

Secondly, so many people have complained about the amount of work! However, when really asked, none of them have ever cut firewood before. They seem to feel the task is enormously laborious, well unworth the benefit, and completely asinine. To us, it is time together, spent working in pace with the cycles of our life. It gives us a time to talk, to be together, to feel fulfilled in a job done well and completely. We come away with so much more than a truckload of wood.

Sometimes it is your children which remind you that your life has changed and you are caught in moments that are so dramatically different you are forced to realize you're not the same. Here are a few things said around our house which you probably wouldn't hear at many of the neighbors:

"You have to finish your strawberry shortcake before you can have any more peas."

"Do you think 100 pounds of apples is enough?"

"Mom, can you sharpen my axe?"

"The rain barrels are not a toy!"

"I'll get your lunch in a minute, I'm eviscerating the chicken right now."

"I figured we had some time before dinner, so I'd take apart the chainsaw."

"Do you want to help me dig up your lunch?"

"Will you check the cottage cheese? It has been on top of the fridge now for two days."

"Sorry I missed your call, I was out hangin' the wash."

"You smell like three day old compost!"
(A four year old insult)

"I'll be in The Hole."

Well, I guess it is official, we're not in Kansas anymore.

I apologize for my absence as of late. Life kind of threw up all over us this last week. Running a thousand miles an hour, every day, for going on two years now finally hit Jules and I in the face. Coupled with the stress of this last quarter of the school year, our cup of endurance ranneth over. ::sigh:: But life as a way of helping us out when we need it and a few late night baths while eating Pop-Tarts (there are just some things that can't be as good when homemade!), the arrival of a new book ordered from Powells, and much sleeping it off has given us back some light at the end of the tunnel.

This past year's food shift has taken quite an unexpected turn. When this all began, I thought that if I began to remove processed foods from our life in favor of foods I personally created our family would somehow become healthier. What I now realize is that what I really wanted was for our family to become healthier in more than just the physical sense. I've been addressing our physical chemistry with the removal of food additives, but not the culture with which we eat our food.

Homesteading, or Voluntary Simplicity, or whatever you want to call this lifestyle, causes you to shift the way you look at the surrounding culture because, for the first time, you are removed from it. As Micheal Pollen writes, "To reclaim this much control over one's own food, to take it back from industry and science, is no small thing; indeed, in our time cooking from scratch and growing any of your own food qualify as subversive acts." With this removal from current cultural trends, I now find myself looking about at our lives and finding large empty holes where I might never have seen them.

For the last two years, Jules and I have been juggling a life which includes one full-time (and then some) teaching job; one part-time, semi-erratic restaurant job; a precocious child who is too young for school; me in school; and a fairly small household budget. What this all boils down to is that we don't every really see each other. When Jules goes to work, I take care of the Barracuda; Jules comes home and takes care of the Barracuda while I go to work. It is emotionally exhausting.

This job/childcare juggling is becoming a mainstay in our society when more and more people are becoming two person working families, but I don't know how they do it. Perhaps they don't, and that is why divorce rates are so high. Even though both Jules and I are reaching breaking points (this mornings stressful bickering included the lines "I don't like my existence" and my retort "My world isn't filled with joy either!" both of which now make me laugh) we realize there is no one else we would be struggling through with. The end of the school year is near and in less than 10 days and we will have our family back. However, some major changes are coming from this realization of yet another hole created by the mainstream cultural juggle of work/childcare: family intimacy.

It has become apparent that our family doesn't dialog well. We have fun together; we work well together; we love each other and can be silly, but not much talking about substance. Perhaps this comes from a lack of modeling (though that seems way to easy a blame). Growing up, communication wasn't a strong point among members of my family. Dinner centered around eating as fast as possible so that none of us had to speak to one another.

As much as our family dialogs well in one on one situations, the act of community conversation is lacking. I find myself wondering, "What would we discuss around a dinner table?" or thinking of the agonizing, forced conversation we are all dreading when we come to the table. But this summer, the adventure begins a new with family dinners and conversation.

Secondly, our TV is dying. We are not switching over to digital. Here in the States, if you are not a cable subscriber, you will need to purchase a converter box for your television set to work. We're not buying in; we are unplugging. Though much of our television is now present on the Internet or checked out of the local library, the ease of flipping a switch and turning off interaction will be gone.

