our street band & ebook sale

as much as i plan things out, break things down and think about the years to come every now and then i make quick decision that changes everything. then back to the plan i go. for example, when i met mark he moved in on day 2 and we got married 6 months of knowing each other. 4 years later all is well, very well. most of the big decisions seem to jump out of our head and we “think quick” and go on our jolly way. saturday night i came up with a plan, we’re going to be street performers playing music for $. we’re going to move all of our stuff to a tiny suburb of dallas (population 8,000) into a home my parents just bought. we’re selling our land through a realtor so that we’ll have money to buy land with our friends, which i’ve talked about here in my interview.  the day after pitching this idea to mark he got pumped because he’s been wanting to build a charango for years (like a small guitar) and that what’s he’s going to bring on the road. my sister who’s been living with us in our tiny house wanted to come with us on the road but there wouldn’t be enough room in our car. mark hates sleeping in the as we have done it for 3 separate 2 week trips plus living in the car for when we first moved onto our land**. yesterday we were in texas helping my parents move into their house. afterwards we drove to the spring and it dawned on me that if we train hopped our way around we wouldn’t have to pay for gas. we could take greyhound & megabus as needed. well, well now heather can come with us! we invited 2 more friends (one was pumped to be a part of this and the other is on the fence). i’ve bought an accordion and put in my 6 weeks notice to my job. quitting my job was very scary. i LOVE my job, it’s by far the best job i’ve ever had. and life goes on.

here’s the deal, if we’re selling our land then we need to live somewhere. if i’m paying any amount of rent i think it needs to go to my parents. their house payment is huge and i really want to ease their burden. there’s personal perks as well but not as many as you’d think because their house is far enough out that it’s a bit intimidating for someone who has one car between the 3 of us (me, mark & my sister). i’m still excited but sad to start looking for a job when that time comes.

how long are we going to be running the streets? until the fun runs out. could be 2 weeks or 6 months. either way time stops when train hopping so that doesn’t apply.

below are 2 pictures from 8 years ago when i train hopped for a few weeks.

i’m so excited.  i have 6 weeks until freedom. last night it struck me that i should put my ebook on sale, super sale! since planning this trip the synchronicities & conformations that have been coming in back to back totally connect dots that an ebook sale is in order. enjoy.

for info & pictures on our tiny house living check out Tiny House & Land

14 reasons to own a tiny house

reasons to own a tiny house

these reasons don’t apply to everyone all of the time.

1. affordable!
a tiny house isn’t always 150 sqft like ours. the shed people who built ours could make a shed (home) as large as we wanted. they can add a loft, divide rooms with walls and even add a second story. digging through tiny house books, i’ve seen tiny houses from 400sqft to under a 100 sqft. really, at this stage in the game if your house isn’t an average of ###### then it’s considered small, and tiny is a small step away from that. if 150sqft ~ $3,000 then a 1000sqft “house” would be about $20,000. well, i’m guessing that’s the case but if you really want the numbers then dig around on the website i got my shed from. pictures and prices included.

2. shed people take payments
even though i’m pretty committed to paying in full, avoiding interest and living within my means, it’s absolutely worth mentioning that a person can finance one. after we moved into ours, it dawned on me that we could have bought one on loan, though maybe it would have been $5k or $6k instead of $3k for the same home but the year that i was living in the city saving up to move to the country cost us $4,600 in rent anyway. that money i will never get back. lets do the math, $4,600(rent)+$3,000 (home)=$7,600. fuck! i could have saved money even if i had bought our house with interest and would be further along with living my dream lifestyle. *side note: i make more money at my new job, moving sooner would have been worth it & would have saved us living in the car.

3. portable
because our tiny house is 150sqft & mark’s woodworking shed is 64sqft we have plans to move them to our final piece of land as soon as it’s picked out. we bought our current piece of land with the intention of forever. now that we have some country living under our belt we have a deep insight on what we’re really looking for.

4. put your home in storage
strange idea but it occurred to me that if we sold our land before we had all of the chips in place, we could technically put our house and shed in storage. i’m guessing it costs a ton of money to move a shed any real distance. so if we were in transition and were not ready for the big move, we could keep our home and shed safe and pick them up when we are ready. less than ideal but options are always good.

5. transition
i think a tiny house is a champion transitional home. it’s better than an apartment because you’d own it. you’d have the freedom to decide when you’re truly ready for what’s next vs. making decisions under financial pressure. i currently think i could live in my tiny house for a very long time because i’m comfortable even though i know we’re going to build our house when the time is right. no pressure feels really good. our last apartment was only $386 a month (and i NEVER felt pressure about paying rent) the light feeling of the weight off my shoulders is hard to put into words…. and because more people pay for space to go to bed at night, i’ve yet to hear how that feeling is expressed.

