Adventures in Time and Space

Hey there, friends. Welcome to another episode of The Grid Is For Squares! I don’t want this podcast to turn into a summary of our to-do list, cause that would be boring, so it’s important to me that when we don’t have a major breakthrough to report, we focus on a theme.

So today’s theme is… time and space! Which, granted, covers everything in existence. But it’s also a way of framing our property, our projects, and the different ways we approach reality and the world. Space is Vince’s specialty and Time is mine, and each plays its role in our homestead progress, so I thought it would be a decent way to approach today’s episode.

SPACE

Right now our lives are incredibly polarized, space-wise. Here in LA, we’re living in a small one-bedroom apartment with 3 adults and 1 dog. And it’s a pandemic, and none of us have jobs, so we’re all here all the time. It’s… rather cramped. But up in Mariposa, we have 10 whole acres of space. I don’t know anyone who has either that little or that much space. We’re living on both extreme edges of the personal-space spectrum. It’s very weird.

But Vince is also a master of Space, from his natural strengths in construction and design to his dedication to leveling and “thinking like water.” And last month, he was excited to use a bunyip for the first time! Not the cryptid, the nifty method of leveling using a clear tube and water… if you fill a long tube with liquid, it’ll come to the same level on each end, which allows you to level 2 things over a great distance without a fancy laser level. Vince used the bunyip to level all of our yurt posts to within 3/32nds of an inch. He also graded the pad for drainage and added some dirt “curbs” to make sure water doesn’t get under our yurt.

Vince has also been getting into the design software SketchUp lately. Typically he just uses old-school paper and pencil, but with an unusual shape like a yurt platform (and to help my spatially-challenged self wrap my mind around the dimensions of it), he says using SketchUp has been clutch.

I’ll post more pics of our platform sketches next time, but here’s an in-process peek.

TIME

Time has been strange since the pandemic began, for us and for everyone. It feels like one month and also feels like 10 years. It’s very strange to think about the “before-times.”

But as Vince has begun staying on our property for longer stretches in his unemployed life, it’s made us start coming to terms with the fact that we’re probably going to end up spending a lot of time apart in the next few years. Vince’s ideal is to spend most of his time on the property, and my ideal is to spend a few days at a time up there while I develop my life/career/art here in LA, and that’s something that we’re going to have to deal with for a while.

Hopefully we reach a point where I can thrive on our property and can stay there most of the time too, and we just have to keep the long view in mind as we struggle through these difficult times. It’ll likely get worse before it gets better, but when gets good I think it’ll be really good. We’re sacrificing a lot to make this homestead happen and our time apart is an investment as much as our money.

Time is also a major factor in planting and harvesting. In California, you have to plan around 2 awkward growing seasons instead of going “all in” on the spring/summer like we used to do in the Midwest. Like with everything else, we feel like we’re always one season behind. But some of our plants have come up—lilies and daffodils, garlic and brussels sprouts—and we just started a bunch of seeds back home in LA. Hopefully everything thrives with all of the rain we’ve been having.

And on a final “time” note, it seems like this is the best time of year to deal with poison oak. Vince’s mom has been pulling a lot of the stuff and none of us have had the extreme reactions that we suffered last spring, so if you have poison oak on your land, consider dealing with it in the winter!

WHAT’S NEXT

We’re hoping to finally build the rest of the yurt platform this coming weekend, so I’m excited to make that happen. We’ll let you know in our next episode!

As always, you can check out more pictures on Instagram.