Keeping Weather Records

This weekend, after a long search of all the hardware stores, I finally found a min/max thermometer. I don't know why it was so difficult to find one, other than perhaps there are few of us left that want an honest-to-god old-fashioned thermometer rather than a fancy digital one. I prefer to avoid gadgets that need batteries if possible.

When we lived out on the land, I kept weather records because it was fun and because they are useful. It was shocking to review them at the end of the hot summer and see that we had over 50 days that had been at least 100 degrees. In two and a half years, our record high was 117 degrees, on a day when Tucson was a couple degrees cooler. This was surprising considering we were higher in elevation that Tucson.

We also got cooler temperatures than expected in the winter, perhaps because we were just a mile or so up the bank from a river where the colder air settled. Our record low was 12 degrees and we spent many nights in the RV bundled up and huddled together sleeping when the inside temperature dropped to the low 40s. The oddest, and most inconvenient, weather trend we noticed was a 35% higher chance of rain on weekends than weekdays. This was just one of several factors that slowed our homesteading plans down.

I don't know what happened to the min/max thermometer we had when we lived there, but I'm glad to have one again finally. We put it outside yesterday evening so that we could start keeping records here. We have had some inkling of the outside temperature from a digital inside/outside thermometer I picked up on sale months ago. It was originally used in the unsuccessful fridge/freezer conversion so that we could maintain the right temperature in the fridge. When I finally accepted that the appliance was not working as hoped, I was left with the thermometer. We put it outside and have noted the cold winter temperatures with interest.

There's just one problem. When I arose this morning, the digital thermometer read 20 degrees out. The new min/max thermometer read a current (and low) temperature of 25 degrees. That's a pretty big difference and I'm not sure which one to believe. They are located very close to each other so conditions are pretty similar. I do have one other standard thermometer that I suppose I could put outside to give yet a third reading, but I'd like to have just one that I know is reading the correct temperature!

On another weather note, our inch and a half of snow on the ground and then later snow flurries yesterday melted down to .3" of precipitation in the small glass tube rain gauge. I'd prefer to have one of the larger metal ones that is probably more accurate but I haven't been able to find one of those locally either.

Getting back to the point of keeping weather records, they are very useful for gardeners, although obviously there are annual variations. And of course, we must also keep in mind that climate change means even more variation and not just towards warmer temperatures. More extreme and severe weather may be on all of our horizons. My weather records will be useful but they will not give a predictable and reliable dates for the first early frost or latest hard freeze anymore. It will be up to us to stay on top of day to day weather and protect our garden and adapt our gardening methods (and timing) as necessary.

Winter Wonderland

We woke up this morning to a beautiful snow-covered landscape.



Don't the desert mesquite trees just look gorgeous covered in snow?



Just for Wendy, here is a picture of our bamboo.



The dogs seemed unfazed by the white stuff.



Although they did seem more playful this morning.
Note the bench with the chard garden to the left.



Check out Angel catchin' some air! Not a single paw touching the ground. Don't believe me? Click on the photo and see.

One Step at a Time

Now that we've decided to do a bit around here, I find myself wanting to do everything all at once. That isn't possible, of course, so I try to slow down and think things out logically. Some tasks can be done whenever or concurrently with other tasks, but other projects must be done in a particular order.

Before we can put up rain gutters, for instance, we have to get up on the extension ladder and clean the roofing tar off the fascia still up there from when we ripped the porch out. Then the fascia needs to be painted to match the current house color. We're considering getting seamless gutters put in and having a water harvesting tank installed at the same time. Before we can call for estimates, however, we've got to research tank sizes and find a place to put one that won't get the county's panties in a twist.

With our planned garden strip in the yard, it's the same thing. While it's exciting to think about what to plant, first we've got to clear the miscellaneous items stored in that space, such as the extension ladder that is needed to reach the roof fascia. We'll have to stretch some chicken wire to keep the dogs out, put shade cloth up on the fence to keep the sun and wind from destroying the new garden, and, oh yeah, we'd better put down a solid layer of hardware cloth to try to keep the pocket gophers and ground squirrels from eating every damn thing we plant. And I need to fit a trip in to the local sandwich shop's corporate office to load up on 5-gallon buckets for planting. (They cost only $1 each, which is far cheaper than pots, and the white color is cooler in the summer heat.)

As I look at all the projects we want to do and look at the calendar to see how much time we have before the real heat hits, I get overwhelmed. I have to remember to slow down and just tackle one thing at a time. And try not to get ahead of myself.

Yesterday, I got out the shovel and the drop bar to start digging the hole for the fig tree. I fetched my sweetie an hour or so later to ask for help putting it in the ground. It's planted and happy, and we have several buckets of leftover soil to mix with my finished compost for the strip garden.

Today, we went to the local hardware store and spent a few minutes talking with the young man in their garden section. He's an enthusiastic gardener and was able to give us some good advice on plants that will work in our area. We get colder than Tucson but still quite hot in the summer, so what works in town doesn't necessarily work for us. For instance, the fig variety we got is not one of the two most commonly sold in town. We needed something hardier. Ours is a Texas Blue Giant and should cope with the cold quite well.

While we were there, he pointed out the pineapple guava trees they had. We'll need two but we only bought one today. He strongly recommended we buy the other one from another nursery so we can avoid having two identical clones; otherwise we won't ever get fruit. Once established, these are supposed to need very little water.

I still want to get a couple of nut trees and maybe some peaches, but first I need to get the one pineapple guava in the ground and find it a partner to plant, too. It's tempting to go to the nursery and bring home a forest of tree, but I know better. One step at a time will get me there. I'm rather clumsy so if I try to leap in with both feet at the same time, I'm likely to fall down.

Dare We Dream?

After the extreme disappointment over the shocking news of zoning restrictions on our land last year, we're not quite ready to dream again. For now, we are just living in the present.

Once we finally finished all the work required by the county, we had to consider our plans for the future. They were uncertain, and they have changed several times. At first, because we couldn't do hardly anything we planned to do here, we intended to sell and move as quickly as we could. We cleaned up outside, sold all the things we wouldn't be able to use here, and planned to put the house on the market this spring.

Then we thought, well, maybe we should wait a year so we don't have to pay back the government's first time homebuyer's credit. If we could hold out another year, we wouldn't lose our shirts even more. Unfortunately, when I received the tax reminder about this from the IRS, I realized I had remembered the information wrong. The requirement is three years, not two. We really aren't sure we want to stay that long.

One factor complicating our decision was, and still is, my sweetie's mother. She lives in the state and has some health problems. While she has wonderful, supportive neighbors, she still relies on us for long-distance transportation, as well as emotional support and the occasional fix-up in the home. Our moving away from the area would sadden her deeply and add additional difficulties to her life.

So, to meet our desires and still be available to help her, we considered the idea of living in an RV. We could do temporary work in different areas for a few years to help us find a new place to live, yet still be able to come back to help her out. We both loved this idea and began decluttering in earnest. Downsizing from a prepper household to just what can fit in fifth wheel trailer was not going to be easy, but we made significant progress. We put a number of boxes in storage for a big spring yard sale.