Third, music will be coming back into our house. The Barracuda has always loved music. He can dance far better than either Jules or I, mystifying both of us and other onlookers as we all wonder "where did he learn to do that?" His musical repertoire includes everything from The Beastie Boys and Andre 3000 to The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan to Solomon Burke and The Band. The Barracuda (so named after the Heart song) has a drum circle drum that he enjoys playing incredible rhythms on, writes and sings his own songs, and finds the rhyme schemes on the classic poetry we use when homeschooling him only to beat out the words on his drum when reciting the lines. It is something that is apparently in his blood.

As much as Jules and I enjoy it, we haven't done all that much (other than dance parties) to foster it. This next year that will be changing. I have purchased a guitar and am one again teaching myself to play. Jules wants to learn how to play the banjo something awful. And, just the other day, a childrens' guitar was found at the local Goodwill for $20. Last year's Solistic present was Guadalupe, this year's will be music.

So, for now, I am left looking within for patience and personal solace. I read in an old National Geographic that the primary task of a farmer's wife was that of patience. At the time I thought it was dramatically underestimating the efforts of farm women, but now I understand. The hardest part of all is reminding yourself this too shall pass, spring will come again, the rains haven't left forever, and soon the snow will be melting.

Memorial Day weekend is traditionally a family holiday filled with the excited acknowledgment summer is coming. In our household, Memorial Day is a bit different. Memorial Day means that Jules does not have to teach school and if I can get the evening off, we have childcare. These two things combined with the nicer weather our area experiences in May mean that firewood season is upon us. So Memorial Day is spent with Jules and I purchasing 12 bottles of beer, sharpening our axes, and driving the two trucks (Jules' and my family's Old Beater) up into the remote areas of our local National Forest. With the two trucks we figure we can get a chord and a half each time and minimize the number of total trips. Around here the permit is $20 and allows for four chords of wood (the general consensus among all for one year of house heating). Technically the season ends in November, but I don't know who on Earth could get their vehicle up there, or once there could get through the snow to down the trees. However, the trees are all tagged and the wood is first come, first served so this is a moot point because once 85-90% of the tagged wood (and they do check) has been cut the season is closed.

With the idea of killing our Natural Gas bill this next year, we're getting ready to heat the house with only our fireplace. This means not only stocking up on wood, but also building the racks for the wood to dry and honing our skills to be able to chop enough without putting ourselves in permanent chiropractic care. So a chainsaw has been purchased, firewood racks have been built, and the overgrown vegetation of our backyard is becoming kindling.

Directly behind our backyard is a The Neighbor Who Does Not Care. I cannot blame him too much as we think he is renting the house. He does keep the lawn moved and junk from piling up, but the trees between our fence and his house are so awfully overgrown. Much discussion has gone down amongst the neighbors that the overgrown vegetation must be taken care of. However, very little has really been done. Yesteday, Jules had had it. The next thing The Barracuda and I know, Jules is standing on the fence hacking away.

Even though this first time we go into the forest The Barracuda will be hanging out with Uncle Flint and Grampa, he is not absolved of work. One of the most important things Jules and I wish to impart on our son is the realization that nothing can be taken for granted. If you aren't working for it now, you will be paying for it later. At 4.5 he has daily and weekly chores, saves his allowance, and has rolls in the garden and water harvesting. Firewood is another household job which he is to have a part in.

Currently, The Barracuda is in charge of kindling and stacking. He uses his tomahawk to strip branches and chop them into stackable kindling. This is a skill in the making, but he is doing remarkably well. His adz swinging in The Hole has really help strengthen his arms and gain controlled hand-eye coordination.

(Yes, his hair is green. His screaming blue mohawk has faded into a shaggy green mohawk.)

More than just learning a good skill, he has to chop firewood with both Jules and I all together as a family. If we are all going to use the heat, we are all going to participate in acquiring it. It is much harder to carelessly burn more wood than necessary if it is has taken hours of work to chop and stack it. Likewise, it is much harder to senselessly log our forests if you use the resource for heating your home and have had to watch a majestic tree fall. An appreciation for working and the earth needs to be fostered young and that is what we are trying to do. Whether it is taking the larger split pieces or his own personal kindling, he definitely feels part of the process and pride of ownership in our household. Much like cleaning his room everyday and helping us harvest water, firewood is becoming a very normal part of his daily life. As Jules jokes, "The family that slays together (trees that is), stays together."

