We had our two month anniversary of house building on the fourth. We have made some great progress. I did not think we would be at this point after only two months. We have half the wall of our kitchen finished. We have even put in our first water pipe.

This is where our water will come in from the cistern outside. It will "gravity feed" into our house. Meaning, that we will not need a pump to get the water from the outside of the house, to the inside of the house. Once it enters the house, it will be pumped through a series of filters. After three filters, it will be usable for cooking and cleaning. Our drinking water will run through a forth filter, a charcoal filter. The reason this filter doesn't get used for all the water is that is slows down the water flow a great deal. This will all happen during the winter. Right now we're concerned with the walls, the roof, and we don't even have a cistern to collect the water in yet ($).

From the outside/back of the house: from the "inside" of the house: We have dug air vent trenches. Or, rather, we're in the process of digging them. These trenches are one of the hardest things we've dug so far. This week we will be putting a twenty foot long, by ten inch in diameter metal culvert into these trenches. This is our air conditioning system. How does it work, how does it work. Well, I have not yet seen them work, but I am hoping that they will work the way they are supposed to. The vent is to remain sealed off until your house is too hot. Then, you open the vent to the culvert, and a window in the front of the room as well. (All the rooms are sealed off with glass walls on the front face). Cold air coming from the buried culvert will blast through the room. The air is the temperature of the ground, 58 degrees. The air will want to escape through the front vent which will be located at the top of the front wall. The cold air will want to heat up, and rise. Thus, creating a cold airflow.

Cross your fingers that this works. These culverts are costing us a pretty penny, we bought six of them today. Two for the kitchen and living room, one each for the two bedrooms. The process has been tried and true at the earthship community. This is at least a tad bit comforting ($). ($). Send money: p.o.box 443 Medanales, NM 87548.

Gigantic 200 lb. 20 feet long culverts (In our "backyard", need to drag up the hill): Our awesome local library was giving away free local squash! This, and our post office has a free box, filled with cloths, kitchen stuff, etc. And, not to mention our wonderful librarian who gives us farm fresh produce. We really lucked out with the community we have moved to.

New Mexico is a tourist state. There are festivals and fiestas, art walks, gallery openings, and happenings going on constantly, all summer long. Unfortunately we've been nearly too busy to go to any of it. This is a little depressing. Next year. We have to get this house done. Well, this room at least. We work at least 3-4 hours a day, and that's a half day. A full day is 6-8 hours long. Hot, hard labor. I can't wait until the day I can be bored again.

The lizards are fighting back, thank god. I really think our cat has an unfair advantage over them. And she also doesn't bother killing them. Just injures them badly.

The cat goes on walks with us now. We're ridiculous, the three of us. Almost every evening. She'll follow us anywhere. It's great. But then we saw our first rattle snake. This is a western rattle snake. Deadly of course. We attempted a prompt removal of it. And failed. That story is for another time. And of course:

From Shack Living

It has been a GOODYEAR

Enough with the puns already! I'm killing myself over here.

The work piles up and piles up higher. We can work non-stop for five days and barely notice any progress. It's like watching someone loose weight. You don't notice the difference unless you are gone during the whole process. Our house, in fact, is just like a fat man on a diet. The progress is slow and seemingly unchanging. But in reality, we'll put up ten or twenty more tires, only to notice the difference when looking at photographs from the past few weeks.

Speaking of which, I've been a dead beat about taking progress photos. Mostly because I'm tired, but also because it's so dusty out here that I take my camera out only every so often. Excuses, excuses. This will not do. That said, Dain and I had a full blown photo shoot yesterday afternoon.

We had such a guest filled past few weeks that we cracked the whip upon our own selves and got super busy these past few days. We have about 40 percent of the kitchen wall done. In order to build a room, you have to incorporate the "wings" of the surrounding rooms walls. The kitchen is going to be in between my bedroom, and the living room. So, we have to build about half of those walls as well in order to finish the kitchen. The tires, being like bricks, have to maintain a pattern throughout. This give the house its structural integrity. Unlike a traditional home, we do not have a "foundation." Quotation marks are being used due to the fact that we do, in fact, have a foundation. It is the earth itself. And boy oh boy, do I know how sturdy our earth is, first hand. Digging this hill out has been as difficult as I was afraid of.

