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Tiny House
The “Tiny House” movement is all about this idea of not having a mortgage, the ability to literally move at a moments notice, and focus on what is really important in your own life. I have a dream of being nomadic, living in a small home built upon a trailer, just going where ever my heart decides to leads me that day. While I don’t believe this is a life everyone can live, I know this movement has something at it’s core that tugs on all of our strings. And it’s not just the novelty of the idea, but the premise of cutting back to just the essentials and focusing on quality of things, not quantity. Funny it might be that, as you cut back for the sake of quality the quantity of quality begins to rise. Then again, maybe it’s this idea of simplistic living, but simplistic living in it’s self is complicated process of deciding what is and isn’t needed. Which also involves a complicated process of trying to get the most functions out of the fewest amount of things. How do you decided what the minimal amount of function that you need to be comfortable? And what couldn’t this be applied too? Now my idea why these “Tiny Houses” are so popular is because we are all waking up to the idea that we are wanting to change the way we have balanced things out in our lives. First let me say, “I love the house my [...]
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Skydiving
The rush from Skydiving isn’t what I was expecting. At least in my case, I wasn’t panicking at that the moment in the photo above. I felt like I was at the starting gate to an race where everyone is just itching for the signal. I thought I might be hesitant to jump, but in fact my mind felt supremely focused, as if someone had clean house up there. I went to Chicagoland Skydiving Center (CSC) in Rochelle, IL just off I-88 for my first jump out of a perfectly good airplane, a phrase painted on the side of the airplane. At CSC they fly you up to 14,000 ft. elevation at which point you jump out. At this height you have 60 seconds of exhilarating, uninterrupted free fall, until you reach 6,000 ft. At which point, if your tandem jumping, it is time to pull the shoot and fall another 1,000 ft. before you’re under full canopy. Once that canopy opens, everything slows down and the world becomes very tranquil. I felt like everything just slowed down at this moment, until at about 6 minutes later I touch ground, time picked-up it’s normal pace again. Right now I’m addicted. There is this huge community behind it that I never realized existed. Something to the tune of an adult summer camp, but without it being corny. People from all over the world, literally, come to Chicago, buy a mobile-home and park it right next to CSC and jump as many [...]
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The Small House Book
Since I’m getting kind of serious about building a Tiny House that I can drag behind my Hummer and sleep in, I bought the book “The Small House Book” by Jay Shafer. I bought the book with the assumption that the book was going to talk about living in a Tiny House, does and don’t of building one, and things of that sort. I thought wrong. I found that Jay Shafer devoted a good portion of his book arguing the case for Tiny Homes and how to argue for it too because it seems there is a lot laws preventing people from living in small homes. I found some of the arguments Jay makes to be silly and and others to be completely against values I believe in. Don’t get me wrong though, I completely agree that American’s spend entirely to much on having bigger homes when a smaller, better designed houses could provide an even better environment. The section on road sizes seemed completely off topic, but if I need some spokes person to defend my right to live in a Tiny House, this part shows that Jay would be a good choice. If I had to sum up the book, I would say that it was just an introduction to defending your tiny home rights. The photo’s of all the Tiny House’s are quite inspiring. The section where he tries to explain that form and function are one in the same, meaning that metal should never like wood [...]