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So a friend of mine is leasing a chunk of NCC farmland on-which she will be gardening, raising broiler chickens, and sharing a goat with another person.
There are multiple farms (in the 10 to 20 acres size-range) available for lease, typically around $1400/month not including utilities and upkeep.
This has got me thinking.
And looking at the available NCC farms.
And trying to sort out exactly what it is I want to be doing with my life.
Yeah, I went there.
I'm 33. I keep hearing (usually in the voice of my mother, but sometimes the voices of random Old White Dudes who are friends of the family, so take that as you will) the words "I'm surprised you never ammounted to more than that". Whatever the hell "that" is.
What do I *want* to be doing?
I *want* to be diligently working away at my weird, not sure where it's going, novel-in-progress. I *want* to be spending four hours a day (so part-time-job territory) growing, harvesting, preserving, and cooking the food my wife and I (and our various guests and phamily/family-members) eat day-to-day. I *want* to have frequent work as a figure model and occasional-but-more-lucretive work as a glamour/fetish model. I *want* to have a lot of time to myself to do these things in, and also to have paid work (like figure modeling, and like much of the stuff I do for RHO) that gets me out of the house and interacting with other human beings of a reasonably regular/frequent basis.
At this point in time, I don't think I'm actually up for the must-have-a-business-plan requirements of running an actual farm. Even a tiny one. Even a hobby one.
What I want to be *having*, then, is rather more like, well, the home I remember from my earliest childhood (except with the option of geothermal heating, photo-voltaic solar pannels, and lots of sky lights for natural lighting): A small house with a lot of good storage space, located on a 1-2 acre (or so) lot that would allow me to grow fruit (and possibly nut) trees, berry bushes, and other perenial foods along with a lot of moderate-intensity vegetable gardening and buckets of herbs and perenials.
Yes, I totally day-dream about an almost little-house-on-the-praries life where my wife and I go so far as to grow our own amaranth and she does coblerry and various other projects out of her workshop and I make our soap and raise our honey and grow most (possibly all) of our non-animal-based food on the land around our rather Scandinavian-looking green-roofed house, and we have a wind-turbine and solar pannels and a high-efficiency wood stove (and possible geothermal heat) and huge south-facing windows and really amazing insulation... and can basically live off the grid, even though that's not what we're doing.
But I'm not up to it at this stage of the game, and I might never be. I don't know. I do know that, when I look at Ghost's parents' 2-acre lot, I know that (a) I want something like that, but also (b) I couldn't handle working more than that size of a place.
It looks like Ghost has (probably) got the Coblery job with the Ceremonial Guard. She has to fix four pairs of boots as a test-run, but things are sounding pretty good and she's got her materials sourced for the current bunch already.
I hope this works.
Even though I know it will mean she is working, basically, 10-hour days - maybe 12-hour days, over the summer, with a far-lighter work-load over the rest of the year - it also means that our combined income is back to where it was in March (or possibly slightly higher) which means that all those things that got taken off the stove, so to speak, indefinitely back at the beginning of April - like (eventual) CSA memberships and home-ownership, plus possible attendance at various Cons over the course of the next few years - are potentially back on their burners.
Which is wonderful and also slightly frightening.
And which is also leading me to wondering "what am I doing with my life" because, honestly, I'm incredibly content being A House Wife who putters and creates and makes a very small financial contribution to the household through a dozen different and ever-shifting channels, but makes a HUGE contribution to our health and well-being (and thrift, if I may be so bold) by knowing how to make things from scratch and grow them from seed.
And there are a lot of reasons having to do with gender and also power-exchange (and also personality - key point) within my marriage, that make this situation something that helps me thrive, rather than a situation that gives me anxiety nightmares.
...And I'm trying to figure out (a) if it's okay to just stick with this, to do this thing that I love and am good at, and fit all this money-making business in around the corners[1], and (b) why the hell I might think it isn't okay to do just that.
Hoy. So that's what's going through my head right now.
TTFN,
Amazon.
[1] Okay. Maybe "in around the corners" isn't exactly the right way to put it. "Multiple income-streams" and "work-life balance" might be the way to put it. But what I mean is having multiple income-streams, few of which are consistent and some of which have "off seasons" (conveniently when the garden will be eating me alive, so hey), but all of-which add up to an extra $6,000-$8,000 per year - which takes a good chunk out of property taxes and annual utilities, even if it won't pay a mortgage.