6. permanent
as a place to live in while building a home it is also valuable in that you CAN take your time on your final home, building everything right the first time rather than doing things half-ass so it gets done quicker. a guy we met mentioned the value of not moving into a home until it is truly finished. i’ve heard some folks get a tiny house so that they have something to live in while building their dream home, and as time goes on they realize that they’re happy with what they’ve got and no longer find their dream house worth the price tag such a dream.

7. extra space
who couldn’t use extra space? a guest house is one of the first things that comes to mind. my friend’s husband has a shed that he turned into his work-from-home office. extra space, i’ll let you fill in the blank.

8. tiny houses are cute
major book store chains even carry picture books of tiny houses. hundreds of pages of the cutest houses you’d ever see. plus people who live a tiny house lifestyle tend to be more experimental. with little money to lose and having a creative vision, a tiny house is something to impress even the more in-the-box soul. the picture books alone got me pumped way before i even took the idea seriously.

9. no rent = more time
when we first moved into our house, i figured freedom from rent was the reward. a short time later i found the real reward was my husband being able to purse his woodworking dreams. i have a vision for my lifestyle, not a vision for a career. mark however has career goals. he wants to build lots of custom designed guitars and basses for people who want high quality instruments. never in a million years would i have thought removing such a nominal monthly bill as rent would open up the space for something so fulfilling. i guess when we had rent to pay i just turned my mind off what was really important to him. now i would jump through hoops to make sure that he can live how he wants to live. he lives his life with passion so he has the energy to ensure the same thing for me.

10. easy to maintain
our roof is metal but if it were shingles that needed to be replaced, think of how cheap that would be. we made the mistake of buying cheap windows and the condensation coming from them may lead to a mold problem down the road if left unchecked. it would be affordable and easy to fix the problem because it’s such a small space. we bought a huge wool rug that is great insulation but horrible at keeping clean. it would be a day project to remove our rug and replace it with whatever we deemed a better fit. tired of that old wallpaper? we could re-wallpaper the whole house fast and affordably. if one day we wanted plumbing i imagine that would be a snap.

11. heating & cooling
a really awesome home is designed to need no cooling and little heating, that’s what the experts say. our house is not that. we have the smallest size A/C window units ($150) and a small little plug in space heater ($60). they get the job done. it doesn’t take much to heat or cool a tiny house.

12. tiny is simple
we pretty much do not bring things home unless something else is being removed. with less stuff to manage there’s less stuff to clean. we’ve fallen in love with our library. we don’t own movies, we borrow them. if i buy a book i give it to the library when i’m done which contributes to nationwide inter-library loans. i’m a huge fan! less mental management & “attachment”.

13. no rent = new priorities
i’ve said that mark was able to follow his passion full time but that’s about time. i don’t have more time because i still work my day job but i do have more money. i’ve felt empowered enough to resolve life-long health challenges (which i’ve written about) because of our lifestyle change. it can’t be underestimated that having one less bill to pay (even an affordable one) is absolutely liberating. at least for me, while having rent to pay, i felt like it was too risky to explore money-suck-holes like looking into health issues. i didn’t want to over-commit in case something happened. survival first, thrival later.

14. freedom by stair stepping empowerment
action replaces complacency. most of us know that we need to unfuck the world and that means change. the big changes that we need in our life and our world are scary to address. stair stepping to empowerment may impress nobody but i promise each personal victory is huge. personal improvement is hard to start and fun to follow through. each step that i followed through with (save income, buy land with hard earned money, quit my job, rent a moving van, etc.) felt like a huge victory. at some stage in the game i will have that same sense of freedom when i’m feeding myself from my land.

by no way is a tiny house the end-all-be-all of living, maybe an earthship is. for me it’s a tool to get me closer to my homesteading dreams while improving my health and my marriage. my ebook Tiny House And Land is the most A to B, step by step instructional on exactly how to do what we’ve done.

calories. more can be better.

