I’ve been thinking a lot about water systems as of late, in regards to the House. The House being my as-yet imaginary home that I plan to build myself at least once in my lifetime, off-the-grid and self-contained ala an earthship or Living Building. My initial thought is to collect rainwater from the roof — Sebastian liked my idea of a spiral roof, which in turn is leading me back into round architecture and the temptation to call it the Snail House — and send this through a rain garden and some progressively smaller rocks into an underground cistern. Gavin helped me calculate water-usage, which was surprisingly dependent on shower length and flow, leading me to suspect that a 500-gallon tank would be more than enough for two people using composting toilets. Heck, since it’s raining 9 months out of year, you can take all the showers you want! Using a solar-powered pump to get water into a smaller above-ground tank allows water to be gravity-fed the rest of the way — all without batteries — and since the water is underground at comfortable 50 F, the solar hot water heater will have less work to do. I suppose radiant heating might up the energy and water usage, but I’ll have to look into that some more if I plan to live someplace with cold winters. On the other hand, I here the southern coast of Oregon gets 70 degree days in January…

I think I’ve figured out why I feel this urgent need to build my own house. As far as I can remember, my plans for the Future have been: go to grade school, graduate from college, … build a house … die. I’m living in the ellipsis and it’s a little uncomfortable. I have to tell myself to calm down, there’s plenty of time. But the House! The walls are half-built in my head already. Heck, the fruit trees I planted are dripping fruit from their branches, like the cherry trees and raspberry brambles I munch from all over Portland.

I was quite inspired by my visit to The Farm this weekend. Alex’s parents own a tree farm near Salem, and they’ve built a little tiny cabin with running water gravity-fed from a stream up the property and gorgeous old wood-fired range. This being dubbed the Freedom Party, we brought guns and dressed up as hippies and cowboys and such. I actually got to fire my first real bullets — with the same gun used by medics in MASH… I mean Korea — and pose with an AK-47. We ate trail mix and vegan pot pie (made with real vegans!) and falafel-spiced sweet potato around our fire and eventually under our impromptu rain shelter. Eventually, though, we aborted our intended mission to stay the night, and disbanded around midnight. Alex’s friend, who had all the rest of the guns, arrived 30 minutes after we took everything down, so they stayed while the rest of us crawled sleepily to Portland beds.

I’d forgotten how much I like out-houses.