There are multiple farms (in the 10 to 20 acres size-range) available for lease, typically around $1400/month not including utilities and upkeep.
This has got me thinking.
And looking at the available NCC farms.
And trying to sort out exactly what it is I want to be doing with my life.
Yeah, I went there.
I'm 33. I keep hearing (usually in the voice of my mother, but sometimes the voices of random Old White Dudes who are friends of the family, so take that as you will) the words "I'm surprised you never ammounted to more than that". Whatever the hell "that" is.
What do I *want* to be doing?
I *want* to be diligently working away at my weird, not sure where it's going, novel-in-progress. I *want* to be spending four hours a day (so part-time-job territory) growing, harvesting, preserving, and cooking the food my wife and I (and our various guests and phamily/family-members) eat day-to-day. I *want* to have frequent work as a figure model and occasional-but-more-lucretive work as a glamour/fetish model. I *want* to have a lot of time to myself to do these things in, and also to have paid work (like figure modeling, and like much of the stuff I do for RHO) that gets me out of the house and interacting with other human beings of a reasonably regular/frequent basis.
At this point in time, I don't think I'm actually up for the must-have-a-business-plan requirements of running an actual farm. Even a tiny one. Even a hobby one.
What I want to be *having*, then, is rather more like, well, the home I remember from my earliest childhood (except with the option of geothermal heating, photo-voltaic solar pannels, and lots of sky lights for natural lighting): A small house with a lot of good storage space, located on a 1-2 acre (or so) lot that would allow me to grow fruit (and possibly nut) trees, berry bushes, and other perenial foods along with a lot of moderate-intensity vegetable gardening and buckets of herbs and perenials.
Yes, I totally day-dream about an almost little-house-on-the-praries life where my wife and I go so far as to grow our own amaranth and she does coblerry and various other projects out of her workshop and I make our soap and raise our honey and grow most (possibly all) of our non-animal-based food on the land around our rather Scandinavian-looking green-roofed house, and we have a wind-turbine and solar pannels and a high-efficiency wood stove (and possible geothermal heat) and huge south-facing windows and really amazing insulation... and can basically live off the grid, even though that's not what we're doing.
But I'm not up to it at this stage of the game, and I might never be. I don't know. I do know that, when I look at Ghost's parents' 2-acre lot, I know that (a) I want something like that, but also (b) I couldn't handle working more than that size of a place.
It looks like Ghost has (probably) got the Coblery job with the Ceremonial Guard. She has to fix four pairs of boots as a test-run, but things are sounding pretty good and she's got her materials sourced for the current bunch already.
I hope this works.
Even though I know it will mean she is working, basically, 10-hour days - maybe 12-hour days, over the summer, with a far-lighter work-load over the rest of the year - it also means that our combined income is back to where it was in March (or possibly slightly higher) which means that all those things that got taken off the stove, so to speak, indefinitely back at the beginning of April - like (eventual) CSA memberships and home-ownership, plus possible attendance at various Cons over the course of the next few years - are potentially back on their burners.
Which is wonderful and also slightly frightening.
And which is also leading me to wondering "what am I doing with my life" because, honestly, I'm incredibly content being A House Wife who putters and creates and makes a very small financial contribution to the household through a dozen different and ever-shifting channels, but makes a HUGE contribution to our health and well-being (and thrift, if I may be so bold) by knowing how to make things from scratch and grow them from seed.
And there are a lot of reasons having to do with gender and also power-exchange (and also personality - key point) within my marriage, that make this situation something that helps me thrive, rather than a situation that gives me anxiety nightmares.
...And I'm trying to figure out (a) if it's okay to just stick with this, to do this thing that I love and am good at, and fit all this money-making business in around the corners[1], and (b) why the hell I might think it isn't okay to do just that.
Hoy. So that's what's going through my head right now.
TTFN,
Amazon.
[1] Okay. Maybe "in around the corners" isn't exactly the right way to put it. "Multiple income-streams" and "work-life balance" might be the way to put it. But what I mean is having multiple income-streams, few of which are consistent and some of which have "off seasons" (conveniently when the garden will be eating me alive, so hey), but all of-which add up to an extra $6,000-$8,000 per year - which takes a good chunk out of property taxes and annual utilities, even if it won't pay a mortgage.
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