Where This All Began

I woke up early this morning! I went to bed at about 1:30 am and then this morning at about 5:15 am I woke up. I considered going back to sleep but decided I wanted to stay awake. And now here I am an hour later, blogging.

When I was little, we lived on a ranch in Southeastern Arizona. Originally we lived in the antique-pioneer house. It was adobe and the ceiling in the living room was gone. My dad has always been a pack rat so one of my earlier memories are of a little trail through the living room to the woodstove in the back corner. My mother tried many times while they were still married to de-junk it and make more space for living. She also tried to make it more livable and prettier since it is, and always has, been falling apart.

My dad still dreams of buying the ranch (he owns a small share of it) and renovating what we now call "the old house," but he has never really done anything and probably never will.

When I was a few months shy of my second birthday, we moved to Salt Lake City for awhile where my sister was born (exactly one week after my birthday, ironically). Then we went and lived with my grandma for awhile. My mother refused to move back unless my dad got something better to live in. He found a trailer. The house was bigger (but not really living standard without some work and money that we didn't have), but the trailer was better.

I liked living on that ranch. We had a garden, dogs, goats, and horses. The neighbors (the only other inhabitants of the ranch) had the same as well as cattle and chickens. My best friend (she was born a few weeks before I was and was the daughter/granddaughter of said neighbors) roamed everywhere. We played in the creek when it ran in early spring (from off of Graham Mountain) and in the hot summer we would run barefoot from shade spot to shade spot (since we went barefoot almost year round due to the short, mild winters).

There was an outhouse off to the side and back of the yard which we never used because for some reason bees lived there (no idea why...). My dad's kids from his second marriage would come to visit and of course my best friend and I would follow my older sister and her friend (my friend's aunt) everywhere which of course annoyed them no end.

I loved it when we got to bring the baby goats in the house (for whatever reason) and feed them milk from calf bottles and following my dad around as he did the "chores." (Feeding the animals, watering the garden, milking, straining the milk, etc.) When there was a day when we butchered, I would go inside and sit under the cooler where I couldn't hear anything. Then when it was over, I would come out and watch my dad chop up the goat (hung from an obliging mesquite tree) into tasty bits of chevron.

I remember one night when I was three or four, my dad was going to go out to the outhouse to get honey from the bees and I wanted to come with. He didn't want to take me, so he told me that the bogeyman would get me. I knew he was teasing, but even if I hadn't I wouldn't have been afraid (my idea of the bogeyman: man in all black wearing a ladybug suit). I insisted so he took me with him (the bees were all asleep, I think), so he finally gave in and we came back with lots of tasty honey.

When I was almost seven, my mom decided she was fed up with my dad and moved out. We moved to a less secluded (the ranch was miles from any kind of neighbor and I loved it) place with two acres and a trailer. From then on out, all the places we've lived, we've never had much more than a garden, a few cats and the occasional dog. So I would pretend. When I was younger I would go out to bring home the (imaginary) cows with my imaginary older siblings (I'm the oldest of my mom's kids) and ride my bike pretending it was a horse. My sister wanted to play Barbies. I wanted to play Farm.

When I got older, we moved to Northern Arizona and when it snowed, I'd go and check on my pretend farm animals to make sure they were safe from the snow. I wanted to plant a garden but I never could remember to water anything I planted and when I wanted to do more than plant a seed and water it once or twice, I had no idea where to start anyways. I devoured the Mother's Children section of the Mother Earth News (we have years of back issues).

After I got to be 12 or 13, I kind of forgot about it all until just before my sixteenth birthday when I started looking at our old Mother Earth News issues. That's when I decided "that's what I want to do." And when I ran out of issues, I decided I wanted to see if there was anything on the internet. I googled all sorts of phrases containing the words "country," "farm" and "rural," but I never found anything until I googled "homesteading." That's when I found Homestead.org and A Homesteading Neophyte. I was so excited when I discovered people still do this and that, even better, they blog about it.

And after reading through two or three blogs, I discoverd that no one ever really started blogging until after they'd been doing what they were doing for awhile or they bought property. I wanted to know about it from before all that. So I decided to write my own blog. And here it is. :)

Catch-Up Post: Peat Pots, Career, Survivalists, etc

I haven't posted in awhile, I know. And I really wish that either my mom's camera could be found or else that my sister's camera had batteries (and that the cord weren't MIA), because I really want to post some pictures of the seeds I have started in peat pots.

Oh well.