Dain standing proud. These tires are ten levels high. We have reached our full height! Our ceilings will be around nine to nine and a half feet high. The tires reach almost that high, and then, we'll have to put a slanting roof up. The slant of the roof will allow for the rain water collection.

Yesterday, my neighbor said to me "it's good to meet some other people who aren't scared of hard work." And I responded matter of factly with "Jason, I don't know about you, but I am very, very scared."

Here I am, scared out of my mind. The right side of the photo is the rear wall of my bedroom. The left, the rear wall of the kitchen. This is the back corner of both rooms, a birds-eye view. They will eventually be covered in mud, cement, and plaster. Only to leave behind just about zero trace of a tire. I would love it if I never had to look at another tire in my life.

Hangin' tough: I do understand that this is difficult to understand. But hang in there, it'll develop into a house, I promise. Here is a view of the house from behind. Looking towards the front of the house. I am, in fact, standing where the back of the roof will be, on the hill that our house will be buried in. This is the kitchen, the first room we are building. The room we are hoping to have done by mid December. As you can see, it's a bit "dirty" right now. In the mean time, we have also been doing other "home" improvements. Most of our improvements for the shack are for aesthetic purposes. Which, as you may see, is we're in dire need of. When our friends Kristen and Sarah were here last week, we finally finished lining the path from the parking spots to the house, with stones. It looks beautiful. We will therefore proclaim this portion of the path the SARAH & KRISTEN PATH PORTION. Kristen also gave me a new beautiful Moleskin notebook. I am thrilled to own this thing, with its silky paper and leathery binding. It just makes my skin crawl! But, with this new pseudo work-aholic lifestyle, I have decided that I am obligated to make one "draw or sketch" entry per day. So far so good, a week strong. The only problem besides my lack of energy, is my lack of skill. When I come up with something worthwhile, I'll post it. For now, I just show a funny collage I sent to my cousin Sam. New sketchbook: As always, more is going on above us then anywhere else around us. The sky in New Mexico is a real thing of its own. It has such an amazing personality, I can't get over it. Georgia O'Keefe said "there's more sky than land," and the second you get out here, you realize why. Besides the sky there is also strange military happenings constantly fluttering by. Silent smoke-less jets. Jets that drop straight down for a second, only to realign themselves with the parallel ground. It's scary. The military is definently to blame for all the UFO sighting in New Mexico. But regardless the sky is a mysterious thing out here, and I know like all the native and non native New Meixicans, I'll never get over it.

Tired.

It has been a long hot month. I have been an absentee blogger, I am aware. This is because, of course, I am trying to build a house. A house built with close to no money, with no water, and little power is, as you would assume, a quite difficult feat.

That said, complaints are not welcomed. We work under the law of one named Murphy. For example: if we need 15 inch tires, we find 16 inch tires. If we need to get our friends to the airport, our truck battery stops working 85 miles away from the airport. But, as always, someone has jumper cables, and we can find a place to put those 16 inch tires.

We have been busy building and entertaining all month. I feel strained and weak. We had 10 guests and a big pizza party on the night of August the 16th. It was fun. Hosting guests out here is amazing. Luckily our friends are as flexible as us, sleeping in trucks, on floors, or just plain old in the dirt!

The house is progressing. We have filled over 75 tires, and are maybe nearing the 100 tire mark. That throws our estimations out of proportion. I guessed we were going to need about 1200 tires total, and I'm thinking now that that was a low ball estimation. Hopefully we aren't too much above that mark because we are finding it hard to collect tires! Only in New Mexico I'm sure, are tires hard to come by. We'll pull threw though. I suppose.

Speaking of tires, that is why I am in town right now. Dain and I are off to collect some more. I wish I could update this blog more often, and I will try hard to do just that starting NOW. Lately I would rather dig a hole, fill a tire, or just read when I can get a chance, rather than drive to a library to update this thing.

Wish us luck, winter is just around the bend. Here are some pictures to tide you over.

