My girlfriend Colleen Murphy was out to visit THO today. We have not seen one another in a long time, but we stay in touch. Colleen is a very talented artist and amateur photographer. It was wonderful to spend the day with my kindred friend.
She took and shared some beautiful photos which I will be posting over the next days.
I am standing here in the sacred grounds, can you find the warrior peaking out of the sun? This photo is NOT edited in any way at all.
What is ubiquitous assimilation? This three minute clip from the 2011 film, Detachment sums up what it means really nicely.
I am pretty sure that no sensible person can argue about the fact that we live in a period of time where society suffers from ubiquitous assimilation in a way that is scarily similar to the Borg.
As a Tiny Houser, I would like to think that the Star Trek: Next Generation writers were wrong. The Borg are science fiction characters, right? Sadly, I don’t think the concept of them is really so far fetched. I think that most people claim individualism but really, in this society, your distinctiveness is not assimilated into the group; Borgists of the world have their distinctiveness written over, disposed of, like an old floppy disk.
This Borgism applies heavily to the way that we live. The marketing holocaust reaches into every area of our life right down to how we live. Really, I would like to believe that we do not live in a world where everyone is not madly consuming stuff. Taking way more than they need, building huge homes which they cannot afford, filling them with stuff that they also cannot afford… just because advertising, television, and social pressure are telling them that this will make them happy. Assimilate, assimilate, assimilate… shop, shop, shop… CONSUME!
The crazy that is packed into this doublethink is lost on most people. I can’t tell you how many people I have heard bragging about the fact that they LOVE to shop… Love to buy… Even LOVE to be capitalists! Funny but these people never seem that happy. The seem too busy, too rushed, with never enough time to sit for a coffee. They don’t have time to enjoy any moments. They explain that they “gotta get to work, gotta get to the mall… My life is too busy to stop” they say.
Ubiquitous assimilation/doublethink.
I encourage you to consider if any of this post applies to your own housing and/or your stuff collection situation. Does this apply your life in any way at all?
I am not saying that you should all buy land, build a Tiny House and set up a farm. This would be as absurdly Borgist (though not as wasteful or consumeristic) as the current big pile of crap in a big house. When everyone does the same thing it is conformity. a Tiny House may not fit your NEEDS. I am not asking you all to mould yourself into something that does not fit you.
The current way of life for most of us in the (so called) developed world is not something that every person should want to do… still, they do it. What I do ask is that you to consider is all that stuff really making you happy? Or, is the way you live your life being constructed and ruled by marketing. Are you living beyond your needs and if so, whom are you are making happy while complying with the ubiquitous assimilation to advertising and consumer culture?
It is obvious, that this constant assault of advertising has created huge social pressure because it has triggered in us the need to do better so that we can be measured by some artificially constructed corporate concept of success. It is human nature (for most of us) to want to be accepted and looked up to, but are we doing this in a way that is truly giving us a better quality of life? Are we happy? Are you happy?
I ask you, have you been Borged or are you still an individual?
Too, if you have just now come to understand that you have been Borged, are you already so much a part of the corporate collective that you can no longer escape it and find your individual route?
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!
I never heard of Dick Proenneke until tonight. I was looking up some videos on how to build timber frame place out of logs and basically stumbled on this beautiful footage. His footage, of himself, building a life in the forest of Alaska in 1968.
There is also a second video which was just released in 2011
The third is yet to be released!
If you love this, as I did then perhaps you will also want to read his Journals? Which can be downloaded free here.
Sometimes the internet is so cool. How else would I have ever met him?
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.
Tiny House Ontario 