Updates 7.13.25
Hello all! Lots of things happening these days, here are a few goings-on in our lives.
First of all, I have been to the dentist so many times over these months. Like, more times than I’ve been in ten years. I have been fundraising to cover the surgery costs and can still use a lot of help! Any support in sharing the posts on our Instagram, giving funds through Venmo and Cashapp (veganchocolatemuffin or platmamma), or purchasing through our shop will be immensely appreciated.
I also have a special salve that I made for Ebony’s family, an anti-inflammatory salve made with ginger, St. John’s Wort, plantain, and almond oil. I will send the salve to folks who send the highest amounts!
In other news, because of my dental issues, family visits, and the heat, our building plans have been postponed for the time being. It’s hot as hell in the trailer and there’s a seemingly endless source of bugs but what can you do! Taping up gaps we see and making our own cooling packs has been helping so far.
We’ve been applying to all the grants we can find that fit our needs! Even some that feel out of our league. Finances are tight right now and if grant funds don’t come our way we’ll be having to get jobs which detracts from our ability to do this work but having no money means we can’t continue establishing ourselves. It’s a real catch-22 without grants giving us a chance. And we haven’t been accepted by any yet.
Before all of this we had also been dealing with harassment from the person/group that we had previously posted about on our Instagram in October. I’m not sure if things will escalate with them but we really hope that it won’t.
In that line of thought, it’s recently felt like our luck has been running thin. Since we hadn’t been able to build our earthen homes before the summer months got to us, the heat in our trailer has been unbearable. It’s even messed with our ability to keep our cat, Charlie, since she cannot stay in the trailer by herself without us to keep her cool but our evaporation cooler takes more energy than our battery banks can charge to. Plus, our first fridge stopped working so we tried buying another and it just.. doesn’t work. So now Charlie is at a new home and we’re leaving the house every day to charge a battery bank at a library to charge the one that is being sucked dry by the new fridge. I’ve also started to realize that the strong winds are genuinely triggering and distressing to the point where I feel like I need to leave the area every time they happen. I know that I would feel more safe in a grounded house instead of a shaking trailer, but building something like that is almost impossible (for us it is at this moment) due to spring winds and summer heat.
We’re currently talking through different options for what we need to do to keep ourselves safe and secure. A possibility would be to move away during the extreme weather months to work a job, and then come back in the fall and winter to build with the money we made. Building for the weather we know we’ll experience will make it easier to live here longer and host people who would want to join us.
In any case, we want MUCK to continue however we can.