Remote Living, Part 3: Housing, Gas, and Cell Phones

I don't think I can honestly call these Tuesday Tips, so this series is moving to Wednesdays. Remote Living Wednesdays? Sure.

Anyway. More questions, this time simply in the order in which they were posted in the comments.

Do you ever get super frustrated living in such a remote area? Have there ever been times when you've wanted to just hop in the car and drive to town to do anything but stay at home? 

Would you believe me if I said, "Not really"? I think that's mostly a result of my particular personality, though. I'm about the most intense homebody it's possible to be without being an actual recluse. So I don't have any great desire to go anywhere, anyway, and I really hate driving a long way. 

That's not to say, however, that I haven't had my moments of frustration living here. When, for instance, I had shingles and had to drive myself three hours roundtrip to get to a pharmacy, I was frustrated. But those sorts of events are very rare, and the day-to-day positives of living here outweigh the occasional negatives for us.

Do you think you will remain in your remote home for the foreseeable future?

Yes. The biggest reason we moved here was because we wanted somewhere like this to raise our children. So as long as they are in school and at home, we plan to be here. That means 15 years, which is when Poppy would graduate from high school.

What would make you move if you ever did?

I will qualify that previous answer by saying that, of course, things can change in our lives, regardless of our plans. So there could be a fire or a terrible illness or any number of family things that could come up that would make it no longer reasonable for us to live here. But that's true for anyone, anywhere, I think.

Would you consider building a bigger home as the kids grow?

Believe it or not, our current home has plenty of space. There are actually five bedrooms. One of them we use for A.'s office, so two of the kids share a room, but it really is a pretty big house. So no, we will not be building a bigger house.

We will, however, continue to chip away at renovating the old adobe house we bought next door. Just for fun.

In this case, literally chipping, as A. removes old plaster from the walls.

How do you purchase cell phones and other technology?

The same way I purchase so many other things: Online. That said, we are very far from technology people (Luddites is probably the best name for us . . .), so it's not very important to us to get the best of technology for the very best price, or whatever.

What are some specific things you enjoy about living remote?

There are a lot of small everyday irritations that just aren't present here because of the low population. Traffic, for instance. Lines at a post office. Parking problems. Anonymity of the sort that requires excessive PINs or automated phone systems (when I call places like our mechanic or the grocery store, I talk to a friendly person every time).

More generally, I think one of the best things about remote living is the inter-reliance of the community. You cannot live here and not rely on your neighbors, few though they are. It is expected that every person will both give and receive help at some time. This goes for small things (like borrowing a tool) and big things (like helping the people affected by the terrible wildfires we had last summer). I think this sort of community cohesion is important, and the remoteness of our location ensures it without it feeling forced.

(The above paragraph also answers the question of whether the isolation here makes for closer interactions with neighbors. Yes, it does.)

Also, the MiL wanted me to mention that living in a place like this results in very self-contained and independent children. There aren't really a lot of formal clubs or activities for them, and they generally live pretty close to the elements on ranches, so almost without exception, the kids--all the kids, not just mine--are good at entertaining themselves and going with the flow. 

Who needs a gym with a climbing wall when you can pretend to be a squirrel in a tree?

When the heat at the school wasn't working in the winter was a good example of this. The students were remarkably unconcerned. I suppose "resilience" would be a good word to describe what living here creates in kids.

What urban characteristics are you happy to leave behind?

Generally, the over-stimulation of urban environments is not a good thing for me. Too much noise, too much choice, too much activity . . . none of it creates the sort of life I want to live. I prefer a very home-centered life, and while that is possible in an urban setting, it is much more difficult.

Also, consumerism as a lifestyle is harder to avoid in a city, and that is not something I want to be a part of.

Do you keep extra gasoline nearby?

Just a five-gallon can for the generator and so on. We are VERY lucky to have a tiny gas station in one of the villages ten miles away. If that ever closes, we'll have to be much more careful about our gasoline supply.

Will contractors and repair men even venture into your neck of the woods?

I'm not really sure. A. has been able to fix any issues we've had so far. I think there are people who will do roofing and so on, but we're definitely not finding them on Angie's List. Like most other things here, we'd have to ask around to see who might be available if we needed an electrician or something. And I bet there'd be an extra travel charge.

I'll stop here, but that's not the end of the questions! To be continued . . .