To some the idea of chopping wood during the summer and beginning axe handling at four and a half might be a bit early. But the more I watch our family simplify, the more I realize how much our life was far more out of whack before all this. We now change with the seasons in the same way the earth does. Our food, our chores, our lives, all shift together rather than maintaining this homoginized feel of droning on. It makes things like chopping kindling in the backyard an enjoyable, smiling event because we do it only time a year. The summer is the only real time for us to go cut due to Jules being off of school and the snow line being low enough, so in a way we are celebrating the are ushering in of summer much like everyone else. We are merely doing it by preparing for the late fall. This seems to be the theme of simplicity: Plan ahead and work hard together so that the small joys in life can be shared and appreciated by all.

Summer is here and so is the dirt! In our family, summer means no shoes, as small a shirt possible (for me) or none at all (for the boys), cut off pants, lots of playing in the yard and garden, and bikes, bikes, bikes. The screen doors open and the windows are left unlatched so that the house is breezy and warm; the clothes are hung to dry in the yard; we play significantly more; music pours out of our outdoor speakers; generally the atmosphere around here breaks loose from being closed up through the fall and winter. This means fun but also dirt, grass stains, dust, debris, and smudgy hand prints all over the house. Personally, I think it is well worth the trade.

For Bell Bell, summer means lazing around the house, preferably the laundry room sink, basking in the sun and shedding her fur everywhere. Guadie prefers the yard under our giant azalea we have named "Big Boy" but shedding all over none the less. If only I could do that, minus the fur that is. For me, summer is a shift in cleaning up fur as well as much more fun that hibernating in doors over the winter.

When I first moved in with Jules, I was amazed at the sheer number of cleaning products he had under the sink. There were at least 10. I usually stick with about three: Windex, bleach, and wood polish. When the floor started to look dull, I embraced Quick Shine as well. Those seem to clean most everything. I'm sure there are specialty products out there that are necessary for certain surfaces (just like bleach can't be used on our hardwood floors) but we have a fairly simple, none specialty house so I'm just not aware of them.

Around here, I began cleaning the floor with Murphy Oil as I'm sure most anyone who has owned hardwood floors has done at some point, but the stuff is expensive! So I began to search for other alternatives that wouldn't kill our floors. I'm not one for chemicals (my skin freaks out with hives) so as basic as possible is the route most traveled around here.

When I first read about alternative floor cleaner, many contained large amounts of water. This made me nervous. Water and hardwood floors are sworn enemies! But cleaning with water made much more sense than cleaning with salad dressing. Yes, salad dressing. Equal parts white vinegar (Do Not Use Apple Cider, Red Wine, Balsamic) and vegetable oil (olive oil, baby oil, mineral oil) can be sprayed onto your floors and then buffed clean with a mop or towel as a homemade alternative to expensive or chemical cleaners. The idea seemed crazy. Oil and Vinegar, really!?! But I read it time and again. So I tried it when Jules was at work in a small corner to see if it would kill the floor. I would suggest this to anyone before they use alternative products, wither they are home cleaners, lotions, laundry detergent what have you. Always try a small spot to check before diving in full bore. Needless to say, it worked. In fact it worked so well that I didn't have to use the Quick Shine at all. Even Jules (the household skeptic) commented on how great the floors looked. Salad dressing, who knew!

Not only are vegetable oil and white vinegar exceptionally cheap, they are something we most always have around so there is not worry about running out of them when needed. Basically, the vinegar cuts grease and grime while the oil polishes. Together they work wonders without any harmful water to ruin your hardwood.

The drawback is that it's stinky to an extent. Let's be real, you are using a vinegar which doesn't necessarily smell the best. In less than 20 minutes however, the floors are dry and the smell is gone. Secondly, you are going to need to shake the bottle up repeatedly because the mixture separates. Though I used an old 1 pint vinegar bottle and poured the cleaner directly onto my rag, a spray bottle would probably work wonders and make the job much faster. We just didn't have one in the house. Regardless, I'm going to be hard pressed to find another product that makes the floor look anywhere near as great! User beware: this product works so well you are going to want to dance across the floor in your socks and undies like Tom Cruise in Risky Business.

