Sometimes, you just have to shut up and let the photos do the talking :)
This is how the SkyCastle looks currently.
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The following pictures are PB’s version of photoshop, trying to decide how to make the SkyCastle look…
I think I prefer the old shield we had, will have to talk to PB about this :)
Some of my photography
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Fear (from Google)
noun: fear; plural noun: fears
1.
an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain, or a threat.
“drivers are threatening to quit their jobs in fear after a cabby’s murder”
synonyms: terror, fright, fearfulness, horror, alarm, panic, agitation, trepidation, dread, consternation, dismay, distress; anxiety, worry, angst, unease, uneasiness, apprehension, apprehensiveness, nervousness, nerves, perturbation, foreboding;
informal the creeps, the shivers, the willies, the heebie-jeebies, jitteriness, twitchiness, butterflies (in the stomach)
“he felt fear at entering the house”
phobia, aversion, antipathy, dread, bugbear, nightmare, horror, terror;
anxiety, neurosis;
verb: fear; 3rd person present: fears; past tense: feared; past participle: feared; gerund or present participle: fearing
1.
be afraid of (someone or something) as likely to be dangerous, painful, or threatening.
“he said he didn’t care about life so why should he fear death?”
synonyms: be afraid of, be fearful of, be scared of, be apprehensive of, dread, live in fear of, be terrified of; be anxious about, worry about, feel apprehensive about
“she feared her husband”
have a phobia about, have a horror of, take fright at
“he fears heights”
Fear is a natural reaction to things that could cause us harm, it is perfectly normal and necessary, without it, many of us wouldn’t be here reading this today. But all too often, we allow fear to rule our lives, we let fear hold us back from living our dreams, it’s the “what if” syndrome, the biggest one being “what if I fail?” or even worse, the fear of succeeding… yes that can be a fear as well.
PB and I have lived off-grid since Dec ’07, we are still here, living and loving our life. Not all of it was an easy ride, but we are still going forward, making things better and better, still very much on a budget. It was scary to walk away from our previous lives, previous jobs, friends and family to move some 500 miles to the west, to an area where we knew no one and nothing lined up except the raw property and a dream.
We could have allowed our fear to freeze us in place where we used to live, I shudder to think of how we would be living if we were still there, we could have taken the “safe” route, we could have done things much slower, but we wouldn’t be where we are now if we had done that.
Our only path was forward, we had to let go of our old life to start our new one.
What is your dream? I hear and read people bemoaning their current life, wishing to live a different one, yet not taking the steps necessary to move toward their dream. What is holding you back? Are you waiting for someone or something to change? Why not be the change? …
British Waterway authorities have unveiled the largest off-grid community in Britain – on the canals of Hackney.
Yes, living aboard is booming in the UK and maybe they are onto something. It seems like a happy medium for some. You have the freedom of not paying rent or a mortgage, plus the very rewarding chance to be self-sufficient and independent. But instead of being isolated on a mountain top (which to some may be heaven), you could be doing all this whilst still living in a 24/7 hour city like London. A humble abode that is unplugged and all yours, inside the hustle and bustle of urban city life!
What you need to know about living on the water before taking the plunge:
Firstly, it’s not as easy as just buying a boat, finding some water and setting up camp for the next 30 years. Everyone using canals and waterways needs to have a boat licence, an up-to-date boat safety check and valid insurance. Once that’s all done, you then you have two choices of lifestyle. You can either get a resident mooring, which enables you to stay in one area for as long as you like. A permanent mooring is ideal if you don’t want to move around, but can be expensive and hard to come by. While a mooring of this type can be had for around £6,000 annually in less popular areas, staying somewhere like the Docklands or Islington will cost over £20,000 a year.
The other option is to cruise continuously – in which case all you need is the boat licence, which ranges from £510.62 to £1,110.32 annually, depending on the size of your boat. Boats are allowed to moor almost anywhere alongside canal towpaths. The main rule with this type of lifestyle is that you need to be moving at least every 14 days and can’t go back and forth between two spots. The recommended cruising range is at least 20 miles a year. It isn’t the most secure way of living, but it has to be done this way to consider all ‘liveaboards’.
Canal and River Trust (CRT) have taken over from British Waterways the job of managing our canals and some rivers. For many years BW publically discouraged ‘liveaboards’, but did little about it. Living on a boat was seen, rightly or wrongly, as a way of avoiding paying rent and rates or of getting to the top of the council house waiting lists. The freedom of living afloat with low overheads was thought to appeal to many people who wanted to ‘turn their backs on consumer society’. Equally, though some of the most desirable London properties float on the Thames or Regents Canal, and many people retired, sold the house and moved onto a canal boat to explore their own country.