food is good

so after digging through ten long pages of blog posts by Go Kaleo i’ve got more to bring to the table. she talks about calories and why they matter. if i understood her, it seems pretty straight forward. there’s a general way to calculate how many units of energy (calories) each of our bodies need. in order for me to run around as a waitress 8 hours a day, sleep 9.5 hours a night, maintain my 140lbs of weight while being 5’4” i require 2,300 calories (give or take 300 calories). when i eat less calories i won’t maintain my weight and when i eat a whole lot less calories my body takes the required energy from my bones, brain, organs, and muscles for fuel. taking someones blog on it’s word i looked up what my requirements were and for the first time i had a number (2,300 calories). then i looked up how many calories a day i’d been eating for the last 2+ months. holy hell. i’ve been eating between 1,000 to 1,300. no wonder my workouts had to be put on hold when i started eating to reduce gut inflamation. wow, that totally puts in persective all the junk food me and mark would split. a bag of chips is 1,300 calories, a box of cookies can be 900 calories, the amount of frozen yogurt that i would personally get would be around 400 calories and a tablespoon of peanut butter is 100 calories. mark would eat a large jar of peanut butter over the course of a few days. being that i’ve been on the full gamit of restrictive diets, it’s pretty clear that the cycle of clean eating that would take place for days, weeks or months at a time would be a calorie deficit turned over on its head. at some point the dam would have to break and i’d get on a streak of fro yo….daily. but think about it, all the junk food would bring in a daily calorie surge of 400 or more in one sitting, for a person consistently striving to (unknowingly) under-eat, the junk food was a saving (calorie) grace. looking back, i went a pretty decent stretch of time without eating junk food when i was pumped about 100% raw veganism. granted i lived off of processed powders and agave syrup….i did eat at least 4 avocados a day (around 300 calories each) then add in the many chocolate drinks, the many nut pates and the tons of fruit. all in all i lost a ton of muscle but my calories were not so bad. no supplemental bag of chips needed. my first impression about paleo was that it was a low carb kind of thing. since then robb wolf and chris kresser have been trying to steer the boat in the other direction (saying that paleo isn’t low carb and that calories do matter). but that message didn’t sink in and in the end i clearly ate too little calories because my cravings for calorie dense snacks (junk) came way too often. eating in a way that less inflames my gut seems to be around 1300 calories on a good day. now having the eye to understand my cravings (for more calories) really takes off the judgment and shame of my junk food ways.

here’s the insight i’ve gained from this new looking glass: *if i don’t want to crave/eat junk then i really need to get more calories in through whole foods, about 2300 calories *gaining muscle requires even more calories than my maintainence minimum *junk food has done me some favors in the past and bad mouthing junk food is no way to return the favor *real food can only do so much if there’s not enough fuel to maintain the fire *more real food is the way *food includes all the macros (fat, protein & carbs!)

when eating a restrictive diet, be sure you’re not semi-starving yourself. there are 2 must-reads (and include links to the calculators for figuring out how much you need and how much you’ve been getting): http://gokaleo.com/2013/01/25/adrenal-fatigue-as-a-cover-for-starvation/ http://gokaleo.com/2012/08/21/putting-the-calorie-pieces-together/

i’d LOVE to hear any insights or disagreements.

raw vegan days. bloated & no muscle.

here’s some calorie* refrences: 1 med avocado 322*

4oz. bacon 611*  or 1 slice 46*

cooked ground beef 1/2lb 579*

1/2 lb ground pork  600*

1medium raw banana 105*

1 carrot 16*

med sweet pot 100*

med potato 161*

coconut oil 1T 120*

1T butter 102

1/4 cup coconut milk 111*, 1Tablesp 28*, 1 cup 445

1cup cooked rice, 205*

1oz slice cheddar 113*

med egg 63*

1T peanut butter 94*

8oz chips 1278*

11oz fro yo  413*

chocolate bar 3.5 oz  593*

4oz cookies  473*

large cucumber peeled 32*

1cup boiled spinach 41*

1cup chard (boiled) 35*

1 cup zucchini (boiled) 29*

1 cup raspberries 64*

1cup blueberries  84*

med orange 62*

bacon grease tortilla recipe

i made mark tortillas. super simple, maybe the recipe needs a little less fat, i’ll see next time i make this.

 

1cup rice flour
1cup tapioca flour

3/4 cup water

1/2t baking soda
1/2t salt
1t cajun seasoning
2Tbacon grease

mix everything up before you add the fat in, maybe start with 1T of fat. OOoooh, test a small amount, roll a small ball, flatten it and fry it in a skillet.

changing my life

i know people want to change. i want to change.

with each birthday that brings me closer to my 30′s, i see more of the veil over my mortality. when i turned 26 a few of my friends parents either got diagnosed with cancer or died from it. i look at my aging parent and think about own future.

i had this idea that how i go into my 20′s will set the tone for my 30′s. how i go into my 30′s will set the tone for my 40′s…so on and so forth. soon enough i will be my parents age, mid to late 60′s. elders should really be our role models and i’ve always felt like something was missing because i didn’t have that. when i got into robb wolf’s shtick he talks about the amount of muscle we age with being an indicator of some good stuff, not a direct quote, clearly. that planted a seed which started with recovering memories of 2 different times in my life that i thought i had lost fat-weight but now realizing that it was mostly muscle-weight. so i’m picking and choosing what i’d like to build towards because i’m starting at the beginning.

when i fantasize about what my best life would be i see a few things that all come down to living like a real human.

1.MY DAILY FLOW. from a month of trainhopping i gained insight into this other porthole of time that does not exist by the clock. having that brief experience of timelessness really makes my civilized self feel like a machine version of a human. it’s hard to put that in words. (vacations do not feel like i’m tapping into anything real just another facet of my civilized life.)

