• Saturday, November 22, 2008 - The "Wait and See" Game

• Monday, November 17, 2008 - Snow and Turkeys!

The last couple of days, we've been getting some snow-the weather channel says it will be snowing for a week, not straight- but enough to lay it all out there! I'm always the first one up in the morning, and I grab a cup of coffee and head for the computer, which is on the front porch (enclosed, of course, haha!)- there are 6 windows in this tiny area, all the way around 3 sides- and I can see everything~ and right now, it is all covered with a few inches of snow! Enough so, that I don't think it will be going anywhere until the spring~this morning as I sat, I happened to see movement outside of my window, the road is maybe 70 feet from where I'm sitting, and as I watched, 5 fat, wild turkeys were making their way down the road- I just picked up our Thanksgiving turkey yesterday, and you can't imagine the guilt I felt as I watched those chunky little guys head down the road, they were so cute! Now since we've been here, about 5 miles down our twisty road that goes along the lake, I've noticed these turkeys on the side of the road every few days or so, nibbling on whatever it is that they nibble on- and I noticed that they have been making their way back towards our place, and today? They made it, lol! We have loads of black squirrels outside of our cabin, as well- here are some pictures of where we are, taken, obviously, before the snow hit! Our cabin to the left, my daughter's to the right From our front door, looking at my daughter's cabin, and the lake! From the front of my daughter's cabin, on our little beach All of the leaves have fallen off the trees now, but they are frosted with snow, and even bare? They are positively beautiful! I have to say, we are not by any means financially well off, but we couldn't believe that we were able to rent such adorable cabins (2 bedrooms, totally furnished!) right on the lake, where in the winter we have been told that they have a major snowmobile race, and because we rented for the winter, the price is unbelievably low. Normally, this is a vacation area- when you drive down the road to get to town (about 7 miles from here), the road curves all over the place, there are cabins and homes tucked away here and there, and trees trees trees- during the fall, it was positively stunning! To understand why I am so thrilled with all of this "nature", you would have to know a little bit about me- I am originally from Central California, and I moved to Michigan 2 years ago- my husband is a Michigander, and I moved here to be with him- I'm a Native Cali Girl ;), and I'm not used to trees like this...I'm used to fruit trees and grape vineyards, as far as the eye can see~ and snow? hahaha...this is a complete unknown to me! Where I'm from, you don't see wild turkeys, or deer, or elk wandering around anywhere except on the Discovery Channel~ we have squirrels here and there, but I had never seen a black one before, or so many! And although I still don't know how to drive in the snow (sorry, I won't even attempt it...I'm a pretty big chicken, lol), and I am still learning how to walk in it (head down, always, looking where I'm stepping, and trying to figure out whether or not it will be slippery, and it took me the entire first winter to figure out when I was looking down? Whether or not it was salt..or snow!!!), and even though it is beyond cold here, it is still so beautiful to look at- and we do, indeed, have White Christmas's here! Looks like another one is on the way... At the moment, the sun is shining...well, it's coming and going, and looking up through the trees, I see mostly blue sky- so....life is pretty darn good! There is one little thing, though- today, is a very important day- I mentioned on my first blog that my husband has a job interview in a couple of days, and today is the day---his interview is at 5 PM- with the CPA (who called him to begin with) and the President of the company- he has a pretty impressive resume, he used to work for a company for 14 years, and he would literally go around the world repairing and training people on the company's machines and software- along with having machine shop experience, so they were pretty impressed with it- and we are on pins and needles, because this job, or the hope of this job, is extremely important to us, and will decide if we are going to stay the winter here or head to California where my family is for the winter. My feelings are hugely divided on this, although I would love love love to see family for the winter, the idea of having to relocate like that until spring really makes me cringe- in all honesty, I don't want us to have to go- so there is a LOT riding on whether or not he gets this job- and I will tell you, the job market here is really, really bad- this is basically the first "bite" he has had, and like I said, his resume is impressive, and he's been at his jobs for years- there just aren't hardly any jobs available here, so this one would be a blessing, believe me- and it would make all the difference. So! With that said, if there are any praying bloggers out there reading this? Send your prayers, because I've been bombarding heaven with them on an hourly basis! :) This is "Us"!

