The Long Plan

glennji | Jan 21, 2018 min read

Maybe I’m getting older.

I mean, OF COURSE that is OBJECTIVELY true, of all of us. Even if time is multidimensional, we seem to be falling this way at near-light speed — with no clear way to steer, let alone slow down. We each grow a tiny bit older with every Planck time clock-tick, our cells die and replenish, the pattern of “us” which arises from and is embedded in the physicality of the universe transforms and changes, like a “river once crossed“.

But this morning I looked out at the tiny yard at the back of our Petersham rental and felt claustrophobic.

Part of it is because of the rental property we went to look at yesterday. From the glamour-photos, likely taken when the property was “dressed” and sold, it appeared to have the features we want: cheaper rent, two bedrooms, a little office, a tiny yard with a tiny cubbyhouse. We could even live with the external laundry, lack of ducted AC, ugly-as-sin bathroom. But what the photos didn’t show was a floor with a marked slope in both bedrooms, to the point where I worried I’d wake up hard against the wall, having rolled there overnight. Is this place on top of a sink-hole? Are the bedrooms about to collapse into the garage beneath?

How could anybody feel safe in a place like that?

So it’s past time to think about leaving Inner-West Sydney, and in fact we’ve being doing that for months — see “Where should we live?” elsewhere on the site. After doing our budget a few months ago, planning our get-out-of-debt-free plan, we’ve decided to move: back to Victoria, and out on the coast rather than in Melbourne. Heaps to plan, as well as saving, so our timeline is three years.

I’ll be doing all the planning on the corresponding wiki pages, but in short we plan to save a deposit for a big plot of land (like 10 acres), then build a couple of tiny (and relatively cheap) kit-house cottages on it. I’ll get a shipping container and/or site office and work remotely, whilst Dee sets up the cottages for holiday rentals and, eventually, runs an eco farm-stay (with the occasional 6 to 12 month project-management/scrum-master contract as required).

Our search for the long way home continues. Perhaps this time we’ll get it right?