Storms on the fringe

Seems like everywhere we go we get treated to unusually bad weather. I can feel it coming days in advance now... We've been under severe thunderstorm & tornado watches and warnings all day long. Everyone here says "This is really unusual", but it seems that wherever we go - well, there we are!

The good news is that if there are 4 tornadoes around us, the storm will split up and go around our location leaving us unharmed, but everything around us messed up.

Today was not that bad - just lots of warnings, wind and heavy rain.

I have not been updating the website much lately. I've been really busy with a haunted house for Halloween. My passion and my website www.hauntwarehouse.com

I've lots of pictures and stories to share - but for tonight, I am tired and the storms are wearing me down, so it's off to bed.

...It's 2 AM on September 21st and I'm up tracking yet another line of serious storms. We're in the path of one that spotters are warning is a bad one with golf ball to baseball sized hail and winds in excess of 60 MPH. Add to that the fact that we're surrounded completely by a tornado watch and you can guess why I am no longer sleeping peacefully in bed, but instead sitting up thinking about how much damage to the trailer & truck I will be dealing with this morning.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that our pattern of having storms go around us instead of over us will continue and there will be nothing to report later...

Hard Transitions

Well, we've decided to stay for a while. We've moved into an apartment provided for us by our local family at no cost. It feels weird... Everything in our super efficient apartment seems so damn wasteful coming from such a small and efficient space that ran mostly off of solar power. The panels will sit atop the trailer all winter long doing nothing but keeping the batteries at their absolute maximum capacity for power.

That being said, the girls all love the conveniences. We have a washer, drier, dishwasher, garbage disposal, air conditioning, dehumidifier/heat exchanger, ice maker, huge fridge, hot water at any moment, 1,500 Watt microwave, etc... I can't help but feel like a bit of a pig living like this. I have to remind myself that it's only through the winter and then we'll be back to being totally independent and living simply again.

Update from Minnesota

We went back and forth a lot on when to return to the western part of the US. It looks like we've decided to stay here in Minnesota for at least a few more months - possibly through the winter. We'll have to move out of our rolling home and into a more cold weather worthy place or figure out a way to weatherize the trailer for the very cold winters here. At this point it looks like we may mothball the trailer when it starts to get cold and then move back in to it this next spring when it's good traveling weather again...

There's a handful of reasons for our decision. The largest one being that we can build up savings here a lot faster than we can anywhere else. The shop gives me the opportunity to sell some of my carvings in addition to our regular income and provides me with an environment to work on one of my long term dreams.