Land Plan (Inch By Inch, Life's a Cinch; Yard By Yard, Life is Hard)

Here it is, mid-(to-late-)June, and I must admit that I have come very little distance in figuring out how I'm going to proceed with my land.

I'm almost resigned to the idea of renting somewhere again this winter – much as I don't want to. I'm just not sure how I'm going to get everything I need in place before the snow flies...

I'm trying to think about things one step at a time. Here is my step-by-step plan. Probably each one of these will warrant its own blog post at some point over the next few months. I'd appreciate any ideas or advice you care to contribute.

Step 1: Research and information/advice gathering

This is the stage I'm in now. It involves doing research and gathering advice and opinions from experts in a number of different fields, including:

• Site design
• Sustainable Forestry
• Infrastructure/Utilities – power, water, waste water, driveway/site leveling
• House design and/or effective winterization of my tiny home
• Financial advice about how to access enough money to complete this project

Step 2: Decision-making

After I've gathered all of the information, opinions and advice that I can, it will be time to make some decisions. I think this is going to be the most difficult part of the process. There are so many decisions to make! And so many possibilities for each decision! I am trying to remember to take these as slowly as I need to and again, one at a time.

Step 3: Skill acquisition

Next up will learning how to do some things I want to know how to do and identifying the right people to help me make this project a reality. I'm enrolled in a chainsaw course on July 18-19, and that will be a very necessary skill to enable me to contribute to clearing my own land. I have to admit that I don't have a great drive to gain many other skills for this project. I am not a handy person. Fortunately, lots of other people around here are.

Step 4: Resource acquisition

Once I have decided what needs to be done, and what parts of it I can do myself, it will be time for budgeting. I have little doubt that this is a project that is going to need to be done in phases, as the availability of money permits. This was a conscious choice on my part, to bootstrap my way into a house. I could have purchased an existing house and taken on a mortgage, but I decided that I didn't want to pay all that interest to the bank, or have a house that was way larger than I needed and painfully expensive to heat. I am only one person and finding a house for sale that is the right size for one person can be a tricky thing.

The more I think about it, the more I think that my financial situation will require one or more years of "roughing it" living in my tiny home on wheels without running water or much electricity. But – step by step – I don't need to jump to any conclusions just yet...

Step 5: Selecting collaborators

I am very fortunate that lots of my friends and community members are skilled and knowledgeable about so many aspects of land development, green energy and building. There are many people who will be able to help me accomplish tasks for which I do not have the skills, like back-hoeing and building and plumbing and wiring.

Step 6: Seeking approvals

Yes, I'm a by-the-book kind of person. Mostly because if I build a home, I'll want to insure it. If my home were to burn down, I wouldn't have enough money to replace it without insurance. That would be a problem. And, I believe that the rules, however cumbersome, are there for a reason. So, whenever it comes time to install the main aspects of the infrastructure, I will be seeking  the appropriate permissions from all of the appropriate people.

Step 7: Implementation

This in itself will be a multi-step process.

1. Access to the site (clearing trees, building driveway)
2. Infrastructure (electricity (on and/or off-grid), water, waste water, Internet)
3. Moving (and possibly winterizing) my tiny home on wheels
4. Building a fixed tiny home with awesome stuff like hot and cold running water and heavy-duty electrical service.

Where I'm at now:

Our summer solstice gathering this weekend blessed me with an even-greater-than-usual influx of advice from a number of smart and knowledgeable friends and neighbours. Some pieces in direct conflict with other pieces, of course – LOL! It will all need to be weighed and measured!

At the end of the day, I know that it is most important that this process and the decisions that come out of it are a comfortable fit for me. And I have to go at the pace that's right for me.

This is going to be my home. It needs to fit my heart.

Sexism #4: Gender Roles

I had a conversation about gender and sexuality this weekend that reminded me of something.

And since it is a chilly, rainy night in mid-June, it seems like a good time to write a blog post about it.

I'll begin with this true story:

Once upon a time (i.e. in the early 2000s), I worked for an organization that produced educational materials.

They had a mandate to represent male and female interests equally*. They also had a mandate not to spend very much money.

And so, in the creation of the educational materials, we used a lot of royalty-free clip-art. (For anyone who doesn't know what royalty-free clip-art is, it's inexpensive stock illustration that is available at sites like clipart.com.)

I remember one math problem that was illustrated with a clip-art silhouette of two people in a canoe. The people were shown on a slight angle with mostly their backs facing the viewer.

A request came back from editorial to make one of the people in the canoe a woman.

"One of them already is," I responded to my manager who had conveyed the request. I mean, for Pete's sake – they were silhouettes of the backs of two people in a canoe. Both of them looked the way most of my either male or female friends would look if they put on their camping togs and had their backs drawn in silhouette in a canoe.

Why did editorial assume they were both men?

"Don't be smart," my manager told me. "Just make one of them a woman".

"What do they want? One foot sticking out of the canoe with a high-heel on it?"

My manager grimaced. (I suspect managing me was not always the easiest part of her day.)

"Just make one of them look more like a woman, okay?"