With the recent rise in gas prices, however, we started thinking this might not be such a wise plan. Granted, our expenses would be lower so we could probably afford to pay a little more for gas but if rationing was instituted, we'd be screwed. Also as the economy worsens and budgets everywhere are strained, the possibility of finding work could be significantly reduced.

Then, at the beginning of this year, my husband's work situation changed and he committed to a yearlong project. Even though we can't do what we want on our land here, it does not make sense for us to sell it now, have to repay the entire homebuyer's credit, and then pay rent in town instead of building equity here. Our home is in a low enough price range that it should not suffer terribly from falling home values. Having at least another year here also gives us time to do more of the little fix-up projects that will make the home more attractive to potential buyers when we are ready to leave.

With all of this uncertainty, and because we are so battered and bruised from this past year, we lost all momentum for doing much of anything. Items set aside for the big yard sale remain in the rented storage unit and tools from the shed (now gone) are stacked on shelves in my living room.

Considering we bought an entire acre so we could have a huge garden, our current garden is practically non-existent. (Thank you, bureaucrats, for this.) We do, however, have a tiny bit going on. We've enjoyed lettuce grown in the kitchen for the past month or so. We're pretty sure our ultra-dwarf apple tree survived the hard freezes. I don't know about my asparagus, though, especially since I didn't mulch them before winter.

All this debate about urban homesteaders has kind of fired us up. Although we still don't expect to stay here for the long run, we've decided to go ahead and do a few things. We already have a couple of experimental beds set up with a big brush pile on the bottom, aged horse manure filling in the gaps and covering it, and we will put a top layer of mixed aged horse manure and compost before planting when the danger of a hard freeze has passed.

Recently, my sweetie planted chard in a box and buckets out front. Seedlings are already poking up through the dirt. This week, I purchased a fig tree that we will plant where the washing machine drains its graywater. Because figs produce relatively quickly we might actually benefit from it while we still live here.

We can't fence garden beds on our acre but I pointed out to my sweetie that our fenced yard for the dogs is probably not much bigger than what many people gardening on city lots have available. And it is the only part of our entire acre that is not subject to the zoning restrictions. The problem is that it is the dogs' yard and we don't want to deprive them of the space to run around and play. However...they don't need all the space.

We are going to fence off a strip along one edge of the yard to do some container gardening. We might even try to squeeze in a small chicken coop. I dropped by the CSA yesterday while I was in town and spoke with a lady who had previously offered me her excess chicks so we just need to make our decision and build the coop if we want to go that route. If the county has a problem with this, they will not get easy cooperation from us again. They will get a big, unpleasant, and very public fight.


Edited to Add: I supposed I should add that we will, of course, continue to live our low-impact lifestyle. We keep our energy and water use low. We combine errands and try not to drive too much. I'm trying to figure out a way to get my bike out of storage and on the property here so I will ride it instead of driving for local errands. I frequently shop at the farmers market and cook from scratch. I haven't done any food preservation in quite some time, but look forward to picking that up again this year.

Death of a Homesteader's Dream

This is Part 3 in my series on our adventures with homesteading, or as I prefer to call it, living a more self-sufficient, sustainable, and environmentally responsible life. You can read about our 2 1/2 years off the grid (almost 20 years ago) here and about our years of less self-sufficient years where we still did a little here and there in this post. Both would be helpful to read before reading this one so that it puts this story in context, especially emotionally. (And yes, I know they're long. I'm wordy but I try to make my words count...)

Anyone who has been following my blog for the last few years will perhaps remember our long search for a place to settle down. The more we read about peak oil, climate change, and the global economy, the more concerned we became. Finding a place where we could settle down and essentially homestead seemed critical to our long-term survival. Also the more we read other homesteading blogs, the more we wanted to enjoy that lifestyle ourselves.

We wanted a place where we could, among other things:

• modify a house to be as energy-efficient and low-water use as possible
• get a couple of solar panels for emergencies (we knew we couldn't afford a whole system)
• set up rainwater harvesting off the buildings
• do landscaping and contouring to slow rainwater flow across the land for use in gardens
• grow as much of our own food as possible
• learn the edible and medicinal plants in the area - read about my wild harvesting here
• get chickens for eggs, meat (for the dogs), and fertilizer
• experiment with aquaponics, wicking beds, and other reduced water use gardening methods - again, we planned to feed the meat (fish) to our dogs
• find a bikable community to reduce driving
• transition to using mostly manual and human-powered tools instead of power tools
• form relationships with our neighbors and barter where possible

We didn't have much money to spend on a place so we were thrilled when, after about two years of searching, we happened across a place north of Tucson that had sat empty for a couple of years after being foreclosed upon. We weren't thrilled about buying a foreclosure or settling for a manufactured house, but we knew by then it was really all we could afford, and heck, being able to get under the house easily would make it that much easier to super-insulate and plumb for graywater.

The good things about the property were that it was in a somewhat rural area close to several small communities and not too far from Tucson. We could bike in the area and my sweetie could still commute to his job in the city. The area was about 750 feet higher in elevation than Tucson which meant slightly cooler temperatures and the possibility of more rain, especially with the proximity of the mountains. There was a medium-sized wash running right through the middle of the property so we knew there would be water available to utilize; we planned to plant trees on top of the banks and stabilize the banks themselves with desert-adapted blackberries. There were broad expanses of relatively flat areas that would work for gardens; one in particularly excited us with the possibility of turning it into a grain field. The soil was alluvial, a great mix of sand and dirt, with a bit of clay deeper down.

In the neighborhood, many people had animals. Lots of chickens but more importantly lots of large herbivores. A number of people had one or more horses, and one place, not too far away, had horses, a cow, a goat, and several donkeys ... and a huge pile of manure just waiting for me to ask for it. The composting possibilities were exciting!

The property was just under an acre, so there would be plenty of room to put in a shed. I had dreams of a greenhouse, an outdoor kitchen, clotheslines (finally!), and maybe even an outdoor shower. Water came from a community well, which seemed a more secure bet in the long run than the water company.


The Purchase & The Move

Buying it was very stressful. Within the first two days of listing, there were three offers on the place, including ours. This resulted in a bidding war and sense of urgency in the purchase. We won, but ended up paying more than 10% over the asking price. We knew it was worth it, though, as this place had almost everything we'd been looking for. We explored the neighborhood and saw that many people had animals, sheds, and corrals, but no gardens.

We were so excited when we closed on the house. This was it. Finally, the last place we'd ever live. The place where we could do everything we'd dreamed about. A place where we could weather through changes brought by peak oil, climate change, and even economic downturns.

My sweetie bought a used motorcycle to keep the commuting gas costs down. We rented a storage unit and started moving the stuff from our rental house garage into it until we could get a shed.

Moving was a chore as I'd acquired a lot of used canning jars and a lot of compost. But, with help from a few friends, we managed to get it done. Moving right about April 1st again should have warned us of the trouble to come, but we were excited to finally get to move forward with plans we'd been formulating for years. It took a few months to get unpacked and organized, sorting through our storage unit to find things we needed.


Because it was a foreclosure and had sat empty for a couple of year, we had some problems to repair and a lot of clean-up on the property. Shortly after moving in, too, our dog was diagnosed with two cancerous masses that had to be removed. Since one was on her foot, we had to build her a long gently-sloped ramp so she could get in and out of the house.