2.MY BIOLOGICAL PRIORITY. really what i’m saying is nature over conditioning. i want to unschool my job-self. when i’m tired i sleep, when i’m hungry i eat, when i’m thirsty i drink, when i have to pee i do it. i don’t want to have to schedule in a 5 second break on the grounds that i have to pee now or else the machine will not go on. i don’t want to feel so second to my services in life. ****that’s the mental side.

****then there’s the physical side. trees, plants, animals, stars, grass, sun, rain, community, etc.

when i think of childhood books where the story is set in the forest with an old grey man living in a hobbit home, WHY, why does that seem so right? my childhood stories did not discuss issues with daily flow or holding your pee til you’ve got everyone elses luxuries (that they’re paying for) addressed.

part of me going into my 30′s means i need/want to build muscle. i need/want to stretch on a daily basis. i need/want to just be able to breathe. my current lifestyle does not support the long term vision of how i see my future unfolding. i’m a workaholic. i’m not on my final piece of land. i’m not getting any younger.

seeing the cob cottage totally put me back into my childhood dreams. whether disney conditioned me well or there’s really something to it, seeing those humble mud cottages in the forest felt right and that’s what i’m going on. i really don’t mind putting the work in but only for a short while. the food forest that our parents never built us requires the extra effort before we can begin but i’m changing my life soon.

here’s an interview that i found super inspiring. 2 people i find very integrated into the natural world:

http://www.rosegoddessbliss.com/ecstatic-parenting-part-one

http://www.rosegoddessbliss.com/ecstatic-parenting-part-two

 

 

earthships & cob cottage

our trip was 15 days.

we left AR heading to nada in OKC. two hours still to go i get a text message saying, “get me out of here, everyone keeps asking me where the weed’s at”…1 minute later, “if i would have brought weed i’d be rich”.

*NADA*

when we first arrived at the earthships in NM it was pretty overwhelming. the one we stayed in was an earth mansion and i just couldn’t wrap my head around building it. it had an attached greenhouse, then inside more tropical garden over-growing the living room & walk way, then spacious bedrooms/kitchen, full bathroom and coop & run on the side of the house for the chickens.

regardless of the million dollar price tag, regardless of the off-the-charts level of kush….
earthships are completely off the water and electric grid. the idea of really building a house without the limitations of those two key things truly puts me in awe each time i think about it. let’s really think about that. the earthship receives 7 inches of rain a year then cycles it 3 times creating 21 inches of rain use in the desert. that line of thinking really punches in the balls my “fuck plumbing” attitude. for one, me not having plumbing doesn’t make my water consumption recycle itself. earthship plumbing does. the moment water goes down a drain it’s already moving onto it’s 2nd or 3rd use. plus their setup is so streamlined that it totally makes me jealous. when we do dishes at home, at some point we need to dump the dish water bucket. the (good) thing about dumping the water is that i know where it’s going. i have to think about it. the (better) thing about having things streamlined is that you don’t have to think about it. and you also know where it’s going. cooler than anything is that the house is made from the land you live on (the dirt from excavation) and landfill trash (tires & bottles). knowing with your 2 eyes where everything is coming from prevents us from making up stories of how “fair” aquiring it must have been. when it’s all said and done you could build a smaller one of these babies for pretty cheap. sure it’s a lot of labor pounding tires but tires filled with earth regulate heating and cooling. worth it.

we filled up spring water at the grand canyon. mark took a few panornamic pictures too. we had 50 million epic fails at dumpstering all the way.

*mt shasta, spring untapped*

we went to LA to check out the tonic bar brian gushes over. *ALERT* clearly i have prejudice against (large crowds) of fancy higher class people. the reason i know it’s prejudice is because everything about the grocery store/tonic bar should have been a total win. insane amounts of healthy real food all over the store. tons of the stuff looked like small-batch handmade. everything was top quality, nothing looked like it was skimped to keep the price low. everything was priced to reflect the high quality that it was, expensive but fair. sounds like a win but i couldn’t hang. everyone was way too beautiful, it made my eyes hurt. everyone seemed empowered and assertive while i was holding back a mini panic attack. the tonic bar really seemed like a gem. a low end drink was $8 and a high end drink was $20. had my gut been fully functional i would have picked out something in the $20 range. another stark difference that i noticed was that all the fancy young ladies sitting around the tonic bar all seemed super vibrant, i was expecting to see more sick people looking for wellness. no punk, no hippies, no homesteader, i clearly pre-judge. we dropped nada off and got out of LA in warp speed. i am over the city.

we completed a 2 year journey to find the perfect canteen. in a suburb of santa barabra we went a food co-op that looked like a little food mart shack. all the workers looked like street kids, they were playing hip hop and had health force on their shelves. their variety of healthy foods and snacks was pretty impressive. there i got two canteens that i’m taking to the grave. one all stainless steel 40oz and one insultated 20oz where only stainless steel touches the drink but has plastic on the outside of the cap. we liked santa barabra, maybe a slower pace city isn’t so bad.

