Obligatory "About" Post.

I can think of no better way to start than to tell you a little (or a lot) about me and mine.

I am a wife and a mother. I once helped run a business, but I realized one day that I did not have the gumption to do the sorts of things that management had to do. That is, I could not figure out how to fire people that didn't know how to do their job, as I was too sympathetic to the woes of being human.

Granted, it is not to say that other people who do these jobs see other than what I saw, but that I myself did not have the spirit to look someone in the eye and tell them they were not good enough, even when they weren't. In stories that are too long to tell here and now, I myself had been told that too many times as a child and didn't have it in me to tell it to others, even if it were to the benefit of the company itself. People who do hiring and firing need to exist in this world, and I consider them very strong people. I do NOT consider myself to be this particular type of strong.

I still love the company and all of the people there, but I am not and perhaps never will be the type of person who can take the type of control it requires to run any sort of business. I see myself as more of the stay-at-home-employed-alone type. If I cannot find a job that will pay me to stay and do what I do best, then I will find a job in something that requires, I don't know, data entry.

As you may have begun to sort out by now, I am a bit of a fragile soul. I, much like the batteries that support our livelihood, need sunshine to kindle my flame. I need the smell of flowers, the chirp of birds, and the earth beneath my bare feet to keep me grounded at all. The winter does not treat me well, though the colorful lights and paper at Christmas will cause a flicker in my inner child.

I am very much in love with people, though I cannot take groups of them for very long. I have a love/hate relationship with watching how they (how you) treat one another and the how it makes the world turn.

Anyway, I walked out of that job and into the woods. It was a bare piece of land except for the trees. I brought with me my boyfriend at the time, though husband now. With the help if his family and my friends, we cleared out a little space on a hill, though not much because we didn't want to disturb what was already there. If I told you the land felt magical, you might not believe me, but I swear to you this place makes my soul feel... wild and raw.

Here, we live in a Tiny House on Wheels that is on a trailer that measures 14'x7'.  Yes, fourteen by seven feet on the trailer itself, meaning even less from inside the home. Although we have bits and pieces spread out all over and there is the lovely California sun, I can honestly tell you some days it does not suit me well to live in what other people might consider a closet.

We live on sunshine, propane, and sometimes gasoline, depending on how long the winter has refused the first of those. We have a compost toilet and an outhouse for guests. Since you might wonder, yes, I do miss flushing toilets, though I still consider them a great waste of an even greater resource.

 There is an outdoor kitchen, shower, bath, and a community yurt. There are no indoor water essentials at all. I am not the most fond of that either, but in the middle of summer you'll find me having quite a time out here.

There is a garden that rotates between delicious vegetables and gorgeous wildflowers, though it is more dependent on how lazy we have been versus how the weather turns.

Water is currently delivered, as our county is refusing to give us a well. It's a lawyer sort of thing that involves a lot of money, time, and other things we don't really have access to at the time of this posting. This means that water is very expensive, so we must be careful how it gets used.

There are salamanders, irises, gooseberries, thimble-berries, mountain lions, coyotes, hawks, owls, and rats, so many rats. There are more rats, voles, gophers, deer, and all of the sorts of things that live in redwood forests. We do NOT have bears, for those of you still questioning the outdoor kitchen.

We have been here now for two and a half years. We now have a dog named Barley and a daughter - both are as wild and free as the forest, and have never known better than the land they claim as their home. We have chickens and are about to adopt some guinea hens.

If you stay, reader, I will tell you about this life; I will tell you what happened in the past and what I believe will happen in the future. There will be days of my writing that you may relate to, and perhaps even more days in which you don't even understand what I'm talking about. Perhaps you'll read more or perhaps you'll wander away from this section of my universe, but I will be here, tick-tapping about on the keys and opening up our world for you.