So I have 50 plants started:

• 4 parsley
• 3 jalapeno peppers (capsicum annuum)
• 5 catnip (nepeta cataria)
• 4 calendula (calendula officinalis)
• 12 onion (Walking & Red Weaver)
• 6 I forgot to label (I hope I actually planted something in there!!!)
• 5 various melons (Schoon's Hard Shell Melon, Bush Sugar Baby Watermelon, Minnesota Midget Melon, and Eden's Gem Melon)
• 7 tomatoes (Big Red & Manitoba)
• 2 Armenian cucumber
• 1 pumpkin (nondescript kind from a store in town. Pumpkins don't like being transplanted--or so I've read--and so this is a test to see if that's true)

(That's only 49, which one did I forget to list??? Or did I add up the numbers incorrectly?)

The weather here sucks. It's either stormy or else bitter cold which doesn't make for pleasant gardening weather. I guess I'm just being a wuss and need to bite the bullet (although it has been snowing the last few days...) and get to work. It never frosts after Mother's Day, so that's when the plants need to go in, while I need to put in the plants that don't mind the cold now, as well as prepare the soil and trim back the bush.

My mother has actually been considering getting a milk cow and perhaps a sheep, if she can get the right fencing for them. I feel like "O_O" because she has always been anti-animal before. She didn't mind cats and she dealt with my chickens, but in all honesty, livestock has always been something she wasn't the slightest bit interested in, while I felt like a bit of an oddball dreaming about cows and horses and chickens and sheep and goats and...well, you get the picture.

So now she's wanting a cow for raw milk (we can get raw milk at the dairy in town, though) and she's wanting a sheep to munch the weeds until they are dead. I guess I'm having trouble adjusting because although raised a city girl, she likes the country but she has never really been into country stuff. Or at least not in my seventeen years. Now, she is suddenly into gardening food rather than just trees and the occasional tomato or vine and and wishing for livestock. Now before you get the wrong idea, I am pleased, just reeling in surprise and trying to get used to the idea. I think it might be a little bit spurred by her obsession (dare I call it that?) with TEOTWAWKI.

Incidently, most people in this tiny settlement are Survivalists. I am not talking the positive, more 'normal' survivalist, either. I am talking guns (for when they become the new Waco), nuclear bomb shelters (for when Obama decides to exterminate them), gardens, solar power, horses (to go get water up the canyon), marijuana (because it's an herb, and inhaling smoke is very beneficial to the lungs), a disregard for building codes (we're talking septic system so many feet from your water supply, not whether your house is underground or made of strawbales), a disregard for laws (like registering one's kids for homeschooling) and other things that make life tougher (not getting a legal birth certificate for their children or a social security number, teaching their children to be afraid of the government in much the same way as a rabbit is afraid of its predator, etc).

Most of these things are not bad in and of themselves. What is wrong is the attitude that accompanies them. Guns are not bad. Stocking up on guns because you think the government is going to massacre you is not a healthy attitude. Sure, the government does things that aren't right, but I doubt any of their plans include genocide in a remote settlement in the middle of nowhere. Realism, please, people!

This is turning out to be a long post. :)

Our washing machine is quite broken. It doesn't switch from cycle to cycle. You start it at the beginning of the cycle and it fills up with water and then agitates forever until you tell it to spin. Then it spins for awhile, then it does this weird thing that I can't explain until you switch it to rinse or else off... We really need to get that fixed.

I am finishing my schooling years and now I have to figure out what's next. I do want to end up homesteading, but the 'from here to there' is a little tricky. I need a field. I'm considering veterinary medicine, but I am not a fan of the years of schooling it will take. I'd like to write and/or maybe something artistic, but I am still weighing the positives and negatives of each. A positive would be something like "working freelance from home" while a negative would be something like the erratic income from such a job.

There are also other fields I am looking at, but I really am having difficulty finding which one would be the best choice. My specific religion has a belief system that includes being a mother and not working outside the home once I marry, but not only am I opposed to the attitude of "just get married and let him take care of you" and not only do I think that living with "marriage" as one's center of the universe, but I also believe that a stay-at-home mother is a good thing.

So more or less, I need a career I can continue after marriage with plenty of time for family but I need a career I can make plenty of money to support myself anyways (because I am planning to homestead in the near future and let marriage happen when it happens, so marriage could be before or after I get started with this dream of mine...doesn't matter). I also need something I can do while homesteading because I don't want to homestead as anything more than a hobby. That may change in the future, but at the moment I'd rather have it as a (time consuming, frustrating) hobby than something to make into a lucrative endeavor (way to add stress, IMO).