Enlisting some slave labor:

Tuckered out on some tires:

BEACH party: Picking Pinon sap off our dead trees:

A beautiful landscape of our beautiful land after a beautiful rainstorm:

And I realize now that I didn't take any pictures of this past MONTH of work! I will update very soon with those pictures. Please excuse spelling errors and typos, I'm off to run errands.

Never say finished.

Today is 7-29-2010.

Ground was broken ironically on independence day, 25 days ago, 7-4-2010. The 1st tire was filled 8 days ago, on 7-21-2010. There is currently 56 feet in length of trench dug. The trench is 3 feet in width. If you multiply the width by the length, there are approximately 280 square feet dug.

If you multiply that by the average of 4 feet in depth, there have been approximately 1,120 cubic feet of dirt removed.

A humble estimation: 1 cubic foot of dirt weighs between 80-90 pounds. That means that we have moved, and re-moved at times, 95,200 pounds of dirt.

We have filled 22 tires to date. A tire in an earthship home is pounded with 300-400 pounds of dirt. Thus, we have pounded 6,600-8,800 pounds of dirt. This would have to be added to the 95,200 pounds of dirt that we had removed, originally. Because we removed it, then moved it again, whilst putting it into tires. So, we have moved not 95,200 pounds of dirt, but somewhere around 102,900 pounds of dirt.

It has been as hot at 97 degrees fahrenheit since 7-04-2010, and fortunately, as low as 58. We have had approximately 3 beautiful inches of rain water. Raining nearly everyday, which would be about 20 times.

Unfortunately, we have only taken 3 days off. Count today, 4. 2 days prior, 7-27-2010, was 1 of those days. We tried to relax, but maybe we are no longer able to do that. We spent the day making pasta. We used about 10 cups of flour. Made 3 different kinds, and now have about 1.5 pounds of pasta secco.

You wont be surprised to hear that we are tired. But more than anything, and as usual, we are satisfied. We have about 1/2 of 1 wall done with pounded tires. We have about 80% of the trench, where the first wall, our kitchen wall is going, dug out. We have spent a total of 0 dollars on this house so far. And probably about 100-150 hours of working. Not counting the hours spent thinking about the house.

We have minimal energy when the day is through, but always enough to score 360 points in a game of scrabble. 1 night prior to last Dain beat me by 74 points, but I took over last night and beat him by 91 points.

But who's counting?

Pasta Party: Tire Party: And another day at the office party (dress code is extremely casual):

From Shack Living

Finishing the First U

We've been hot. We've been busy. We've been tired. Never have we been so sweaty. We have nearly completed digging out the first "U's" trench. This is where the first wall will go. The wall of our kitchen. The rest of the room will be dug out while we are filling the tires with dirt.

Here is a view of the floorplan. This might change over the course of our construction. But for now, we're pretty dead set on building this thing. It is actually pretty close to scale.

>

And if you are interested in speedy weight loss and muscle gain I highly recommend digging a 20 foot by three foot hole into rock solid ground. This hole should be two feet and up to five feet deep in some places. Here is the expletive trench:

And of course, some tires that will soon be walls.

In other news, we are not only sweating. We are enjoying the heavenly land in which we live on. Everything couldn't have been more perfect for a party we hosted the other night for our Albuquerque farmer friends.

And a beautiful sunset to wrap this entry up. More later! Much to do here in the greater northern New Mexico region!

From Shack Living

Ground-breaking News!

We have broken ground! A trench has been started. Dig after dig after dig. The hole in the earth is getting bigger, slowly, minute-by-minute. The only reason my sanity still exists is the fact that this monstrous hole that I am digging is for me. It is a wall. It will be my wall. It will be a wall in my home for eternity. Right now it is just a dirt cliff. The trench I am in is about four feet deep. The dirt surrounding me is rock solid. Earthship, here we come.

My arms are like jell-o every evening. We have only been digging since July 4th, which, like our country, is also the birth of the home. The trench is much larger than I would have imagined it to be for four days of work. We are satisfied, though, constantly fatigued.

We've been celebrating with droopy eyes and tired hands. Drinking homemade sangria, eating North Carolina BBQ. It rained yesterday evening. At the end of the storm we were congratulated with a double rainbow. We could see both ends of each rainbow. It was the most magnificent sights I've seen out here yet! We threw down the shovels and ran fast to find our pot of gold. Well not exactly, but we did throw down our shovels and finish the sangria while watching the beautiful sight.

