Merry Christmas

As we prepare for our trip to celebrate Christmas with family, I wanted to wish everyone a Blessed Christmas with our Lord Jesus. May you all experience His blessings and love as you honor Him.

I have not written in a long time as we have been busy finishing up the interior of our little house and unpacking the mountain of boxes, wondering along the way, why in the world did we bring this? It is very hard to part with things one has had for years, even harder to figure out what to do with them in a smaller home.

Kirk and I have built the cabinets for the kitchen, yesterday we nearly completed the doors for them, but they will have to wait now until after the holidays. The truck is fixed and ready for the 1000 mile drive ahead of us. We are praying for clear roads and weather. We have gotten about 8 inches of snow so far this year and dropped down to -20, a tad cold for us desert dwellers. I love it here and am thankful we are able to do this.

The year ahead promises to be very busy and I hope to be more consistent at my writing, I look forward to sharing our adventure.

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL AND A HEALTHY AND HAPPY NEW YEAR.

Nothing to exciting to report today, though we did see the deer again today on the hill above us, it is probably warmer up there as cold air sinks down to the lower places. We spent most of the day making the counter top for the cabinet in the kitchen (awaiting the laminate which should be here this coming Friday, I sure hope I picked the right color) and making the front frame for two of the top cabinets. I tell you, building your own house can be really trying, especially when your trying to make dinner with no kitchen sink (or bathtub) to do dishes in. We do have the bathroom sink in but not much will fit in there, I keep holding off and using paper and plastic, but what do you do with pans and such. Sigh. Another issue we have is water, at this time we are having to haul it and the storage which only holds 1,000 gals was freezing up on us, so we had to get a tank heater for it.

The weather was sunny but still quite cold, if you would like to watch our weather use accuweather.com and put in zip code 82428.

I think I have decided how this blog will work, sort of like the movie Godfather, looking at the present and popping back to the past. I will try and make sure I let you know when I pop back, so you won't get lost. I remember when we went to see that movie, you see, I get very wrapped up in movies so I was able to follow it just fine but the other 3 people said it was to hard to follow. I will try and make this easy to follow. Did you follow that?

Tomorrow we will be taking a trip up towards Billings, Montana. This is where we go to do any shopping at places like Costco, HomeDepot, Lowes, etc. It is a 3 hour drive, but nothing like we ever did in Ca. Traffic here is very light, most of the time we are the only car on the road, a traffic jam here generally involves cows, the other day it was wild turkeys, sometimes a deer (which usually is at night and is not a good thing, it causes braking and some creative steering), ducks sometimes get in on the act of stopping traffic, and the occasional pheasant, too. It is a sad thing here though, as alot of animals get hit by cars especially at night so if you are ever driving thru Wyoming be on the watch.

So our trip tomorrow is to take the transmission and clutch to the truck for repair. I think we really put our Dodge Ram to the test, with the 6 trips we made back and forth to Ca. to bring all of our "treasures" up here. Our loads were heavy and with lots of steep grades, it was hard. Kirk and I are huge DIY, except when we find someone who can do it better (as with the trans and clutch) so we hauled all of our things ourselves in a converted truck box, like you'd see on a semi. He built a goose neck trailer to put under it and away we went, just your everyday run of the mill rednecks, LOL.

The picture is of our place now, this was taken 2 days after Thanksgiving and our first good snow of the year. If you'll notice, just to the right of the building is a trailer, yep that is the one we loaded to the hilt and hauled up here, 1,000 miles one way. The truck, a diesel, it really did the job well, kind of torked the transmission though.

What do you think of our back yard?

Night all,
Gail

Just a quick note this morning, imagine my surprise this morning when I awoke and saw these beautiful deer in my yard, the sun was just coming over the mountain. We often see them in the fields below, but this is the first on our hill since we have been here. I look forward to more visits, I may change my mind once we start putting in gardens, but for now it is a wonderful thing, we also have a resident cottontail.

Off to the days chores,

Introduction and Welcome

Welcome to our blog. I hope you enjoy your visit here and will come back often to check up on our progress. I am not a writer, nor is spelling one of my strong points, so don't laugh to hard. Ok, that being said.

Kirk and I started this journey back in 1996 when we got married, of course we didn't know where our lives would lead. In 1999 we considered the possibility of the talk about the computer problems of the year 2000, and had begun also to consider homesteading, (during this time we had also begun to study the Constitution and taxes) so we began preparing for both by stocking up and learning new skills and ways of living. Our current home being in the desert of Southern California we realized that there wasn't much a person could do there to live, without a grocery store nearby, so we began looking elsewhere for a place where we could live closer to the land. Kirk had been hunting here in Wyoming for a couple of years and loved it, so about 5 years ago, he brought me up to see what it had to offer, it wasn't very long (a couple of days) when I told him I felt like this was home. Being at the foot of the Big Horn Mountains, with creeks nearby offered the ability to live more off the land and oh the beauty of all God has created right in our own backyard, so began the search for land here in a valley of cattle ranches. See the view above from our land.

I am sure your thinking, there has to have been more that caused us to consider such a move. Your right, there are alot of things that would make a couple with 3 grown children and 5 small grandchildren to make a radical change, from a corporate job to a homestead type of life and to move so far away from their family. This was not an easy choice as I am sure you have heard others who have made a similar change say. After working 25 years in his profession, it was very hard for Kirk to leave it, for me I took my profession with me..I am a homemaker. Perhaps I will go into more detail at a later date on this, what I will say at this point is that we no long wanted to live in California with the way the state is headed, we are a very conservative Christian couple, who believe in the principles this country was formed on and our state kept going farther and farther away from all the things we hold dear. We wanted to find a place that was more akin to our belief of Constitutional freedoms.

So if I have not lost your interest yet, I hope you will check back and see how this is all unfolding. To wet your appetite, we have choosen to build a strawbale house.

Gail