Ontario

Sands Mud Bog

Posted on September 9, 2012 by Laura

I took the day off yesterday.  Spent the day with my dad’s side of the family at the Sands Mud bog, North of Battersea.  Talk about a total hoot!  It is a family/community event that is held every year.  It was the first time that I have been able to make it back and I can tell you that I am not missing it again unless I am too old to get into the back of a truck!  The family and thier community are just so much fun!

Lots of people – a beer or two were enjoyed.  The laughter was as loud as the trucks in the bog.

Sadly, I forgot my camera so I had to steal a couple of pics from my cousin A.  Hope that is groovy with her as a truck tire in the bog.  The John Deere truck is her baby.  She is a dead awesome bogger!   Uncle Steve would be huge proud!  I have to tell you that it makes me really sentimental.  I am thinking that the rainbow that popped up just as the bog ended was more than a little symbolic.

Thanks to my cousin B and C who hosted this brilliant event!  Glad to be invited!

After the mud bogs I went to another family event (Mom’s side).  While there, I mentioned that I had enjoyed a totally awesome day at the mud bogs.  A lady who was there stuck up her nose and said “I don’t see the point, this is a stupid thing to do, it just ruins the soil in the bog, so loud, so futile… blah, blah, blah”.  I was not prepared for anyone to be such an argumentative, negative, arse-pick.   Seriously… with the way that the land is being taken over by housing?  A mud bog does significantly less damage than one single McMansion and I can assure you that this one gave pleasure and a community event for about a hundred or more people… hard for a person as uptight as that to understand laughter and community participation is my guess?

You can’t make everyone happy and I have to say that if I am picking who to have fun with… well you know the answer, I am getting in the truck going to Battersea and I am wearing my rubbers too.

I wonder what the other Tiny Housers did this weekend?

Categories: Family, Friendship, Magical, Off Grid, Ontario, Simple living, View | 1 Comment

Stored Food

Posted on August 27, 2012 by Laura

I am still in the Big City and thus away from the Tiny House.  I thought I might as well put myself to good use while I am here and get some food squirrelled away for winter.  Put away a little over 2 bushels of tomatoes yesterday.  Some mine and some from a farmer down the road from here.  I used to can a lot of them but these days I freeze most of them whole.  I still like to condense and can them but I have not done these yet.  I want to use my own tomatoes for that.  I like them done with the mixed heirloom varieties about 10% of those lovely sharp black ones make for a tasty mix.

I picked up the additional tomatoes when I went to pick up farm fresh peaches.  I bought, sliced up and froze a half a bushel of them which I leave the skins on.  I chose not to can any this year.  They taste great but there is so much sugar in them and I am trying to get away from this.  Also put away three bags of grated zucchini for warm winter loaves and alternately chopped up some plums, bananas and peaches in small bits and froze these in one cup bags for smoothies.

The two longer jobs were the boiling down tomatoes for condensed herb and garlic starters.  I like to boil the salted tomatoes down until it is almost to a paste (I leave the skins and seeds in).  When it was the thickness I added  about 1 cup of fresh garlic, two cups of minced parsley, 2 cups of minced basil and take it off the heat.  Then I put about a third of a cup in silicon muffin cups and freeze them.  I made 24 portions of this (luck not planned).  I pulled them out of the cups today and froze them individually.  These are perfect for throwing together a quick pasta sauce meal for the two of us.  I do this with a few frozen tomatoes.  The skin rolls right off these frozen jewels if you run a bit of hot water on them.  I cook them only enough to be able to smash them up, then one of the starters, a quarter cup of grape seed oil and then you can add gnocchi right in the sauce when it is nearly cooked. Sometimes I add pine nuts, a few raisins, oregano, onions, other fresh veg – whatever I have on hand and feel like really.  These little guys make for some seriously fast/slow food!  Takes about 15 minutes from freezer to table.

Actually, after all the food prep during the day I did not want to get into something elaborate, so we had this for dinner last night!

All this said, I have a freezer here in the city.  At THO I do not.  When I am there, I will have to go back to canning everything.  Makes for a little more work on prep days but still when you get this all done, there is no reason that I can’t have fast/slow food ready for use in a root cellar.  I just have to build me a cellar!

