Bureaucracy, waste and plants

We are nearing the end of the paper maze we have been navigating for so long and can almost taste the power currents surging at it's exit. After three months of paper signing, document gathering, hair pulling and pleading we have received an approved design for a vault which will supply us with electricity. Of course, it came with it's own series of confusing papers which need to be filled out, signed, notarized and mailed by us AND our neighbors, but surely this is the last of the growing stack(?). It's going to cost us almost $8,000.00 to run power to our homestead from Puget Sound Energy, and we still have to dig our own trench AND buy the 425 feet of conduit it will be running through. That's enough to make us reconsider going completely off grid, but with the dark winters so far north, this is the only reasonable answer. I can't express how gratifying it will be when our first bill arrives with a negative balance, thanks to our future solar panels. Until then, we must play the system's sadistic game. With luck our neighbor, Dane, may pitch in for the vault with hopes of tapping into it in the future, and we've found an excavator we can rent for a reasonable price, so we may still come out close to what we have budgeted for this inconvenient convenience. Watching Christy drive an excavator should be worth the extra cost.

In other news, I've had an entirely different type of effluence on the mind. Greywater. After hours and hours, plus additional hours and a bit of overtime, I have a pretty solid idea of how to treat our greywater. I'll go into more detail in a future post and just say for now that we should have enough available land to distribute our minimal amount of hazardous wastewater through a series of underground, pressurized hoses into mulch beds furnished with enough water loving plants to safely absorb and process it. We probably won't submit our proposal until January, when Washington's new, more lenient greywater legislation passes, so we have a bit more time to work out the kinks. Wish us luck.

I'll leave you now with a sneak peak at our

greenhouse! We're putting together a video of it's erection from beginning to end, which will be a few weeks from now. Stay tuned!

P.S. I hope you voted!