Some say I’m a little hard on my friends, but I honestly wouldn’t do anything to them I wouldn’t first do to myself.
This is my friend Carol. It’s been a while since I cut her face, but she’s healing up nicely now.
She’s still talking to me.
A lot of people gasp with shock when I tell them we have no t.v.
“Did you see blah blah blah last night…?”
“Nope. Haven’t got a television.”
“What??!!”
I do caregiving for a living, so I stay for two days and two nights in a house each week. But even then I’m still not tempted to stare at the goggle-box. Unless there’s a good documentary on, or Bones – about the only drama I like to see regularly, because her autistic-type personality has a train-smash sort of fascination to it, and the other characters make me laugh. The other exception being America’s Next Top Model, but that’s because I like watching the photo shoots that they come up with. In between the shoots (when they’re bitching at each other about who should be doing the dishes or what a cow so-and-so is) I usually wander off and hand out meds or empty catheter bags or something else so much more fascinating.
It’s no hardship though, having no t.v. We do have the internet, after all, which can keep us amused for hours. Any question you can possibly come up with, Google will find an answer to it somewhere. Which is how I know that steam rollers don’t roll steam… Continue reading
Tiny house living has its idiosyncracys. Such as being stuck inside a small space during very bad weather. A couple of winters back I had the dubious pleasure of experiencing this while it rained for two weeks solid. After several days I got to wondering if I should tie 44 gallon drums around the outside of my wee home, while nursing visions of it lifting from the ground and gently drifting out to sea.
A bottle of wine or two combined with over a week of solitude, and three nights later, I had written a poem/saga encompassing the visions that flashed through my head. It contains lizards because I’m great fan of them and somehow a collection of lizards ornaments and doodads has grown around me over the years. Funny what happens in a 17ft-long tiny house when the rain and the wine do flow…
Never had the lizards seen a sighting like the Lizard Queen, leading from the towbar thus…
This is actually a house, not just a toilet!
There’s a great blog on the WordPress site written by a guy called 23thorns, full of witty descriptions on South African wildlife, parenting ups and downs, and all manner of other ravings. I had a nosy at his blog, he popped into mine and read one of my ravings on Tiny House Living, and he wrote a post of his own that posed a few questions about the lifestyle to which I am largely now accustomed.
The answer to why I went (back) into Tiny House Living is in my blog here
My point of view about some of the Pros and Cons of Tiny House Living is here
And the raving that 23thorns read about Tiny House Living is here
And now to his questions. Continue reading
There’s a lot to be said for having an awning off the side of your caravan on a cold, rainy night. While sitting here with a hot water bottle stuffed up my clothing, somewhere between my merino undershirt, my lambswool jersey (purchased from a menswear department because menswear departments for some reason unknown often have better quality garments for lesser prices than their womenswear equivalents), and my very thick sweatshirt (also purchased from a menswear department for the aforementioned reasons), I have pondered upon this fact mightily.
A few weeks ago I pulled out all the coins and notes I had been stashing aside for a very long time and forked out for a new awning to be tailor-made to my requirements. It’s not that I didn’t like the original awning that came with the caravan, it’s just that I was running out of places to put duct tape to plug up the holes where the wind whistled beautiful melodies into my private spaces, and the water feature was quite frankly getting out of hand. Far be it from me to complain, but when the bits of duct tape begin to outnumber the bits of awning, a girl just has to get practical.
Tiny houses don’t necessarily have to be grotesque little tin shacks in the woods ya know. There are some beautiful ones out there, hand made with great care and a flair for design. This guy has made some beautiful vardos – the gypsy word for Caravan, essentially – and his Facebook page shows some of them in the throes of creation – fascinating stuff!
His website Zyl Vardos here
And his Facebook page here
One of the beautiful Zyl Vardos – Fortune Cookie. Image by kind permission from zylvardos.com
Your potential new lawn mower.
There’s a lot to be said about living in a ‘real house’. As I’ve mentioned before, the divine presence of an automatic washing machine is number one in my book. Here are some other great things about it: Continue reading
There’s a movement going on out there. It’s called ‘The Tiny House Movement’.
Check out the documentary ‘We the Tiny House People’ here.
My humble lil’ abode – the innards.
Life has its way of having a good chuckle at your expense, does it not? Way back in the child rearing years of my life, my partner at the time and I took to the road in a 1948 Leyland bus, which had a couple of lofts on the roof just big enough to swing a mouse in. So off we set with three kids, two dogs and a parrot, and did a few rounds of the North Island of our lovely country, New Zealand. A grand and interesting life it was too, with many a character-forming challenge along the way.
Things I learned while living on the road: Continue reading
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