T.T.: One Coleslaw To Rule Them All

(Not to worry--more questions about remote living will be answered tomorrow. I just decided it wasn't so much a Tuesday Tips thing, so remote questions get their own day.) 

Summer has just begun, and that means that coleslaw season is upon us. I have mentioned more than once that I have a really good coleslaw recipe. My children agree. A., who doesn't like mayonnaise-heavy salads, agrees. The MiL agrees. She makes it, too. The MiL's friend Jane agreed, too, and asked me for the recipe many years ago.

It is not a mayonnaise-y, very sweet coleslaw, of the sort available at delis. I don't care for that kind of coleslaw, but I really love this one. I can drink the dressing on its own.

This is the only recipe for coleslaw I ever use, and I'm going to share it with you now. Because sharing is caring, and more people need this recipe.

The recipe comes from Serving Up the Harvest, which is a wonderful book with recipes to use garden produce by Andrea Chesman. I discovered just now that it's available online in Google Books, which means you can see the actual recipe (and the rest of the book, too) right here.

I'm still going to write it out for you here, though.

Andrea Chesman's Creamy Coleslaw

8 cups shredded green cabbage

3 carrots, shredded

1/4 Vidalia or other sweet onion, finely chopped (I just use a yellow onion)

1.5 cups buttermilk (I use plain yogurt)

3 tablespoons sugar

3 tablespoons mayonnaise

3 tablespoons cider vinegar (if you add the previous three ingredients in this order, you can use the same tablespoon measure for all of them)

1/4-3/4 teaspoon celery seed

salt and pepper (she gives no measurements for this, but I would say at least a teaspoon of salt and a few grinds of pepper)

This will make a TON of coleslaw. The recipe says it serves 8, but I think it serves more like 12 as a side dish. I usually make a half recipe for my family. 

I use a food processor for shredding when I make a whole recipe of this, but my box grater to make smaller quantities. Either way, you're going to get cabbage and carrots all over the place. Shredding is messy.

Anyway.

All you do is mix together the vegetables, mix together the dressing ingredients until smooth, then combine them both. She notes that the coleslaw will look dry when it's first mixed, but the longer it stands, the wetter it gets. This is true. 

She also notes that you should refrigerate it at least an hour. Longer is better, though. I usually make it in the morning to have for dinner.

To be honest, I don't measure the celery seed, salt, and pepper. You're going to need to taste it to make sure the balance of flavors in the dressing is right, anyway. Especially the salt.

You need a picture of my coleslaw, right? I thought so.

You probably didn't need this, actually. I promise it tastes better than it looks, though.

A Memorial Day Re-Direct

Before you commence all your Memorial Day preparations and celebrations, please go here to read the post about what this day is really for, and then take your moment.

Okay! Carry on. 

Snapshots: A Horse, a Girl, and Plastic Tea

Let's see what stunning photography I managed this week, shall we?

A happily grazing horse. Between the horse and the sheep, we provide many free weed whackers as a courtesy to the fellow residents of our ghost-village. 

This time of year, I get my wildflower bouquets on the table, and Poppy gets her wildflower hair accessories. Everyone's happy. (This is a weird angle and picture because she was sitting on my lap at the time.)

I buy quite a few pantry staples from Walmart periodically, but my most recent order came not with giant tubs of peanut butter and olive oil, but with a giant box of this:

Definitely not peanut butter.

I got a box full of plastic cups filled with plastic herb tea "sachets." A total of 400 sachets, as a matter of fact, of the "Jade Mint" and "Peach Tranquility" variety. Still not sure how my order was replaced with this, but Walmart told me to keep the tea and didn't charge me for it.

That's nice. I guess. Except I am not dropping tea encased in plastic mesh into hot water for imbibing. Yuck. So I painstakingly cut a bunch of the sachets and poured the tea into mason jars. This left me with a lot of plastic waste.

Gross.

The cup part has a lid, so I washed those out and will use them to hand around snacks in the car, I suppose. 

I brought about 20 of those cups up to the post office and put them out for anyone to take. They were all taken, so that's good. 

Still upset about the packaging on those, though. Not that I'm even close to zero-waste, but that was just ridiculous. It's a Starbucks brand, by the way. 

Yes, I'm calling you out, Starbucks.

And there you have it! My life, snapshotted. 

Friday Food: Starting Summer with Sniffles

School ended, and the kids immediately all got sick. By Sunday, all four were hacking and dripping. Appetizing.

We're mostly all better now, though!