By the time we were somewhat settled, the hot weather had arrived and outdoor projects were put on hold. We still needed to move our belongings from storage, though so we bought a shed off craigslist. It was a good size and already built. All we had to do was hire a tow truck driver to move it for $250. Even with that expense, it was cheaper than building one ourselves. We got it moved into a good location, convenient to power, and unlikely to flood in the summer rains. We began emptying out the storage unit, although it was quickly clear that everything would not fit, especially since our Xtracycle bikes are long.


The Trouble Begins

About this time, the first of several disasters struck. My nephew died unexpectedly. This was devastating, not just for his loss, but for the lifelong pain I knew it would cause my sibling. Losing a child is very, very difficult, and I knew they'd been very close in the past few years.

Not too long after this, about the time I'd gotten through most of the grieving process, we received an official letter in the mail. Uh oh. That's rarely a good thing and this time was no exception. The county zoning department sent us a notification that our lovely porch spanning the entire front of the house was a code violation. What?!

I was to call and discuss it with the gentleman that dealt with violations. I called and found out that it had been written up by a field inspector in February. Upon further research, I found it this had happened just a few days before the house was listed on the market yet nothing had shown up in the disclosure paperwork. As the current owners, this was now our problem.

The problem, it seemed, was that the previous owners had built it without a permit. No problem, the zoning guy told me, just apply for a permit retroactively. We'd have to pay more, but it would clear the violation. When we got the paperwork, I started filling it out but had to call him several times with questions. The average citizen cannot easily access building codes so we really didn't know if it was built to code. The roof looked questionable as it was attached to the fascia of the house, something not allowed in the covered deck plans they sent as an example. (Apparently there are so many tornadoes - *snort* - in Arizona, they are worried one will blow the whole roof off.)

We sweated our way through the site plan - a drawing of exactly what's on the property, including the offending structure - and the application. When I went to file it with zoning, I was told it had to be approved first by the flood control department since our entire property lay in the floodplain. We knew that but didn't know they needed to approve anything and everything we wanted to do. It seemed like just a formality, although we would also have to get approval from them for our shed, too.

At the flood control district, our application triggered, for some unknown reason, an "administrative review" of our entire property. They sent us a five page letter of problems that we had to address. At this point, it was just a notification but the implication was that if the issues were not addressed, by the dates specified, we'd be taken to court.

The death of our dream of a homestead began that day but we didn't know it. We still thought we could get through this process relatively unscathed. Ha! Anyone who followed my blog this summer and fall knows the months of anger, disbelief, and depression that followed. Although their letter barely addressed the porch, I'll address it first.


The Porch


By this point, we decided it would be best to have professional help, even though we were perfectly capable of remodeling the porch ourselves. There were other issues in the letter to address (including the shed, the engineered pad the house was on, and allowed property use). We hired a general contractor through a friend of a friend. She came out and hemmed and hawed. There were other problems with the porch besides where the roof was attached. The floor was "spongy." The supports underneath were not evenly spaced. But, she said, she'd go talk to them. See if they could waive the code to allow it since the porch was overall solid.

She reported back that the porch was a no-go. The roof was definitely out of code and due to the high placement of the windows on the house, there was no way to move it down to attach to the side of the house as required by code. That was the least of the problems, though. Supports underneath had to be evenly spaced so that the sheets of plywood fit perfectly from one support to the next, rather than leaving parts of each sheet hanging off past it. That was not something that could be fixed. It would have to be entirely redone, which would mean removing the entire existing covered porch and rebuilding it ... after applying for a new permit.

We didn't have money for that but we still had to get rid of the current one. It was solidly built, it would have held up just fine, but it did not meet the official requirements of the bureaucracy so we had to tear a 600 square foot raised covered porch off our house. We were determined to do this responsibly, though, so we dismantled it rather than just sawing it apart. We sold the railings, the custom-made wrought iron T-brackets, and the 4x4 roof supports. We gave away the 2x4s, the plywood, and the 4x4 porch supports (dinged up by their removal). We recycled the thousands of nails and screws removed by hand. In the end, the only thing that went into the landfill was the rolled roofing. It was simply not reusable nor recyclable.

Needless to say, doing it this way took a whole lot longer than it would have taken to take it apart for the trash. I had to get several extensions on our deadline. Besides dealing with the other issues - far more grave - from the letter, we were also dealing with my sweetie's mother's health issues.

She'd gotten some poor diagnoses on the health of her lungs and then slipped in her home, breaking her hip. She was brought to Tucson for the emergency hip replacement and following physical therapy. My sweetie had taken two weeks off work to finish up the porch removal and instead spent every day at the hospital. So, when the zoning guy told me on the phone that he supposed we could get another extension because we were cooperating, I was hard-pressed to remain pleasant. When he added, "We're not trying to make your lives difficult; we're here to help," I had to bite my tongue, hard, to avoid exploding at him. At this point, we couldn't afford to piss them off since they had so much control over our lives.

We finally got the porch removed, cleaned up the pad, and built a small set of new stairs to get into our home. He cleared the violation and, in his mind, figured our lives would be just hunky-dory as a result of all his help.


The Pad

Yeah, right. All their help included a notification from the flood control folks that, sorry, they couldn't confirm that the pad for the house, permitted by them in 1999, was built correctly. We'd have to do that by either having them come out to inspect it (I'd rather invite a vampire into my home!) or hiring a civil engineer to write a letter confirming it was done to their specs. They included these specs and it was immediately obvious that we had a problem. We hired an engineer who confirmed that we would have to have some work done and he recommended an excavator to do it.



To the tune of 4,000 big ones, we got to have the pad upgraded to include a 3 foot "toe down" along the front and side of the house, and have the pad in the back brought out to the ten feet required. A toe down is an angled slope extending into the ground. To get the three feet required meant the guys had to dig a five foot trench, and they had to do it carefully because Blue Stake never bothered to show up to mark where the electric power came in. The toe down had to be lined with something like landscape cloth and then big rocks before being back-filled. For them to have access to the front yard and side, we had to remove half our wrought iron fence and two small mesquite trees, perfectly situated to provide future shade. The fence posts were, of course, set in cement. (More hard labor.)

By the time they finished, we didn't have the time or energy to put all of the fence back up. The extended toe-down also made it almost impossible to replace the fence where it had been along the side and it couldn't be moved further out easily for reasons to be divulged soon. We decided to close in a much smaller portion of the yard and sell the leftover fencing. We wanted to get this completed before having any inspectors out in case they decided we needed more permits to replace what they had made us remove.

I don't know if it is true, but the guys working for the excavator also told us that the county had not required toe downs like this back in 1999. Apparently, the county was making us bring our pad up to current standards under the guise of saying it didn't meet the 1999 requirements. Nice.


The Wash



This is where the story becomes really heart-breaking. The letter from the flood control district informed us that our site plan was inadequate and they included a sample one of our property, along with a few problems they noticed in our plan.

