five acres in florida

friday was a big day after all... not only did i have my interview at the birth center, in which they offered me the job by telling me i'm "the one," but we ended up buying a bigger place than the one we planned on for the same amount of money! thank you, lake city. it's not quite as bright inside as the original pick but it's a 4/2 with a few hundred extra square feet and lots more closet and cabinet space, so the trade-off was ok in the end.

working backwards from furthest to soonest:

on monday i have to go into work and tell them that i am moving and can no longer work full-time. i have decided if they are willing to let me be part-time i will stay (2 days a week commuting), so it will be up to them what happens. it's not going to be a fun or pleasant conversation, but it has to be done. there will be tears on both sides.

also on monday, i meet with a potential nanny just in case i need one. she sounds good so far and has an 18-month old for rowan to hang out with, which is nice. i hope i don't need her; i think between my mom and my best friend we will be covered if i do end up working.

on friday i will be going to buy our new home! i'm so excited, but trying to stay calm and focused and really ponder what it will mean to leave gainesville, so that i don't get overemotional after the fact. mental preparation is important, here.

tomorrow i go for an interview with the birth center to be their receptionist two days a week. even though the pay is very little and it will be 35-mile commute one way, i would love to work for them. it sounded like they really want me, too, but i will only be able to accept if things don't work out with my current job to stay part-time. i'm not sure what i hope happens--staying at my job will be more money (and benefits) but working for the BCOG will be really fulfilling, i think.

in the meantime, we've been planning our first steps while the house is being built. we need to get fencing up, a workshop built, and acquire some animals. pretty straightforward, though finding sheep has not been easy. i still don't know if we have a source for the florida native breed that matt wants to get.

i'm also going to have a truckload of flowers to transplant to the new yard, since i am not wasting all the effort i put into growing them by leaving them to rot! i just hope they survive the move. we have a small apple tree and a rose tree that i cannot bear to leave behind... i have to say, i will really miss the 24/7 access to the prairie that i have now. it's beautiful out there this time of year.

anyway, that's the agenda for now. i think we found a family friend to dig our water well at a dramatically reduced rate, which is lucky. every $ we save is one more that can go towards the rest of the necessities...

i will admit i'm a little bit of a "conspiracy theorist" (though i think that term is outdated and misleading), but sometimes reality just gets too weird to explain...

in the last week, there have been FIVE major disasters in the asian pacific, causing massive amounts of death:
typhoon in the phillipines
earthquake in indonesia
tsunami in samoa
flooding in india
typhoon in the phillipines

i don't know what i think about climate change--what is causing it, whether we can stop it, if it means hot or cold temperatures--but something is seriously wrong here. i have read some pretty convincing stuff that posits the cause is that we have a rogue planet traveling in our vicinty which is creating magnetic confusion for the earth (ie, the planet is vying with the sun for our magnetic/gravitational allegiance) and will shortly be the cause of a pole shift... in this process, supposedly, the inside of the earth is what is heating up due to friction between the tectonic plates and the mantle/core. i have no idea whether this is true and i'm certainly not going to share my source--you'd think i was nuts--but it is an intriguing explanation, in my opinion.

anyway the point is, supposedly the weather will get increasingly whacked and things like this, most especially massive earthquakes and resultant tsunamis, will become a regular occurrence. so i'm keeping my eye on this. if the sun ever rises in the west, or we have 3 days of day or night, you can bet i will bunkered down in a trench far from florida's shores!

incidentally, check out the USGS data on earthquakes and you will find an alarming exponential increase in earthquakes over the last few years vs. the rest of the century. (and i have to add this is the data they publish... not necessarily the full story...)

as i read over the first two posts, i felt i should give a little more background on our situation, since in fact we aren't making as drastic a change ("city" to "country") as it may appear on first glance. yes, we live in a suburban college town, but we've done a decent amount with our .33 acres.

two seasons ago matt dug out a 20x20ish plot in our backyard to put in a garden. and when i say 'dug out' i mean he removed 18 inches of sandy soil and replaced it with an unbeatable mix of composted horse manure and topsoil. that year we grew the biggest lettuce i have ever seen in my life, plus enough sweet potatoes to strangle a house, among other things. the next year matt doubled our garden size to about 850sqft. for never having grown anything before, his thumb is neon green.

next he decided he wanted to try raising rabbits, which i was totally opposed to. being vegan for 7 years (though i am no longer), the thought of bunnies being murdered on my property was a little too much to handle... i tried to compromise on chickens but he wasn't having it. so we got 4 rabbits (new zealand and californians) and he successfully bred them and has "harvested" several of the offspring the past few months. apparently they are really tasty, but for now i don't want to know.

we also co-own a dairy cow living on my sister's 1.5 acres, so fresh milk is available and they have generously supplied us with as many eggs as we can eat (most of the time) also. so really, moving onto more land will just mean upgrading our current setup and intensifying it in terms of time and resource commitment. e.g.:
1) bigger gardens, maybe a full acre
2) fruit trees
3) bees--we know an agricultural entomologist who works with bees in the area
4) goats and sheep
5) chickens of our own
6) cultivation of the wild blackberries and passion fruit that grow rampant in the area

i'm really looking forward to brewing beer and wine, so at some point we will have to work on hops... but that is a while away. we'll probably do it on purchased supplies until then, though we have made our own wild blackberry wine in the past with success.

