The Self-Sufficiency Challenge

We are setting ourselves a challenge to be self-sufficient by Thanksgiving 2010 and we are going to chronicle our progress here on this blog.  There is nothing like going public to add incentive to a goal. 

Hunt camp junk yard   This room resembled a torture chamber

We are here to prove to ourselves and others that two sixty-somethings can go off the grid and establish a self-sufficient and sustainable lifestyle and, if we can do it, anybody can. We are here to demonstrate that the real promise of our advanced technologies is to allow any of us to become independent of the corporate megalopolies that rule our lives.  This is our personal declaration of independence.

A little background.  We started this adventure about three years ago with the purchase of a 50 acre property in the wilds of eastern Ontario, Canada.  What followed was a three-year-long process of what we call divesting.  I wrote a blog about it elsewhere and it describes the process of virtually buying our way out of the grid-tied life.  Essentially, we had some small business interests to divest, properties to sell and a miriad of connecting details to undo having to do with credit cards, hydro and phone accounts, changes of address and on and on.  It doesn't sound like much when you say it fast but the whole process ate up almost three years to date.  The last of the divestments was the house and it finally sold in the fall. 

Our committment to this new property, then, has been sporadic weekends mostly spent hauling garbage to the dump and breathing a toxic brew of Fantastic and Bleach in an attempt to sanitize the lone structure, a hunt camp, for human habitation.  This also involved the forcible eviction of the previous occupants.  These inhabitants were four-legged, furry and numerous including various rodent species in the building itself, groundhogs below and squirrels in the attic.  The place was quite literally crawling.

Diane and I are both in our 60's and this adventure is our version of retirement.  We have not been forced into this lifestyle by circumstances, financial or otherwise. It might seem like an unusual path given our time of life and the inherent hardship and physical demands involved but we set out on this journey for a few reasons. 

One is our belief that life is not to be 'taken easy'.  The rocking chair is a one-way ticket to the nursing home on the way to the cemetary. Another is our belief that the lives most of us are living are not sustainable in any way.  And another yet is our belief that we have all become far too dependent on the grid...the grid being a metaphor for all the corporate and government bureaucracies that have come to control our lives and rob us of our independence. 

Hence the name: from beyond the grid, from which we will be blogging on our quest to be self-sufficient in every important way by Thanksgiving.  We have set a budget of $5000. for ourselves as well and we will keep a running tally of all our expenses as we go.

I will outline our plans more later but I can tell you that one of the first jobs on the list is to fix the roof that caved in last winter.