Home on the Range

Hi there, Internet! It's been a while. While we haven't been totally away from the Internet lately, every time we have been around it, its been because we actually had some sort of important business to do. When you only get internet a couple of hours a week, you find that you end up paying bills and deleting emails the whole time rather than writing blog posts. But hark! we have made time to do some writing. Unfortunately, we don't have the cables to upload our pictures as of yet, but hopefully we will be able to coordinate that at some point soon too.

Living at the cabin has been an trip. While we do have an air conditioner (set at a cool 80 deg F anyways), which makes sleeping tolerable out there, we spend the majority of our time outside anyway. Cooking, eating, using the outhouse...even in the middle of the night during a thunderstorm, purifying our water, showering, and just generally relaxing is all done outside. And we've been broiling in the heat some of our days out there. It's so different from our recent stint in the desert because of the humidity. Even some days sitting still in the shade with a breeze, I'm still overheating. But we've got a lake there, so it's pretty easy to cool off. At least its easy to stay hydrated compared to the desert.

I spent about a week setting up all of my projects, and everything is running smoothly. Solar hot water heater is heating, the shower is showering, and the sand is filtering. On a good sunny day, the water heater gets the water up to about 110-115 deg F, so it's not super efficient, but good enough for a hot shower before bed. It also stays hot enough over night to have a greater-than-luke-warm-but-not-quite-hot shower in the morning. And with the low flow showerhead drilled out to work with my low pressure system, we get a decent flow for about 6 minutes of shower.

My sand filter is up and running as well. It filters the water so that it looks crystal clear and clean, but we're not drinking directly out of it yet. The filter reaches it's peak efficiency in purification only after 30-45 days of continuous use, and we're only about 3 weeks into the cycle. So we're using the water in cooking where it's going to be boiled and for dishes, but we are yet to drink it straight. Combined with solar disinfection though, we're solid on the drinking water and haven't even gotten sick yet! Honestly, the spring water would more than likely not make us sick to drink it straight, but I'd rather be extra safe than sit in the outhouse all day.

So now that we've spent all this time doing projects, cleaning, raking, weeding, and cutting the lawn (with a sickle, yes a sickle), we've finally got some time to just relax out there, without any TV, Internet, or phone calls to disturb us.