we head up the coast, i’m working on my tan. we see rami. we couldn’t quite see what he was seeing in covelo CA but it was awesome seeing him and his sweetass beard. rami’s dog was super cute. once we got in covelo the rest of our northern CA trip was cold & rainy. set my tan aside. this is when the trip started to go down hill. we finished all of our gut friendly food (should have made more while at the earthships) and nights were too cold to sleep straight through. when we got to mt shasta (a major point of interest) i was sooo irritable. plus while talking to our homies about our group land via web conference it became clear that they’re thinking about land that $8K per acre; way outside of the numbers i was imagining. that felt pretty shitty but they’re good people and i don’t see setback in our plans.

we were running short on time because we have a scheduled tour at cob cottage in oregon hours away. total we spent 2 nights in mt shasta and filled up on their untapped spring water before heading north. the morning we left shasta we mapped out the area where there is wicked affordable land. we drove through montague CA which was about an hour north of shasta. the land that we saw was mostly flat with rolling hills in the distance. the land looked mostly cleared, no forest, but the sky had cleared up at that point and i could see potential for that area. because the land was already clear anything we would do would be restoration whereas getting land in the forest (which is my fantasy) would mean anything we do would be destructive. plus flat land means no one would be left out of facing south. whereas if we were on a slope we’d need to ensure everyone had access to a south facing side of the slope to build and grow food on.

when we crossed over to oregon, mark said that he liked the vibe better. oregon seemed more lush. the prices i saw online seemed that $4k an acre was lucky. most of the drive to cob cottage was rainy. i said at one point, “i hope it’s not raining during the tour”. at that point i hadn’t fully grasped that it’s ALWAYS rainy (8 months out of the year) in northern CA/western OR. about now i’m on & off irritable. we’re running an hour late to cob cottage. as soon as i got cell service i called allie to tell him we were running late. while scheduling this tour with allie on the phone he mentioned that they usually try to serve a dinner afterward but i decided because of my weird dietary guidelines that i’d rather them not go through the trouble. he asked me what i was eating and i was nervous to say meat because he sounded like a hippie. i name a few things and he says, “oh, sounds like what my wife is doing”. sweet.

we get to the cob cottage grounds, park the car and walk the foot path to the site. FUCKING PROFOUND. cob cottage is inside of the oregon rainforest. i’ve never seem something so grown up, so many layers, so alive and complex. it’s cold & raining but i’m thrilled. we walk up the trail and allie is sitting outside with his cute little toddler. he stands up, we walk to the myrtle (building next to us), we take off our shoes and he says, “so are you doing the GAPS diet?”. we walk inside and it’s super cozy. we took a million pictures but because the cottages are all round and small it’s hard to really capture the experience. we sit on the rocket mass heater bench and i’m in love, the room feels better than anything i’ve even known. allie talks with a smile, he talks like he’s the most relaxed person in the world. him, his wife and their 3 kids live out there, watching over the place while the creators of the cottage are in wales. he slowly starts talking about the room we’re in. he points at the ceiling (not insulated), the wooden door (with cracks in it), and one of the windows that never got finished (huge window space with flimsy plastic semi covering it). he points out all the flaws and concludes that despite all those potential weaknesses, the place was as warm and dry as a person could ask for. it’s also one of the oldest buildings on the property. he talked about the crazy dancing parties, where 30 or 40 people had been in the tiny space and it was all good. he was so relaxed, he kept saying, “we could go check out all of the cottages, what ever you guys want to do.” i told him that we had the $50 donation for our tour and he tried to talk me out of giving it to him. i insisted that his time was valued by us and he ended up showing us around for 3 hours. we toured about 10 buildings. half of them were 80% complete. some had straw bale exposed, some didn’t have roofs, most of them had tarps protecting the completed parts. he took us to a completed building and said that his mom had been staying in it. cozy. amazing. simple. he opened up a wooden door to a small box cut through the wall with a screen on the outside. he points around, “quart of raw milk, butter, bag of carrots, eggs…” holy hell! impressed. hole in the wall for a fridge. the tour is me, mark, allie and his 5 year old daughter. he said that he’s been teaching on and off for 2 years the fire (rocket mass heater) stuff. i asked if he’s built a cob house before. he looks around the building that we’re in and says that the house he built was about twice the size (my guess, 400sqft?). i asked him how much it cost him to build and he said $2,000. he said that it was mostly for the rock foundation. he said it wasn’t complete but it sounded like they lived in it the way it was. i started asking him about his house and he said that it only had one plug for a single light, that they pay $5 in electricity a month and he didn’t even know what the point to that was. he also mentioned that his family sleeps outside on a bed. he was blowing my mind but i was keeping my cool. every cottage he took us into he pointed out the strengths and weakness. one cottage was completely built by workshop students. a few of the completed buildings didn’t even have doors but a blanket over the doorway. i couldn’t believe how beautiful and dry each building was. it was a testament that a beginner could build a beautiful cob home. by the end of the tour my toes were frozen beyond belief. we went back into the myrtle and i stood on the warm bench. i need that bench. at one point i told him that we were looking into land in that general region but the cheapest land wasn’t that cheap. he pointed out that i was from arkansas where land is wicked cheap so of course i’m going to think of $4k an acre as pricy. THEN he asked us if we had looked into tax sales. he said that a friend of his had bought 4 pieces of land from tax sales, including 160 acres near shasta for $26,000! then he told me about a woman who bought land in montague who’s building a cob house and starting a cob community out there. he explained that she had taken a class at the cottage and was really pumped about cob. that she moved her wool felt business to montague and was going to make things happen out there. huh.

