(7s) Goals For 2010 #1 - Unabomber Shacks On Compound

Years ago, I still lived with my moms, sleeping on a mattress behind the living room couch with my dog Waylon. I worked the second shift over an hour away in Richmond, and everybody else in the house was normal daytime people, so I'd be home at like 1 in the morning, eat dinner, drink beer and write until like four or five in the morning, then go to sleep, dead to the world as my moms and my sisters got up and went to work or school. Usually on the weekends, I wouldn't make it home for a couple days, so we never crossed paths on that, and mostly I was out of the way, except on my days off which were like Tuesday and Wednesday I think. Well I ended up quitting that job to move to the beach, but then the guy I was going to move to the beach with, Boomer, disappeared on me, so I didn't move to the beach. Instead I got a job painting houses in stupid fucking Farmville, the real life shithole not the stupid Facebook game. At this point, I was in the house the same time everybody else was, and you could see the house wasn't big enough for such personalities.
Back then I used to go sit on my grandfather's porch to hear him unwind his bizarre and hobo-like past. Wrecking cars trying to see some girl, building irrigation ditches with Indians, falling in love with some crazy woman in New Orleans, marrying some crazy woman in Chicago (what up grandma, I know you reading this!), all that stuff. So I talked him up about helping me build a nice little simple shack, about 8 feet by 12 feet, which, as it came together, I affectionately dubbed the Unabomber shack. Once we had framed it all and put the roof on though, I ended up splitting a trailer with a dude I had worked with, and trailer park life swallowed me whole and I only went home the 8 miles away if there was a football game I couldn't see on my rabbit ears and to check my mail of all the strange shit people used to mail me when The Confederate Mack was going strong. (Actually, there was a brief period of time where the mailing address to the zine actually included "Trailer #7" in the address.) My first sister ended up living in the Unibomber shack for a while, called it something else of course, and then when my youngest sister moved back home with her 49 cats, the cats lived in the Unabomber shack, they put a cat door on it, and it has been called The Cathouse ever since. Most of the wood came from a hurricane that blew through and knocked down a bunch of trees on my grandpa's property that he had some dudes with a portable sawmill come mill up for him.
Anyways, in our current compound, my wife be seeing clients on the regular for herbalism treatments for what ails them. (Oddly enough, that is not a euphemism for drugs. She's actually a trained and certified herbalist, always making me take little droppers full of things in two fingers of well water.) As my wife sees more clients here at the house, it becomes hard to separate the kids from the house, because I'll have to rush home to take them to the library or something. It's not convenient.
And at the same time, some gypsy jewish lady left a camper here for me to use as a studio, and for her to conveniently store her camper, like six years ago. The camper is pretty stifling though, not to mention it's all fucked up from being in my possession for so long. I honestly don't know if the lady could get it out of here now. I've wanted to call and make an offer for it, but I know she thinks she has more than what she has, so she'd probably say something like $1500 when you couldn't get more than $300 for that thing in the local Bucksaver newspaper. I've wanted to call her and be like, "I'll give you $200 for it," and if she says no, tell her to come get it off my property. She's some sort of nomad based out Canada or some oddball set-up like that. Seriously, she's only come back to see her camper once, and the last time she called, she couldn't even remember my name.
Now what I plan on doing is laying out the building of a pair of Unabomber shacks, one in our pasture for my wife's herbal clinic, and the other back where the camper is for my studio. It'd be pretty easy to do step by step, get it all built and wired, and then have my uncle come out one Saturday to run power from the box on the house to each of those buildings, already wired up. Additionally, and I have to do the research on this, but if you are under a certain square footage, it doesn't fall under the domain of the building inspector so stringently. In fact, I could see building like 9 of these things on our property in various spots in a slow meandering "addition" to our main farmhouse.
Having just started work, and having dug a mighty hole for myself moneywise the past four months, I'm probably a good half a year away from having plenty of money for building materials. But I'm sure I could site scavenge enough foundation blocks to go ahead and dig the two foundations for both shacks. First though, I have to get rid of the camper, which is too full of stuff right now to even think about that, and I have to get the pasture chopped down a bit up front where it's grown kinda wild. Or I could just set fire to the camper and take the stupid old-fashioned scythe we have and get medieval on the area of the pasture where the herbal clinic will be. DIY, always the hardest way and just barely the cheapest way, once all is said and done.