Wind power and living off the grid

    One of my dreams for Dusty Acres is to build at least one windmill, a fancy one overlooking the "town". It obviously won't be as big as the one pictured here, but it will be fully functional, and it will power our home. I really have no idea how much power one windmill will generate, so I may need two or even several for all the power we will need, or even couple the wind power with solar power. If there are two things we have a lot of in the high desert, they are wind and sun.
     I found a website that details how to make a home-made wind turbine out of "common household items" per-se. You can view it here if you are interested. Putting one of these up saves the environment. But honestly, that's the least of my worries. I want to be off the grid because there's really no reason to be on it. You can build your own wind turbine for probably 300 - 400 dollars (the guy in the website above built his for $140, but had some parts on hand already). I heard of a guy today who built one in his yard and it not only powers his house, but the extra is hooked into the grid for the rest of the neighborhood, so he gets no electric bill and Edison pays him $25 a month for the electricity he generates for them. That's a sweet deal.
    Not only do wind turbines look cool, they can also provide all the power you would need for your house and everything you do around it. If the power ever goes out in the neighborhood, yours should stay on (if you've got a good store from the turbine). Storms, which generally knock out power lines, actually produce a lot of wind and thus if your turbine is strong and secure enough, you should get extra energy during storms instead of none. But probably the number two reason I want to build this (just beneath not wanting to pay an electric bill) is for the experience and challenge of creating the turbine, from scratch. The author of the website referenced above states that anyone with a little mechanical bent and some knowledge of electricity should be able to do this easily. I have neither of those attributes at my disposal. So this will not be easy for me.
    I will carefully document the process and you can all laugh along with me at my foibles and terrible mistakes. Hopefully we will come out in the end with a beautiful and functional turbine that powers our house, and makes Dusty Acres look a little more like we want it to be in actuality: a throwback to simpler times gone by.

Grace,

Jeremy

God's Coming Through Already

    Well, we are within two weeks of closing escrow on Dusty Acres. Our closing date is technically this coming Monday, but there is still some work the seller has to do on the house before our FHA loan will close. They should be completing that work today. And after they finish their work, I get to pay my stupid tax (Dave Ramsey's term, not mine).

     I daftly volunteered to paint some bare wood on the front of the house in order to "sweeten the pot" a little bit and make our offer seem more appealing to the seller. It was by far the least expensive fix of all of them and I decided that we could handle the cost (meaning the cost of the paint, because we will be doing the painting ourselves, "I'll get by with a little help from my friends").

    They say that two of the most stressful things in (an ordinary suburban American) life are 1. Escrow, and 2. Moving. They just may be right. It is all we can do right now to stay calm and collected, and to tell the truth, things are not exactly peachy-keen in the McCool household at the moment. On my end, I am handling the escrow and watching my savings account dwindle as more and more sudden (and rather unexpected...since I've never done this before I did not know what to expect) costs come up in this process. We have been praying that our funds will prove to be sufficient and that we will have a little leftover for some repairs and improvements. We are making priority lists of how urgent all of the changes we want to make are and then we will see how far we can get on the money we have available.

    Two of our main priorities are:
    1.    painting the front of the house (we cannot close escrow if we don't)
    2.    getting a stove (so that we can eat once we move)

    God has already started answering our prayers. In the last few days both of these needs were met. I work for the company that owns the apartment complex we currently live at. I work with supplies to make ready the apartments as they become vacant and repair occupied units. My boss is the manager of all the supplies for the entire company (58 properties in all). I simply mentioned to him that we are looking for a stove for the house and asked him if in the improbability that his drivers picked up an old beat-up one that still actually worked, would he consider sending it my way? He asked me a very unexpected question. He said, "How old is the stove in your apartment?" I found out it was "original" which actually means about 7 years old. He said he would have no problem replacing it when we move out and passing our stove on to us! Blessings galore. That's at least a $100 appliance that we no longer have to buy.

    Also, my dad told me the other day that my good friend's dad used to be a house painter. I have known this guy since I was born and I never knew he used to be a house painter. I called him for some tips and he had lots of suggestions. I was glad that I had talked to him. I need all the help I can get making this house look nice and covering the naked wood and I have to do it really really quickly. I was planning to spend a few hundred dollars on paint and supplies. He called me today and said that he just happened to be at the hardware store and asked if I wanted him to pick up some paint for us. He found a 5-gallon of greyish paint for $30.00, deeply discounted because it was a tinted color that had been rejected by the buyer. I told him that would make a good undercoat, even though we had planned on painting it white to match the rest of the house. He called back about twenty minutes later to tell me that he had dug into the employee at the paint counter for a while and found that they actually had a 5 gallon of good quality almost totally white paint with the primer mixed in already for $25.00, discounted for the same reason. So if the colors match OK, the $250 - $300 I had planned on spending on paint just dropped to $25.00.

    God is good. He is still on the throne, and prayer most definitely changes things. I dropped about 20 lbs of worry with these two developments. Jesus said (as related in Matthew 6:25-34) that the lilies of the field and the birds of the air do not worry about what they will wear or what they will eat or where the money will come from, but God still feeds and clothes them. He then goes on to say, "Are you not worth much more than they?" He then explains, "[The world] eagerly seek[s] all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you." Heather read this to me yesterday afternoon when I was in the middle of a stress meltdown. Today, God took care of us. He'll take care of you too if you will only ask.

Grace, 

Jeremy