Categories: Food, Ontario, Open your eyes, Simple living | Leave a comment

Tiny House Ontario Fresco

Posted on August 24, 2012 by Laura

Who can resist the emerging octogenarian artist Cecilia Gimenez?  Certainly not Tiny House Ontario!

tee hee…

Categories: Art, Ontario | Leave a comment

Seeing Next Week

Posted on August 24, 2012 by Laura

I am grudgingly still in the city way over on the South West side of the big lake.  I don’t like it a bit and miss being at THO on the North East.  I have to stay here until late next week because I have to see an eye specialist.  I am afraid that my eyesight is running away from me faster than it should and with some (a lot) of eye issues on both sides of my family, it is time.  I need, as did my 89 year old grandmother, to use 3.75 glasses to read and often suffer with aches behind my eyes.  Granted I do spend a lot of time using the green devils at the top of my face, I am hoping they are just tired, not sick and tired.

The family has left to go home to Germany which is another reason that I came here, it was lovely to see them.  Too, I also had to see my dentist and I am glad to be done with it, I had a good cleaning, but must go back for a crown on a tooth that has been wobbly since I was about 14 years of age.

I think I am too young to be falling apart!  I am just in my mid 40’s but I am not as fit as I would like to be and yet I refuse to go to the gym and stop eating candy, so I can’t want youth as badly as I think I do.

It will be 7 days exactly from this day that I arrive back home at THO and start connecting the wiring in.  I have to say I am pretty darn excited about this!   For now, I wait and dream about the Tiny House in the forest.

 

“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.”  ~ HD Thoreau

 
Categories: Forest, Ontario, Simple living, Tiny House Ontario, View, Writing | Leave a comment

Money, Money, Money

Posted on August 24, 2012 by Laura

I always put off doing the figures for the 1/2 year because this makes me crazy!  Financial stuff is so darn boring and always so bleak!

Last night when I was doing the figures for this year Hj exclaimed “that is a lot of money” and of course he is right.  THO has cost $92,703 for the lot.  There is a hidden cost too which is not included in here.  This is the land debt.  We have been doing projects on a pay as we go with the income that Hj and I live within, but we do owe money on the land still.  $38,000 of the original $67,000 is still outstanding.  With the payment of $250/month that is made on this but at this rate we are likely never ever going to pay this debt off.  As a matter of fact when we got the loan in fall of 2010 it was about the same amount as it is today.  Not too sharp!  We simply must stop the financially costly improvements on THO and start paying down the debt.  When you start adding interest to the figures it becomes NUTS to have debt!

Saying that we are not nearly as bad off as some people does not make this debt excusable or explainable.

The fact is that we are pretty privileged!  We have two properties, one that is required in Southern Ontario as well as THO and together we pretty near have both land and space though not exactly a McMansion.  Kent Griswold’s Tiny House Blog hosts an article by Andrew Morrison, which suggests that a Tiny Straw Bale home is the answer could be right.  The interesting idea in this article is that he has taken some time to gather some very frightening unconsidered figures on what the McMansion cost their owners/ hour to live in.

I am not sure of his figures but I have done some of my own (to the best of my ability).

The Hamilton house value about $150,000 it is 1000 square feet.   When I include all expenses including food, recreation, mortgage, upkeep, vets, dog care, car, home and debt insurance, … living in this small house costs ~$48,940 a year

As a purely recreational property without any improvements THO adds an additional ~$4,580 to this budget a year, plus extra transportation costs for back and forth between the two places.  This makes THO a ~$400/month recreational property but as I mention we need to increase our payments on the land, perhaps $300/month which ups this to $700!  Brutal!

Assuming we would still use two vehicles and the same amount of gasoline: if we moved to THO, full time, today and lived a similar lifestyle our living costs would drop to ~$26,180 a year, but we cannot.  It is like that silly children’s round… there is a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza!  For him there is a hole – for us there is a different kind of hole.  THO’s hole is the nearly $40K in land debt.  Either I have to get a job or win the lottery if I want to move ahead… unless anyone wants to give me $40K… which I think is mighty unlikely.

Categories: Money, Ontario, Open your eyes, Tiny house, Tiny House Ontario | 3 Comments