Breaking ground for the earthship. Some fire works to celebrate. Siesta everyday. Constant presents from WWII. Our closest neighbor is the end of the rainbow.

Al's RV

I woke up like any other morning, ravenous. Not having a stove proves to make breakfast a bit difficult. I went at it as usual. Armed with eggs, tortillas, and what ever other dregs of nourishment I could scrounge up, not realizing what a downhill slope into American Civilization I was about to embark upon.

Soot on my face. Soot on my hands. Soot on my last clean pair of jeans. Plop. Down goes my spatula into the sand. Smoke in my face. I couldn't breathe. Wait a minute, it wasn't the smoke, I was having an anxiety attack! I lost it. I was throwing cast iron skillets and practically rolling on the ground like a baby.

To the phone! Everything in this particular part of the desert is on hold until I buy a stove. I didn't realize buying a propane stove was as difficult as it was going to prove to be. Call after call after call. It took over an hour of tries until I was pointed towards Al's RV on Cerillos Road in Santa Fe. To Al's! It sounds like a perfectly legitimate business. This is New Mexico. RV stores are like bodegas in Brooklyn.

I dialed the number, unsuspecting as I should be. The ringtone I heard had been re-programed to have an early 90's Run DMC rap song, rather than the normal "baaaringg" we are so adjusted to hearing. This should have been a red flag, or at least an orange or amber flag. But, no. Not to me. To me it was an intrigue. Some sort of sign of a respectable alternative business practice. The voicemail picks up, "Hey Ya'll! You've reached Angelique and Lisa's. Leave a message, right?" So I do as I was told, I leave a message, right?

Two hours later, one year old Angelique's mother, Lisa, calls me back. I could smell the wood paneling of the trailer through the phone. I sensed fried chicken and baby smell all over the place. A littered yard. Mangy cats crying at all windows. No one has ever called me "Babe" as quickly into a non-blossoming relationship as this woman. And for that matter, never as casually or constantly, either. Nothing about my inquiring about a stove made me a babe, so I thought. Here begins that downward stumble into American civilization, which I never thought I'd fall so deeply into.

Lisa says she'll call me back later, with prices and dimensions of the stoves Al has. She finally did call me back at 7:30 that evening, five hours late. She told me that if I wanted a stove for 150 bucks, I'd have to come get it right now. Why not? Nothing Dain and I do is normal. No purchase we've ever made is in a normal store, with normal clerks, selling normal things. To the truck! To Santa Fe! It's 8:00 and we're off to Al's RV! You've made yourself a deal Lisa, Babe.

With the world's worst directions and Lisa calling us every five minutes after nine, we arrive at Al's RV a hair before ten. And as promptly as I turned off the ignition, a woman clad in a pink tank top, boobs flailing this way and that, tight black shiny pants two sizes too small, and a thong hanging out to boot, bursts through the door screaming.

"AMANDA! Oh my god, babe! I thought you were so lost, GIRL. Come here babe! Give me a hug! Oh my god, I'm so glad to see you! You're finally here! I was so worried about you, Babe." This, and a great big hug. Up close I notice how vivid her fake orange tan is. She was holding an infant child in one arm, and some sort of bottomless beverage in the other. I was horrified and in complete shock and fear. Who the hell is this woman? Was this seriously happening? It was, and it did for the next three and a half hours. Fun loving Lisa dragged me into the store, arm around my neck, booze breath going down my shirt, with Dain trailing us the whole time.

Lisa must have smelled the greenbacks in my pocket. As we entered the store, there was a fine piece of chinese ingenuity sitting up on top of a table saw table, with all four burners and the oven lit and on full. This, and propane tanks galore, surrounded by three men, all smoking cigarettes. Well, if I blow up now, at least I haven't paid my cell phone bill this month. There were two old mexicans, one who didn't speak any english, and one who was the only level headed man within a mile radius. Then there was the third gentleman, who I would later learn was Al, Lisa's baby's Daddy. Al was sixty five years old, like Hugh Hefner, Lisa told us. All I saw was a burnt out old grouch who's face was permanently painted red from the vast amount of alcohol he consumed. His RV store was a fine size, but such a mess that it really made you feel at home, in your trailer.

