What I did…

… over my Covid-19, um, “vacation.” Vacation in quotes in part to not take the situation in any sense lightly, and in part because we’ve kept ourselves quite busy. For myself, I am currently only working on the drawings for the gut renovation of our lake house, while deferring another job until I have our house drawings done. I am also fortunately not teaching this semester (i.e. I am not currently going through all of the craziness that every other professor is going through to move all of their teaching online). That gives me until the fall semester starts to focus on our own projects, which are requiring all of my attention at the moment. The brief update on our lake house is that work proceeded a couple of weeks ago and they now have the new basement walls poured! Here is what it looks like now:

That also means that we will be switching gears tomorrow from work on our tiny house/mountain retreat to work on the lake house. And as I say that, I have to acknowledge how incredibly fortunate I feel to have two amazing places- dream places really-  to work on, or with as the case may be. We are super excited about how things are evolving up on the mountain. At the same time, we know that the lake is going to be equally amazing and challenging and will also ultimately help us to feel deeply at home in the world. It’s a ton of work, but again, how lucky are we?

Shannon has been off of work for the last month as well, but is returning to work tomorrow. That doesn’t help so much with our house cause, but again, so much to be grateful for. I know that not everybody gets to say that they will be returning to their jobs. I know this disruption won’t be a simple blip in the map for anyone. In the coming rearrangement, I hope and hold intentions for everybody to find meaningful work that allows their true gifts to come through. 

In the meantime, we have used our free time tackling our long list of projects up on the mountain. This list, incidentally, will literally never be done. It’s already longer than two people could achieve in the time we have left on the planet, and it just gets longer every day. The lake list is equally long, so like… we are already seriously double booked! Ironically, I like being done, so my penchant for imagining more and more to create doesn’t really help that cause. Add Shannon’s penchant for the same, and well, let’s just say that we have a wealth of things to do for the rest of our lives! It’s a great practice for me to just be with taking one step at a time, enjoying the process, celebrating each little milestone, and watching it evolve as it does.

That’s the lead in. Now for the fun stuff we have been up to! First off, hats off to Shannon for the fruitful month that she has had. I am thoroughly enjoying the fruits! I honestly can’t believe how much she has done. What I really love is that she has loved every second of it. It started with a bunch of tweaks to the interior of Tiny Drop to improve storage and functionality. Then she moved to building the little shed that we needed to house the outside unit of the composting toilet. Then it was on to the big stuff. 

The first of these was the front entry to Tiny Drop. The way these things typically go is that we get an idea for something and then one or the other of us sketches it up. We have a pile of sketches. Fortunately, we had also already accumulated materials for some of these projects. That means we had piles of stuff we were wanting to get cleaned up, and the way to do that was to build! Did I mention Shannon is a champ??? Check this out:

In the process of building the whole thing gets tweaked and new ideas added. In this case, what we needed was a place to get dry and take off our shoes before entering the house. We also wanted an outside bar to mirror the bar inside. That means that when the french casement window is open, we can have an intimate dinner for four! Of course there is shading and weather protection involved here, but the grand last minute act of creativity came from Shannon. She added a star gazing seat that we can access out of the roof windows from the loft (not to mention to help with egress in case of emergency). I mean seriously, how cool is this?!

The other big building project Shannon completed is our first trail bridge. We are focusing on the trail up to the sanctuary, and this is part of that. We didn’t have a sketch for this one, but had seen something similar to this on one of our hikes last fall. Shannon used the materials that we had on hand to make it happen. I only provided peanut gallery consulting on this job. We love it:

We really love that it beckons us to come up from the porch of Tiny Drop.

O.K., o.k. So you are probably wondering what in the hell I was doing as Shannon was doing all of that. It turns out my job might best be described as ditch-digger! At least digging a bunch of ditches was the prerequisite to putting these next visions into place. The first was part of what I have described previously as an effort to slow down water as it comes down the mountain. When I asked the mountain what it needed, this was the request. So I chose one particularly swampy spot to start a pond. This is still a work in progress as we give it time to see how it is working, but here is pond #1 in the works (which Shannon thankfully helped me to dig):

This will ultimately be a micro zen garden along the path to the sanctuary. We are imagining many more spots such as this. Another such spot is just beyond the Moon Gate. I had started garden beds, a retaining wall, and the first steps of this trail to the sanctuary with stone left over from the Moon Gate, but hadn’t finished it yet. So that was next on my list. Here goes:

It went so smoothly and the garden made me so happy that I just wanted to keep going! I have long had a vision for a terrace garden on the slope just beyond the Moon Gate, but I thought that project would be a ways off because I envisioned needing a lot more stone for the project. But rather than wait we figured we would just see what we could do with what was on hand and what we might find as we started digging. 

I had a lot of help from Shannon on this one too, first on the initial leveling of the ramp and digging of the first gardens beds, and then thank God as I started pooping out on day 3 of moving dirt on the next level up. For all of you Houston gardeners, you know how incredibly hard it is to work with gumbo clay. It’s hard! Most of what we were digging through here was also clay, and while not as hard as gumbo clay, it was hard instead because water is literally leaking out of every inch of this mountain! That means that I had to use my best permaculture tricks to dig trenches and build berms to get the water to go where we needed it to go. Good grief, I did a lot of digging. So far it looks to be working. From there I built stone retaining walls for the landings and beds. Then we ordered a truck of good soil and a bunch of seeds. Soil is now in place and here is what it looked like before and after:

We were going to plant the seeds on Sunday, but then it snowed Saturday night!!! When is it going to stop snowing on us?????!!!!!!!!! O.K., I just had to get that out. So seeds aren’t in the ground yet, but hopefully soon. 

That leads to our new favorite form of entertainment at Tiny Drop: movie night. Movie night consists of downloading movies onto my computer (only downside is that it takes way too long to do so down in town), setting ourselves up in the loft, pulling the blackout shades, sending the sound through our bluetooth speaker, and of course making popcorn, hot chocolate, etc. It’s the greatest! It’s like having the theater all to ourselves with the best seat in the house and surround sound. Of course this also has led us to thinking that we need to permanently install a screen on the ceiling that can tilt down for this purpose. And you know one of these days we will!

Our other favorite form of entertainment has become listening to podcasts. On that front, I have to give a shout out to Brene Brown’s new podcast: Unlocking Us. So, so great. So great that I am going to leave you with that tidbit and encourage you to take a listen:

Unlocking Us

Oh, one more thing- I just ordered a ton of books. The one I am most excited about is Glennon Doyle’s new book Untamed. More on all of this soon. For now, I hope you all are finding your own restorative, creative inspirations during this timeout.