Progress is sweet

Finally, after four months, we're looking at something BESIDES a hole in the ground!  The concrete guys have been here all day, every day, getting the footings and the foundation walls poured.  It looks pretty spectacular, and it's going very quickly.  We've had a few scary "uh oh" moments (like, "oh hey, your ledge is cracked!"), but we trust our concrete guy (and so does Echo).  Actually, Echo loves the concrete guy.  Over the last week, he has gone from his suspicious "who's here?" bark, to sitting by the door, whining, and wagging his tail at 6:30 every morning.  Normally, he waits by his food for me to get up. But no, now he waits for Bob.  Bob talks about taking him home, and I'm starting to feel like Echo would happily go.

Anyways, I finally have pictures!  A blog is no fun without pictures.

To start, we had to pump out the giant hole in the ground.  As I'm sure many of you have gleaned from this blog, it's rained here.  A lot.  Every time it rains, the folks at the hardware store have been kind enough to set aside the pump for us to rent.  We've now had to rent it six times.

We should have started a refugee camp for frogs, as they escaped en masse from the pit.  There was also a litanny of other creepy crawlies that I took pictures of but will give me nightmares if I have to look at them again.  Once that was dry, we had to shovel dirt off the rocks. Finally, the concrete guys came, measured out the exact dimensions for the footings (oh, hey, remember how I said they could be exact because they had lasers?  Guess what they came equipped with?), and got to work making the molds for the footings.  

Making the molds for the footings

Concrete!

This add-on, 12x48, is where the horse stalls will go.

Making the footing walls

Echo overseeing operations (Jereme thinks he's the GC on all of this, but it's really the dog).

I can't even express how nice it is to see progress being made.  Seeing no changes with fall creeping in was starting to give us this desperate, panicked, OMG-We'll-Be-Homeless feeling.  As of now, we will probably be stuck in the RV until mid-late October.  That will be a whole other barrel of interesting, as it's already starting to get very cold at night.  The leaves on some of the trees are changing.  I keep yelling at them to knock that shit off, but they're not listening. 

The walls have to set (cure?) for seven days, and then Jereme will backfill in the floor.  So, in about a week and a half, we'll have Bob the Concrete Guy come back and pour the slab.  I am very, very insistent that we put our hand prints (and paw prints) in the floor.  Jereme says no, but he is no fun.  

Everyone tells us this will be worth it when it's over, and I believe them.  This view:

makes everything worth it.  But more than that, this house/barn is so much more than just a house.  Warning:  I'm about to go into a little bit of sniffly sentimentality in a rare moment of transparency.  Anyways, there are a lot of things in my life I regret.  Like...a LOT.  Basically, my life until recent years is one, long, horrifyingly morbid blooper reel.  It would be really easy to say I wish I could go back and have a do-over, save myself a lot of heartache (and therapy time), but I'm a big believer in serendipity, and I firmly believe that any change, no matter how minute, would have lead me to NOT be at Highland Mountain Bike park on that day in July, and I would not have met my husband.  

This house represents erasing all of that, to me.  It is the final nail in putting everything in my past, his past, and our history together behind us.  We have been through hell and back together, and this is really leaving all the baggage behind and starting over, together.  No home town drama, nothing.  I really believe that this will be something extraordinary, and I try to give him that same sense of faith, too, because he often needs encouragement.  So, until we are living in that house, I will be the one keeping the faith and quietly pushing forward.  

Waiting....waiting....waiting....

I know I had this great dream of blogging about our experiences while we venture boldly forth and build a house and farm in the middle of nowhere.  You know, write all about our progress.   I still plan on doing that.  I just haven't lately, because....there's been no progress.

None.

Apparently financial institutions in our neck of the woods have a very difficult time actually doing their jobs, and our loan was screwed up/delayed/neglected in every way possible.  Accordingly, we didn't feel comfortable dropping another penny out of savings until we were sure it was going to happen.  So, we've been doing a whole lot of nothing.  I mean, we're still living in a camper.  In a dirt hole.  With a neurotic dog.

