Don't Call It a Comeback - The Return of the Blog

"Don't call it a comeback, I've been here for years."

Back in March of 2017, I posted that we were finally framing the walls.  Then the posts stopped.  I could evoke a Thoreau reference by reminding myself that as his work began in earnest he was engrossed by it and found himself "...not having many communicable or scholar-like thoughts..."  Surely that was part of it.  The other, though, is due in no small part of utter lack of time.  The entirely of this project, while probably only 20 or 30 days of actual labor has been completed thusly as notes scrawled in the margins of my daily grind.  In the days since the last post my full-time IT consulting gig has put my toes in the Gulf of Mexico by way of Houston and Corpus Christi, Texas, the sands of Jacksonville Beach, Florida and the foothills of the Smokey Mountains in Tennessee.  The 8-5 had been, for the entirety of those trips, bloated to the 7am - midnight, 7 days a week and I think it is no stretch to say that I went a full 35 days without a day off at one point...

So, those words above were written in November, 2017.  We were living in our previous home in Oklahoma.  I was grinding it out as an IT consultant for a small firm and was pushing every spare minute and penny into building our cabin.  In the two and a half years since then, we've done it.  Actually, tomorrow will mark one year of full-time, off grid living in the cabin we built.  Time flies when you are having fun.  It also seems to accelerate as my hair turns whiter and my kids get taller.  A lot has unfolded between the bookends of 2017 and today.  It's time to play catch up, to fill in the gaps and to expand on what we have learned up here.

Spoiler alert!  It's better than we ever dreamed it could be.  And, it has been so much easier than we thought it would be.  Now, if you have spent any time reading or watching other off-grid folks online you have likely heard stories about '10 things I wish I had known before going off-grid' or heard things about how hard simple things were to do now.  I can say that, in our experience, we overthought every single step at least 12 times before we made a move.  So, when we finally took our foot (or sometimes feet) off the brake pedal and let the wheels of adventure begin to move, we spent more time laughing at how concerned we were as we learned to loosen up.  Yes, we've had a few close calls, of which I'm sure to regale you later, but for the most part, this whole living thing is a lot more user friendly that we thought it would be.  It's almost like one does not actually need all the trappings that we've been sold as essential for all those years.  But, again, more on that later. 

Ok, we've got a lot of ground to cover.  Onward.