How we know we're really home at last

Moving boxes: When I left Whidbey Island in 1991 I packed everything I owned in boxes and hauled it to a storage unit in Bozeman while I lived in cramped crew housing at Lone Mountain Ranch for four years. When Tom and I moved to Las Vegas from Big Sky, we never unpacked the boxes the whole time we were there. When we moved from there to Albuquerque, New Mexico, we unpacked, but kept all the boxes for our next move, which turned out to be to Boise, Idaho. I left my stuff in boxes with Tom in Boise while I moved back to Whidbey Island to finish my undergrad degree at UW. After graduation, I joined Tom in Boise and we moved to the house we lived in there for the next 7 years. We unpacked, but we kept all the boxes.

From Boise we moved here to our Montana cabin. We have not finished unpacking completely, but there is one significant difference from our other moves: This time we burned all the boxes in the woodstove, and not because we needed the heat. We're here to stay.

There will be an update of the water project with pictures in the next post. For now, I'll just say that we are surrounded by mountains of dirt and broken rock and very deep trenches. We have had drill rigs, backhoes, excavators and rail trucks in and out of here, and we aren't done yet. Stay tuned.

The most important lesson of the last week is that the batteries for the solar power system are only supposed to last three or four years. We think the batteries we have were the original ones Doug and Nancy put in when they installed the solar system in 1997. So the fact that they stopped holding a charge this last week (after 11 years instead of the predicted three or four) is not surprising. Unfortunately, we didn't recognize the signs of their impending demise, so we waited until they completely quit, and then found out no one had them in stock in Bozeman. So we have been out of power for a week, except for the generator, which luckily plugs into a power strip in the kitchen so we can run computers and charge up the cell phone, etc. We run it for about an hour each morning and immediately grind coffee, then check email. We have rewired the pump in the bathhouse to a pigtail that was there for the purpose, so we still have hot showers while the generator runs. But that's about as long as we can stand the noise. Then we revert to a non-electrical life until the next morning. We have had some romantic candlelight dinners and there are three propane lamps installed in the house and many oil lamps and candles which give a cozy light, but I'm looking forward to having those batteries again. Wednesday we'll make another trip to Bozeman for that.