Recently, possibly partly because of a shortage of economic …
If I weren’t living where I do now and loving it, this is how I would want to live, on a homemade island home. These two artists are truly living the dream, I can’t imagine how it must be living on the water like that, but they sure have made it work. Listening to them talking, Catherine King and Wayne Adams, I can hear PB and myself in them, especially the part about him knowing every board and nail in the place as he put each one there himself.
Seeing it from the sky is the best way to get a sense of the place, it’s bigger than it seems. I love the way it seemed to have grown in an organic manner, not seeming to have a plan, but just being added on to bit by bit as it was needed or wanted. It has taken them 24 years to get it to this point. One last thing I’ll mention before moving on to the video, they have 2 chihuahuas, anyone with chihuahuas are alright in my book. :)
I hope you enjoy watching this video as much as I did.
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Meet Jesse, he lives in a tiny house in Maine, he built this himself and is quite ambitious – to live simply. I can appreciate how he lives, he is obviously a packrat (like I am), his little cabin is filled, stuffed to the rafters with stuff, but it’s not too much IMHO, though it if you are more of a minimalist, it might set your teeth on edge.
I like that he even builds some of his own tools, that’s the best way to learn, just jump in and try thing, if it works, great, if it doesn’t work, then you have the challenge of doing something different that does work. I love his pizza oven, I’d love to learn more about how he built it, it looks small and simple, something a person could do on a small scale.
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As the Rio Olympics draw to a close, it’s nice to think of the medalists returning home to praise and honour. But that is often not the case.
Although he came in last in his competition, accident-prone skier Eddie the Eagle returned to England after the 1988 winter games in a blaze of glory. They even made a Hollywood movie about him.
He was the only Briton to qualify for the ski jump. But now he’s hit the skids – living off-grid in a shed in his family’s back garden, eating sandwiches for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, following a ‘wipeout’ divorce with ex-wife, Samantha Morton.
He revealed in an interview that the split had cost him about 85% of his wealth, and the £180,000 that he had earned from the recent movie about him, he had to give to his ex-wife whom he had met whilst working as a radio presenter part-time alongside his law degree. She was his co-host and they were married for 13 years, raising two daughters, Otillie, 11 and Honey May, 8.
Trying to rack together all the money he can get, he explains his current plan: “I had to sell my flat in Bedford, which I got about 30 years ago, to pay my anticipated tax bill. I got £175,000 for it. I’ll also have to pay capital gains tax from the property sale. At least 90% of the money in my account is earmarked for tax.
“I’m trying to save up from all my work now. I moved into the shed in my garden about a year ago while developing my new house; I’ve lived off sandwiches ever since because I don’t have a kitchen. Egg sandwiches are my favourite.”
Okay, so his off-grid lifestyle is only temporary whilst he gets back on his feet and his new home is built. But still, he’s been living unplugged for about a year now and doesn’t seem to be complaining! When asked how it feels to have lost essentially everything, he preaches that “It’s just one of those things. If you think about it too much, you get depressed, so I think: I made it once, I made it twice, I can make it three times. You have to be philosophical.”
Shocking as it may be, Eddie (born Michael Edwards) lived out his Olympic days in a similar fashion. Being poor, he slept in his car in between events and lived off scraps whilst training, all to compete for Great Britain. So living in a shed couldn’t be too much of a shock to the system. I mean, despite becoming a global celebrity from his skiing, in 1992, he was declared bankrupt. Claiming the trust fund into which he had put his earnings had not been properly managed. Years later, he bounced back and earned a law degree from De Montfort University in Leicester and …
You can get many things for free when you live in a good off-the-grid community. You can get your drinking water for free, from converting rainwater, you can get your energy for free from converting solar power.
What you can rarely get, in the USA or most other countries, is your land for free.
A good plot of land is essential to living unplugged comfortably, it’s helpful if you can grow your own food out of it and that can be costly.
Unless you are Russian.
Yes, the Russian government have launched a new programme giving away parcels of land in their Far East region for free. The scheme was put in place as an attempt to boost settlement in the thinly populated area, but it could give birth a new wave of Russian off-gridders?