Unbeknownst to us, there is a 75 foot "erosion hazard setback" from either side of the wash due to the amount of water that can flow through it during the monsoons. Anything built within this area must be approved by them and be built to withstand terrific flood conditions. For instance, a support for a wall would have to be something like 12" on each side and set in a deep, reinforced hole of cement. The bottom of any wall or fence would have to be a foot off the ground to allow water to pass through.

Oh.

Hm, that would be a bit of a problem for fencing in the gardens we had planned. After all, the reason they need to be fenced is to keep out all the critters that want to eat the tender, tasty plants. These are small critters like rabbits, quail, ground squirrels, and pocket gophers to whom a fence with a one foot gap at the bottom would be like an engraved invitation to a succulent buffet.

Looking at the map, we discovered that almost our entire property, other than the pad where the house was and the small fenced front yard, fell within this setback zone. We also had to contend with 30 foot wide road easements on two sides of the property. In other words, we would not really be able to do diddly-squat with the land that we bought, the land that we thought we owned. Sure would have been nice for the realtor to have let us know about this, especially considering he knew our gardening plans and had years of experience in the area.

It gets worse.

I know, you're wondering, how can it get any worse? Well, not only was the setback an issue, apparently this was a "special" wash that had been designated a riparian area in the early 90s. As a result of this designation, nothing man-made was allowed within 50 feet of the wash. SAY WHAT?! Every single property along this wash in our area has structures, in some cases, HOUSES, within 50 feet of the wash. Every. Single. One.

But, the county decided to pick on us. We wouldn't even be allowed to build inadequate gardening fences at all. I asked and was told that gardening was fine in this riparian area, provided we didn't remove any of the native brush or trees and didn't fence it. In other words, we could plant trees and that's about it. No gardens, no aquaponics, no chicken coop, no outdoor kitchen, no greenhouse, no shed.


The Shed

That's right. The shed was also an issue. Because it was within the erosion hazard setback, we had several choices. We could elevate it two feet off the ground, cut holes in the floor and sides for "flood vents", or move it. That summer, we had two and a half inches of rain in one hour. The shed had not flooded even though it was only sitting on 8x16" blocks. In fact, it had been perfectly situated to avoid being flooded. The only other place we could move it to had been ankle-deep in water during the big rain.

We debated about elevating it, but by this time we were extremely discouraged (and angry) about not being able to use our own property the way we bought it to use. We decided there was no point in staying on land that couldn't be "homesteaded" and made initial plans to leave. In the meantime, we had to wrap up all this stupid zoning crap. When I called the civil engineer to come do the final inspection on the pad so he could write the letter clearing up that issue, he wanted to also be able to tell them the shed was gone. Suddenly, we were under pressure to get rid of it and fast.

We posted it on craigslist, and eventually managed to sell it for two-thirds of what we'd just paid for it a few months before. To empty it out, as well as raise the money to pay the excavators, we had to sell a lot of our stuff - a good portion of my sweetie's tool collection, for one. When you're selling in a hurry, you don't get good prices. Brokering the shed deal was a nightmare, but it was a sad relief to see it get loaded up on the tow truck (again) and leave the property. Inside were the two 275 gallon water tanks we'd purchased for rainwater harvesting; we sold them to the same guy that bought the shed.


Could we have fought this?

Some people have not understood why we didn't fight this. We considered it but it would have been a losing battle. We had hired the general contractor and the civil engineer, both of whom talked to all the officials involved at length. They would not budge on anything required of us, even though there are numerous people in this area also in clear violation of the codes and even former owners of this property. In fact, the contractor felt so bad about our situation she didn't even charge us for her services.

Could we have sued the realtor for doing such a crappy job? Why didn't he do better research or help us to find out these issues? Maybe we could have sued, but we would likely have lost and spent every last penny on court costs. This is a conservative state (as you may have figured out from the recent news) with conservative courts.

What about the title company? Shouldn't they have disclosed at least the code violation? Alas, we found out that their "due diligence" covers only the title search. They do not search any other records. We were screwed there, too.

Could we have fought the county? Again, maybe, but we would have probably lost. And we didn't have the funds. This is a very pro-developer state where the individual Joe Shmoe has little power. Consider the cost for them to go after us in the first place. They did not receive one penny from us and they have lost money directly and indirectly as a result of their actions.

Our cash went to the civil engineer and the excavator. The county received no sales tax on the used porch materials, shed, and tools we had to sell, plus those people didn't have to go buy any new materials they might have purchased (and paid sales tax on). In fact, because I filed for an adjustment of our property value, they will now collect less property taxes from us. The accessed value of the porch was over $10,000!


What did this cost us?

Money. We figure in direct and indirect costs, we lost tens of thousands of dollars as a result of this baloney.

Time. We spent months dealing with the bureaucracy and getting rid of our belongings (including the porch) that could have been spent developing a better homestead.

Effort. The physical effort to remove the porch was intense, although the sledgehammer therapy had some benefits.

Trust. This was yet another lesson in a series of lessons we've gotten that you just can't trust a lot of people. (The "urban homesteading" community sure found this out with the Dervaes action!) People who seem to have your best interests at heart often do not. We learned we have to look out for ourselves, especially in any business transaction. This cynicism eats away at us, but we don't want to be screwed again.

Friends. I had several friends who apparently decided they did not want to deal with my anger, frustration, and depression during this summer and fall. To those that were there for me, thank you for not pulling your support when I needed it most.

Dreams. The biggest loss was that of our dreams. We are so beaten and battered now, driven away from our dreams once again by bureaucratic nonsense, that we don't even know what to strive for next. This is where the heartbreak comes in for me from reading all these blogs where people share their pictures and successes as urban homesteaders. We want to be there with you but have almost given up all hope of that ever happening for us.


I suppose this just became a 4-part series as I do not have the energy after writing all this to talk about our future plans and small hopes to still eventually do what we really want to be doing. I know this post was probably incredibly draining to read, but trust me when I say, it was far more draining to live.

The Years In Between Homesteading Efforts

This post picks up the story again after we left our land and life off the grid. We felt broken after running into the bureaucratic wall and decided to move north. We spent a year in Colorado in a rental house. While we did not garden there, we were required, as renters, to maintain the yard. To avoid the disposal or hauling costs of dealing with massive amounts of deciduous leaves in the fall, I started a compost pile. I cannot say we really did much else initially that would qualify us as "urban homesteaders."

However, I did spend the year reading and learning about living more frugally. If you put all the books I checked out of the library in a stack, it would probably have been at least four or five feet high. I checked out every book I could find on frugal living, being a cheapskate, saving money, being thrifty, doing without, making it myself, and so on, and then I hit up the Inter-Library Loan system for more. After a few months, I was just skimming new books because I'd read all the tips before and could only find a few new ones in each book.

These books led me to cutting our expenses everywhere possible. I turned the heat down to 55 degrees while my sweetie was at work during the day and down another ten degrees at night. We were very conservative with our water use. We cut out cable TV, a luxury we'd permitted ourselves when we moved after the disappointment of leaving the land. I cancelled our trash pick-up service and reduced our garbage output to a single kitchen trashbag per month; we drove that out to the transfer station ourselves, along with all of our recycling and any tree trimmings for the city compost and mulch program. Through our efforts to save money, we lowered our environmental impact.

