Thinking ahead

Today's weather:
Sunny, warmer, and less breezy than yesterday
Temperature: currently 54 at 7:40am, with a high of 81
Wind: NW 7mph
Humidity: 88%

We're starting to think, talk, and plan, for purchasing our own property, one that would be suitable for homesteading and that also makes sense given the other dimensions of our lives, for instance, is reasonably close to our graduate programs and places of employment. One location that is receiving serious attention is the small "city" of Pine Lake, which, in the 1940s, was a quick country get-a-way for downtown Atlanta types, and now represents an odd, quiet, little community of bungalows tucked around a small lake, where properties are still affordable and little to no "development" seems to be indicated.

We want a home that is comfortable to live in (we're nowhere ready to build or even renovate anything ourselves), with yard and sun enough to sustain a garden that could supply all of our vegetables, a blueberry patch, and some fruit trees. Ideally, I would like a wooded lot adjacent to or at least nearby, as well. While we want to retain central heating, AC, electricity and Internet, etc., I would like to add-in a number of dual systems, such as cast-iron wood-burning cooking stoves, and ultimately solar panels and a composting toilet. First thing's first, though, we've got to make some progress on purchasing a property, whether in Pine Lake or elsewhere.

One property we're interested in is below, as it's likely attainable at a reasonable price (we hope) and there is at least one lot (maybe two) adjacent to it for sale also. If you would, please keep us and a great homesteading property like this in your mind!

New Options

Today's weather were we live:
Temperature: 73, alternating sunny and big clouds
Wind: NW at 14 mph; it seems very cool and breezy
Humidity: 29%

As I consider various dissertation topics for the PhD program I'm currently working my way through (just now at the end of year 2 in a 5 year program), I'm giving serious thought to modern homesteading as a research topic. Rebecca Kneale Gould's book, At Home in Nature, offers some superb historical and theoretical resources, as she writes about "homesteading" from Thoreau to Wendel Berry, with special emphasis upon the Nearings.

More, a dissertation (basically, a book-length project that takes three-years to complete and that ideally becomes an actual book) focused, for instance, upon the writings of Scott and Helen Nearing and the ways in which these writings are selectively and creatively taken up, applied, argued with, rejected, and so forth, by later generations of homesteaders, would bring together personal and academic aspects of my own life, making room in my mind for a life that integrated homesteading and public intellectual practices.

So, this blog is back. I'll leave all of our previous posts up so that later readers might see clearly the crazy (and indeed embarrassing) ups and downs, in and utter outs, of homesteading we've been through. As read more in Gould's book, I see that we're hardly alone in this, and that the full, complete, and successful switch over to a homesteading life is a radical re-writing of our cultural programming affecting virtually every activity. In the entries that follow, I'll be writing about my research, our attempts to re-imagine "homesteading" in ways that allow us to do everything that we want to do (e.g., have a blog, which requires computers, electricity, an Internet connection), and our efforts aimed at re-creating some basic homesteading elements here at a suburban property we rent.

Thus far, we've been collecting our compostable garbage in a bowl each day and I'm taking it out to the old compost bin each evening. I'll need to do some work with leaves and soil and straw - adding them to the bin - here soon. It's not very ambitious, but with so much other work required of us, graduate programs and jobs, it's the best we can do toward a natural, organic (i.e., not forced) approach to re-beginning.