matt has been a master canner over the last year also, canning store-bought and home-grown fruits and veggies as well as chicken and beef stock to the point where we have no place to put it! and we got a chest freezer also, for storing the fruits of the animals, so to speak.

the biggest change will be my taking on the role of genuine homemaker; i have always been at least 50% of our income working in an office. i cannot wait to devote my time to things i care about and to be able to cease my zombifying "career" for a life of practicality.

so it's not a wild leap of faith to think we can make it on a farm--we started small changes living in town and will be expanding on them as we move away. my point is that it's possible to 'homestead' even if you don't have the amount of land you want... start small and you'll be surprised what you can do. just look at path to freedom...

so what led to our sudden change of fortune, allowing us to move to the country? in an effort to give the whole story (and to help others in similar situations) i'm going to go ahead and expose some less-than-attractive details of our financial situation. humility is a good thing...

we bought our nicely-sized concrete block house on the edge of paynes prairie in 2005. it needed a bit of work, and we happily jumped in with the plan to make it our own. buying it was a bit of a fiasco, as matt had good credit and low income, and i had terrible credit with good income; in the end our "mortgage broker" (read: scam artist) essentially fabricated matt's self-employment income to allow him to get the house in his name only. she got us an 80/20 loan that was also a disaster: 20% of the balance was fixed at a 12% interest rate, and the other 80% was fixed for 2 years and then became an ARM. she assured us we could refinance before the 2 years were up, but that didn't happen. so now, several years later, we found ourselves with a half-finished house full of remodeling projects, an interest rate that evens out to about 10.5%, with backtaxes we could never afford and insurance costs through the roof. and our bank won't talk to us about refinancing, especially now that my income is so drastically reduced from working only 2 days a week.

so... we were drowning and the bank didn't care. fine. both of our credit scores are now so bad that foreclosure, bankruptcy, whatever won't even affect us. and we can't afford to pay the $1800/month that the bank is demanding.

at our most desperate moment, while trying to decide whether to sacrifice being at home with my daughter or scraping by financially, my parents swooped in an offered us a loan at a miniscule 3% to live on land they own outright. it wasn't a hard decision. we are going to purchase our new home a week from today, and have stopped paying our current mortgage. what happens next will be up to the bank--i am working on the paperwork to request a deed-in-lieu, but i don't expect that to work out so i'm also pursuing a short sale option with an investor who is interested. if we have to, we will allow the bank to foreclose. (fyi, if anyone else is "allowing" foreclosure to happen, remember your assets may be at risk. lucky for us the new home and land are to remain technically owned by my parents...)

i am not proud of this situation, but at the same time, f*ck it. we made unwise decisions, yes, but were also screwed by liars and thieves and a massively-merged corporate parasite. at this point in our lives and with the state of the world, nothing is more important than securing some land, animals, gardens, and a safe community. where we are moving one might classify us as a "clan," haha. seriously though. an extended family commune on multiple plots of land. with many guns.

i will post updates on the foreclosure/short sale/whatever situation in order to share the experience and possibly advice for others like us, in addition to the process of building a mobile home (which i am sure will be an experience in itself).

first things first, i have to pull some permits and get a well dug! thank god/dess for the florida aquifer...

i was raised in fort lauderdale, in the most rural 5 mile block in the city (which means we had a whole acre of land). i grew up working on ranches and in barns, trading my time for the right to ride the horses. i had more pets than anyone i knew, guinea pigs, chickens, birds, you name it. one of my friends had pigs, and i can remember playing barefoot in the muck inside the pig pen as a kid. when i was 12, my parents bought my sister and i our own horse, which we kept a few blocks away at a barn but had to take care of 100% because my parents couldn't afford room and board for her. we rode bareback through orange groves every day, for years. for living in south florida, i was practically a farmer.

matt was born in a tiny fishing town in maryland and moved to west palm beach--very upper middle class--with his mother as a kid. he never had a pet. he had never ridden a horse until we were married and i took him out on mine.

at some point during our relationship we both came to the same conclusion independently: we wanted to back away from the modern world a little bit, to simplify, to "homestead" it, to become as self-sufficient as we possibly can... someday.

with the birth of our daughter this year we starting feeling the urge to do it now. we not only want her to grow up learning about gardening, animals, and various practical skills, but also to have an appreciation for a simpler life. the stars have aligned and the opportunity has arisen for us to move onto our own land--5 acres--before the end of the year. the land is owned by my parents, just about 2 miles from their own 20 acre plot, in a "neighborhood" (all 10-20 acre parcels) full of the rest of my mother's family. we're starting modestly by building a mobile home and getting a few animals, and we plan to add things like a greywater system, rain barrels, possibly some solar panels and whatnot over the years as time and finances permit.

for me, moving means staying at home with my daughter full-time to care for her along with the gardens and animals. it also means running our home businesses full-time to help with income as much as possible. for matt, it means a 45-minute commute to work 60 hours a week in gainesville. it won't be easy, but we are committed to making it work.

i hope you learn something here, either by our mistakes or successes, and i hope you will share your knowledge and ideas with us as well.

this blog is dedicated to my parents, whose generosity and faith has made our hopes a reality. someday perhaps we will find a way to thank you enough.