Samson's Power

Well, it finally happened. Nearly two years to the day, I've gotten a hair cut. The last hair cut I got was about a week before our wedding. (Note to self: two year anniversary approaching.) Luckily for me, my strength doesn't appear to be connected to the length of my hair. On the contrary, it has allowed me to work and sweat indefinitely without dealing with hair ties, brushes, or hats. It also only takes me about 3 minutes to shower in the morning now. (And since we have an awesome 1.5 gal/min shower head, thats only 4.5 gallons of water. Bam!) Hopefully my super soft luxurious hair will now make some kid super happy when they get a sweet prosthetic hair piece made out of my two little pig tails (well, maybe not that little, they are a foot long).

I'm free!

Hair sure is weird when it's not on your head. 

Say Goodbye to the Stripes

Time for the stripes, and lime green wall in our bedroom to go. I'm not sure how long I could stand waking up in the morning to this paint job. I don't know that I would mind the lime green so much as the black stripes. It's a little hard to see in this picture, but after a coat of primer, the stripes were still super obvious. Also after the first coat of our actual paint color, the stripes are still visible. So three coats of paint is all it will take to cover them up... But at least the end of painting is approaching! 

Nomads no More

After the last 8 months of being homeless nomads, we're finally back in a place of our own. We closed on our new house on Thursday, wrote the single biggest check of our lives, and were handed the keys. It was a day of moderate anxiety--not so much about writing the check, but mostly just because we were wholly tired of the process and just wanted it to be finally over with.

The only moment when my hand did waver in the face of a signature was when we signed the initial contract offer on the house back in June. That is when I thought--what the hell are we getting ourselves into? After that was all over, I didn't expect to have to go through another month and a half of inspections, appraisals, paperwork, having our phone calls, messages, and emails ignored by various parties involved, multiple rounds of negotiations with the seller, and not knowing if we were actually going to get the house until the keys were in our hands. I suppose that going through things like this is the stuff of adulthood.

Now that all of that is behind us, it's on to the fun part! Painting, yard work, tearing out carpet, emptying all of the plumbing traps of mysterious black sludge... Well maybe not fun, per se, but knowing that everything we are doing is an improvement to something of our own is a pretty awesome feeling. The projects abound and to do list seems never ending, but at least we know that we have the rest of our lives to complete it all (and I'm sure it will take that long).

Hopefully it won't take too much longer to get the paint and flooring done though, as we've postponed moving in the majority of our things for ease of work. So we're working every night so that we can actually move in the rest of our stuff in a timely manner. In true Jay & Lauren fashion, we spent our first night sleeping on the floor on the same camping pads that we used in our roadtrip out west. We have now upgraded to sleeping on a pull out sofa bed in the living room. Our utensils and chairs are also straight out of our camping gear. Its like a camp-out every night in our house!

The help from our friends and family has already made everything much easier on us. The monumental undertaking of home ownership would be so much less enjoyable without everyone being so willing and able to help. Thanks to all of you in advance for your trucks, your lawn mowers, your used furniture, and your company at our soon to begin house party circuit!

Marmot

I wouldn't really call myself a particularly brand-loyal person. For the most part, the whole concept of branding seems rather dubious to me. Paying extra money for a name brand product usually just means you're paying a premium so that you can see the company's advertisements everywhere. However, there are a few brands that I can actually trust to be something better than the generic, and I just have to give a little credit right now to Marmot.

I bring this up because a few nights ago we went to the Gear and Beer event at Backwoods in Overland Park, where Marmot reps fed us free Boulevard beer and food. Now, you may think that anyone who gives me free beer gets my seal of approval. While this is mostly correct, I also have other reasons to think Marmot is the best gear outfitter on the planet. I got my first gore-tex shell jacket for backpacking in 2001, a bright orange Marmot jacket, with a zip-in fleece liner. I wore this jacket for ten years, without getting a single tear, or having the zipper, buttons, or anything else replaced. It was also pretty much the warmest jacket I ever had until I got a Marmot down jacket last year. (Honestly, the Zeus jacket is so damned warm, I can't hardly ever find a time to wear it where I don't overheat. Also doubles as a great camping pillow.)

Since then, I've got Marmot rain pants, a packable rain jacket, fleece, and gloves. Everything I have ever owned from Marmot has been awesome, and after years of use is still in great condition. And now, I can add the Marmot Kompressor Pack to my list (bright orange no less), as I won it at the Gear and Beer party by running up to the front to answer the trivia question of what a Marmot is. (Hint: it's a woodchuck that lives in the mountains. Or was that a groundhog? Apparently, they're really just giant squirrels. Where's Punxsutawney Phil when we need him?)

Now, I know what you're thinking: this guy must be rich! To be fair, Marmot is super expensive, and I don't think that I've paid full price for any of the stuff. It's pretty much all closeouts from the previous year, mostly off of Sierra Trading Post. Hopefully, some day I can do the company more of a service than spreading the word by actually buying some of their things at full retail price.

Kahola Preppers

Well, I survived my first week back to work. I don't know that my survival was ever in doubt, but some may have questioned my ability to actually do something productive for 8 hours a day. After five years of engineering prior to the sabbatical, much like the proverbial bike, it was a bit wobbly for the first couple days, but then it was back to business as usual. It helps that I'm picking up on all the same projects that I left off on 7 months ago. And I'll probably still be working on them 7 months from now. Yes, things go slowly in the development world. Now we've only yet to see if Lauren will survive her first week. Something tells me she will.

Regardless of our inevitable return to working life, the sabbatical seems only half over. We went straight back out to the cabin this last weekend after work on Friday. It felt as if we just needed to get some business done in town over the week and were getting back to our real lives for the weekend. The only difference at the cabin this time is that I didn't have any projects to work on, so we actually just relaxed the whole weekend. The water filter was flowing, the stone pathway was built, solar shower running, and all of the other little things were taken care of.

My biggest goal was realized out there in the form of a self-sustaining drinking water supply from a system that I built myself. The biosand filter worked wonders on the lake water. Only rarely could you smell even a hint of fishiness, and you could never taste anything off. I had to start using the lake water because the small spring on our property dried up on us after a month without rain. However, I came to like the lake water more (considering how much improved it was through the filter) because the spring water was extremely hard water, which is something no water filter can change. It sometimes tasted like I was hanging drywall--liquid chalk. I don't think I could build a reverse-osmosis filter myself for under $50...

I combined the biosand filter with solar disinfection, and for the last three weeks of being out there, that is all the water we needed for drinking, cooking, dishes, and showering. For the two of us, that equated to about 10 gallons of water a day, or about 300 gallons a month. If we were doing more laundry out there, I imagine that might have doubled that number to 600 gallons a month. Considering the average American household consumes more than 10,000 gallons a month, I would say that we're doing pretty good. You start to really understand how much water you use when you have to manually filter all of your water yourself, and carry it around your property instead of having it piped. However, except for the manpower involved in carrying water around, there wasn't any external power source needed for the purification process. Our Prepper street cred must have surely ticked up a couple notches. Now we just need to get our booby traps installed...