Our story: Part 1

Our story is not that different or unusual in our eyes, we see our self as part of a movement of people who are tired of the rat race, tired of being mass consumers who are never satisfied, tired of taking our natural resources for granted, tired of settling for less while the modern world tells us we are getting more!

This journey of ours began quite by accident really.  I was working full-time and Racey was in school full-time pursuing a degree in Chemistry after being laid-off from his IT job.  We had a blended family of three teenagers.  Life was quite normal if you were looking at it through the crazy lens of 2000-and-something!  The one problem with all of this was that I was so tired! I was sick of my job, I was worn out by the demands on my time, and I was sick of never being able to really sit and talk with my kids.  I was disgusted with having to eat so much  fast food, and I was just exasperated with having what I felt like was little or no control over my own life. So it became time to evaluate things. 

First I started with my job. Yep, the biggie!  It wasn't that the job itself was so bad, and it wasn't that I disliked my coworkers.  It was the simple fact that I had to trade 10 or more hours a day of my time just to run the rat race.  I felt like that kind of time could be better used to do other things with.  To me time is the most precious thing we have in this life.  We come into the world with an undetermined amount of it and we are constantly losing it.  Sure, we can do things to hopefully increase our time just as we can do things to decrease our time, but no matter what it is always ticking away.

I realized that I had to quit working outside the home and focus all my energy on the people inside my four walls in order to deal with the feeling of dissatisfaction I had with how my time was doing it's ticking.  But how in the world could I do this?  I was our only income!

When I came home and talked with Racey about it, we both knew it would take drastic measures to allow us to continue to keep a roof over our head and food in our mouths.  To make it happen would plunge us headlong into a world we couldn't even imagine at the time.  It has since become our life... and the story of that will be spilled onto this blog for the world to see...