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For the past month, Wesley and I have been working on earning a living, hoping to get enough money saved up so we can start a coffee house. Unfortunately, life happens, and things take your hard-earned money as fast as you get it. The car needed to have its axels replaced, and we could only afford to get one fixed. The other will have to wait until next time we have some money saved up.
We’ve been really busy working on estate liquidation jobs and then we travelled again to Maryland to visit family. Earl appears to be headed right over the top of us! Perhaps it will turn back into the ocean and not hit land anywhere.
We barely have time to write in our blogs any more, but I wanted to at least give an update. We are now, technically, people without a home. We have drivers licenses from Georgia from two years ago. We have no address anywhere to call home. We are driving a borrowed car. We are actually wanderers on earth with no home.
We are neither Georgia residents, nor Tennessee residents. We are residents of no state, but I’m not afraid. I miss our camper though. At least we had a home when we had that. Now, we live wherever our car takes us.
Why do some people appear to get things handed to them on a silver platter, while others barely scrape by? I don’t get it, but I do still trust God. Perhaps a coffee house is not His will for us, but it’s a dream that doesn’t leave my heart, and until it does, I’m going to pursue it.
I miss Tennessee and I wish my husband and I were serving muffins and cupcakes to the people of Oak Ridge. Since life happens, and we don’t get to do that right now, we’ll just have to keep going on our journey. At least our car won’t have the left axel fall off. Perhaps the right one will. (just kidding)
If I could give anyone out there any advice, it would be this. Man makes a plan, but the Lord directs their path. (Proverbs 16:9)
Trust Him anyway, even if His path is different than the one you wanted.
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Well, God has answered prayer! Wesley and I have been blessed with a wonderful business. We started a business (estate liquidation) a year ago, and it has taken that long to get the business off the ground. We’ve been doing estate liquidation with my sister’s company, while waiting for ours to get going, which is why we made the trip to Maryland. We were getting ready to make another trip to Maryland when we got a call of our own for a Knoxville estate!
We are not ready to open our coffee house in Oak Ridge, but we are still working on it and the newspaper. Our newspaper, Kudzu Jungle, is about ready to go into the publishing stage, which will most likely be the first week in September.
Other news is we sold our RV today! We don’t have to live in a campground any more. Still other news is….oh no! We sold our RV faster than we thought were going to, and we don’t have any land yet! We’ve been watching BillyLand.com for a few months, but nothing is coming up for the Oliver Springs area.
We are in the market for unrestricted land, so if you have knowledge of land available within 30 minutes of Oak Ridge, TN (but not in the direction of Knoxville) please contact us. The reason we don’t want to go that direction is because we want a small town setting.
We want a place where it’s wooded. I HATE clear-cut land. I’d like to clear out only enough trees to make a cute little yard and a place for a garden. We want to live off-grid, so the zoning has to allow us the ability to dig a deep well, have solar powered lights and stuff, and use one of those waterless toilet systems.
Okay, maybe access to electricity might be a good idea. I don’t know. Kind of skeered to be totally off-grid. I mean, what if solar wont run a Kitchenaide mixer? Oh no!
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The thing about buying all raw ingredients, and being healthy about it, is this. There is no such thing as an instant meal you put in the microwave, and walla, you have food. Nope. Have to cook from scratch. I’m sure I’ll eventually not miss the boxed foods and the speed of getting a meal out of a box for a quick fix of “comfort” food.
Last week, Wesley got a propane tank of gas for the camper, but have I baked with it yet? No. It’s the idea of being in a small camper, and having gas coming out of a stove, that stops me. Yes, I know all the campers have little tanks firmly attached to their campers (or not so firmly in some cases) but I don’t like my stove. It’s brand new and I am afraid of it. I have visions of things going BOOM! when I light the pilot light. There is also this very loud alarm that goes off if gas leaks. I accidently tripped the alarm by putting a bag next to the trigger thingy whatchamacallit. It’s VERY loud and annoying. The only reason I can think of to have one of those alarms is if there’s a chance a gas leak could happen. That’s another reason I don’t want to turn the gas on to the stove. Will it leak?
