One of the things you'll find yourself giving up if you decide, as we have, to start the homestead from scratch, is time. There just ain't enough of it.
Still, for all the lack of time, there are some things I will not give up. I don't consider these niceties or luxuries. I consider them necessities.
Computer time. The computers in our household are vital for our business of teaching and selling fiber arts. With them around, though, we find time to blog a little (or a lot), surf a little, research a little and they can become time wasters in a hurry. We jokingly (or maybe not so jokingly) call them hypnogourds (a silly reference to the fun Xanth series of books by Piers Anthony).
Books! We have library cards at every town we go to and we do frequent them to the tune of once a week - each - while we're there. That's Castle Rock and Monument, CO (really really nice libraries!), Mountain View, AR and Hammond, LA at present. I've still got cards, but don't know if they're still valid, for Craig and Rocky Ford, CO, too. If you haven't been to a library lately, go as soon as you can. Gone are the dusty stack of mouldering books with the stern, white-haired librarian stamping books thunderously and telling you to "Shhhhh!" Instead, there's computer access and printing - often even Wi-Fi, and multimedia (DVDs and VHS and CD and cassette - music, videos and books on tape) as well as books. We have a rather huge library ourselves and when we get the house built, the plan is to have all of the walls covered in books. No simple, silly bookcase for us - walls, I tell you! That why I was shocked and appalled when I read yesterday that few people read books and those that do average less than 7 a year. I've probably read more than 20 this year and it's only August and I've been busy.
Then there are things we find easy to give up and I think that this might be what's sucking other people's time, too.
Television. I did a little (very little) research and found that the average person spends about 4 hours per day watching television. We haven't has television since, um, since... well, since Fox canceled Firefly. We still watch movies. Sort of. They're on in the background on the computer and I'll glance up when there's something exciting going on. We treat 'em more like books on tape, really... and we have a lot of those, too.
Video games. Last night, as I began this post, Jeanette was researching keywords to beef up our search results on eBay and sees "PSP." She asks me what it is and I say "I think it's a file type for the old Paint Shop Pro (which used to be really great shareware from Jasc) program." Nope. PSP stands for Play Station Portable. It's the most searched term on eBay. Makes me want to put the line "Spinning is more fun that a PSP," in our listing, but that would be dishonest, right?
I'll grant you that playing a video game or watching a reality show featuring people drinking pigs blood as a sport might be more fun than diggin' post holes, but I guarantee you that you'll get more done and (eventually) feel better for a little hard work.
Oh, but my father is surely laughing at me now!