I sighed and returned to my desk, muttering about tits, tiaras and high heels. And this most recent example of editorial's stupid, backward headspace.

I looked at the silhouette.

I sighed again.

And then, I made one of the figures have a narrower neck, made what was visible of its chin less prominent, and gave it a ponytail.

I'd like to think that I then imagined that one as the man (it certainly looked like a couple of the men of my acquaintance in the early naughts) and the other one as the women. But I think that possibility is only occurring to me now.

What does this story illustrate? 

Basically, that we have some really persistent and pretty screwy ideas about what women and men should be like – even when they are clip-art silhouettes in a canoe.

I identify as a woman. Despite failing to meet a "stereotypical standard of femininity" on a lot of different counts – while I definitely meet that stereotype in some other ways.

Despite the fact that I would look just like a man if you stuck me in a canoe and drew a silhouette of me from the back.

Here are just a few examples of my complex gender stereotype composition:

I don't like make-up or babies. I do like baking and knitting. I don't like high-heels or shopping for clothing. I do like pretty stationery and having long, deep talks about feelings. I don't like removing my body hair (and I don't).

I do like cursing and splitting wood. I don't like manicures or moisturizer. I do like having a drink and talking off the cuff. I don't like measuring twice and cutting once.

I do like sitting with my knees apart. I don't like order. I do like control. I don't like lies. I do like a firm handshake. I don't like macadamia nuts. I do like getting massages. I don't like pandering.

I do like hugging. I don't like making mistakes. I do like being a person of my word.

I feel like I'm supposed to feel confused of conflicted about all of this, but I don't. None of it makes me question my gender. Am I gender-queer? I can remember thinking in the past that that would explain – label – the ways in which I diverge from "typical womanliness". But today the question occurs to me – why would I need (or want) a label? I mean, why do we have to assign "male"/"masculine" or "female"/"feminine" to any human characteristics? Why does picking out throw cushions have to be a woman-thing and using a chain saw have to be a man-thing?

(I reference here, for members of the Free To Be, You and Me generation, Dan Greenburg's poem, My Dog is a Plumber, which ends with the line: "So perhaps the problem / is in trying to tell / just who a person is, / by what they do well.")

In my opinion, we, as a culture, are fundamentally messed up in the head about gender.

Like what you like. Do what you do. Be sexually attracted to the people or things or activities to which/whom you are sexually attracted. It doesn't have any impact whatsoever on your "masculinity" or "femininity". Those are constructs that don't mean a damn thing. Be "you-gendered". I'll be "me-gendered".

If only we could then all be exempt from judgments and derogatory comments and prejudice and discrimination when our behaviours and appearances don't line up with expectations other people have because of our anatomical appearance. As if any of it is anyone's business but our own...

*****

*It is interesting to me that while this organization was expected to represent equal numbers of males and females in their materials and while some attention was paid to racial diversity, there was no effort made to represent kids with different body types, abilities, etc. That would have been a fun challenge with clip-art, which tends to be bland, Caucasian and svelte. I wish editorial had been in the habit of coming back to me with requests like, "Put that person in a wheelchair," "put another 100 pounds on that person," "give that person a prosthetic leg". And I wish I had thought and dared to introduce that diversity myself – to send images up to editorial that were fat, pierced, naked or otherwise outside of the status quo. 

Now that would have been fun. 

I probably would have been fired. But in a fun way. 

(And given how that job eventually ended, being fired might not have been such a bad thing – but that's another story, perhaps for another rainy evening).

Last-minute tax agonies

I swore I wouldn't do my taxes at the last minute again this year.

And here it is, the day before the filing deadline for self-employed individuals and I am knee-deep in receipts. I'm hating every minute of it, too. 

(So much so that writing a blog post about it is a welcome procrastination technique.)

I swear (as I have sworn many times before) that it's not going to be like this next year. Now that I'm using my YNAB budgeting software, all of my expenses are getting entered electronically at least every two-three weeks. So next year, theoretically (i.e if I can keep up the good work), all I'll need to do is run a report, fill out my statement of business activities and file. 

Also, in theory, using YNAB means that I will have saved up enough cash to actually PAY my taxes on time, as well, which is not the case this year. 

I might even file on April 30 next year - or - gasp - earlier?

Well, a person can dream.

Despite my past failures to institute helpful routines for the financial administration of my life, I remain hopeful for the future. And steadfast in the face of the present moment. 

It is not easy. I have bags and bags of receipts, including things that didn't get found when I prepared my 2013 taxes, my 2012 taxes, even my 2011 taxes. 

There are some unhappy memories among those receipts. You wouldn't think something as innocuous as a receipt could be hurtful. But doing my taxes this year kind of feels like someone poking a pin into my heart - over and over again. 

Sigh.

Oh well, I have only myself to blame. If I had dealt with these receipts properly at the time - if they had been sorted and either recorded and filed or burned - I wouldn't have to be going through them now. 

I am hating this, but I am doing it. Even if I have to stay up all night, it will get 'er done and filed on time. That is one promise to myself that I will keep. 

I will never file my taxes late again. 

I swear.