How to Live Like a Millionaire on $10 a day (kind of)

Did you ever drive through a patch of unspoiled
wilderness and then wonder why the people who live
here are surrounded by piles of dead appliances and
vehicles, reels of hopelessly tangled barbed wire, and
flocks of diffident and somewhat bedraggled chickens?
Did you think, "How could they junk up such a pretty
place? If I lived here, I'd keep it clean and
pristine!"

Well, here's the story of that pile of what you think of as junk,
and how the previous residents' pile is now our pile, and how we
are adding to it.

Our property came with at least one Ford V-8 engine,
innumberable car parts and fencing remnants, plenty of
soggy drywall and warped plywood, a console stereo,
and other things that should go straight to the dump.
But, that's not on our list right now. In fact, we
have added to the heap. Some half-broken sprinklers
and a leaky hose now adorn the brush heap next to the
shed, and we are stockpiling flattened cardboard
boxes.

There's sort of a triangle of consumer consumption
that is becoming evident to me. The first corner is
money. The second is time. The third is space. It's a
bit like the scope-time-budget triangle that we are
always working with in the construction business. Here
in the country, we have a lot of space and a lot of
time, but not much money. So, when it comes to
consumerism, we can spread out our possessions all
over creation, spend all the time we want on tinkering
with them, but we can't just run out and buy new ones.
Why not just throw away those broken trucks and rusty
cans? Because they Might Come in Handy Some Time. And
they're Not Taking Up Much Space Anyways.

Another factor is that it costs money to throw things
away. We pay a water-sewer-garbage fee out here just
like you do in the city. The difference is, we are
limited to 33 gallons a week of garbage, and there's
no recycling of paper or plastics and no throwing away
of yard waste. Junk ends up waiting next to the bin,
for the week that we haven't filled up the can.
Anything vaguely combustible or decomposable goes in
the burn pile or the compost pile. And the rest of the
junk just isn't garbage yet, since someday, somehow,
it could be re-used again.

If something breaks, wears out, or starts looking long
in the tooth, it's not just a 20-minute trip to Target
to go get a new one. It's 140 miles! The cost of gas
really adds up for that pilgrimage. So you've got to
make those trips count. Yesterday we made our first
big shopping trip to the big city (Bend). We spent
hours composing our lists, choosing our purchases
ahead of time, and scheduling the big day. It was a
fourteen hour trip! We stocked up on everything from
potatoes to pet beds. We brought coolers for the food.
And when in doubt, we bought two.

Back in the city, you're at the opposite end of that
space-time-money triangle. You can run out and buy
anything you want at pretty much any hour of the day
or night. And with all those high-falutin' office
jobs, the money is available for that kind of
lifestyle. Why keep something that's broken or worn
out? It's just taking up space and it's never going to
be useful again. Even if you wanted to, you don't have
time to figure out what's wrong with it. The only
smart thing to do is to chuck it and get a new one.

In the best of all scenarios, if you have infinite
time, money, and space, anything is possible.
(Actually, if you have infinite money, you can buy the
space and someone else's time, and make anything
possible. Look at Larry Ellison's home for the extreme
example of that.)

Larry Ellison isn't funding our experiment in time and
space. But the cost of living here is pretty low, so
we can forgive him, just this once. Having nearly
unlimited time and space is something that not many
millionaires are blessed with anyways, at least not
before retirement. We are slowly learning to make the
most of our time and space, by using our time to save
money and using our space to... hoard junk, I guess.
We have all the time we need to go fishing, hiking,
biking, tinkering with our junk, or spend hours
canning, carving, cooking, dehydrating, painting, or
sending verbose emails. To us, it's more of a blessing
to have all this time, than to have the money and
conveniences we had in our old life.

As for the chickens, that's a mystery I'm still
unraveling. Our future chickens should be mature
enough to bring home in a few weeks, and then we may
be able to shed some light on that.

In other livestock news, today we are preparing for
the arrival of cats number 4 and 5. Squirrel is cat
number 3. He came with the house, and he is already
best pals with our dog, Banjo. I snapped some photos
of their daily morning chase session, and posted them
here under "August 2005 in Monument". We had a cold snap
this week, which explains the silly jacket on the dog.
Besides, it's deer hunting season, so if you want
something brown and fast to not get shot at, it's best
to cover it with something fluorescent.

Also in that album I posted some photos of a
particularly dramatic sunset from last week. I'm not
sure if the photos show it, but there was a lot of
forest fire smoke in the air, and a lightning storm
was blowing in. The rimrocks all around town were lit
up with an eerie red-orange glow, as if the whole
landscape was about to burst into flame. There were a
lot of fire calls that night, including a 200-acre
fire about 8 miles northeast of here. Monument's
finest remained in town that night, though. Good
thing- I know  I'm not ready to fight a forest fire! 

