New home in Oregon!

Recall that we arrived in Oregon at autumn just as it was getting cold and this left us with a tough choice. Should we go south where it's warmer and risk not returning to the Pacific northwest? Or should we stay through the winter and experience Oregon in the springtime? Chant and Susanna at Trillium Farm made it easier to decide by letting us power our trailer off their electricity in exchange for work around their place, and so we stayed there from October to January. In fact, we spent Christmas day in their warm farm house while they went to Hawaii.

We were able to learn some interesting things while we were at Trillium. We helped them build a bath house out of cordwood, where logs are "mudded" into a wall with a cement mixture (with an insulating layer in the middle). I helped Chant cut the hardibacker flooring before tiles went in and rough in his wood stove. Over the winter there was applesauce to be made, firewood to be cut, runs to the dump, and pottery to be spun. (Susanna is a talented artist and teaches art at the highschool). And of course, there was the special place called Trillum to experience and explore. Over the course of four months we had many dinners and good times together with Chant and Susanna and consider them to be of the highest calibre of awesome good people.

Since we were in one place for a while, mingling with locals, new opportunities came up. We were invited to move onto the land of a young family and work around their place in exchange for rent, "work trade" it's called. And so, that's where we are now. We have moved into their hobbit hut cob cabins and plan to stay here at least until October of this year.

Our main activity will be cultivating their vegetable gardens, and there will be many opportunities to learn how to build with cob, a mixture of clay, sand, and straw. We are off the electrical grid and so through the winter months with short days we have to watch our power use. We have a dial up internet connection which we're still getting used to, and we see our children less often now that they spend many hours playing in the woods with the other family's two children who are just about the same age.

So, here's where we'll be for a while. Stay tuned!