We got healthier, too, when I started thinking outside the box about ways to save money. Taking care of ourselves physically was one way to reduce medical and health costs, both in the short term and in the long run. Following Dr. McDougall's program went a long ways towards improving our health. I shopped the farmers markets for fresh, local produce and cooked almost everything from scratch. Some of what we practiced definitely fit into the lifestyle of an urban homesteader, even though we did not grow our own food.


From there we moved back to Arizona. After fixing up an old 1917 house, I worked on the yard. I removed the dead rose bushes and transplanted almost a dozen live ones to my mother-in-law's house. (I hate roses and she loves them.) We planted a small vegetable garden that was totally unsuccessful. The soil drained the water too quickly and the sun baked the plot. However, we did enjoy eating fresh peaches from a large, old tree in the back yard and shared chiltepin peppers with friends. Life moved on and so did we.


Our next move, also within the state, found us in a unique earth-bermed house. We had incredibly low energy bills thanks to the added insulation and even had some tropical plants in a protected courtyard. However, the gardening bug had not bitten and we spent our time on other pursuits, such as making arts and crafts for sale (created with predominantly used and salvaged materials), and learning how to make sushi. Sadly, the nearest farmers market was very inconvenient to get to so I rarely went there for our produce.


When we tired of being in the rat race in the big city and tired of the conservative attitudes in Arizona, we decided to head north once again, this time to Oregon. I have loved Oregon since spending a summer there with friends when I was a teenager. I loved it again when we moved there. We rented an apartment with a beautiful view overlooking a tiny wooded copse but didn't try to do any gardening on the tiny little balcony. We spent a lot of time walking and biking along the Willamette River, and actually started to bike more than drive while we were there.

As sometimes happens, though, the bloom can fade when you get to know your love a little better. Winter in Oregon sucked, big time. For months, the sky was covered with an oppressive dull gray blanket of clouds. It drizzled all the time and the sun only peeked out for, I think it was, three or four days all winter. It also snowed multiple times, the first time in a dozen years there. Now, in southern Arizona, snow is a delight. It falls, it's pretty, and then it evaporates that afternoon or the next day. In Oregon, it snowed, and then it rained, turning it all into a big slushy muddy mess. This froze overnight into dangerous ice which was again rained on. This cycle continued for days on end and we soon got fed up with wiping the mud off the dog's paws.

The lack of sunlight, too, was quite an ordeal for us desert folks. I had successfully quit drinking coffee in September but took it up again mid-winter as a way to combat the blues I was suffering. We had looked into settling in Oregon but decided the winter weather was too dreary to contemplate living there forever.


So, it was back to Arizona for us. We rented a house in Tucson, pulling out of Oregon on a brilliant sunny day and arriving in Tucson on a stormy rainy one. How's that for irony? I suppose it shouldn't have been a surprise considering we arrived on April 1st.

We spent a couple of uneventful years here before I started reading blogs and renewing my interest in living an environmentally responsible life. I started my own blog in 2007. If you are new here, feel free to explore some of the things I've posted about in the past, using the tags on the left. I've written about many components of homesteading in the city, such as our gardening efforts and compost, our successes in water conservation, lowering our energy use, bicycling for transportation, and converting to the use of more manual tools around the house, workshop, and yard. On the food front, I volunteered with the local CSA for three years, took up canning, cooked with my solar oven extensively, and learned to make my own liqueurs and vinegars.

We both read lots of homesteading blogs and talked for several years about finding our own place to do this whole-heartedly. Last year, we finally found the perfect place in the price range we could afford, bought it, and moved our houseful of belongings, garden, and a ton (that's 2,000 pounds!) of compost.

Then we found out it wasn't quite so perfect after all, but that's a story for Part III tomorrow.

Memories of Homesteading

The tremendous pulling together of people that call themselves "urban homesteaders" to resist the trademarking of this lifestyle by a single family has resulted in my exposure to many new bloggers and folks interested in creating a sustainable and self-sufficient homestead. In some ways, this has been wonderful; in others, it has been heartbreaking for me personally.

Let me explain, especially since a few people unfamiliar with my blog may be reading here. I'm going to have to back up a bit to give you the full perspective. While living at home in my youth, I fondly remember a big garden out in the back. At times, I think up to 1/4 acre was cultivated with just about everything that would grow in the area. There were fruit trees, such as peaches, apple, pear, and apricot. There were pecan and almond trees. There was a small trellis of Concord grapes, which my mother used to make the most delicious homemade grape jelly imaginable. There were so many strawberries, we actually tired of them by the end of the season. Months later, though, we always enjoyed the tasty strawberry jam on our morning toast.

The vegetable garden produced quite a lot of what went on the dinner table: summer squashes (zucchini & yellow crookneck), tomatoes (cherry, plum, big tasty ones), peppers (jalapenos and green chiles), onions, greens (spinach, collards, mustard greens & more), cucumbers, winter squash (pumpkins and banana squash), and more that I can no longer remember. We ate them fresh out of the garden, prepared for the table, or however my mother preserved them. If you've only known store-bought ketchup, you haven't really lived. She made all sorts of pickles. The freezer was always crammed full with pumpkin pies made with either pumpkins or banana squash; we could not tell the difference. Roasted green chiles, and I think jalapenos, could always be found in the freezer, too.

We did not go so far as to have livestock. I'm not sure why, but my guess would be that my father really didn't want that much additional work. It also would have been difficult to manage with the long summer vacations we took, hauling a tiny little trailer behind the station wagon. I don't remember knowing anyone who owned chickens, actually, but I do vividly remember when my folks bought half a cow. The cuts filled up the full-size freezer. The purchase proved to be a poor choice in the end as my mother had no idea how to cook the more expensive cuts.

When I left home for college, that was the end of the delicious food from the garden and preserves from the cupboard. I was too busy with classes to even consider doing any of that myself and, quite honestly, I've never really enjoyed gardening. I became a regular consumer, buying from grocery stores. I still cooked from scratch as cooking and baking is something I have always loved to do.


Years later, I found and married my sweetheart. In the early years of our marriage, we bought 40 acres of somewhat remote, undeveloped land. There was nothing on the property other than a road going around two edges for access to neighboring land. No water, no power, no phone. Our plan was to build a straw bale home with solar power, graywater use, composting toilets, and so on. We cleared, by hand, a quarter-mile driveway to a spot where we could park a 25 foot RV that would be our temporary home while building the house ourselves. We gradually acquired the entire collection of Mother Earth News magazines and read them voraciously.

Things did not always go smoothly on our homestead. After paying quite a lot of money to have a well dug, praying the water would not be too deep for our solar-powered pump, we discovered finding the right kind of pipe for the pump was not easy. We ended up at an irrigation supply store 100 miles away. We were relieved when we dropped it all down into the well and it worked. Well, except for a leak where the pipe was connected to the pump.

We set about pulling everything back up to fix the leak. Now, keep in mind that 180 feet of pipe (flexible), 180 feet of thick electrical cable, and the well pump was heavy. In the process of hauling it up, the safety rope snapped and some of the cable fell, wedging itself firmly between the pump and the big well pipe. It took three long nerve-wracking days of fishing with a long rope and hooks to snag the cable, pull it free, and pull up the pump.