So let the freedom rock and gangster rap flow through our backyard and the dirt fall where it may. My salad dressing and I will take on the fur, the grime, and the smudgy hands! The summer has come and we can't wait to get out and play!

Jules is the primary income for our house. Though I have a job, it isn't really a job. I work 3-4 nights a week in the kitchen of a local restaurant for minimum wage and tips. It isn't rocket science, or brain surgery, or police work. It is nothing compared to working with at-risk kids like I used to. Now, if I screw up or make a mistake someone doesn't get their dinner when they thought they would. I can live with that.

By no means does this imply that I don't take my job seriously or try to do it well. I really like working in restaurant kitchens with their adrenaline-based, fast paced lifestyle. I just mean that the stress is different and the consequences not quite so extreme. Our household could exist without my job (it would be very tight, but possible). My job is the latte job. It allows us to go out to eat, to get lattes, to shop at thrift stores on our Saturday walks, to go to Chuck E. Cheese or bowling for family night. It is the cushion of money that makes us feel safe.

My real job is taking care of Jules, our house, and our son. I homeschool the Spicy Barracuda because his birthday misses by 4 days for kindergarten entry. I clean (though I'm not very good at it) and make our meals. I manage the grocery lists and household projects. But most of all, I do research and look for ways for our house to run more efficiently. Coupon clipping, meal preparation, gardens, root cellars, rain barrels, these things all take time and which is at a significant premium with both people working full time. By not working full time, I can take on these various household chores with enjoyment and gusto allowing Jules to relax after work. It also means no child care and the ability to lower bills.

This last year the goal has been centered around food. Before the Spicy Barracuda and I, Jules spent about $250 a month in the dreaded task of grocery shopping and ate tuna fish and nachos as his staple meals. Oh, Bachelor food, what would the world be without you? With the onset of actual cooking, and some meal planning our grocery bill has plummeted. We purchased an apple tree, two blueberry bushes, and planted the garden. The root cellar began to be dug so that we could use the dirt to fill in the multiple large raised beds and have somewhere to store our veggies once we harvested them. Composting was used to temper the dirt with organic material so it would be good soil for the plants. The rain barrels came about to water the food we would be growing. The bulk food purchasing was to help with the food bill until the plants actually could be harvested and wound up slashing our garbage bill along with it. Along the way much more has transformed and as we walked around the yard yesterday, I was amazed at all that had been accomplished.

So, on to the next real project for our household! The bills. The grocery bill might have plummeted with the arrival of the Spicy Barracuda and I, but the rest of the bills definitely went up. With two more bodies occupying the house during the day, a lot more was being used at a higher frequency. When Jules and I sat down and discussed it there are about three main bills in our house and two miscellaneous. Electric, Natural Gas, Water are the big main bills. Cell phones and Gasoline are the two others. This next year our focus is going to shift from infrastructure for our food to infrastructure for our bills.

Electric
Our house is a 50's style atomic ranch. It is fabulous! We have tried to keep the style throughout even including furniture and colors. For this reason, energy efficient appliances aren't really going to work out very well. However, by purchasing only two a month, we can outfit the whole house in energy efficient light bulbs without one killer monetary hit.

Another big energy sucker is our dryer. It heats up the house tremendously during the summer and only adds more money drain in the air conditioner trying to compensate. Luckily our entire neighborhood has been outfitted in the backyard for umbrella clothes lines. No more dryer in the summer!

Lastly, the purchase of a solar water heater would do wonders for some serious decreasing. The main use of our electric right now (other than appliances) is the hot water heater. The current state and federal rebate/tax credit programs make the purchase ($2,500) almost break even within a year and that doesn't count the amount saved on the electric bill. I have my fingers crossed for next year's tax return outfitting our house with solar for heating the water. Photovoltaic cells for complete energy dependence is completely out of reach right now and no where near practical. Not only is it not sunny enough here, but the total cost is like $25,000. Hah! I don't know about your household, but we aren't getting anywhere near that much back in a tax return!

Natural Gas
Our Natural Gas is only used for the furnace. The local National Forest allows for firewood permits at $5 a chord. We did some talking with our older neighbors who used to heat their house solely with wood and they have said four chords was the magic number. Another declaration on their part was how wonderfully fun it was to go up and spend the day out in the woods cutting. We will see! For $20 of heat for the whole winter it will be well worth the exercise!