Luckily, it appears as though we will be closing on our loan on Tuesday, so we have started getting serious about finishing the septic pit, foundation footings, etc.  It's actually starting to resemble a construction site up here instead of resembling sad, pathetic, abandoned dreams.  And, Jereme built a totally kick-ass driveway.  Like, I brag about this driveway, because it's that awesome, and I'm so proud of him.  So now I can drive my fancy schmancy car up the driveway with little fear, and we don't have to worry about getting stranded and eating the dog if it rains a lot (which it still does, by the way.  What the heck, New Hampshire).

Mother nature has been decidedly bitchy this summer and keeps hurling herself wildly back and forth between baking, unnatural heat, and drenching, unnatural rain.  My garden is accordingly unhappy, my kale stopped growing, and most of my tomatoes have split before they've ripened, which is a total bummer.   But, we've gotten SOME good tomatoes, and I grow a damn good squash. My tiny little bean plants that I started from seed are now producing, and I anticipate getting maybe a meal's worth of beans from them.  I also have a few pickling cukes that resemble lacrosse balls but don't seem to be growing anymore, so I'm going to pickle them this weekend.

Luckily, there are lots of people in town who have much greener thumbs than I do.  The Wolfeboro farmer's market is seriously kick-ass, and I thoroughly enjoy going every Thursday and spending a lot of cash on farm-fresh produce and chicken.  I've been pretty sick lately and have been having a hard time keeping stuff down, but yesterday I seem to have been given a "free" day by my body and had an appetite.  I went nuts at the farmers market and came back with an assortment of cheese, meat, veggies, and PEACHES. Lots of peaches.  I also got funky heirloom tomatoes, corn, zucchini, arugula, blueberries, etc.  So, last night, I made corn and basil cakes with goat cheese and arugula.  It was AMAZING.  I can't wait to have a real kitchen again, and I basically plan on spending my retirement money on a pro-quality kitchen in the new house, because cooking in an RV kinda sucks.

So anyways, here's the recipe for those cakes.  I am by no means a precise cook- so most of my recipes are something along the lines of "a handful of this, a smidgeon of that."  I'm a big believer in eyeballing, and tasting as you go.  This made four cakes, two for two people.

Fresh Corn and Basil Cakes with Goat Cheese and Arugula
-Kernels of two ears of corn, uncooked
-Half a zucchini, shredded (cheese graters work wonders)
-Handful of basil leaves, chopped
-two gloves of garlic, minced
-Two green onions, white and green parts, finely chopped
-One egg
-roughly 1/4 cup cornmeal
-Splash of lemon juice
-1/4 cup panko bread crumbs, plus more if patties don't hold
-1/2 tbsp red pepper flakes, more to taste
-1 tsp thyme
-salt and pepper to taste
-arugula (as much as you want)
-goat cheese (as much as you want)
-cherry tomatoes (as much as you want), halved

In small saute pan, briefly cook corn, zucchini, and garlic over medium heat until soft and a little sweet (about three or four minutes).  Transfer to bowl, let cool, and stir in remaining ingredients.  The mixture should be a little goopy, but if it won't hold together at all, add bread crumbs until it just starts to stick.  The cakes will hold together better than you'd think.

Heat oil of choice (I use light olive oil, just because it's what I have on hand. It's a pain in the neck to fry with, though) over medium-high heat until oil shimmers.  Wet hands, and form palm-sized balls of mixture.  Add to oil, and flatten with a spatula.  Fry until crispy and browned, four or five minutes, and flip.  Cook for another four or five minutes until evenly browned on both sides.  Remove from heat onto paper towel to remove excess oil.  Add crumbled goat cheese, and serve over bed of arugula and tomatoes.    This recipe is great because you can add whatever you'd like (some sundried tomatoes, perhaps) and serve with whatever you'd like (a tomato relish?  A poached egg?), and the corn will still really sing as the main attraction.

