Antelope herd

I am sure by now that you have this idyllic little picture in your head, as we do, of life at the cabin. In the summer fishing and taking long hikes. The dogs romping off-lead. Wildflowers everywhere. In the winter you can see us tucked into our cabin sitting in front of a fire while snowflakes drift lazily past the windows. La Vie en Rose for sure! Well, at least for us it is. I can't speak for the rest of you.

Let's just take off the rose-colored glasses for a moment, shall we? They are several things that interfere with this life of bliss. The worst offender is The Wind. It deserves capitalization and respect. The Wind is both friend and foe. A friend first because it gives us power through our wind generator (seen here). 

The wind is a good source of energy for us. It fills up our little battery-powered home quickly. The one big drawback to the wind generator is the furling process. When the wind blows too hard the generator turns its tail to the wind to save itself (called furling), and when it does it makes the most god-awful noise! It sounds like a helicopter just landed on the roof. It can get very annoying to say the least. I suppose when you hear it all the time you will cease to notice after a while. Kind of like parents with screaming children. 

The wind is not our friend when it blows the snow into huge drifts and makes the roads impassable. Up here you can't really go through the drifts, you have to go over them or around them, hence the need for an all-terrain vehicle like the Polaris we are going to buy that has switchable treads; one for snow and one for normal use.

Out for a walk

The wind is sneaky. You can have a clear blue sky and still get snowed in. How you might ask? Whiteout conditions. Snow that is on the surface and not packed down is lifted up and carried by the wind. It will fill in any and every crevice (such as your newly plowed driveway) in a matter of a few minutes. We know, we've been stuck in those conditions once. 

See that greenish blip in the above photo? That's Larry, one of our neighbors, in his big green John Deere snowplow/snowblower making a path for us to follow in. I can tell you that the snow was filling our tracks in behind us as quickly as we left them. Scary. Of course, we needed to get out because Rick needed to be at work and we couldn't wait it out. In the future we will just stay where we are!

Did I mention that we live seven miles in from a road that is plowed by the state of Wyoming? Many people leave their vehicles at the house of a person who lives on the Wyoming side and drive their all-terrain vehicles to his house, then leave it there and take their normal vehicle into town or to get the mail.

And yes, there are times when we could be snowed in for weeks at a time. You just have to prepare in advance.

If all else fails at least you have snow as a reliable source of keeping your wine cool.

Bella at the top of our driveway (on right) looking towards Bull Mountain at the end of the day.

These days it's all about looking forward. Rick is looking forward to retirement (83 working days left!). We are both looking forward to being home, back in Colorado. Tucked away in our little log cabin on 70 acres of land that we know pretty much by heart. 

It's kind of funny how I thought I was "moving back home" when we moved East. Since I was born in Poughkeepsie, New York and lived in Hyde Park (Roosevelt's), I thought it would feel like home. After all, my childhood roots were only a two hours' drive away from our home in New Jersey. At first I embraced it all: the trees that covered everything in sight, the culture, the big city, and yes, even the humidity. It was different, and I guess I must have become weary of Colorado's days upon days of sun. Imagine that! Now I long for the sun, the dry crisp air that allows the Milky Way to shine crystal clear at night. The expansive vistas that the lack of trees affords my eyes.

Colorado = Home. Not New Jersey, and not the East. 

Rick and I lived in so many different places and cultures. And if you think the East coast does not constitiue a different culture you'd be wrong. Living life in Germany, The Netherlands and France has shaped us and formed us just as much as Colorado (and yes, even New Jersey) has but there is only place we now want to be and it is none of those places except for Colorado. (Although I would have loved to have stayed in France at one point in time.)

But it seems I have gotten off the track a bit as I am prone to do. 

One thing I am not looking forward to and that is the move itself. Ugh. Nothing can be worse than packing up your belongings, deciding what goes with us and what gets sold, what goes where -- storage or the cabin. Yesterday we spent a little time going from room to room, saying yay or nay on furniture and assorted things. We were in agreement on most things. Little red dots starting showing up all over the house. Everything with a red dot goes with us. I still have to make another cut in clothes and books, and we have not decided on things in the kitchen yet, but we are getting there.

Looking forward to all of this:

Big sky

Katy Coyote and the Magpie

Snow Jelly Rolls!

Moose naturally!

Dining room window wildlife TV

And of course, the cabin itself!

What's not to look forward to?