Turning the furnace off also allows us to store more in our root cellar because the furnace shares the space. Without the added heat of the furnace the space stays cooler and more damp, both major pluses! However, the insulation down there could use a major revamp as well. It keeps the cold down and the heat in the house where it should be. So we will be reinsulating.

Water
It takes one major weekend rain event (sometimes daily rain event) to fill up 1-1 1/2 rain barrels. This means during the rainy season here, we will have to have more than the current five barrels if we want to maximize the amount of harvest. Right now we have enough water to have disconnected our toilet from city water, and have back stock for the summer. With more water we will be able to expand our rainwater usage into the daily small loads of dishes I wash by hand and the car washing throughout the year. This leaves showers/baths, three loads of laundry, and one load of dishes a week as the only major uses for our city water.

Currently, the water we harvest with our rain barrels comes off the back porch and runs through a rather old, metal gutter. It works for getting the water off the roof, but makes for the water uncertain for use as anything other than irrigation and toilet flushing. A replacement gutter made from high impact plastic is needed along with a leaf guard system to keep the water filtered.

By surveying our yard, we think we have space for 8 more barrels tucked away in the far corner of the yard and along the unused side of the house. With small stands and a nice wooden screen (so you don't see them) the addition will be highly useful and very inconspicuous.

Cell Phones
Jules and I switched to a shared minute plan quite a while ago. This brought him over to Verizon where most all of his family and mine get their cell phone service. With Verizon, if you call or recieve a call from someone who uses Verizon the call doesn't charge you minutes. This alone made the cost of our phones dramatically decrease. When we signed up, we did what most people do and went highly safe with the amount of minutes being used. Now, it has become clear we can most likely downsize our plan without much of any change in our useage.

Gasoline
By paying attention and grouping errands I've managed to only fill up my gas tank once 10-12 days for about $20. However, Jules is a teacher. One of the cardinal rules of teaching is that you do not live in the same district that you teach. This allows you to have a personal life and not run into your students everywhere at the least opportune times. (I once ran into parents of students while buying a large amount of alcohol for a friend's college graduation party.) He drives his truck quite a ways twice a day as a result.

However, Jules loves to bike to work. This commute is 60 miles round trip, and though he used to do it at least once a week, the toll on his body and time is extreme. Luckily, in September when the new school year starts, the completion of a significantly closer mass transit system will be in place allowing for the commute to take much less toll on his body. This means he can bike/ride to work two, three, or even more times a week. Not only will this make him personally feel better, but it will help with gasoline quite a bit.

The changes for next year will definitely be a more noticeable cultural shift than this years. Hopefully, the Barracuda is young enough still for the views of the mass culture to not affect him too much. Whether all of these ideas will come to fruition the same with this last year seems to be falling into place one can only wonder, but by having a plan and writing it down the ideas are at least in place for us to slowly move toward them. This last year has (and continues) to be a tremendous success in my book allowing for high hopes for the future.

Spring break arrived and though we had planned a long awaited camping trip with the Spicy Barracuda, a forecast of 38 degree highs and 100% chance of rain kinda killed it. So, off to my family's beach house we ventured instead. The four days were wonderful! After the first two of pouring rain and crazy wind, the skies were cloudless and in the seventies.

The Barracuda loved it, Guadalupe loved it (her first time at the beach) and it definitely showed me the extent that our family's lifestyle is a bit off from center. To open up a pantry and see stacks of cans was odd. To not have a bins of bulk food and be making meals from scratch, was odd. To be without Jules (he stayed home for most of the trip), was odd. But most odd of all was the water!

Having rain barrels of water has changed the way that both Jules and I look at the consumption of our water. The idea of rain barrels began because in the summer it is as though someone turns off the rain faucet. It completely dries up (not even a shower) for at least a good two months and more like three. The bummer with this is that it is the prime growing season and thus, if you want a garden you have to pay for the high priced irrigation from city water. City water around here increases almost 20% in the summer! With 90-100 degree days the water is a must and so we figured why not harvest the water for free during the rainy season (the other nine months of the year).

We started small with only two barrels set up and an incomplete overflow valve. Sure, it rained a lot here. Sure, everywhere on the internet cautioned people at how quickly rain barrels filled up. But, come on. We just had them hooked up to the small porch awning not the whole roof, and two barrels is 110 gallons of water. No problem, we had a couple of weeks to get it all perfected.