I really need to stop analyzing life and just start living.
I do long to bake something in the oven though. Maybe I’ll try using it tomorrow and bake some cupcakes. I have to practice making a cupcake display for Thursday’s meet and greet for Tracy Wandell. I will use my friend’s kitchen for the actual cupcakes for Thursday, but it would give me a reason to light the oven. Of course, if it goes boom, you won’t be able to read my blog any more, and Mr. Wandell won’t get any cupcakes this week.
I haven’t cooked anything on the stove either. It’s attached to the same propane tank as the oven is, and if you don’t know why I’m not using the stove, see the paragraph above, for the reasons associated with the oven. I’m still using a hot plate, and our baked goods consist of .99 cent day old bread from the corner fruit stand at JB’s Market.
Seriously, I’ll try to bake something tomorrow. If all goes well, we are going to have our second set of cupcake testers Thursday. We had our first taste test (which was a big hit!) on January 1. Wesley and I got to give our coffee house idea a trial run for an evening at a church. We served tropical pineapple, triple chocolate torte and carrot caramel cupcakes. That’s what I’m planning on serving Thursday, too.
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Seven years of litigation and you tend to pick things apart and see what makes it tick. You tend to find every possible angle that will go wrong, could go wrong, or could even think to go wrong. You pick and pick and pick and analyze until there is nothing but tears and frustration left. That’s what litigation was like for me.
If there was a trick in the book, the lawyers knew how to play it. I didn’t, nor did I want to learn. I just wanted integrity, and a light at the end of the tunnel. In August of 2009, I saw the light at the end of the tunnel, but it wasn’t what I expected. It was God asking me to forgive everyone. That was not the ending I thought was going to happen.
Forgive, yes. Get rid of the analytical thinking? God help me!
I find myself analyzing everything now. What can go wrong? What is a liability? What eminent domain trick will be used if I get land someone else wants? What if this….what if that? I have “what if” so much that I now fail to trust that God wants something, anything, to turn out in my life that I can honestly say He did it.
At the end of each month, I find myself wanting to give up dreams and hope. Today, my husband and I talked about selling our camper. I dream of land that I can’t describe, and of a life that has no words to explain it. That is, until I found this post. This just makes my heart leap to know there are people out there who just keep going, and somehow, God gets them to where He wants them to be, and it’s more than they could have done if they did it themselves.
Perhaps some day I can get to where I can love and trust that God has a good plan for me, too. I suppose that will come when I stop analyzing and looking for all the things that could go wrong; and just start loving God with a faith that says no matter what happens, I’ll praise His name all the way through it.
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God provided for us!
We have some temporary work that will give us another month of working on Kudzu Jungle. I really miss Tennessee, but work was not available there for us. We’re willing to go where there is a job, and we should be back in Tennessee in about a week and a half.
I’ll have to get some pictures for our trip, but I’ve been so busy. There is one part of the trip that isn’t fun. It’s going through underwater tunnels while ships go over the top. I especially hate it when the traffic stops in the tunnel. Other than that, we are having a good time here.
I’ll write more this weekend when I get some time off. I should have enough money to do a little work on our homestead plans when we get back.
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Perhaps it’s only one strawberry last month, but to a woman who is starting a new homestead, it is hope. My husband and I sliced it in half, clinked them together in a “cheers!” happy moment, and ate them.
Simple things amuse me.
The strawberry plants are in one container and even though they didn’t produce many berries, I don’t care. I was happy with what we got.
Now, the critters are running new babies everywhere and I’m trying to accommodate all of them in other containers so I have some for next year!
I really do like my mini homestead. One day at a time is about all my life has right now, and that’s good enough for me.
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Ahhhhh….it was yummy!
My mother gave us a large zucchini from her garden and it’s been sitting in my refrigerator for a few days. It’s amazing how much longer home grown veggies last than store bought. It looked like it had just been picked.