A week in Monument

(edited, thanks for the suggestions)

As of today, we've been in town for one week. I don't
even feel like it's real yet, but at the same time I
feel like I've been here forever. Every day has been
long and lazy, yet strangely eventful. 
Dad encouraged me to write out my impressions of rural
life, so I'm trying to do that. I got about 10,000
words out earlier this morning, then the power cut out
and I lost it all... so now I'll try the condensed
version (!)

Our arrival in town was marked with a generous plop of
'country welcome', when locals Joe and Patti rode up
on their new horses to chat for a moment. Boy, does
our dog Banjo love that stuff. He's had a few baths
this week, but it doesn't seem that he's learned his
lesson yet.

My overall impression of country life is
that people out here are not much into
expending extra effort. That's not necessarily a bad thing-
Who really wants to spend all their time working?
It doesn't take much effort at
all to get by here. 
...
Unfortunately, there's a down side to the less-work ethic.
Some of the work that was done on our house takes the concept
of half-assed to a whole new level. Our so-called
walk-out basement is constructed of dry-stacked CMU. Dry stacked.
That means no mortar, no grout, no reinforcement, and no
protection against the elements. What??
It gets better...
The walk-out itself is just a hole carved down to the
foundation level, with a sliding glass door at the
bottom. I am not sure what happens in there in the
rain, but I bet it's not pretty. The addition seems to
be sturdily framed, but the plumbing work is pretty
questionable. Do you think it's legal to run domestic
hot and cold water through plastic sprinkler pipe??
There's no sign of vents in the plumbing either. At
least this means it will be easy to tear out when we
remodel the bathroom, and I won't feel like I have to
live up to a previous installer's standard of excellence.

We joined the Monument Fire Department this week.
Gavin and I are the latest addition to the
auxiliary force, and we got the first part of our
training on Wednesday. Most of it consisted of shaking
cobwebs out of old uniforms and trying them on. I
found a whole outfit that fit me fine, except for the
right boot. A lot of the right boots seem to be
missing. We need some one-legged left-footed guys on
the crew...

It's hard to believe, but within an hour of showing up
for the meeting, I was given a little training and
then allowed to single-handedly control a 4" hose with
a giant nozzle... The hose stream from this reaches
about one city block, and the back force is enough to
send an amateur firefighter (ahem!) flying. I tested
my skills with the hose by watering the whole city
park from the other side of the street. Wow, that
thing has a kick!

A lot of the guys on the fire department 
are stationed out in the hills from July to September,
on wildfire watch. What this means is that if that
siren goes off, Gavin and I are definitely needed, and
we'll be suiting up and fighting fires. All with about
two hours training. No wonder people are so cautious
of fires here! 

We've had some good country fun this week, driving
back and forth to town and spotting wildlife. This
whole area is just silly with deer. We've also spotted
antelope and coyote, but no elk yet. The elk come down
from the hills a little later in the year, and winter
in the valleys around us. We took a drive out north of
town on Sunday, just to see the sights. Around every
hairpin turn is a new vista. The micro-climates are
alternately green and lush, or rocky and forbidding.
There's one valley view up there that looks just like
the Grand Canyon- no kidding! No photos yet, since the
air has been too hazy from all the wildfires, and we have
just been too lazy...

I got to go swimming in the river yesterday. It's low
this time of year, but still very clear, cool, and
swift. I can't wait to go out there again with goggles
and hunt gold vein rocks or jasper.

For dinner last night we had elk burgers courtesy of
our neighbor Stacy. Elk is like beef, only tastier. I
could eat that every day. Stacy is tired of elk since
she does eat it every day... They recently got some
variety though, since their daughter Bailey raised
some hogs for 4-H. They sold one at the fair and then
had "Oinky" for themselves. I had some leftover
Oinky roast a couple days ago, and he was pretty good!
I think you can taste the love that went into
fattening him up for the table...

We had a big event last night- we went to see an old
folk singer, Peter Rowan, at a rustic venue in the
town of Richmond, about 40 miles from here. Brian and
Gavin went up there early in the day to set the place
up and try to figure out how to get some electricity
in there. The venue is an abandoned church, which
seats about 100. It's really, really "rustic" in
there, but the sound is great, since it's a small room
and all built of old wood, with plenty of holes to let
the echoes out. The band got lost (like 3 hours out of
their way lost) on the way up there, so it was a
pretty late start. Good thing, as many of the patrons
seemed to have gotten lost on their way up as well.
Folks really came from far and wide for this- Idaho,
Washington, Portland, Humboldt. Brian was the opening
act and he finally got going around 8:30 pm. At 11 pm
Rowan was still playing, but we had to leave, since we
were drifting off. Early to bed, early to rise... We
don't have that much choice in the matter, since
there's plenty of roosters in town. Soon we will have
our own, too. 

Well, that's all for now, it's time to go to City Hall
and meet the mayor so we can sign up for utility
service. I'll try to post some photos soon.