Updates 4.11.25

November

• Officially moved into the trailer!
• Got heating inside via a diesel heater.
• Found a free water fill up.
• Found a tasty drive-through pizza place.
• Started reaching out to local networks for communities and friends.
• Accidentally let loose gallons upon gallons of sewage from the previous resident’s full black water tank in the trailer.
• Moved the trailer back a few feet.
• Found a company to clean up the toxic waste.
• Sold my car, stress-bought a truck which promptly lost its caliper bolt, leaving me on the side of the road.

December

• Finally got the truck home and after doing two errands with it (buying hay to fill our composting toilet bin, scoring some free pallets), it died before we could take it to a mechanic to get it checked out.
• Towed truck to the mechanic, got a laundry list of issues with it.
• Truck becomes a clothesline after cows found our makeshift line made of hay bales (ate the hay).
• Cows destroy our compost bin for the poop hay.
• Find out we’re supposed to use straw because animals won’t eat that.
• Nights get colder and colder but we’re cozy and warm.
• Get added to local group chats and find that our closest neighbors are really sweet and pursuing similar goals as us.
• Get connected to a funding source of people willing to give away their trust fund money to projects like ours.
• Start more seriously planning for things that had seemed out of reach in terms of money and time.

January

• Adopt our cat Charlie and figure out the life of pet parents.
• Make a ton of pancakes.
• Get more solar power.
• Start collecting things for our future buildings.
• It snows! We have nature’s fridge just in time to start making our cat’s food from scratch.
• Get introduced to an abandoned lot where we can scavenge for fence materials.
• A friend comes over to help us try to fix the truck. We learn many things but the truck will not yield.
• My birthday!

February

• Ebony’s birthday!
• We find a place to get native seeds and live plants for when we’re ready to start growing.
• Cows keep eating our toilet compost and drinking our gray water.
• A new mechanic works wonders on the truck, we can finally use it again.
• One trip to a nearby town almost leaves us stranded, this time another caliper bolt comes loose but our angel mechanic saves us just in time.
• I land my first movie gig for audio description.
• We buy a utility trailer to haul things like pallets for building and IBC totes for water.
• Wind storms pick up and feel like they’ll tip our trailer over, we start planning to secure it better.

March

• We sell at our first market in Albuquerque, raising over $200 for our friend in Gaza (her GoFundMe is linked here!).
• Charlie wakes me up in the middle of the night, I think people are trying to steal our small trailer. Turns out a herd of cows were paying us a visit and Ebony chases them away.
• We purchase metal roofing panels and framing lumber for our future buildings.
• Plans for building parties are a bit overwhelming. But we are getting connected to more and more people who want to help and it feels good!
• The days start getting hotter. The trailer is a bit stifling and we know we don’t want to stay here in the triple digit summer heat.
• We find a sweet cat at an abandoned campsite, we take her to the vet and learn she was stolen from many cities away in December.
• We book a consultation with a man who makes the style of building we are interested in, the meeting is.. strange and we feel like we wasted the money we paid since it was just regurgitated information delivered with a condescending/demeaning attitude.
• A friend comes over to and gives better advice on our plans. We decide to build smaller in order to not get in trouble with the county.
• We meet more friends in person!

Our April plans:

• Start our item gathering (pallets, gravel, straw bales).
• Hire a neighbor to level the building site with his tractor.
• Start our digging, framing, cobbing, roofing, and flooring parties so that we can finish before the beginning of summer.
• Find more grant and market opportunities in order to keep making money to support ourselves without needing to be in a draining job environment.