Once that was fixed, we had running well water when the sun shone on the two small solar panels. We'd fill the water tank in the RV and use the water sparingly. We had power in the RV, thanks to the generator and using the solar panels and a trickle charger to keep the batteries charged. We could run lights and low-power items off the battery but needed the generator for air conditioning (in the 100+ degree summers). We had phone service, kind of. This was in the early days of cellphones when they were big bulky things. Due to the surrounding mountains, the only way to get a signal was to stand on the roof of the pick-up truck's cab. Needless to say, we didn't use it much. (And, no, we had no Internet service either. Or TV.)

We knew we were capable of building our own house, but we didn't have much money. We quickly learned that trying to pay as you went meant everything happened very slowly. While working on a rock and cement outbuilding, we also began working on providing some of our own food. A nice chicken coop housed four chickens which produced plenty of eggs. My compost pile yielded rich soil in just a month's time thanks to inputs (outputs?) from the chickens and boxes of discarded produce I picked up from the grocery store.

I also gleaned the food that was still edible from the discarded produce. It was time-consuming but there was a lot in there that could be eaten, especially if one didn't mind cutting out a few bad spots on the apples and pears, rinsing the slimy radish leaves off to salvage the good radishes in the bunch, picking out the good cilantro leaves from a wilted bunch, and so on. I made a lot of fruit compote, dried herb and celery leaves, and we ate a lot, I mean A LOT, of radishes. I figured 10-25% of each haul was edible for humans, another 25-40% could go to the chickens, and the rest went into the compost.

I finally started digging a plot for our garden. The soil there was hard and rocky. I was naive and didn't know that one should always wear firm-soled boots for shoveling and only push on the shovel with the ball of one's foot. I wore my tennies and often pushed (stomped, even) down on the shovel with my insteps. Two weeks of that led to years of pain and medical treatment for plantar fasciitis. (I've written about that journey here.)

We ended up growing lettuce in a big metal tub - the inside spin basket from a broken washing machine we salvaged from a nearby abandoned survivalist camp. (We found old literature there that indicated they were another sect like the Branch Davidians that were involved in the Waco siege. Thankfully, this place had obviously been abandoned for years, though.) Sadly, with all the other tasks on our list of things to do, we never did get a garden put in the ground there.

After two and a half years, we still were living in the RV. We had a small fenced yard around it, a 10x12' shed holding most of our belongings, the small rock/cement/block building we'd finished where we stored food (in barrels to protect from the mice) and supplies, the chicken coop, compost pile, and the lettuce garden. We'd also salvaged a 250 gallon metal water tank from the camp, patched the bullet hole in it, and used it for water storage. The plan was for this to eventually hold harvested rainwater.

One task that took a fair amount of time away from planning and building was dealing with the refrigerator. The refrigerator in the RV died so for a while we had to live out of an ice chest. We looked into replacing the RV fridge but the cost would have been over $1,200. We decided instead to order a compressor for around $700 and build a chest refrigerator ourselves. We built the box out of heavy plywood, filled it with six inches of foam insulation, and lined it with Formica for easy cleaning. The usable space was 8 cubic feet and there was no freezer section.

Due to the construction, the lid to this baby weighed over 30 pounds. That was a wee bit heavy to hold up while rummaging around for dinner, so we built a counterweight system. We had built a little gazebo cover over the fridge since it had to sit outside and the hot sun shining on it would have made it work harder. We mounted a pulley on the beam overhead and used a gallon jug filled with sand and water as a counterweight. Using a gate hook, we could latch the lid overhead to keep it out of the way while inside the fridge.

How did we power it? We put the well's solar panels on a wheeled cart so we could move them between the well and the fridge. With a bank of deep cell marine batteries, we could charge them up for the fridge and then wheel the solar panels back up to the well to pump water as needed.

In case those who have successfully given up your refrigerators wonder why we didn't just live without one, remember that we lived in the desert with two months of temperatures 100 degrees or higher. It got very hot inside the RV anytime I was away because I couldn't leave the generator running, so food would have spoiled in an afternoon. (And no, I never left our dogs in the hot RV either! In fact, we frequently spent hot summer days hanging out at my mother-in-law's house 20 miles away.)

All of our plans came to an abrupt halt when we drove the 100 miles to see the state Department of Environmental Quality office about getting permits for our graywater system plans and composting toilet. Arizona was not friendly towards alternative systems at that time and we were informed we would have to install a septic system, at great expense in our rocky ground, even if we would never use it. In addition, getting the permits approved for graywater would take six months (at best) to two years (more likely).

We went home devastated by the news and finally decided that we just couldn't hang in there that much longer. We were worn out, broke, and I was still having a lot of pain with my feet. We sold the fridge to our neighbors (who were living out of an ice chest occasionally emptied by their dogs); gave them the water tank, compost and the chickens; sold the composting toilet to my sibling (who is still using it); sold the RV; and put the land on the market. We were out of the homesteading business and back into a rental house while we regrouped and reconsidered our dreams.


Tune in later for Part II which will talk about what happened after leaving the land. Part III will then review the past year of trying to homestead again and talk about where we go from here.

Mistakes Were Made...but not by me!

This is the title of a book I've begun to read by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. I haven't gotten very far into it yet, but you can read the link I supplied for a little more information. The book discusses cognitive dissonance and self-justification, and can help one understand seemingly completely irrational behavior and the inability of most people to admit when they've made a mistake.

Talking about mistakes, Crunchy Chicken pointed out a big one made by (what used to be?*) a big player in the sustainable gardening movement. Read the comments, follow the links, and use a blog search engine to find posts about it. (Click "Search" to refresh the search. New posts are going up frequently!) I think these folks will find that they made a pretty big mistake. The backlash online is happening fast and furious. Kinda makes me want to get myself comfy in a chair and read through my book!

*By the time this is all over...

Being Sick - Are You Prepared?

I thought we were pretty well-prepared for emergencies: a little extra food in the pantry, some stored water, hand-crank flashlights and radio, solar oven and rocket stove for cooking, camping toilet, and so on. We don't take many OTC drugs, but I have a few bought on sale, with coupons, just in case - ibuprofen, some cough syrup, flu and cold medicine. You know, just the basics. I've also got books on natural and herbal remedies but haven't got the supplies on hand to make most of those.

My sweetie gets sick more often than I do because he is exposed to more people through his workplace. My exposure to people is generally limited to retail establishments (no, I don't spend all my time shopping) but I am very careful to always use the hand wipes now supplied by most stores to clean my hands and the bar on the grocery cart. In other locations without carts, I clean my hands once I return to my vehicle. It took a while, but I also successfully learned to avoid touching my face, especially my eyes, nose, or mouth, before washing my hands when out in public.

These habits have done a remarkable job of keeping me well for years. Being around someone who had a really bad cold, though, this year did me in and I finally succumbed. This was not an emergency and should not have been too difficult to deal with. Rest, keeping hydrated, and eating healthy food should have taken care of it.

The thing about emergencies, though, is that they are not predictable. How could I have known that when I finally did get sick, it would be at the same time the vehicle got a serious oil leak and was undriveable, that we'd have a broken pipe due to record cold temperatures and I'd be without water for 48 hours (and then laundry ability for another week), and that my husband would also be sick at the same time?

