So we finally got the "yard" taken care of. Scott used the bush-hog to get the main part of it, then I had a muscle-jarring few hours of quality time with a brush cutting mower. Most of the brush and tall grasses are gone for the time being. Still lots to rake up but we're working on that between rain showers. Normally I'd just let it mulch but there's just too much.

So yesterday while I was out there raking, I think I got a new message from the God, The Universe and Everything. I paused in my efforts to take a look at how much I had gotten done (or not gotten done as was the case) and I was just taken aback at how peaceful and beautiful it is out there. I can only see my brother's house across the way and other than that it's all trees and gently rolling farmland. You could hear so many different birds and the breeze in the treetops and that was about it.

I was just really SURE, you know? I felt that this is totally the right decision for us. Even though it seems no one "gets" our doing it. I think many people feel we're doing it because we have financial troubles. While we do tend to have our share of financial difficulties, that isn't our reasoning. This all might make sense to everyone if we didn't have financial problems in that sense. They'd understand that we're trying to live simply, that we want to be financially independant, that we don't want to be tied to the infrastructure and the grid. We want to be sustainable. But since we're not rolling in the dough, they all think we're forced into this. We're not really...we could have made it work where we live now but we'd always be skint and we'd never get to do the things we really want to do, like travel and enjoy our family.

So we're moving ahead with everything. Should have everything together to finally get the permit here shortly then after we have the grading done we can move the house onto it's final destination and we can get to work on it. Happily, we don't have a real time limit on the permit so we can do the septic anytime we're able. Of course we can't live in it until we get the final occupancy permit, but still.