Monday, April 6, 2009

Patience is not a virtue

Yesterday, the unthinkable happened. Jeremy initiated a state-of-the-union-address type conversation about future plans for the land. I tried to be cool about his unexpected enthusiasm to start actually really talking about getting out there but I blew my cover with uncontrollable shaking and foaming at the mouth.

No, no, no. I kid. I really did have it under control and managed to keep him talking about it for a full 37 minutes by nodding with a big dumb grin on my face and agreeing to his many and complicated ideas that involve: a toolshed, within a barn that houses a smokehouse which sits beneath an attic that has a trap door from which drops a pulley and platform to "lift heavy things" (say wha??) next to a pavilion that can be used for both parties and to milk animals (excellent dual purpose usage), that sits beside a garden shed and greenhouse which will all reside atop a hill above the beehive, vineyard, and wheat field, etc. Etc. It is clear that he's covered all of the bases except for....well....a place for us to live.

Ahem.

I have some different ideas. Well, two, mainly. They involve 1) a temporary dwelling that can be permanently left on the land and used later for many, many things (this is, like, a REALLY good idea) and 2) the permanent house. I'm having trouble getting much beyond these two goals but am pretty sure that until we have said dwelling, it might be tough to smoke meat, milk animals, and grow grapes along with the various other activities that require, you know, living there.

The combination of our two future plans, as illustrated, go something like this:

To this entire, expertly drawn to scale, diagram, I added the dot which is now completely lost in the middle corner of the sketch. The dot represented one of my two tiny goals - the temporary dwelling - and I clearly made the mistake of placing it within the area where Jeremy has planned his combination toolshed/smokehouse/barn/orchard/hay field. Oops.

Regardless of where anything will go or what it will be, it seems we're now looking at a Twenty Five Year Plan and the Five Year Plan I criticized earlier looks quite appealing about now. Too bad that the FYP got lost somewhere in the scribbles.

I am not a patient person but this process is going to beat me down into enjoying "the simple things" (blah. puke) - - like tiny teeny steps forward. And I'll admit, adding our first official piece of furniture this weekend, was incredibly gratifying.

1 comment:

Brett said...

Ok, as you can see, I'm doing my best to get caught up, and knowing that this is a couple of years too late, I still thought I'd chime in. I can totally relate. The barn, toolshed, workshop, pulley-system, the garden, the vineyard, the orchard all make sense, but where's the pool?