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• Saturday, November 15, 2008 - And Here We Are...!

A year or so ago, my husband and I decided (well, ok...I was the one who brought the idea up, but as it turns out, HE was wanting it too...he just didn't know it as..concretely, as I did!) that since acreage was so..do-able in Michigan, we wanted to find our own piece of land, with lots of trees, and build our own log home, with our own hands, and have a piece of that heretofore elusive thing known as "The American Dream"- The biggest problem we had, was not a small one by any stretch- money, or better yet, lack thereof--and the fact that both of us being divorced previously and with horrific credit, we knew there was no way we could ever be financed to buy a car, let alone property. But Michigan is home to a wonderful thing known as a Land Contract, which in a nutshell, is your basic "rent-to-own"- I started to hunt down properties and emailed those that interested us, told them our somewhat questionable situation (the bad credit, for starters, the fact that we would only have $3,000 down, and that, only because of our income tax return) and waited to see if we could perhaps find someone to buy property from, who would be willing to take a chance. I was brutally honest in my emails, and told prospective sellers our situation- better that, than to have someone show interest, then find out that we had awful credit, not a lot of money, etc.- the nice thing about it, is the acreage in Michigan is relatively inexpensive, IF...and this is a big "If"- you are NOT looking in suburban areas. But then, our whole idea was to get away from the hustle and bustle (and crime, and 5 o'clock traffic) of downstate suburbia where we were living. We wanted wide open spaces, lots of trees, friendly country people, and a little piece of land to call our own. We found it, we really did. But! There is also a reason that land is cheaper the further north that I looked- not quite up to the U.P., but darn close- and that is because the jobs are...you guessed it....downstate, in "suburbia". We found 10 acres in Montmorency County- Rick (my better half!) went to take a look at it- two hundred miles away from where we lived. I would have gone, had my son not decided (well, ok...he really didn't decide) to get the flu, and seeing as how there was still snow on the ground, I didn't want to put him through a several hours long road trip feeling the way he was. So! Off went Rick, digital camera in hand, and went to check out the property. The funny thing about it, is he would have forgotten to take the pictures, had the owner not reminded him! He came back home, excited, with pictures in hand. We couldn't get the camera pics uploaded to the computer fast enough, and once they were up, I ate them up visually- marveling at the snow everywhere, the sun shining through the somewhat abundant trees, the realization that if we decided to buy this property, this would all be ours. I listened raptly as he went on about how nice the owner was, all of the things they talked about, the beer that was shared...(the beer? And he drove home after this???) We decided that yes, we wanted this property, and we did all of the paperwork, paid our money for the down payment, and went around for weeks afterwards telling each other, "hon...guess what? We're land owners!" Our property in the wintertime We started looking around in the area we would be moving to for prospective jobs, and didn't find a whole lot. We figured that we probably needed to actually be in the area in order to find jobs, thinking that maybe a lot of them weren't advertised. Big mistake. Of course they were advertised...what few that there were. The truth of it is, Michigan has the worst unemployment rate in the entire country at this time. The reason we didn't see a lot of jobs is because.... there weren't any!!! But I digress. We didn't know this at the time, and we felt that being in our 40's, we didn't want to come to the end of our lives wishing that we had done this or that, and looking back to see many opportunities lost due to fear of failure. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, you know? We knew that if we were going to do this, it would take a leap of faith into the great unknown. The "unknown" in this case, being "will we be able to find jobs there?" Rick's job would be ending in a few months, after having been with the company for almost 10 years. This was nothing new in Michigan, jobs were ending all over the place. So....we did our paperwork during the summer, and decided to move in September before winter hit. My daughter and her husband decided to go "in" on the property with us...5 acres for them, 5 for us...we were thrilled to pieces, and envisioning two log homes in the woods, imagining the satisfaction of looking around at something we had actually built. We had spent the last year reading everything we could get our hands on about building log homes, and had settled on the butt & pass method. We bought a couple of old trailers, deciding that we would live in them until we could build something permanent. In the ad for the property, we knew that there was septic already there, no electric, but that it could be run in to the property for "approximately $800"--- Well....guess what? We could afford