In one weekend rain event we had a barrel and a half full. And it was still coming! We hadn't anticipated this kind of water falling from the sky. I have lived here my whole life and never really thought much of the volume of water when it rains. It doesn't pour, it just rains...all the time. What were we doing to do with all that water?!? We didn't want the barrels to become completely full, and flood out the makeshift overflow creating a nice eroding river in our backyard.

There had to be something, so we brainstormed. We couldn't use it to cook with because the gutters are dirty. We couldn't drink it for the same reason. The crops weren't in yet so watering wasn't necessary and the rain was watering for us. Dishes and laundry were out for the same reason we couldn't cook with it. Jules came up with it at last - the toilet. It didn't matter how dirty the water was if we were just using it for flushing the toilet!

We figured we could make use of the water (and mainly keep the barrels from flooding) for the next couple of days (it rained all week) until we could acquire a third barrel and establish the overflow. Problem solved, at least temporarily.

How much water do you think it takes to flush your toilet? I had never thought about the toilet this way. Who really wants to think about their toilet? Uh, not me. But it is one of the most highly used appliances in your house and a very simple machine. Once you turn the water off at the wall you get only a single flush. You then have to take the back lid off and fill the tank up again to the water line (literally a line in the tank) to get another flush. This is normally done automatically through the wall and that is why you turn it off. I had no frame of reference as to the water capacity of our toilet. The tank didn't look that big, eh, maybe a gallon or something. NO! It takes almost four gallons of water with every single flush of our toilet!
To put that into perspective, those are two liter soda bottles and

that is only one toilet flush.

The average person flushes the toilet 8 times a day. For those of you who work outside the home and your house (and toilet) sit unused all day this might not be much, but the Barracuda and I are home almost all day, every day. That is a lot of water (and money) literally being flushed down the toilet. Jules and I could not figure out why the water bill had spiked so much since the Barracuda and I moved it. We accepted it, but were baffled. Now, we have the answer. Somewhere between $20-$30 of our water bill was just toilet flushing.

Everyone's toilet is different, and you can calculate the amount of water you toilet uses (a great bored out of your mind activity to do with the kids) by visiting this website. If you live in a large household, this probably wouldn't work for you. There are only three of us here so we are able to pull it off very, very simply. A large kitty litter container is exactly the right size to fill the tank of our toilet now that two bricks have been placed inside. You flush, you fill. The difference is actually surprisingly minimal except in your perception of personal and household consumption.

I had no idea we used the amount of water we did. With the extent of the global water crisis leaving more than a billion people without clean water to even drink, I am so taken aback by us using four gallons of fresh water just to flush our toilet. Though I do not see our small simplification of using rainwater to flush the toilet as a way to save the impoverished of the world, the perspective it has given me on just how much I take for granted will stick with me for a long time to come.

I still think of us as normal, but in all honesty this probably threw us over the top into the realm of what my son will refer to as "his weird parents" when he is a teenager. To stop buying packaged foods in favor of those made at home was a very simple change that our household has made over about 3 months and it has done significantly more! This never began as a way to "Go Green." It was honestly that our food bill was reaching $300 a month and that just wouldn't do. We couldn't just stop buying food, something else needed to be done, so slowly we began venturing into the bulk food section of our local grocery store. Bulk foods generally cost less money because they can be purchased by the store in very large quantities and they aren't packaged. What shocked me was that many of them were the exact same product just without the box, and we were just going to put into the trash (or recycling) anyway.

We get everything from grated Parmesean and Ramano cheese to locally milled, all natural, whole wheat flour. We can get all natural wild rice, organic beet sugar, multiple varieties of raw nuts, dried fruit, whole wheat pasta, dog treats, candy, dark chocolate chips, and bajillions of other things in bulk foods that we could never afford in the swanky natural section packaged up in small quantities. The greatest part is not only are we getting a product whose quality is better than the packed brand name, but we are getting it for cheaper.

This seems as though it goes against all common sense and depending on where you live, it might. We are not shopping at Fred Meyer (Kroger) with their small (though ever expanding) bulk foods or at Wild Oats (Whole Foods) and some upscale market places where everything costs more. We are fortunate enough to live around a regionally employee owned supermarket chain which provides dozens of selections of bulk food. However, an internet search might find you amazed at the number of stores offering such options. When our store stopped carrying raw sugar, I went on a quest to find more in bulk. The internet search gave me five other places which were much closer that carried the product. The difference in price was about 60 cents more a pound because the stores were independent and not a chain, but still well below buying the sugar in a package.