Theoretically, this is what emergency preps are supposed to address. Well, I found out ours were lacking. I've written about how we've successfully made it through a weekend with our water, electricity, and gas turned off (see posts under emergencies tag), so I knew we were perfectly capable of dealing with the lack of water. We have bikes and feet so dealing with no vehicle isn't the end of the world, although we've not been riding at our new home nearly as much as we did in town.

What I didn't take into account, however, is that being sick saps ALL your energy. I wasn't sick yet when the water was first turned off, but found I'd not thought about the use of stored water, either. We put a bit of bleach in the bottles to prevent algae from growing. Bleach tastes nasty! It's easy to deal with; just open the container and let it sit 24 to 48 hours - the chlorine will evaporate out. I had to scramble to find water bottles from the vehicle and packs for us to make it through this period, though.

With the lack of water impacting food preparation - not enough to wash many vegs or dishes - I turned towards my frozen food and easy meals off the shelf. Even though we got our water back relatively quickly, I was now sick and my sweetie had not recovered yet either. The need for easy food continued but my supplies were running low. Normally, if we were faced with this situation of both feeling like crap and not having easy food on hand, I'd run to the store for some frozen or prepared food. That wasn't an option with no car and no energy to bike.

I know, I know. You're thinking how hard could it be to boil water for pasta or cook some rice or something. Think back to the last time you were really sick. You simply don't have the energy to lift a pot of water for pasta or even measure out the rice. And the fuzzy brain that comes with illness doesn't help either. What we really needed was someone to go run errands for us, take care of us a little. Sadly, though, we don't know any of our neighbors that well here and we're now 25 miles out of town so it's hard to ask friends down there to come all the way up to drop stuff off (and risk getting sick).

Thanks to the whole not being able to think clearly issue, too, I forgot about two things that would have helped me get through the worst part of the cold faster - my neti pot and my steamer. I'm doing those now because I'm still not over this, but starting it a week ago probably would have helped a bit.

What have I learned from all this? I've learned I need to do some organizing and additional preparation for this possibility in the future. Rather than telling myself that my backpacker sample packs of dehydrated vegetables and beans will get me through any emergency, I need to take the time to assemble some of them into soup packs, and then store them in a convenient and accessible place in the pantry. I need to go ahead and stock some convenience foods we normally try to avoid, such as instant rice, ramen (or any quick-cooking) noodles, canned soups, and maybe more frozen food. I need to keep at least one large bottle of water in the house filled with fresh water, changing it regularly, so there is always something to drink.

I also need to finish organizing my medicine cabinet. I just tossed what I had on the shelves months ago and never finished organizing it. Grouping the items for colds together, including the neti pot, would have helped me see what we had. I need to stay on top of expiration dates (only loosely followed) and restock as necessary, and look into what natural and herbal remedies I could have on hand. Shelf-stability is obviously important since we don't get sick all that often.

And, of course, I need to get back in the habit of biking and walking frequently so we're able to deal better without a vehicle, although being sick would still put a real crimp on that. I am getting to know the neighbors better and have gotten a few phone numbers recently. I hope to network more in my community so that I have people to call on in a similar emergency.

Have you ever gotten to test your emergency preparations when sick? What worked and what didn't?

Oh, that reminds me of one additional thing on the list: replace the camping toilet. A leaking toilet when you have no running water and you are sick is NOT fun...

Lemon Dessert Scramble?

When your spouse suggests you call your latest attempt at a pretty dessert a “scramble,” it is time to accept that making attractive desserts is simply not your forte. Sticking to making tasty and easy desserts that don't have to look nice - such as chocolate chunk cookies, pudding, and ice cream - might be advisable. Quit trying to make anything that involves frosting.

I used to be able to make a decent cake. Not a particularly beautiful one, but one that could be taken to a potluck without embarrassment. I got creative one Valentine's Day and made a heart-shaped cake by baking half the batter in a square pan and half in a round pan. After cutting the round part in half and turning the square part a bit so it was now a diamond, the two half circles went on either side at the top of the diamond. Voila! A heart that looked presentable once the whole assemblage was frosted.

In past years' efforts to declutter the kitchen, I gave away my spring form pans. I used them very rarely as I'm fairly lazy when it comes to cakes and generally just frost a single layer baked in a 13 x 9" pan. On the few occasions when I wanted a layer cake, I cut the 13 x 9" cake in half and stacked the halves. Not elegant, but fine for home consumption.

That was my plan today, but with some additional twists to make the cake more special. Bryanna Clark Grogan has a scrumptious looking vegan recipe for a lemon cake with lemon curd filling and a "buttercream" frosting. I made my cake from a mix, but made the filling and frosting from scratch. I baked the cake in a 13 x 9" pan with the plan to cut it in half for a layer cake of sorts, but then I was going to cut each half horizontally to fill with the lemon curd.

Yeah, right. This worked out even worse than the ugly Christmas sugar cookies. The first problem was the cake did not come out of the pan cleanly. We consulted and decided it might still be okay if I just kind of flipped the one side over so the bottoms were in the middle together. It didn't work. The cake crumbled and the top stuck to the baking sheet I had flipped it over onto.



It was pretty much a complete disaster but I tried to smear frosting on the sides anyway and put dollops of frosting on the top so the middle pieces would still get a little of it. The cake continued to crumble as I worked and, on the cut side, the frosting simply rolled right off. I did the best I could with the mess and then lifted up a "piece" for each of us.

It tasted okay but overall was disappointing. The mess in the kitchen was disproportionate to the resulting dessert. I hate wasting all that time and effort to make something that doesn't turn out. Next time I'll just make a lemon pudding cake in a quarter of the time (with a third of the dirty dishes) and we'll be happy with a messy and tasty cake.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Trying to Tame a Painful Cough

My sweetie is a nice, generous, sharing kind of guy. What's his is mine.

In other words, I now have his cold. Oh, joy. Lovely. Thanks ever so much, honey.

For the past two days I have been racked by painful coughing. Dry, unproductive coughs that feel like someone is raking a rough wood rasp across the inside of my throat. My voice is hoarse and actually gone if I try to speak in a high register. In my normal register, it breaks and sounds awful but, strangely, seems to work fine in a deep register. Whatever....in any case my throat hurts.

I have been sucking on lozenges all day and downing cup after cup of "Throat Coat" tea. Both help quite a bit, but only while I'm consuming them. Once they're gone, I'm right back to coughing.

I hate cough syrups and have mixed feelings about whether one should really try to totally tamp down the body's response to illness. Some things I've read indicate that suppressing cold symptoms just makes the cold last longer. The taste of commercial cough syrups is also pretty awful and after a night of terrible heartburn when I tried a night-time cold syrup, I'm a bit leery of taking anything else.

This morning, I remembered a remedy I'd read about and tried in the past. What I like about this "cough syrup" is that almost everyone will have the ingredients - onion and sugar - to make it in their pantry. And it actually works for me as well as, or better than, the chemical-laden options from the pharmacy.



Simply dice an onion and toss it with sugar to coat (generously). Pile this into a sieve and place over a container. Leave it for a few hours.