that $800....had it actually been $800....there we were on the property, in our somewhat icky trailers, and after a call to the electric company I found out that it wouldn't be $800, but $4,000. That, we couldn't afford. We couldn't even HOPE to afford it. So there we sat, for three weeks--during the end of the summer, with the heat AND the mosquitoes coming in equally hazy waves (Michigan mosquitoes are absolutely HUGE...you can practically see the gleam in their beady little eyes as they salivate over your jugular), no electricity, no running water (our neighbor, the owner we had bought from and the owner of the OTHER 10 acres which attached to ours, was kind enough to let us use his well for water. It was the nastiest tasting stuff I'd ever encountered, but I chalked it up to "not being used to it". I decided then and there, that although we would be putting in a well which would have water that I assumed would be just as nasty tasting, that although I would bathe in it, wash dishes in it, and cook with it, no way was I going to drink it. I determined to buy the BIG bottles of water for that!) ANYWAY! There we sat. We weren't sure what to do, we had a couple of nights where it hit 32 degrees, and it was seriously cold. We didn't have heat, we were basically camping out, and I was in a literal state of panic trying to figure out what we would do if we were still out there for the winter, which I knew, realistically, we just couldn't do. There were times that I would get up in the morning, walk outside, and it was literally colder inside the trailer, than out. We were getting pretty rundown, we were cooking outside on a campfire, we couldn't take showers unless we drove into town and paid $5 for the privilege...everybody was coming down with a cold. And there it was, our first go-round with reality checks. We had some money coming in, although not much. We were lucky to find a couple of adorable log cabins, 2 bedrooms, fully furnished, in a town 40 miles from our property, VERY reasonably priced (and just in case you're wondering, by "reasonable", I mean $425 a month), we figured we could rent those, hole up for the winter,and keep trying to find work. It would also give us a chance to actually live in a log home, to see if it was what we really wanted. Although at this point in the game, seems it's a little bit late, haha! That brings me to the present. We have been here for almost 2 months now, and although the view of the huge lake outside our door is beautiful, and the landlord is very nice, and the gas "fireplace" is wonderful, the way the firelight dances off of the gleaming wood of the logs which make up the walls...at this time, out of the 5 adults, only 3 have found jobs. And those are minimum wage jobs, and part time.  My husband has a really good interview coming up in 2 days, and we have every finger and toe crossed for him to get this job, because we realllly need it! He is ill with bronchitis at the moment, I'm just coming down off of the nasty cold I've been suffering the past few days (I can't prove it, but I would just bet these are both stress induced...we are really in a state of panic looking for jobs), and talk about having worries...absolutely! Living down state had it's own worries, and our whole idea behind moving up north, finding property, and building on our own land was to eventually whittle down those worries. Operative word here, being "eventually". So, after all is said and done, after we've already made the "leap", foolishly or no (believe it or not, we thought out a lot of things, we truly did. But as they say, "hindsight is 20/20"- and when someone is planning to do something as drastic as this, true, you can see a lot of the pitfalls from faraway, but you can't actually see all of them until you are, like us, in the big, fat, middle of things!), do we wish we hadn't done it? Or...perhaps not have done it the way that we have? But of course! ;) Given the chance to start again, I would have done things differently. And hopefully, to anyone reading this? Maybe you can avoid the mistakes that we made. For one, I think that I definitely would have considered looking not just for an empty piece of land (cost was a factor), but maybe acreage with a house on it of some sort. The downside to my looking, because I did, was the fact that almost all of the property within our price range that did have a house on it, only had maybe an acre or two of land. And my daughter and her husband wanted to build a home there, as well, not to mention that we wanted land that had enough trees to build with, room for a garden, etc. - at the very least, I would have tried to find something that already had electric poles up and was ready to go. And we probably would have waited a while before we actually moved, a lot of our reason for moving when we did had to do with my husband and I both suffering from major burnout. However, here we are, for better or worse! Our biggest challenge now, is finding work, and hanging on to our property throughout the winter until spring comes, and we can start building. At this point, I would like to quote something that a really wonderful woman named Dorothy Ainsworth said (Google her, what an amazing story!).... "If not me, then who? If not now, when?"

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