Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Visions of... alpacas... dancing in my head

I haven't had much to say lately, at least nothing I was ready to share here. The truth is, I'm not any less committed to living a locally-based, sustainable lifestyle. If anything, I'm more committed. But... and it's a big 'but' (there's another big butt to discuss, but I'll leave that one for later!) I'm finding it hard to execute. My life is dominated by a 40+ hour job that keeps me locked in an office in front of a computer all day (barely seeing, much less experiencing nature) and the kicker is the commute. At 52 miles one way, I'm spending between 2 1/2 - 3 hours in the car each day. On the low end, I'm losing 12 hours in the car each week and on the high, it's 15. By the time I get home, I'm wasted. I'm lucky if I can motivate myself to put together any dinner. Even frozen pizza seems difficult some nights.

I'm deeply dissatisfied with the routine, with the job, with our current lifestyle. I'm spending long hours dreaming the far away dream of our future country-house-turned farm. Like so many other people who thought they were doing the right thing, we bought our home. It's a nice little house in a pretty nice neighborhood. And it's worth roughly 70% of what we owe on it. Moving isn't an option unless we receive a giant inheritance from a long-lost relative. I won't be holding my breath for that.

So we're stuck here, and I can't get my head back in the game. Living and working here, if we are focused, we can save a good deal of money towards the future. Towards the house and land I'm dreaming of. And somewhere along the way, we can hopefully figure out how we can make a living in this future life of ours. But knowing we can't have it now, or even in the short term future, it's driving me batty. In my mind, I'm adding more and more animals to our future. In addition to the chickens and goats, now I'm thinking sheep and alpacas. Of course, we'll need dogs. While we're at it, maybe we should breed some. Nevermind that I know next to nothing about these animals. I've got time to learn!

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