As much as Jules likes it, he has said it was the largest degree of culture shock to him. Where would we store all these jars of stuff? We are going to look into the pantry and not see anything to eat. This isn't the way normal people live. Coming out of a grocery store with all these bags of dried stuff, coming home to put all the dried stuff into jars on our shelves, not having any bright flashing plastic like presents ready to open caused him a mind glitch. Now, our cabinet doesn't have hardly any of them. Mainly we are now filled with large glass jars harboring everything from corn meal to black beans. However, Jule's admits his favorite part of this whole process is emptying the contents of all our bags into the jars and watching our food supply slowly grow. It is a level of security for him to know that every month we are slowly accumulating more flour than we use, more beans that we eat, more corn meal than I turn into bread. By having an ever growing (if however slightly) supply of food right on hand, it is a nice saving grace for the stress of a recession. It also means that if we don't have the money one month for a specific staple, we have some backup. As long as I create the snacks from the dried foods, he is happy to eat them. I like that the pantry is no longer clogged with box upon box of stacked treats and never being able to see anything. In fact we have more storage now than we ever did before!

The initial output for unpackaging you pantry is a little more because you have to have a place to store all of your culinary treasure that is now without its box. Standard glass jars can be purchased most anywhere (even Ikea) and cost around 10-20 dollars a piece. (I think we got ours at Fred Meyer (Kroger)) Once purchased, they last forever and are dishwasher safe. More than anything you want to be sure they have a lid that will seal either with a rubber ring and clamp or a twist on lid. This will keep the air out and your food from getting stale. It also helps with keeping the moisture from your food. Even simpler and without the cost is to save glass jars you would normally recycle or throw away. Many products from spaghetti sauce, to salsa, to sundried tomatoes come in glass jars with securely sealing lids. By running these through the dishwasher and saving them you have food storage without the cost of a large glass storage jar. The only draw back is merely size. If you chose to buy jars, you will recuperate your cost of the containers in mere months, have much better food to show for it and much fewer items in your pantry to take up space!

The initial thought I had about going over to bulk was "Where would we put it all?" I had no idea it would actually thin out our pantry because I had no idea how much packaged and processed food we actually ate. Now, that we have transitioned over to bulk foods and I have been reading up on the subject it kinda creeps me out!

Many things about the way our culture acquires its food I'd never really considered. However, I needed to do so reading up on ways to lower the costs of our household, and on ways to make it run outside of the mainstream. We were (and in many ways still are) a highly normal American family. I didn't honestly know much about food storage, or how much flour the average family uses in a month when making their own food (the internet tells all), or what goes into making corn bread without a box. So I hit the local library and began reading, I started with Google and began searching, I hunted down blogs and began asking questions of people who were living this way. That is when I began to realize the extent of our agriculture in this country.

Currently, each food item in a typical U.S. meal has traveled an average of 1,500 miles. The amount of fuel it takes to put a meal on the table outweighs the amount of energy we gain from consumption of the food itself. Not only is fuel consumption created in direct transport, but also through processing, packaging, warehousing, and refrigeration. This doesn't even count the fossil fuels used in the synthetic fertilizer and pesticide used to grow and keep the food perfect looking.

Just think of it this way, if every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country's oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week. That's not gallons but barrels.
Statistics and Information acquired from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver

Our families grocery bill is now $150 a month ($200 if you add the pet food and supplies) and we rarely ever go out to Taco Bell or Burger King anymore. We no longer associate cereal with a cartoon character, fruit with packaged gelatinous chewables, and Macaroni and cheese with a blue box. I make our food. I know what goes into it and where most of it came from. Our garbage bill has been cut %75 because we now have pick up only once a month due to a complete lack of packaging and an ever growing compost bin. More than anything else, we aren't getting sick anymore.

Jules spent most of last year feeling ill; when he got sick so did the Spicy Barracuda. Neither have had much over a day or two of feeling as though the onset of a cold might be coming. Though I have no direct evidence this is from a change in our diet and decrease in stress, there isn't much else that has changed. In general, we just feel better now that we eat better.