The siren call of simplicity

To anyone who cares,

I'm starting this blog with every intention of journaling my transformation from web geek into old-school, self-sufficeint provider/farmer/homemaker. That's a rather grandiose introduction, so let me explain:

Right now, I'm a 27-year-old male who gets paid very well for working on a video website (http://vmix.com/). Although I consider myself lucky to have such a great job and to be paid well for doing something that I consider fun, my life is not complete. All too often I hear of people in technology professions retiring to a few acres, building their own home and living out the rest of their days in self-sufficeint, hippi-esque bliss. This siren call of simplicity has captured yet another restless soul: me.

I'm not sure when I'll be able to "retire" to work full time on building my house. Hopefully it'll be in the next few years. I do have one thing already done: I've bought the land. I own 20 acres of mountain-side property in lovely Spokane, WA (which for some reason everyone has a low opinion of, but I can't for the life of me understand why). The land is about halfway up Mt. Spokane.

I have a TON of challenges ahead of me, all of which I'll be spelling out in subsequent posts. Some of the things I'll be covering: why I'm doing this, how I plan to solve each of these challeneges, and where I fail and succeed. Hopefully someone else trying to achieve similar goals as mine will glean some useful info from this blog.

Just a rough outline of some of the things I HOPE to accomplish

• growing 90% of my own organic food through french intensive gardening
  
• building a geodesic dome from a kit
  
• building an attached geodesic dome greenhouse (also from a kit)
  
• installing radiant floor heating
  
• crafting a greywater recycling system
  
• installing a wind turbine for electric power generation
  
• possibly installing supplemental solar power
  
• raising a goat or two and making handcrafted cheeses from the milk
  
• making pasta sauces and/or salsas from garden vegetables and selling them at farmers markets
  
• maintain the wife's happiness factor
  

That's enough for now. In the next post I'll try to explain why I'm doing all this and a few of the things I'm doing to prepare for the big shift.