Friday 

Short version: Bull tacos, sick-boy potato soup, still-frozen peas

Long version: Just a jar of pressure-canned bull meat cooked with salsa, chili powder, and garlic powder. Three children ate theirs in corn tortillas with cheese. A. ate his topped with melted pepperjack cheese. I ate mine in a salad.

The very day after school ended, both Jack and Cubby woke up sick. Cubby had a terrible sore throat, so I made him his favorite soup: potato. Just a few pieces of fried bacon, onion, carrots, potatoes, and sour cream. I used these little tubs of sour cream the school cook gave me the day before, because she didn't want to throw them away.

We're always a good repository for excess food.

Anyway, I pureed all of the soup and Cubby managed one bowl before he went back to bed.

Saturday

Short version: Stewed beef, garlic bread, roasted bell peppers and onions, still-frozen peas

Long version: I was organizing the two chest freezers and found that I seem to have already used all the ground beef from the cow we got in February. I asked the butcher to give me 3/4 ground beef and 1/4 stew meat (the same cuts are used for both of those), but it looks as if they did the opposite.

Dangit.

So there's going to be a lot of stew in our future. Perfect for summer. Ahem.

For this round of stewing, I just dumped the meat in my enameled dutch oven with four cubes of green garlic puree and a quart of pressure-canned chicken stock--plus salt--and cooked it until it was tender. Then I added two cubes of frozen basil pesto and about a cup of grated asadero cheese.

It was really good.

Random photo break!

'Tis once again the season for wildflower bouquets presented to me by my children. This makes me very happy.

Sunday

Short version: Roasted chicken pieces; bread and butter; curried cauliflower, green beans, and peas; sprouting broccoli; leftover Crispy Rice Treats and brownie crumbs

Long version: A. bought a package of chicken thighs and a package of split chicken breasts at the store, and I used both for this meal. I salted the chicken a couple of hours before cooking, then cranked the oven up to 475 degrees and roasted it plain for awhile (so it could release juices without the sauce all sliding off), and then sprinkled on paprika and garlic powder, and THEN spread on a mixture of ketchup, mustard, garlic powder, and quite a bit of vinegar. It came out pretty well.

I made the curried cauliflower because I had some cooked cauliflower that really needed to be used up. And then I put way too much curry powder in accidentally. So then I added some cooked green beans, and then a bunch of frozen peas. Plus a bunch of sour cream and cream. It ended up being a lot of vegetables, and the curry didn't really go with the barbecue-ish chicken, but I enjoyed it.

The desserts were both left from different end-of-school events. The brownies were impossible to get out of the pan intact because I baked them right before we went to the school on the last day and they didn't have time to cool enough. Thus, brownie crumbs. The kids didn't mind, though.

Monday

Short version: Leftover stewed beef, bread and butter, leftover baked beans, frozen green peas

Long version: We seem to have eaten bread and butter for several dinners in a row, unusually. Well, the kids did. I didn't hear them complaining about it, either.

Tuesday

Short version: Re-purposed chicken, green salad with weeds (and ranch dressing), pomegranate

Long version: I had the food processor out to make fruit shakes (smoothies) for lunch, so I rinsed it out and made some marinara sauce with a can of tomatoes that were in the refrigerator, along with some green garlic, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and dried oregano. 

I made pasta for the kids and used that sauce, plus some finely diced leftover chicken (they can't eat around it that way--ha) and some asadero cheese.

For A. and me, I fried some chunks of leftover chicken with leftover roasted peppers and onions and a bit of the tomato sauce, plus some asadero cheese.

The salad was MY LETTUCE HOORAY, to which I added some lamb's quarters because the kids found some out back and brought it to me. Plus this ranch dressing.

The combination of all the vegetables made for a very colorful plate.

Professionally styled food photos are my primary concern, obviously.

The pomegranate was the one that A. bought some time ago so he could save the seeds. He gave each kid a bowl and a chunk of pomegranate and they had a great time spitting seeds and smearing red juice all over themselves.

Like so.

That same child observed while eating his pomegranate: "This kind of looks like bear poop."

I had to acknowledge the truth of this (bears eat a lot of seedy things), but it doesn't seem like the sort of visual that would really improve the appetite.

Wednesday

Short version: Stew meat tacos, pinto beans, carrot sticks with ranch dip

Long version: The latest iteration of the stew meat, this time with frozen green chili sauce and green garlic puree, plus chicken stock, simmered until I could break it apart, and then I added some sour cream. From the little tubs I got from the school cook, of course. Those little tubs held a surprisingly large quantity of sour cream all together.

