This morning we went to church at the Bennett Creek Church in Clark, WY: http://bennettcreekchurch.com/ (If you go to the link you can listen to sermons online)
We had a great time! We had so many people come up, introduce themselves, and really give us a warm welcome! They sing traditional hymns and the church is just beautiful. It is so peaceful to look out the windows in the front of the church and see the Beartooth Mountains!
As we left church, it was snowing!!! You can tell in the mountains that the rain we've been getting this past week has covered them in snow.
After church we felt like getting out and doing something so we came into Powell. Here is what we encountered on our way!!
This area of the drive is considered an 'open range' area, so we are VERY careful when driving. I saw last week where a car hit a full sized cow in this stretch.
It's hard to tell, but above is the show blowing on our way into Powell today.
Guess what I had Scott do this week???
It has been a pain to deal with my long hair, so I asked Scott if he would give me a hair cut!! For his first female haircut, he did a really good job. He chopped off about 6-7 inches of my hair so now it is much more manageable.
We have Survived!!
I haven't written a lot about the last few weeks, but we are doing well!! I'll fill you all in with our day-to-day stuff.
I think we've had more rain/snow days here than we have sunny days. It gets pretty cold in the trailer at night, as low as 35 degrees and the highest was 50 degrees (this was one night only, and that day we were a high of 88 degrees!!).
A lot of people have asked how the cats are doing. Surprisingly, they are adjusting very well! They all sleep with us each night and in the evenings before bed, they like to run around and play in the trailer. They aren't too happy with the cold, but we've made some hiding places lined with blankets for them to hide and get warm. We used to have 3 XL litter boxes and now we are down to just 1 medium sized one, so we have to clean it at least once a day to keep them happy (and have a better smelling trailer!). I thought it would feel cramped, but we are getting into a good routine and I actually like the cozy feeling.
Not having electric has actually been nice! No TV, no internet (unless we go to town), no modern appliances, etc. It hasn't been hard at all to adjust. For entertainment we have been reading (American Assassin and Kill Shot by Vince Flynn) along with looking through all the travel books my mom gave us. We have this DC to AC converter for my car (via the cigarette lighter), and we've been charging our laptops and cell phones with that or even with the generator (*Funny side story about this below). We watch about 1 hour of DVDs or TV shows (we have a few complete sets on DVDs) at night before we hit the sack. Our favorite is Gilmore Girls!! I think we've made it to season 4 already:)
Each morning we have a routine - get up, get dressed, clean the litter box, take out the 'pee bucket' and dump it out, then get things ready for breakfast. We have something light for breakfast like coffee/juice and a piece of fruit or some trail mix, although Scott has his pop tarts he likes too:)
We try to 'shower' every few days, but our version of a shower is very different. We thought we'd go to a campground to use stand up showers, but in 2.5 weeks, we haven't given it a thought!! Instead we've done 3 different things. 1. We take a 'wet wipe' bath - especially on days it's been too cold to get wet. 2. We bought a solar shower bag ($10 from Wal-Mart) that heats about 5 gallon of water at a time. Scott used this once and he liked it!! I haven't had the chance to use it yet... still not sure about bathing butt naked outside yet. 3. This is what I've done the most - we take a bucket of water (inside the trailer) and get a wash cloth wet, then soap it up, and wipe off the soap. Then for hair, I have another bucket that I dip my head into to wash.
The other thing we've become more aware of is trash!! When I was growing up my parents paid for trash pickup. When I was in college it was easy to just take the trash to the dumpster. And when I moved in with Scott, part of paying our property taxes was getting free trash pickup. But out here, you can pay to have a dumpster on your property (not something we want to do at this time) or you have to take your trash to the landfill. I've never been crazy about recycling every single thing before, but now, after literally throwing trash into the landfill it sets in how wasteful I've been in the past. So we have 4 trash containers - plastic, metal/aluminum, paper, and actual trash. We found a recycling place to take the plastic and metal/aluminum (for free!), we burn anything paper, and then what's left (typically just kitty litter) is what we save for the landfill. It's amazing to see how much of our waste can actually be recycled! It seems to be less than 1/4th of our 'trash' actually goes to the landfill.
I would say that the hardest part about this adjustment has been being stingy. Not that before I was frivolous (I was far from it!) but here it is so hard to read about and hear about all the fun places to go see and explore, but we are on such a tight budget that we are conserving gas and money as much as possible. But we have made it a point to explore one day a week so we don't get too crazy cooped up in the trailer:)
This coming week:
The electric guy is coming on Monday to talk to us about bringing the temp pole near our building site. Either on Monday or Tuesday (depending on how long the electric guy is here), we will be going into Cody to submit our septic permit and our building permit. Once we get these in, we already have our septic guy lined up and Scott and I are getting antsy to start on our foundation (hopefully within the next 2 weeks).
I'll keep you all posted!! And keep your fingers crossed that this week we will get to spend more time outside in the sunshine!!
*Ok, funny story about the generator. We were low on fuel in the car and I didn't want to run out just because we were charging the laptops/cell phones, so Scott fired up the generator to use instead. He made the comment, 'The generator gets better mile per gallon anyway...' I busted out laughing and said, 'It better!! It doesn't go anywhere!' haha
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