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!