The Pad before the Pad before the Pad.

Life 101
Everything is a production.
House 101
Foundation- the basis or groundwork of anything; see above

I walked into my room, reached into my medical supplies and pulled out my vial of WILLPOWER just a few minutes ago. Yes, I really did!..but before we go any further, I am going to get side tracked for a minute.
This is my 1st time writing a blog. I've pondered it before but never really have been able to pinpoint exactly what I wanted to write about.....Food, happiness, $$ or lack thereof, sustainability, the earth..... My list could go on and on, however in my brain everything is connected. For instance I have come to learn that so many of the problems facing our planet are directly related to food. Growing, eating, feeding, politics, pollution when applied on a global scale have wreaked havoc on our planet. If this subject appeals to you, some good books to look at are Animal Vegetable Miracle and The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, Ishmael, My Ishmael and The Story of B by Daniel Quinn, The Omnivores Dilemma and In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan. I have found that as much as 95% of the food eaten in Alaska is imported. In fact, I have just discovered that if I get too far into this, my blog will turn into a food blog. So suffice it to say that the earthship was an answer to my prayers.
In November our log home burned, very little was left intact. However, the kids were at school, my husband and I were at work, the baby was taken care of and our neighbors saw the smoke and let the dogs out of the burning house. So though we lost our stuff, we didn't lose anybody. We had insurance too so that was a relief... Once the initial shock wore off, we started talking about what was next. Moving, staying, building , buying, sailing off into the sunset: anything was possible. We moved into an apartment with cable tv, wifi and a washer and dryer! One night I was channel surfing @ 2 am and there was a movie on called "The Garbage Warrior". It was actually a documentary about Michael Reynolds, a man in Taos, New Mexico who has pioneered methods of building with trash. He calls his building materials " The natural resources of the modern humanity" as they are already available most everywhere. The homes being built by Earthship biotecture were not only beautiful inside and out, but supply food, heat and shelter independently of any outside systems. Earthships have been evolving for 30+ years now and will continue to do so. I watched the documentary with my jaw on my chest and at the end, I knew what it was we would be doing for the next step in our bigger picture. We bought all of the books written by Michael Reynolds and quite a few not written by him and have now spent the last 7ish months reading, planning, talking to people, collecting things for the house(windows, cabinets, bathtub, sinks, tile and of course the requisite tires, bottles and cans) and preparing to build our new home. We have found some great deals....a lot of Craigslisting, garage sales etc. have supplied our building materials. However, we recently realized that in order to utilize all of our great stuff, we had to build a foundation strong enough to hold it all up. Our finished earthship could weigh in the neighborhood of 400,000 pounds! This was not within our comfort zone , but we eventually decided to do it ourselves anyway. So with the aid of a 20,000 # excavator, a skidsteer, a humongous roller compactor, approximately 250 yards of pit run gravel and our wonderful family who took the kids for almost 3 days straight, we dug a 5ish foot deep hole about 40x60 and proceeded to fill it in approximately 1 foot "lift" intervals. Each layer was heavily compacted. After knocking down our power line with the excavator, crunching the back of our 4 wheeler with the skidsteer and crunching the cooling unit of the skidsteer with the excavator bucket when pulling it out, as it was mired in thick clay, ground level was finally attained! The only thing left to do to finish is to "shoot the grade" which means bringing up the foundation to the level we want to build the house off of and doing the final compacting, making sure that the pad is perfectly level all the way across. By the end of memorial day weekend we should be ready to begin the long awaited tire pounding stage! So have a happy weekend, stay in touch and we will continue next week!