Cabin Christmas 2004

Things are pretty hectic for us right now. At least that is the excuse we will use for not doing personalized Christmas cards this year. 

So, this is our Christmas greeting to you! And, we do sincerely wish you the very Merriest of Christmases and a Great New Year! 

We hope you'll take the time to read this post on our "Off the Grid" blog site and catch up on all our news. And, maybe come back once-in-a-while to catch up on our adventures. Please leave a comment to let us know you visited.

2015 started off on a high note. We decided we had the desire and resources to retire from full-time work and move to the cabin in the summer. I announced my intentions at work and planned to do a formal retirement announcement once we had a contract on our house in NJ. We hired a realtor and put the house up for sale.

This kicked off a flurry of activity, both at the cabin and in NJ.

We visited the cabin in May/June. And, saw it through a different lens. We knew we'd need additional storage, new batteries for the "battery powered" cabin, additional solar panels to give us enough charge for full-time residency, etc. Follow the links for details.

The barn design we picked for additional storage.

The need to establish mail service was critical, and we began the steps necessary to set that up--an endeavor that is ongoing.

As summer approached, we were highly motivated to go through the house room-by-room. We sorted our stuff into piles: a trash pile, a donation pile, a keep pile, a sell pile and an undecided pile.

As summer passed by without any bites on the house, our motivation waned and now there are just piles. Still, we got a lot done and can probably finish up quickly when motivation returns.

I sold Mia. (Change is hard.)

Mia is gone to a new home

It was a good thing I did not give formal notice at work. Turns out, I'm going to get a full additional year in before we move!

The good news is that we do now have a contract on the house. And, the buyers are not in a hurry to close, which is a great thing since we'd never be able to move into the cabin in the winter. We are going through all the steps needed to finalize the sale, though. Contract negotiations, inspections, etc.

The year was not all about preparing to retire and move. We also had a couple of nice camping trips with Lady Bug. And, I got to knock-off a bucket list item--fly fishing on the Beaverkill river in New York.

Camping with our "Lady Bug" in the Catskills

Fishing the Beaverkill

Our current plans are to retire officially on 13 May (although, I've still not given formal notice at work). The house closing is set of 12 May, but that could change, of course. We'll use the two weeks prior that to move out of the house, have an estate sale, clean up the place, etc. We already have reserved a storage unit in Laramie for the items we won't be able to cram into the cabin.

No snow for us this Christmas, it is record warmth in the North East. Can't wait till next year when we will be cozy in the cabin with a fire in the fireplace, a modest tree with rustic decoration, maybe some friends over for egg nog or a new favorite "salted caramel with mezcal"! We wish everyone a very happy Christmas and an adventurous New Year!

This post is a follow-up to Return to Sender Part 1 and Return to Sender Part 2.

Yesterday, I got a call from David. He had recently checked our mail box at the Wooden Shoe Ranch, and sure enough, my test mailing was there! This means we have, for now, established a way to send us US Postal Mail at the cabin. Okay, it goes to a Wyoming zip code, so there are plenty of remaining problems to solve in the future, but at least we now have an address we can forward mail to. 

David said it was also crammed full of junk mail. There are ways to turn that off at the post office, but junk mail can also make good paper for starting fires, so we keep it coming!

This is a follow-up to my earlier post called "Return to Sender" (read the whole thing including the comments to get the story, so far). At the end of that post I mention that a neighbor was going to purchase and install a mail box at the Wooden Shoe Ranch along Sand Creek Road in Wyoming. This is where all our neighbors have planted mail boxes and then use their Sand Creek Park street address to get mail. 

The mail box got installed a while back. I sent a package to David, our neighbor, that contained a letter addressed to the Laramie, Wyoming post master. David placed this letter in our new mailbox and lifted the red flag to indicate outgoing mail. Sure enough, the next day that letter was picked up for delivery to the post master. In that letter I informed the post master that we'd like to use a specific address to get mail delivered to the mail box. We used the same addressing scheme as others do, even noting paranthetically that the physical address is in Sand Creek Park in Colorado.

According to David, we started getting junk mail immediately.

After a couple of weeks, we sent a test letter to ourselves at this proposed address. Since David is checking our mailbox, I told him to look for it and to open it if it arrived -- it had a nice personal message inside actually meant for him and his wife.

It was returned to us, unopened, yesterday.

Bummer.

So, I've sent a new package to David with a new letter to the post master so we can try again. This whole address issue is turning out to be as complicated as everyone said it would be!