Quick update - moved and RAIN!

Since there is not an internet connection on the farm yet, this update will be pretty short.  We are moved!  Everything is out of our old house and the gentleman who is renting it has moved in.  We are settling into life in the RV and shed with few issues.  We also find ourselves re-living some of our ancient ancestor's issues - we have no running water and no electricity.  Luckily, we aren't actually living in the 1800's - we have flashlights, batteries and water available from the spigot by the road.  ;-)

Construction should start on the stand for the solar panels this week with a hopeful goal of having electricity by the end of next week.  Running water will have to wait until the contractor gets here in mid-August, but that's only a couple of weeks away.  Until then, we're doing a bit better than camping, but not much.

On the upside, we've seen baby deer, cayote's, no end of birds (and bugs) and gotten to experience the wonderful silence that comes when you can't hear any man-made sound.  I missed the quiet more than I thought.  It is amazing and so worth it.  You don't realize how much noise there is in town until you're not there.  You also forget how many stars there are - we can see a dazzling number of stars from the farm.  On a really clear night, you can even make out the milky way crossing the sky.  We also got to eat an entirely garden grown meal of cooked cabbage and tomatoes and pan fried potatoes.  So delicious!  Anyway, here are a couple of pictures that I remembered to take.  Hopefully we'll check back in soon with more news!

Home sweet home

Newly brush-hogged top field

Solar components and batteries waiting to be assembled.

Solar panels arrive and moving

For the last 2 weeks we have been steadily moving everything out of our house and into the shed.  We should be completely moved by the end of the weekend (crossing our fingers) so that we can get the house completely cleaned and ready for our renter to start moving in on Wednesday.  There's a rediculously long list of misc. stuff that has to get done for that to happen, but we're working our way through it steadily.

One of the key elements of us living at the farm is having electricity.  A key milestone in that process happened on Tuesday when our solar panels and control system arrived!  We purchased batteries and some other needed cables on Wednesday and started reading the manuals for how to hook this thing up.  Its a mid-sized system at 2.4 kW with 8 batteries.  It should be more than enough to run the RV and, later, the cabin.  Thursday we purchased the electrical panel and associated breakers so that we can eventually have normal electrical connections everywhere.  With a little luck, we'll get the system operational by next weekend.

Then we can work on building the stand for the solar panels to mount on.  That will be a larger project that will have to wait until we get completely moved out of the house.  The gap between getting the panels mounted and us moving to the farm means we will be living power free (read: camping) for a while.  Fortunately, the next 10 days look to be cooperating with unseasonably cool temperatures. 

In other news, we had the farm brush hogged on Monday.  We really needed to get the Sumac cut down so that it will stop spreading.  We hope to get our own brush hog by spring time so that we can maintain it ourselves going forward.  We didn't have time to do that this time though - we're too focused on the move.  It makes quite a difference in how it looks!  Of course, in the busy of moving, we have been lax about taking pictures so you'll have to wait on that for another post...