In which I am cranky...

I'm melting.

Our dinky little propane-powered refrigerator can't keep up with cooling against the heat, so it's melting too. Or, about $100 worth of groceries inside it are.

We don't have power here, so functioning on a sort-of-normal level involves a carefully choreographed dance of running the generator and charging three batteries- two that power the RV, and one that I run a converter off of to power my laptop, wireless router, etc.  We run the generator for about an hour a day, during which we do all the big battery-burning things like take a shower, wash dishes, etc.  Only, because of how hot it suddenly became (we're in New Hampshire, for crying out loud), we have to run the generator a lot more.  Which...subsequently heats up the surrounding area, and so on and so forth.  We actually have the air conditioner running right now, because my computer was overheating and I couldn't work.  And, I have to run errands later, and didn't want to leave Echo in an oven.  It's quite nice in here right now.  I'm willing to go broke paying for diesel for the generator if it means having a little bit of creature comfort...

Mother nature needs some medication...

So... where to begin.  Well, we're here!  Sort of.  If "living" here can be defined as living in an RV and peeing in the woods.  At least we have semi-potable water now; for the first week we had nothing but anti-freeze water.  I refused to bathe in it because it stank, so I got a gym membership to use their shower.  It's the most I've ever used a gym membership.  Jereme bathed in it...and then got sick.  I told him so.  Our neighbors have a solar-powered pump, so we've been using that to fill 55-gallon drums from the stream, sanitize with bleach, and then fill the fresh water tank in the RV.  It's probably safe to drink, but it's fine for bathing (except for the fact that bathing in chlorine water will give you lizard skin and straw hair.  I'm super sexy with all my flakiness... the lethal combo of peeling sunburn and what's essentially pool water).  It also gives the RV the vaguely nostalgic smell of a hotel pool, which brings back childhood memories of traveling to art shows with my dad for some reason, so it's cool.

Jereme rented an excavator (I think he misses having his own), and frantically dug out the driveway, footings for the foundation, and septic.  He did it just in time, too, because after a week of nice, balmy, mid-60's sunshine, it rained.  A lot.  More on that later.  Anyways, he dug and dug and dug a big 70x38 hole in the ground.  And then we realized that, because we're doing a slab, we have to actually put dirt IN.  Oops.  So then he filled and filled and filled.

And then the rain came.  Let me tell you, it has never, ever, ever rained like that anywhere I've ever been.  Six. Straight. Days.  Torrential downpours.  So not only was it really cold, and really wet... our dirt "yard"/"driveway" turned into something out of a mud wrestling championship.  On the first day, it was squishy and messy and we had a hard time driving up and down the hill.  We thought, "this sucks, hopefully it will stop soon."  Hah.  By last Friday, Jereme's 5-ton truck sank in past the tires in the mud.  You couldn't walk anywhere without sinking, slipping, sliding, or falling.  Forget about getting the truck up the hill.  The dog had gone from being happier than a pig in shit to looking all wilted and sad and hiding in the corner of the RV.  That could have been because Jereme would carry him out to the woods to do his business, and then carry him back in.  I'm not sure he's forgiven us for that.  Life was starting to feel a lot like something out of the Shining.  I'll never watch that movie without thinking, "I get it, man.... I get it."  I actually think I was starting to have a psychotic break.  Jereme found me crouched on the ground by the RV crying a little.   I was having dreams about the RV washing away and mud coming out my ears.

Anyways, that's all over and done with now.  Yep.  It's 90 degrees out and sunny now.  Not that I'm complaining.  Although if the dog keels over, then I might complain... and he looks like he's going to at any second.  Hopefully now my plants can get to growing, and we can get to driving all the way up the hill without praying.  Pictures of the mud put will follow, I'm sure.