we leave the magical land of cob cottage and i’m totally high on the idea of making an electricity-free cob home for a few thousand bucks within a summer, fall block of time. i bought The Hand Sculpted House book from the cottage and read 90% of it within the next 3 days. (this is a must read regardless if you’re building an earthship or strawbale or whatever. must read first!) so we drive up the coast, get to portland, stay at (the boy) eli’s house and meet up with jonathan for coffee. i’m glad to see these two lovely men but i’m ready to leave. so we head back down the coast to see the redwoods that we didn’t have time for just the day before.

this time the sun is out and i’m in a good mood. this trip to CA was much better than the first time around. we saw the redwoods, stopped at the beach (lots of pictures), laughed a bunch. we stopped in redding CA for the millionth time to go to the health food store. when we came back to the car the guys in their car next to us say, “thats a good book” referring to my cob book in the front seat. so then i start through my million questions, “have you built with cob, how much did it cost you, how long did it take, how much was your land, what did you need to do to make your soil ready for cob building, etc”. i brought up the $4k an acre thing with this guy too. he said that in that area (which was 45 minutes from mt shasta) but outside of the city land was about $2k per acre and “here look up our realtor, he’s amazing”. we wrote it down: http://mountainvalleyrealestateredding.com/ the guys said land with a spring would be realistic. which reminds me, (the boy) eli said that he had some friends that saved up a bunch of money to get land in OR and moved there to look for it. and since they got there they keep meeting people and keep finding better and better land (better including cheaper).

this person is pumped. amazing pictures of everything will be posted here: https://www.facebook.com/TinyHouseAndLand

pictures & info about our Tiny House And Land

so i got my shits DNA tested…

today i got my results back from my GI test.
as if part one wasn’t long enough, i have even more pieces to the puzzle worth mentioning.

i think my face looks less puffy since i’ve taken this picture

i owe a super big thanks to chris kresser because of podcasts and articles1,2,&3 that connected enough dots for me to wrap my head around what’s been going on and what to do about it. a second thank you is due to sweet ass bert who reminded me that resolving lifelong issues is a big deal, very encouraging.

so i figured out that FODMAPs and histamine foods are major triggers of my lifelong bloating and my on/off lip inflamation. i whittled my diet to only include these foods: local meat (only fresh or frozen! no smoked, cured, etc), pastured bone broth, carrots, greens (no kale), cucumber. also i’ve been taking clearvite protein powder (as recommend) and pastured gelatin power  added to the clearvite smoothies. i made some awesome lemon/raspberry jello last week. i’m addicted to it but it hasn’t been sitting well so i’m either going to try a lemon juice (histmaine food) free recipe or avoid yummy jello for a while. also only salt & fat (tallow mostly) with my meals. adding powdered thyme to bone broth is the best. so you’re seeing my food journal for the last 2 months. meat, carrots and chard.

though my diet is not well rounded with the full spectrum of nurtients it’s a lame trade off. i can reduce inflamation and even cut down on some of the SIBO but i don’t (can’t) eat all the foods that a healthy person can. healthy foods inflame my gut. yep, probiotics, immune boosting mushrooms, all the things that are gut healthy for a healthy person end up creating gut war for me. my indigenous bacteria are out-numbered so genocide is what has been happening in my gut. so when i add some more of the good guys in where they belong i’m just putting them in the line of fire. they don’t win. so i removed the “healthy” foods and let the war die down, hopefully with less war means less enemy occupation.

while listening to chris kressers talk about FODMAPs and histamine intolerence he mentioned that the ROOT CAUSE is often some sort of parasite or gut infection. he talked about strong herbs vs. antibiotics and why sometimes the latter is more of value. taking strong herbs for a prolonged period of time can wreck a person worse than a quick antibiotic can. it just depends. so he talks about the value of a GAPS type diet and getting your shits DNA tested through metametrix to know what’s really going on.

