Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

I was talking to my father yesterday and a part of me is considering making a pitch for the remaining part of the old farm I grew up on, although I'm a little cautious for a range of reasons.

Anyway, I want to visit a few in person first but barring any unpleasant surprises I think I'm buying a yurt in the next month or two and moving into it. I'm rewriting all the BME software so that it operates on a distributed “work packet” model so it's very easy for the half dozen people who help keep things going can work from anywhere. Anyway here's a picture of a yurt in Mongolia:

I don't have a lot of money to spend but that path would let me have an owned-without-debt semi-permanent place to live (for something I can afford while I build a “real” house), and if my father pseudo-gifts me that property, it would work now, and the same applies if I buy a property that's a bit more north-east of here. I think if I had a yurt I could spend next summer building a sand bag house (versus an earthship, although I still think earthships are great) — I like both how cheaply they can be built, and how they integrate into the landscape.

Here's a shot of another one:

Or maybe something crazier… although when I showed Nefarious a picture of the house below (she liked everything else, especially the yurt picture, but I think that's also because it had a little door with kids in it) she told me that it was most definitely a broken house.

I feel like I have to do this now not just because I really want to, but because it's important to me that Nefarious sees a beautiful art house being built inexpensively. All of the pictures in this entry are from the highly recommended book “Home Work” by Lloyd Kahn, a part of the amazing Shelter series which has kept these thoughts in the front of my mind for a long time with stories of outwardly successful people who ditched corporate life in the city to drop out and do something more rewarding.