Goodbye, CabinDwelling

Goodbye, Outhouse

Running water. Pooping indoors. A toilet seat that is not blue foam. A counter top that is not a 30 year-old piece of plywood.

No more stringing Christmas tree lights from the dwelling to the outhouse so visitors can find the facilities in dark. (They're like runway lights for the intoxicated.)

It has taken almost a month to work on the older, strangely built house and accomplish the move, hence the near absence of updating this thing. A month and unanticipated truck loads of crap. How did I go from a 15 box limit of personal goods a few years ago to eleventy five truck loads?

But... here it is. My last post as an official CabinDwelling-type person. Flic and I have discussed this, and it is kind of prompting a blogger identity crisis on my part. Hot showers at home, laundry at home, indoor toilet ... I mean, how posh can a CabinDweller get?

Above right: No more bargaining over who has the chore of knocking down the inevitable poop cone.

No more hauling water from the water wagon in the five gallon blue jugs. We've given most of them to a friend who just moved in to a dry cabin nearby.

The old Goldstream Valley house we purchased has a well with pretty good water, so we're not going to be forced to haul water in one of those 300 gallon plastic tanks you see in the back of folk's pickup trucks. Speaking of hauling water ...

Goodbye Subaru
To amplify this whole identity crisis, my Soob up and died last week. Francesca the aged Loyale, rounding the 235,000 mile mark, went to the great lot in the sky. It's like she knew that we were moving to an actual house, even if it's an old outside-Fairbanks-city-limits-we-don't-need-no-stinking-building-codes house, and she said, "Nope. That's not a driveway I care to sit in."

Goodbye, Random Animal Parts Wired to Trees
Yes, this is a strange one. At the final cabin, we kept finding antlers (caribou, moose) wired to trees. Antlers as decor are one thing - in small doses - but on several occasions, I'd be out walking on the property quite a ways from any building or structure and there would be a set of antlers wired to a tree. And I'd think, "What the hell? Where's the context?"

So far, I haven't found a single set of antlers in the new yard.

Of course, who can forget the whole animal head in tree thing? Our site got more traffic over the animal head thing than from the recent boost from She Who I Am Mighty Tired of Talking About.

Goodbye, slop bucket. No more near misses on the over flow thing; and since this was a chore I agreed to take on as mine in order to convince the S.O. to live in a dry cabin, well, yay. No more lugging the thing out away from the house, trying very hard not to splash on myself.

Goodbye, carpenter ants. Have fun consuming that cabin from the ground up. I'm not going to miss the annual weeklong population explosion, hatching, or whatever the hell it was that manifested as an ant party inside the house.

So, what to do? What moniker, what nom de plume, shall I adopt? Ex-CabinDweller doesn't have a good ring to it.

Not that we've gone totally yuppie or anything. We're still down in the bottom of the Goldstream Valley, plumbing the depths of thermometer, or thermometers, (since they all read different anyway.) But I confess, there is a small part of me that is going to miss the dry cabin lifestyle; it was a good, cheap way to live. Although, the simple life is anything but simple. It's a whole lot more work.