The stove on the saw horse was everything I feared. New, in that it was manufactured with plastic and other breakable garbage, and of a brand I have never heard of. I was promptly quoted $250 dollars for this stove. Not the $150 Magic Chef I just drove over an hour to see. "Aw, girl, honey, babe! This stove is Awesome! Look! All four burners work!" Oh god, she just said all four burners work. I can't imagine how much tinkering it took before we showed up to get all four of those burning.

This is not what I came here for. Where are the $150 dollar stoves you told me about three hours ago on the phone? Surely there wasn't a rush for propane RV stoves at 7:45 p.m. on this mild Tuesday evening, especially since your store had already been closed for two and a half hours.

Al is pissed. He cops the attitude of a 13 year old girl in a pink frilly dress with punch spilled all over her at her Batmitzva. I don't think he was used to sober women with long sleeves. He's out of there. That's fine, Lisa seems more than interested in showing us stoves. That and inviting me to come over to her house to party. After many failed attempts of selling us broken stoves, she shows us a dusty Magic Chef in the back of the store. I look at it in disgust. It's super small, very dirty, and looks as if it's turning on would be close to a miracle. Dain wants it. He thinks it's great. Lisa promptly quotes us 150 dollars again. I'm skeptical, but at this point, up for anything.

Lisa is constantly going to the back room to fill her cup of booze. Al disappeared. The baby disappeared.

Roger, the nice older Mexican man, is the only one partaking in any sort of work. The stove works great. Everything turns on instantly. With a little soap and water, it could be beautiful, as far as stoves go. We want to buy it. Of course, here at Al's RV, nothing is that easy. For the next hour and a half, Roger is fixing it up. Finding us the right tubes and regulators and a bunch of other things we need, while telling us "This isn't my real job. I'm just doing this as a favor. These people are idiots. They are drunk and embarrassing. This is why I'm glad I've been sober for 16 years." He doesn't know where anything is and as I said before, Al disappeared.

Throughout the night Roger is the only person we had seemingly normal conversation with. If you count naming bands from 1960 to 1980 relatively normal conversation. Lisa would tell me about the new RV Al just bought her, while intermittently Roger would be name a band. We would then reply with another, different band. The conversation went like this:

"Babe, what do you do in Abiquiu? There's no mossy there! You got to come to Albuquerque, I've got a pool!" I would then try to figure out what mossy meant. Roger would be name a band.

"Journey!" Says Roger.

"Babe you gonna love that stove! 4 burners? You don't need to cook a turkey!"

"No, Stevie Wonder." Says Dain.

"Led Zeppelin" Says Roger.

"Oh shit Al, where's the baby?" Says Lisa.

"Yeah! Led Zeppelin. Black Sabbath?" Says Dain.

"Oh don't worry, the customer comes first." Says Lisa, and I can't tell if she's winking or if a gnat flew into her eye.

"Michael Jackson." Says Roger. And so on.

Three hours had passed. I realize that in order to get things moving, I needed to pull some money out of my wallet. Everyone "employee" was far too drunk to realize we wanted to buy the damn stove. The second I did this, things did get moving. Lisa and Dain took the stove out to the truck, while I followed with the propane tank. Lisa came up to me and whispered. "Ok, give me the money. Don't give it to Al."

I went inside and told the gaggle of them that I didn't know who to give the money to. Al replied with "It don't matter. It's all going to the casino tonight." I threw the money onto the the table saw table where the stove had previously been sitting, and booked it. As I was getting into the truck, I saw a blur of glittering pink run by. Without a word, Lisa was off to drop the money on whatever she had been jonesing for.

A scary thought, her driving at this point in the night.

Meanwhile, it was back to Abiquiu. Anti-civilization is what suits me best. New Mexico sometimes feels like Mars. We have landed.

To see more pictures, click on any picture.

Dain made the stove cabinet as I made breakfast. Tea and crumpets! Seriously!

From The stove! THE STOVE!

A bench? A table? It's never ending! And of course, a nice walk up onto the Mesa!