Thursday

Short version: Breakfast sausage patties, curried split peas, rice, green salad with ranch dressing

Long version: I found a quart jar in the pantry that was about half full of yellow split peas, so I cooked those until they were done on Wednesday. Then I used the cooked split peas to make the curried split peas by simply sauteeing onion and sweet yellow curry powder in coconut oil, then adding the peas and a couple of those little tubs of sour cream.

Still haven't used all that sour cream. And of course, I haven't even begun to start cooking the three giant jars of dried split peas I showed you the other day. 

Okay, your turn! What'd you eat this week?

T.T.: Remote Living, Part 2 (School!)

Several of the specific questions some of you had involved schooling, so that's what I'll focus on today.

How far is the school? 

Although there are many students at our school who travel an hour or more to get to school--because of the large size of our district or because they chose to come to our school from out of district--we are only ten miles from the school.

How do your kids get there on the days you don't work?

Same way they get there on the days I do work: On the school bus. 

A. is the bus driver for one of our school buses. Our small (but mighty!) bus lives at our house. Currently, we all get on the bus in the morning on the days I work, pick up a few more kids on our way to the school, and that's it. On the days I don't work, it's often just our boys on the bus in the morning. However, A.'s bus route does actually include much farther homes, it's just we don't happen to have any kids right now that live out that way. 

Our house is not on the main road, but is visible from it, so whenever anyone is coming who hasn't been here before, we just tell them to look for the school bus parked in front of our house. A handy marker.

The one other bus starts its run at the very edge of the district and picks up a lot more kids along the way. "A lot more" meaning . . . 15.

Is there a high school in your area?

The school our kids attend is actually pre-K through 12th grade, in several buildings on one campus.

If you have to be away while the kids are in school, do you coordinate with someone ahead of time to take them if you get held up? Or would you just call someone from the road to make arrangements?

It's very, very rare that A. and I both go somewhere while the kids are in school. When we do, we don't make any special arrangements. If our car broke down or something, then yes, we would call the school on our cell phone. Cell service is good enough to make a call most of the places we go around here. (Although our cell phone doesn't work in our actual house, so I have to go outside at home if I want to use it.)

Anyway, I don't worry too much about the kids at school if we have a situation that keeps us from being there when school lets out, because most of their friends have a parent who works at the school. So if we couldn't get there for whatever reason, they could just go home with one of those staff parents and we would pick them up when we could. The community here is very, very supportive and accustomed to helping each other out. It wouldn't be a problem.

What about college?

There is no college nearer than 100 miles away. If they decide to go to college, they will not be living at home while they do. Unless they do it online, which a lot of people do nowadays, anyway. 

And a bonus, non-school question: Who is Miss Amelia?

Miss Amelia is our elderly neighbor. She lives alone in the same house she's lived in for probably sixty years, about half a mile from us. She loves children and is just about the sweetest woman ever. She's constantly sending food over to us. Luckily, she LOVES my bread, and also garden vegetables, so I can return the favor.

More answers to your burning questions about remote living coming next week! And if you have anymore, just put 'em in the comments and I'll get to them, too. 

Snapshots: Snakes 'n' Summer

Most of the time when my mom brings the kids random toys and other diversions, I save them for some later time. Last time she came, those diversions were water guns and water balloons. Those I saved for the last day of school, which was conveniently 83 degrees.

(Swim) suited up for battle.

And look who we saw when we were getting on the bus to come home on the last day of school.

It's Howard's cousin!

Instead of a coffee maker on the counter, we have an electric kettle, which I use with a french press to make my coffee. Our five-year-old kettle melted down in a rather spectacular fashion a couple of weeks ago, so I had to order a new one. The one I got is glass, and when it's on, the base is surrounded by a blue light. 

When it's at a full boil in a dark kitchen, it looks pleasingly like a lava lamp.

My coffee is so much groovier now.

And lastly, here is a bowl of fresh fruit. I do not usually have enough fresh fruit to have a fruit bowl of the sort that seem de rigueur in carefully styled kitchens, but I happened to have a very photogenic variety this week. And a photogenic bowl, too.

A. bought the pomegranate so he could plant the seeds and grow a tree. Isn't that why you buy fruit?

And there you have it! My life, snapshotted.