Posted by Dave on April 13, 2010
Besides being financially independent, could you grow all of your own food too?
I think I could – I grew up on a farm and spent most of my life (it seemed anyways as a teenager) doing chores, baling hay, and generally being kept busy. Otherwise who knows what kind of fun I could have gotten up to living 15 km away from anyone I knew. I read a book last year titled “Self Sufficient Life and How to Live it” by John Seymour. In the book, he not only provides the benefits of being self-sufficient food-wise, but also provides a scalable operation that shows how to set up your farm from 1-50 acres.
With our household becoming more interested in food and where it comes from it would seem like a good fit to grow our own – not only would I know exactly where my food came from, but I could control each and every aspect of inputs to it’s growth, or (in the case of animals) what kind of feed and care they receive.
Maybe I’m a little paranoid from reading too many post-apocalyptic stories in the last few months (for example: The Last Man; The Book of Ember; I Am Legend), but there are very few people (relative to say 100 years ago) that are able to grow their own food. I’m wondering what will happen to food prices with ever-increasing energy prices on the horizon. How much would food prices go up if fuel costs increase to $200 per barrel?
I can see some potential problems with homesteading:
- Can’t really leave the farm: This is one of the reasons why I don’t have a dog – we’re never home. If you have cows, sheep, pigs, and chickens it’s difficult to schedule a week’s vacation in the sun when your animals need fed somewhere in Southern Ontario. A farm would really be a drag on vacations and essentially tethers you at home.
- Poor growing years: If you experience poor yields, you still have to eat, meaning you may have put a significant amount of time (and possibly money) into a crop and end up with nothing to show for it – might as well have lived in the city.
- Opportunity Cost: The trade-off between such things as buying land and spending time growing food may work out less than just living in the city and buying food.
In the end, there are some significant draw-backs to doing it all yourself, but at some point I may freak myself out enough worrying about how I’ll eat in 20 years to take the plunge. I think I have been away from the farm long enough to romanticize how rewarding working for your food is, but there is a certain level of satisfaction at the end of a day of building pasture fences knowing that you have just done something that is going to help feed you in the future.
Have you ever thought of homesteading? Could you do it, if necessary? Would it be worth the extra work?
Posted by Canadian Dream on April 9, 2010
I have to thank Mike for the link on his comment on Part I of this series. It was a very useful read how someone else dealt with a similar situation if you haven’t read the article I suggest you go have a read.
Now back to my lifestyle design. I know what the problem is: I don’t have enough hours in the day. I know what I want to do: more time for writing other than this blog, more time for house projects and more time for myself . Yet changing your life doesn’t happen over night, so I’ve broken down my plan into stages.
Stage 1 – Make Better Use of What you Have – I’m guilty of wasting time just a bad as the next person so here is my plan to rein in that habit.
- Make better use of my lunch hours. I typically don’t do much of anything during my lunch hours than surf the news. So now I’m going to devote 30 minutes of my lunch to novel/short story research, brainstorming and even writing.
- Start blocking out time during the weekend mornings. I tend to lounge around the weekend mornings drinking coffee and reading a bit longer than I should. So I’ll be trying to wrap that up by 9 or 10 am which should give me a 2 to 3 hour block of time to work on either: some writing, house project or board reading (at least one day for those weekend prior to a meeting). I’m going to alternate those to ensure I get to everything.
- Stop watching so many movies. After the kids go to bed, about 8pm, I’ve been watching too many movies. I think partly because I felt brain dead, but I’m going to try to only do that every second night at most and free up some time for writing.
Stage 2 – Adjust priorities - I can’t be everywhere and doing everything, so this is what is going to give.
- Turn down more optional Board events. In the beginning I’ve attended just about every event partly to get to know people and learn more about what goes on in the Division. I’m over that stage so I’m going to be saying no to more things to ensue I don’t over book myself in a month.
- Stop posting on this blog on Mondays. By cutting out Monday’s post and having Dave continue to do Tuesday I limit my blog posting days to a mere three days a week. I’ve been rolling this around in my head for months. I just don’t want to keep up posting five days a week anymore. This change is effective immediately.
Stage 3 – Longer term adjustments – These will take some time and some money to change.
- Hire help. I’ll be sitting down with my wife to discuss what we really want to do and when. Then with her help I’ll draw up a plan for what items I’m going to contact out. I’m thinking likely items here are landscaping and cleaning or perhaps painting projects in the house. Just because I enjoy doing house projects doesn’t mean I have to do all of them.
- Use flex benefit at day job in 2011 to buy an extra 7 days off. Use half a day a month for ‘me time’ in 2011. That way I can ensure I’m always getting some time to myself each month. It’s going to cost me perhaps a year at most on my retirement date (since I’ll have less going to my pension), but I think it will be worth it.
- Spend more money/time on my family and myself. I want to start making sure we get as a family, as a couple and by myself at least once a month to do something fun. So it might just be going swimming as a family, attending a play as a couple and signing up for a writing seminar for me. What it cost won’t matter that much, it could be free, but I want to ensure I’ve devoting time to enjoying life.
So that is the general plan of attack, obviously some of the details might shift around a bit while I execute the plan, but that is ok. At the very least I feel hope that I’ll be taking back my life and actually living the life I want rather than just letting it happen.
How have you changed your life recently? What are you willing to spend to enjoy life?
Posted by Canadian Dream on April 8, 2010
As I mentioned in my comment on yesterday’s post I think my version of the time requirement for the board job is a bit high. I do get periods of time off from the job (ie: this week I’ve only had like two emails since the kids are not in school) and I am noticing the time requirement going down in this month. I think March was just a bit more brutal than expected (for example I spent about 2 days interviewing people, which is an unusual event), so that perhaps it is skewing my view of the time commitment.
Now today’s post is more about what do I want with my time. Which seems like an easy question, but in reality it is hard to figure out what you want the most some days. In general I think some of my dissatisfaction in my current life comes from not having enough writing time. That is something I do enjoy and this blog is sucking up a large amount of that time right now. I’ve realized I’ve settled for writing for this blog as it gave me a feeling of success, but it’s not what I really want. I want to tell stories and this is a very limited platform to do that. I still want to finish my book I’ve started related to this blog but I also would love to spend more time working on short stories and a novel I’ve got started. I understand there is no money in fiction writing, but I still like to do it.
I also want more time to myself in a week. I’m the kind of person that NEEDS some time to myself each day, I don’t function well without it taking some alone time. I do manage to usually get a short decompress time (~10 to 15 minutes) each day after work (a big thank you to my wife who makes that possible). Yet I find it hard to block out some time during the weekend to do something just for me. If I took more time for this I could also be happy in a writing course in the fall if I can swing the time (even if it is during the week).
The last item I want to do more of is working on projects for the house. I realized during a project this last weekend how much I really enjoy working on painting, flooring, tiling and even landscaping. Just right now it seems these projects are always on the bottom of my to do list. For example, I think I’ve had the material to do my tiling project I did over the weekend for the last six months but I only just completed it on Monday.
Of course I could go on, but these are the items that came to the top of my list while I was brainstorming for this post. Tomorrow I’ll look at some possible solutions to this mess and how to rebalance my time/money to better manage my happiness. Now what in your life would you want to do more of and what would you be willing to give up to do it?
