1. Move away from the suburbs, urban sprawl, home owners associations, heavily populated areas, etc..
2. Purchase a small working farm / hobby farm on several acres of workable land.
3. Build and install my own energy generating methods by what ever means is available
The list here is not all inclusive, solar panels, wind turbine,geo-thermal solutions, passive solar,
grid tied system, battery backed system, emergency generator, solar hot water heater, high R value
Insulation, high R value double pane windows,utilize the latest technology in photovoltaics.
Hydro-electric power from a creek or river on my property.
The list could go on here in this area of alternative energy sources, and I will add to it here as
Technologies change.
4. Become less dependent on grocery stores and restaurants for my Family’s food supply.
5. Participate in a growers co-op, and community gardening.
6. Have our own water well.
7. Live a simpler life
8. Seek out a more organic diet for me and my Family.
9. Find a more spiritual side of my life.
10. This should have been step 1 – Secure the financial means to achieve steps 1-9.

These are not such lofty goals considering the government is offering tax breaks and incentives to individuals that install and use alternative energy sources, as well as the tax breaks that you get if you operate a farm.

I ordered a very thick book a few months ago called the solar energy source book. The company that publishes the book has been around since the mid-1970′s. It is packed with alternative energy ideas, and the actual sources where you can get everything you need for living a more self-sustaining lifestyle.
These people where probably called hippies then, but are considered innovators now.

I highly recommend it for anyone interested in this sort of stuff.

A wish list

I have been wanting to drive around Smyrna and take pictures of the few places that are still left that hold memories for me, more on that in a later post.

In the meantime I have decided to try a brainstorming exercise to try to think of every person, place and or thing about Smyrna and my experiences there.

Here goes the random list as they enter my mind, I will add more as I think of them.

Family,Sandies, Dantes Pizza,  Smyrna Elementary,  Aunt Fannies Cabin, Brinkley Park, Dunn St., Campbell High School, 1970 Chevelle Malibu, summertime, friends, GB’s Place, Hoot Gibsons BarBQ, Storyland, the covered bridge, bennet woods, old fire truck, the 4th of July, how to make a buck, belmont hills shopping center, Howards, Cobb Center, Griffin Middle School, Sisters, sparkles skating rink, Campbells Restaurant, The American Legion, Tenneco, Lee St., Jonquil Plaza, Smyrna Cable, The Sunnyside Inn, Nanny, Holly Tree, Colquitts, Ponderosa, Pizza Inn, Shakeys Pizza, First Baptist Church, Calvary Baptist Church, Church St., Ridge Rd., Pecans, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Silver Corvair, magic tricks, baseball, Johnny Rebs, A&P, Captain D’s, JC Penny’s, Woolworths, Dunaway Drugs, Dairy Queen, cutting grass, Whitfield St., Cousins, The Music Mart, Gibson’s Department Store, Richway’s, Jonquil sporting goods,Garage, Floor Heaters, Big Apple, Love, sno-cones, the concession stand, pool,green grass, blue sky, Jonquil pool, the teen canteen on Church St., Jane Lyle Rd., the woods, tennis, go cart, old Smyrna Library,

I am sure I have a bunch more in my brain but it is not 11:40 and I have to wake up at 4:30 AM

To be continued

P.S. If anyone from Smyrna reads this please post your memories here.

Thanks

So again with Twilight the movie, I am sort of late here as well. My daughters have been reading all the Stephenie Meyer Twilight series books way before the movie was made, of course while watching the move they informed me several times that the book was way better than the movie. And they kept saying something about “is robert pattison’s married? They googled it, the answer is no.

I have to say the movie was pretty entertaining, I doubt if I will ever get around to reading even a chapter of one of the books. I am more of a technical reader that a pleasure non-fiction reader, I need to change that I’m told.

Now I am looking  forward to the release of the next movie, New Moon.

Recently these are the things that have happened in my life. We have been working on trying to prepare our home in Powder Springs to sell it. We have rented a house in Marietta and have moved in there, so we can start staging our home to sell. I must admit this is terrible time to sell your home, but we are hopeful the market will shift soon.

Well, we had to start searching for good movers that work in metro Atlanta, and in and aorund the powder springs, Marietta area. Now we have moved a handful of times, and had a few bad experiences so I wanted to try to find a place where I could get some unbiased ratings from actual customers how had used certain movers. I had heard about a website called Angie’s List. 

Bascially some friends of mine who have used the site referred me to it. There is a small fee for signing up, but I would have to say that after using it once, I can think of many reasons I will be referring back to the site. After reading the reviews, we were able to find a mover that did a very professional job, and did not try to coerce us by hinting about tips to hold us hostage to ensure they did a good job, (past experience) a bad one.

Once we got a huge amount of furniture moved into the rental house, where might I say is where we will most likely be for the next few years to save and plan where our final destination will be. I.E. the last move we will make, fingers crossed.

Sooo… back to the huge project ahead of us in preparing our home in Powder Springs to be sold. First we had to find a home improvement contractor to finish out the part of our basement that I had previously started. I am sort of AADD, meaning I have a lot of projects that I have started and never finished.

I have been told that a finished basement with a bathroom and toilet in the basement can add allot of value to your home, and in this market we need all the attraction we can get. Again we sought out the reviews on Angie’s List to get a feel for a contractor with a quality rep that people rated as reliable.

We got estmates from a few home improvement contractors that we found, and we where able to get one to finish the basement for the price we could live with. It took over a month for them to finish the project, but they held to the price we agreed on. This guy and his strange bearded partner had a picture book of jobs that they had completed in Buckhead, Dunwoody, Powder Springs, Marietta, Alpharetta, Duluth, basically all over metro Atlanta. Really that photo album gallery of their completed jobs was the thing that sold me on chosing them over a few of the others, the price was key too.

I would have to say, these guys were really more than your average handymen, overall we had a few blips but I think that the research we did on Angie’s List
paid off.

Now we can focus on staging our home for a quick sell, I think in this market you really have to step it up a notch to get your house sold. One of my favorite shows TV right now is called  The Unsellables. Home staging is their speciallty, and it does seem to make a huge difference. If you get a chance watch it, I think it airs everyweek on HGTV on Sundays at 10:30 AM EST, this is the comcast programming for this show I think?

Well I will try not to go quite again, we got busy and blogging dropped to the bottom of my priorities.

Next Project… landscaping