It’s that time of year again…. Dusting off backpacks, gathering supplies, haircuts, alarms, uniforms. It all begins to settle in that this short season of fun is about to end and everyone in my household walks around with their heads hanging low. I have to admit, Dean and I do it too. I often wonder...

On New Years Eve 2014, I sat down to reflect on the year. With great anticipation, I was ready for the new year to begin but wanted to take a moment to give thanks and grab hold of the treasures that should not be forgotten. My thoughts took me back to the beginning of this...

Where do I begin? I have been extremely remiss in my postings of late. So I guess it is appropriate to start up again with an update on the state of affairs at Kapalai Farms after the wave of storms that we experienced this past week. Hail (the size of golf balls) did not make...

One of my dreams, as we were developing Kapalai and learning an old style of living, was to build and learn how to cook in a wood-fired earthen oven. We have an abundance of trees many of which are invasive species and need to be removed. Eventually, our plan is to replace them with native...

Webster’s defines self-reliance as reliance on oneself or one’s own powers, resources, etc. In my last installment, I wrote about our family’s attempt towards self-reliance. Writing about it stirred many thoughts that kept tugging at me. In my greatest intentions, I planned to sit down within a few weeks and share these thoughts. Here we...

In my last blog, I shared an article on homesteading. It described, in a nutshell, the adventure that my family has embarked upon. This stirred many questions and I promised that I would elaborate. The goal for many homesteaders today I guess is to become more self-reliant. This was never our mission but in many...

The other night hanging out with friends, the conversation led to our recent change in lifestyle. After explaining how we compost our human waste and cook our food in a wood oven, one of Dean’s friends asked with a look of complete confusion, “How did you get into this?” As if to say, “You used...

Well, after many have asked, “Are you journaling this?”, I have decided to finally set my pen to paper and start this thing called a blog. It is for no other purpose than to record the events of this extraordinary and radically out-of-the-box season of our lives. It is appropriate that I start on this...