When you return, sweetened onion juice will have dripped through to the container below. Take a spoonful just like you would regular cough syrup. It doesn't taste great but it doesn't taste as bad as you might expect, either.

I'm still coughing a bit but at least the onion syrup is a change of pace from the lozenges and tea. Now if I could just get someone to hand-deliver some homemade chicken noodle soup (or a vegan version of it), I'd be a happy camper. Not having a working vehicle has been a challenge, especially since I'm running low on really easy-to-make meal ideas. Cooking when sick has never been something I enjoy, especially the washing up part.

Yes, I know I'm whining. I hate being sick!

One Down*, Two To Go...

*Well, one down ... sort of. My sweetie is still quite ill but managed to identify the several places where the cold temperatures caused pipes to burst, went to the hardware store, capped the pipes, and got the water turned back on. So, technically the leaks are not really repaired yet BUT we do have running water finally and he'll hopefully feel up to the repairs tomorrow.

We still need to get him well and figure out where the oil is leaking from in the vehicle. Hopefully the second one will be a simple repair rather than one of those really awful (read: expensive) repairs. The vehicle is old for this day and age - 12 years - but still runs relatively well and serves our needs adequately. My sweetie is a little older than that, but also still runs relatively well, and serves my needs more than adequately. His repairs won't be expensive; he just needs the chance to rest and heal.

I surveyed our water containers once the tap was running again and determined that we used a total of 8 (that's E-I-G-H-T) gallons of water in the past 48 hours....for two adults and two large dogs. Granted, I did no laundry but we stayed hydrated, cooked, washed dishes, and kept ourselves clean. I think that's pretty remarkable myself. Not that I'd want to live that way all the time, but it is doable if necessary.

It Comes in Threes

I'm sure hoping the old adage about trouble coming in threes is true. We've got no running water. When I headed out to get some of the portapottie tank fluid (that helps break down the solids), luckily I stopped to talk to the postman....after which I discovered my vehicle was leaking something in copious quantities. I got home okay but can't head back out until that's repaired. My sweetie came home from work early but not because he got the time off due to yesterday's long hours. Nope. He's sick. He was already getting sick before spending hours in the cold last night and now he is burning up.

Please keep the noise down so he can get some sleep and recover. I'm hoping to at least get running water back tomorrow afternoon and that the vehicle is an easy fix, but this depends on whether one afternoon and night's good sleep will get him over the hump. Sssssshhhhh!

Emergency Preps in the Office

As I mentioned in my post last night about not having water, my sweetie was tied up late at work yesterday. For a while, it looked like he might even have to spend the night. Luckily things finally got fixed and he made it home by about 10 pm, cold and exhausted.

As he was unwinding from working a 13 hour day with barely enough time to eat lunch, he mentioned that he would have been okay if he had needed to stay. He would not have been particularly comfortable, but his office had heat, thank goodness. Back from his days of bicycling into the office - even during the rainy season, he has clothes there so he could have changed. I think there's even a shower in the bathroom and he has a couple of towels available.

With the space blanket he keeps in his desk, he could have slept there using a towel for a pillow. It would not have been fun, but it would have been possible and that's what one needs to look for in dealing with emergencies.

He keeps a gallon jug of water in his office all the time so he would have had water available if pipes burst and he lost water to the building. (Pipes were bursting all over town yesterday and probably more did last night.) He keeps a few tea bags on hand and this morning he scoured the pantry for snacks he could take to keep in his desk. I'm sure he'll snack on some of the popcorn and Clif bars he ended up taking with him, but as his emergency supply runs low, he can just replace it with new goodies. I sent a couple of bottles of Gatorade with him today, as well.

I don't know whether his office has first aid supplies but he keeps a basic first aid kit in his pack. There are also urgent care centers and a hospital close enough to deal with major injuries. Considering how much ice is probably on the roads this morning from broken and spraying water pipes, I'll bet those places will be busy today. Under normal conditions, Tucson doesn't get much ice on the roads except possibly on the bridges so I doubt any steps were taken to deal with it. Plus, the location of the icy patches would be random. It's going to be another cold day here so that ice is unlikely to melt. Let's hope folks take it easy on the roads today, especially with all the out of town visitors here for the annual Gem Show.

It doesn't take much to be prepared for an unexpected night spent in your office if you are stranded by the weather or by work emergencies. Take a look in yours today and see whether you have a little extra drawer space in the desk or file cabinet to stash a few supplies.

No Water, No Problem

While Arizona has not been hit by blizzard conditions experienced by other parts of the country, we have had record low temperatures. At 1:45 am, when Angel insisted that she absolutely had to go outside, it was 11 degrees. This morning, it was still in the teens when I headed out to the laundromat with multiple loads of laundry; I'd given up hope that it would warm up enough that I could do laundry at home. (It didn't get above freezing until quite late in the day.)

Unfortunately, when I came home, it was to find water pouring out of a pipe on the side of the house. I called my sweetie who had me turn off all the water to the house. I was able to tell him where the burst pipe was and he sent me off to the hardware store with a list of parts to get, along with additional pipe insulation. There were already dozens of others in the store and the pipe insulation was flying out the door. I got what I needed shortly before their stocks ran out, and the employee who helped me gather the other supplies told me the big box hardware stores were calling everywhere to see who had insulation left. Evidently lots of people in Tucson have broken water pipes.

Our hope was that my sweetie could make it home early to repair our pipes but freeze-related problems at work not only prevented his early departure but are keeping him there late. With an early morning meeting, plus the prediction of another night of hard freezing, he can't miss work tomorrow either. That means we will be without water until tomorrow night or, more likely, Saturday.

Am I in a panic at the prospect of no water for a day or two? Actually no. This is what emergency preparations are for. We have several 5 gallon water bottles - full, of course - that we kept from when we bought bottled water in town (because Tucson's water tastes vile to me). That's plenty for drinking and food preparation, and cleaning up.

I stopped by our storage unit on my way home from the hardware store and picked up our camping portapottie and another 5 gallon jug. I asked a neighbor who did have running water if I could fill up the jug from her hose. That water, not clean enough for drinking, will be used in the portapottie. Rather than fill it up quickly with bodily fluids, I set up a portaloo bucket with sawdust and peat moss. This will be used for urination as it can safely be added to a compost pile. The other portapottie, the one with water and a finite tank capacity, will be reserved for solids.

For cleansing our hands, I have a bowl of water in the bathroom sink with a splash of bleach in it. Washing up in the morning will be with some water warmed on the stove and a washcloth. Since my sweetie is fighting a cold, I filled two small separate water bottles for use in brushing our teeth. For washing dishes, I've got some cold water in a tub that I've been using to rinse all the dirty dishes. Tonight after dinner, I'll heat some water on the stove and quickly wash all these dishes, using a squirt bottle full of water to rinse them. Rather than try to rinse vegetables without running water tonight, I'm planning on just heating up some food from the freezer to make life easier.

It's inconvenient not to have running water but it's not really all that bad. And I'm very grateful to still have natural gas coming into the house for heat - about 14,000 people in Tucson are without heat until next week! I also have electricity still, so I am able to be online, have light to read, and enjoy my evening. We could make do without those, too, but keeping warm would be more of a challenge.