Is this piece in the 'corporate communicator' voice, for talking about electrification?  

Did where and how you'd been living help you get the job, having been off the grid?  

Can you see any stars where you live now?  I realize you were living in a rainy part of Washington, but --- more stars now or fewer?

You mention being eager to get at least one compact fluorescent into each home -- I've been using them for years, but just found I could cure my insomnia just by taking the standard CFLs out of our evening reading lamps (to use "low blue light" for evening lighting).

I know of only one CFL that's low blue -- a little bit in the blue part of the spectrum allows some color perception.  There are yellow buglights, but the completely no-blue light is oooougly.

Is the utility talking at all about light pollution?  

And what are the fuels/energy sources for your employer? I recall California forbade building any new coal plants decades ago, so I assume you buy from outside the state?

My sense is that it is more or less the whole story, though.  As someone who's also spent life vacillating between the boonies and various "more-sophisticated" worlds, albeit not quite this dramatically, I can say that sometimes you need one, sometimes you need the other.  At heart I will always prefer the boonies, always be unhappy if I have be surrounded by too many people too much of the time, but I'd be even more unhappy if I hadn't had the chance to get the kind of education you can only get in places where there are too many people for my taste.  There are things I like, and occasionally even crave, about society, but that doesn't mean I don't "really" love the boonies.

Of course, I only speak for myself, but I do identify with her somewhat, at least based on this story.

But for those of you that would like to live back in the Country there are plenty of places that would love to have you.  You really ought to consider checking it out.  South Dakota, North Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas have many small towns that have plenty of room for a family or two.

In my experience those 50 and older do best in making the adjustment to country living.  Small towns are unique.  The small number of people in the towns, there were 180 people where I grew up, make each town more unique that those who have lived in towns bigger than 5000 can really appreciate.

Back there in the remote north central part of the US you really can forget how many people there are in the world.

I didn't scroll back up and look at it, and, well, like you said, it seemed like something you would say. :)

When I was a baby, my mom got out of a really bad situation in NYC--leaving not just the situation, but also her best friends, father, aunts, and my two much-older sisters who lived with their dad in New Jersey--and moved to Santa Fe.  She rented for a year, and we had nothing.  We had a Coleman stove, a beanbag chair, a table made of plywood with firewood pieces for legs, presumably a carseat for me, and four dogs.  A year later, she begged loans from her family (who thought she was nuts) and bought an old adobe house that had burned 25 years before and had no roof, though most of the walls were still mostly there.  She restored it herself, a little at a time, living in a travel trailer until the house had a roof again.  We lived in the house for quite a while without running water, electricity, or heat other than a wood stove (in fact, while the running water and electricity only took five years, the wood stove was the only heat in the place for about 20). My grandfather used to get so mad because we had no telephone, and he couldn't fathom why a person would choose not to have a telephone (actually, I think my mom chose that partly so he couldnt' call her, but...).

Some of my earliest memories are of taking baths in a washtub heated on the wood stove, and of riding in this old battered Ford van she used to haul all the building materials except the vigas (roof beams, New Mexico-style).  I don't ever remember resenting it.  I don't ever remember wishing we were anywhere else.  Everyone else had a tv; I got a pony when I turned 6 (also not the exclusive province of the wealthy, btw).  It was the best thing she could have done, for me and for herself.

So if you think you're too poor to do what Vanessa did, or too constrained by your kid, or whatever, you're just not thinking hard enough.

You were the one who said your kid kept you from moving away from LA to the boonies.  I'm glad your kid is beutiful--I'm sure s/he is the most beautiful child in the world--but you can't have your kid and your boonies too, apparently, so if it's because of the kid, then either admit that you chose the kid over the boonies, or I'll assume the pregnancy wasn't your choice.  Look, I'm a woman too, and I personally choose--for environmental and ethical reasons, and because I just plain don't want any--to avoid having children.  You didn't choose that.  Fine and good, but don't cry about it when your choice alters the choices available to you from then on.

In fact, for the record, I do not think Willa said anything whatsoever about her ancestors' activities, to the effect that they could be construed as "gleaning."

Some folks in this country that prides itself on the rule of law pay attention to such details.

Which is not to say that there is no place for the Robin Hood principle.  And many folks in this same country of ours are mighty sympathetic to it.

Anyway ... Willa, did you all have a post office box, at the main post office, in SF?  I recall that that was a big event, in the afternoon, going down there, rain or shine, hitching up the pathetic green bike, and waiting for the mail.  That was the only time in my life, when I subscribed to The New Yorker.  Yes indeed, the afternoon visit to the post office was a big deal.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

Excerpt:  choices are related to cash flow, as they have been forever throughout history.  don't you think the indentured servants would have preferred to farm their own land?  the big danger in america is bashing people over the head with their supposedly available "choices".  

Exactly so.

kathleen sisco

And we did scavenge the odd item of building material, just never when "scavenge" was the polite term for "steal".  A couple of things in our house came from the county landfill back before they started looming over everyone with earthmovers and burying the trash instantly as you finished dumping it (I guess the liability for the county must have been outrageous), and occasionally builders would give us scrap that they would otherwise have paid to haul off.

The thing is, when you build with adobe, there's not much to scavenge.  We did reuse the bricks from the south wall (which is now all glass) in rebuilding some of the other walls, and we dug the dirt for the mortar from a bank near the house, but the additional adobes had to be bought (we didn't have the energy or the space to make our own).  The roofing materials also had to be bought new, as did the windows and exterior doors.  Interior doors, the tub, the sinks, and the cabinets and stuff mostly came from thrift stores (Salvation Army used to have a big outdoor yard where they sold all that kind of stuff).  

It wasn't until I had lived a few other places and moved back home that I really realized just how, um, "special" my house really is.  I mean, I love it, but...to anyone who didn't know my mom, it must seem like she was a seriously stoned hippie-type.  Not that there's anything wrong with that--just that my mom was actually a rather proper sort of person, a nice Jewish girl from New York, who just kind of blew a gasket and decided it wasn't worth putting up with her nice Jewish lawyer husband just to have a nice house and a nice car.

I'd say I'd write it when I get too old and decrepit to do the other things I'm doing now, but then, my mother said that about quilting, that she'd take it up when she was too old to build houses and found horse rescues and whatnot, and she never got that old. :(  So for now I'll settle for inflicting chunks of the story on unsuspecting blog commenters...