so i ordered the GAPS diet book (anyone want to borrow it?) and it really hit home. my mom use to take all sorts of meds for stomach problems she’s had most of her life. when she had me she couldn’t breast feed because she was on meds then. i was given soy formula (i have tested super allergic to soy) and grew up with all sorts of digestive issues (diarrhea and killer little kid stomach aches). so my mom coated me in bad bacteria at birth because she didn’t have the goods to share. one of the things the book talks about is often a kid (like me) will have learning disorders (yes) and emotional turmoil (yes again) and a sibling with autism (my older sister bonnie) who has a small list of foods she will eat (digestive issues) and lifelong constipation issues. in short the book says a mothers gut dysbiosis gets passed down which completely reflects my real life family.

*side note: justin brought up a very good point that the author of the GAPS book does make some pretty bold statements about what “cures” gut issues, autism, etc. after reading gary taubes and denise minger i have a better understanding of the no-no’s to confusing correlation with causation.

so i’ve squared away a least-harmful diet for myself but still needed the GI test. i found mary vance (nurtionist) and became her client. she is a former vegetarian, she was an animal rights activist, she totally gets what FODMAPs/histamine foods are, she coaches folks into primal lifestyle and she can order tests. while listening to her podcast, she even mentioned the issue of superfood importation creating a lack of food for tradional people. clearly she’s awesome and looks super healthy too, no elephant in the room.

while filling out my paperwork for her i remembered that there was a time in my life when i lived off mcdonalds. somehow i’ve blocked that out. growing up, my dad was an engineer at IBM and after 15+ years he got laid off. in between fancy jobs he worked at mcdonalds and would bring home bags full of the stuff that would have been trashed. for those handful of months i felt like i was finally getting some calories. he never touched the stuff. soon he got a job at texas instruments and the free for all ended.

“HISTORY-Please describe your eating habits growing up:
Started with soy formula. super underfed, lived on mustard & bread sandwiches til I was 10. then lived on noodles with tomato paste (no fat!) until 11. 6th month period when I lived off of the end-of-the-night leftover mcdonalds food. At 12, ate poor mans food; processed cheese and canned shit. Got a job at 14 and LIVED off fried msg chicken til I went vegan at 17. I did junk food vegan, macrobiotic vegan & raw vegan for a total of 9 years. Come out the other side with weston a price and finally a paleo type thing. Drank soda instead of water. But now we harvest spring water. I weighted 180lbs in 5th grade.”

when i started talking to this awesome lady, mary, i already had a plan. because i didn’t just hand her my problems and say “fix me” we decided that buying her small short term plan for $350 would be a good start. so i bought a chunk of her time then she ordered me the GI test, $250. she strongly suggested i buy clearvite protien powder due to it’s supportive detox herbs. plus the added carbs (not sugar) helps me feel better. $60 for 21 servings.

i opened up the box, filled out all of the stuff, put on gloves, felt a slight panic feeling (“retreat! retreat!” -my brain), shit on a plastic bag, scooped the right amount into each of the 3 vials, shook the formaldehyde solution up with my shit, mailed it to the lab.

3 weeks later while driving through southern california, i recieve an email from the awesome lady saying that my results were in. i tell her that we’re in her hood and can talk about this in person. we drive up to san fran, ran wicked late to our appointment and heard the bad news.

BAD NEWS:
i have a super gnarly strain of bacteria, a parasite and damn-near none of the good bacteria. plus mark needs his shit tested now too. (another $250)

SOLUTION:
antibiotics (cause it’s that bad), then 6-8weeks of strong herbs (with detox support) then REBUILD.

the antibiotics require a dr to perscribe them to me $$$. the journey doesn’t end. rebuilding looks a lot like what i’m already doing, GAPs kind of thing. after we atomic bomb my gut i will introduce probiotics in VERY SMALL DOSES. none of that “look how much fermented veggies i can add to my entree.” none of that “lets see how much kombucha i can drink in one sitting.” no. another thing the awesome lady said was that wild fermentation can be a no-no for someone in my condition, that i need to use specific strains of bacterica (from body ecology).

many unknown factors seem a wee bit scary:
1. how (bad) will the meds and strong herbs feel?
2. will my gut feel like childhood death?
3. will they cause me to run to the bathroom while in the thick of it at work? (fucking nightmare)
4. could taking the meds & herbs make me feel worse on a daily basis?

number 4 is by far my biggest fear. while mary was talking about how bad i’ve got it she repeated the phrase “you must feel pretty bad”. luckily i don’t feel bad, just bloated, but i’m scared that once i start stirring things up i will feel bad. when i thought of fear number 3 i heard eli in my head giving me a speech about my life coming before my job. thanks eli.