I need to start blogging about my mother’s homestead because she has quite the little zoo going on. She calls her homestead “Domestic Jungle” and her garden looks great!
This grilled dish was easy to make and it was suitable for a complete meal. The only other thing Wesley and I had with it was water. It’s very filling.
I got the recipe from my mother and only added cooked ham to the cracker mixture, which is not in the original recipe.
I don’t know where she got it from, but she made it when I was a kid.
6 medium zucchini, cleaned (or one large)
2 cups buttery cracker crumbs (Keebler Town House Light Buttery Crackers were used in the above picture)
1 small onion, chopped (Purple/red onion was used)
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese (Kraft refrigerator kind, not the powdered kind)
3 TBS butter, melted
1 tsp salt
1/8 tsp pepper
2 eggs, beaten
Ham chunks or slices (optional)
Place zucchini (cut in half if using large) in a medium saucepan with boiling salted water. Cook 10 minutes or until tender, drain.
Cut zucchini in half lengthwise. Scoop out pulp, leaving firm shells; chop pulp.
Combined pulp with other ingredients. Mix well. Divide the mixture evenly in the shells.
Place zucchini shells directly on the grill and close the lid for 30 minutes. Check them every 15 minutes, depending on the size zucchini you use. The above size was cut in half for boiling, then in half again for stuffing and grilling. It took a full 30 minutes for our little grill.
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Times are tough. I haven’t been writing in Crawford Acres because I’ve been busy writing in Kudzu Jungle. Work is so scarce that we only had enough money to cover the campground through July 6th. On July 7th, we don’t know where we’ll be.
It isn’t that I have given up on my little homestead, but I struggle to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I barely want to water the container garden any more because I don’t know if I’ll get to harvest them. Still, I would feel sorry for them if I let them die, so I’ll water them. If we have to leave, I can always give the plants to a fellow-camper that’s also gardening.
My husband and I have considered different options, but not sure what we’ll actually do when push comes to shove. We’ve talked about selling our camper. We’re getting rid of as much stuff as possible to lighten our load.
We have a 5th wheel camper with no way of moving it out of here, so if we leave, we have to reserve $50 for someone to tow it out of here and take it to a storage place. We can store it for $25 per month.
Anyway, I hang on to faith that God has a plan. He has to, because we sure don’t.
I don’t know how long it will take Kudzu Jungle to get going, but we are working as fast as we can on it. We are down to $2.11 in our checking account. Pitiful, yes. But we are determined to hang in there and walk in faith.
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Well, life in the camping world is interesting. With no running water in our camper (because the hot water heater is cracked) we had to figure out a way to clean out our septic tank. Why not just drag the hose in through the window and flush the septic? Brilliant idea, Wesley!
Wesley’s new role in the household was the valve-opener-closer-water-turner-on-off. I would be on the inside of the camper making sure the water goes where it’s supposed to go.
We opened the window and ran the hose through the camper and cleaned out the septic. It worked like a charm. Since that worked so well, why not just clean out the grey water tank too, and while I’m at it, I’ll fill all the water jugs. Mission accomplished!
I went to put the hose back out through the window, and to my horror, there was another camper standing outside watching us with the look of puzzlement on her face. I was glad I was on the inside, where she couldn’t see how embarrassed I was.
Wesley just smiled and waved, and she asked if everything was okay, and could she help with something. Wesley thanked her and said everything is okay.
I can just hear the conversation over this one in her camper. “Honey, don’t they know they can just hook up a hose to their camper?”
I’m glad they are one of those weekender campers and I’ll never see them again. Next time, I’ll clean the septic at night.
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I had one day left to work at my temp job, but Wesley’s job would sustain us while I went out to market Kudzu Jungle. Then we get the news that put fear in me. Wesley no longer has a job.
It’s hard to walk in faith that things will work out, but some how they will, and we will once again put our little homestead on hold for now. I’ll continue growing the few plants I was able to get going, but the rest of the garden will have to wait. I’m not sure how much longer we can stay here.
I can only hope that some day God will make something beautiful out of all this.
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