The Russian Far East is two-thirds the size of China and only holds 6 million residents, compared with the 100 million who live in the Chinese provinces across the border. Sounds like the region is so unpopulated, you could get a plot of land almost anywhere – live peacefully – and still have enough room to build everything you want. Living off-grid in a place like Russia might not sound too attractive at first, but there are actually already some off-grid communities, such as the Kovcheg Village and the Rainbow Gathering.
The number of “eco-communes,” in Russia, has grown dramatically in the last decade, and the movement back to the land is drawing professionals weary of the country’s corruption, pollution, and new consumerism. Giving them a simpler, back to basics lifestyle that we all hope and dream for.
So, could you take the plunge and live off-grid in Russia?
By Chelsea Mendez…
When I think of living on a boat, I think of being on the ocean, or on a lake, but there are other waterways, called canals where people live full and part time, on what are called narrow boats, these are long, narrow boats of 7 feet wide (or less) and up to 72 feet long (though usually shorter). The width and length being determined by the locks that allow these boats to rise or be lowered to different depths in the canal systems.
Looking at these boats, I think I could live on one, though I wonder if I could really pare my belongings down enough to really live in such a small space, especially if I was doing this with my husband. PB could probably do it well enough, he seems to be happy enough with few belongings, me on the other hand, I come from a long line of pack rats, I got the junk gene in spades.
Back to our story here, we meet David Johns, a former TV journalist from the UK who quit his job, sold his house, and bought a narrowboat to cruise the canal network, he planned on giving it a year to see how he liked it, apparently it grew on him and he is still doing it. Not only is he doing it, he is documenting it as well. Here is the original video that caught my eye, I’ll include a link to his YouTube page below.
Here is David Johns’ YouTube page
https://www.youtube.com/c/cruisingthecutuk
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You can see many things in the desert, some see desolation, others see stark beauty, yet others take what they see and transform it into an even more interesting and ethereal vision. Light is one of the driving forces in the desert, by adding mirrors to this run down shack, this artist took what would be ignored and passed by into a reflection of the surrounding beauty. The wood appears to float, seemingly supported by air. At night it transforms yet again into an ever changing palette of color. Have you been there or seen this?
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You think of 13 year old kids as playing with their game machines or their iPods, but this kid has invented a real free energy device, he is really harvesting energy from the air, he is modeling his life after Tesla in many ways, I like this kid! It makes me wonder just where he will be when he grows up.
Things are happening at the SkyCastle, as you may or may not know, late last winter I spilled a very large, very sweet cup of coffee (complete with melted marshmallows) into my laptop, I was able to get it rinsed out and dried pretty well, but things did not operate correctly after that, my keyboard pretty much died, I limped by using an external keyboard. Other things quit working or didn’t work right, I really hated to give that computer up, I had it set up just the way I liked it. Fortunately I had a Square Trade drops and spills accident warranty on it (I HIGHLY recommend them), I contacted them and they shot a prepaid return box to me, they had my computer the following day, then a few days later then let me know they couldn’t get parts quick enough so they cut me a check for what I paid for my laptop.
I hung on to the check for a while, not ready to buy another laptop yet and not wanting to take the chance of touching that money, I realized it was getting dangerously close to the time when the check wouldn’t be any good, I deposited it and began the process of picking out another laptop. Fast forward to now, and I’m writing this on my spiffy new laptop, an Acer Aspire E 15, 15.6 Full HD, Intel Core i7, NVIDIA 940MX, 8GB DDR4, 256GB SSD, Windows 10 Home, E5-575G-76YK. Not having my laptop meant I had to do everything on my tablet, that’s why my articles here have been so thin on words, it’s not easy to type on a small screen, especially the amount I like to write. :) I’m still getting this setup like I like it, installing my old software and getting used to Windows 10.
So now to the rest of the update, this will be a video update of the west side of the SkyCastle, PB has been busy working on the roof area over the laundry room, it’s also the deck area (3rd floor) where the round tower is situated. We have wanted to make that a small nook like place where we could sit down and survey the neighborhood, maybe even have some friends over and some meals. The original roof leaked, and leaked badly, whenever it rained we would have to go in there and move things (my clothes mainly), put out buckets and plastic to protect what couldn’t be moved. That is all fixed now, PB used a product called Redguard on the new plywood he laid down, that is a paint on coating that is used in shower pans to waterproof the wood below it, the idea is to keep the wood from rotting should moisture get to it. Then he used wide flashing as the next layer, now we have to …