factors to look forward to:
1. no matter how bad i feel at first, i will only get healthier
2. i will be able to reintroduce healthy foods
3. with a clean slate and a vision of health i can build my body right, the way it should have been
4. the deeper insight on digestion really trashes a lot of dogma that i’ve taken on over the years about what builds health

number 4 is by far my biggest wake up call. though junky snacks aren’t healthy i totally think that a healthy person can enjoy them and it just wouldn’t phase them. (everyone has a different threshold for over-indulging though) AND that a sick person can only exacerbate their sickness even with the healthiest foods. i know it firsthand. advice about junk food and health food can’t be so conclusive.

now that i know what’s going on down there i’m super proud that i took the energy to figure this out. i could have put this off for another 10 years, how would i be feeling then? my parents are super health-minded and are talking about getting their shit tested. i hope they do. i can’t really wrap my brain around what it will feel like to be really healthy. i would like to die with good amounts of muscle just to throw that out there.

in 4 months i will be at the beginning of rebuilding. wish me luck. once most of my gut stuff has evened out i will get a monthly hormone panel done. mary suggested that my hormone issues (infertility & random facial man hairs) could be partially due to the stress my body has been through in dealing with a long term gut infection. resolving that and having a hormone panel will paint a better picture of what’s really going on down there-THERE.

i realized that the number one reason why i felt ready to address my health challenges is because we own a tiny house. not having rent over my head somehow created the space to trust that it would be okay to spend the extra money to get all of this done. while living in the city i felt like i needed to have savings, god forbid something happen and we can’t make our rent…etc, etc. rent was never a big deal but in the back of my mind i needed that security. living in the woods i just feel secure so i’m free to pursue my health.

earthship adventure. taos, new mexico

mark took epic pictures of the landscape. when it’s printed out it will be 8ft. good job.

legit jello~ lemon raspberry ginger, no sugar

my new fav food.

 

i’ve read a million places that gelatin from pastured animal bones & skin is THE best thing to heal gut issues. i’ve also heard that it does wonders for our skin & joints.

here’s my first time jello recipe.

disolve 4 T of gelatin in a cup of water, let aside. juice 2 lemons, add about a cup of frozen raspberries, add water til it reaches a 2 cup total. put the 2 cups of raspberry, lemon, water goodness into a pot and boil with ginger (i used an herbal ball to hold the ginger). once it’s nice and hot carefully put it in a blender and add the gelatin water mixture. blend, pour, put in fridge. this is sour, not sweet. if you can handle some sweet then i’m sure you know how to take it to the max.

 

 

 

 

 

 

for tiny house info & pictures: tiny house and land

 

starting our (farmers market) candy stand

 

a few weeks back i saw an ad in the paper that the farmers market was looking for cheese vendors. i figured we’d find a good source of dairy and make butter, ghee, yogurt and cheese. after calling a dozen different health service government workers i was directed to ask my questions (“what do i need to do to sell dairy products at the farmers market?”) to the health inspector. he kept saying, “no, i don’t THINK you can do that”. whatever. then the farmers market got us intouch with a woman who told us that we really could sell dairy goods but the hoops to jump through were a bit outside of my pumped up feeling. (such as going to a dairy plant to make produce the goods). so i reviewed the farmers market guide to see what was clearly allowed with no questions asked. the only realistic thing i could make on that list was candy. i looked up a bunch of recipes and it seemed simple enough. i bought about $200s in organic ingredients and supplies. i failed every recipe back to back. money, joy, inspiration, & time all went down the drain. not to mention that i haven’t been able to sample anything because i’m working on gut health, sugar is a no-no.

sugar is science. to get the right texture while not creating a crystilized failure was totally my weakness. plus using organic ingredients without corn syrup created a situation where many of the recipes were wrong and would fail…. or would have to be adjusted for the lack of corn syrup and would also lead to failure. i’ll say this, failing this much in such a short amount of time was pretty soul crushing. but what got me though was the soul quenching desire to take beautiful pictures of MY CANDY!

there’s a couple stories of funny stories of failure that i will not bore you with. after all the failure i started to win. we ran our booth for the first time. it was a very cold day (it ended up snowing that afternoon). almost no one came out to the market. BUT! with all that said, we still made $74 in 3 hours. success! the farmers market will be busy soon but we’re clearly doing fine for now. i’m excited to be a part of our farmers market. we love our farmers and they’ve done a lot to show us that we’re welcome.

*side note
putting myself out there was very revealing. i pretty much never want to talk shit on anyone for trying ever again. plus i can understand why things often cost more than what it seems. i had invested about $700 into getting this stand going but you’d never know it by looking at it. right now i’m not pricing things at an hourly rate on how long it took me to make. i hope folks consider my prices fair, most things are a $1 per ounce (give or take).

PS: failed organic fudge may be too gritty to sell but i know people would enjoy it for free. failed candy has made me friends.

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