Sufficient unto the day...

Outside the hastilly installed window, the snow is deep but sagging and the trees are bare. We're in one of those January warm snaps that happen every year now, although everyone still pretends to be surprised. It's raining.
To the right of the window, Tammy is sipping a coffee, reading a book. To the left are bookshelves. Laden mostly with books but also with wine. Theose cheap four-litre boxes look like elegant encyclopedias among the real books and the reds stay somewhere near the right temperature. Tacky plastic taps potrude convenientlyover the shelf below. The whites are chillin' in the outside part. Where we got weird with the house.
On top of the bookshelf are canned goods. There's no root cellar yet. And not much space in here. But it's all, in roughly the words of Arlow Guthrie, comin' around on the gi-tar. The question, of course, is what 'it' will look like. 'It' is, of course, self-sufficiency.
Winter, in the cozy mythology surrounding rural life, is a time to rest and reflect. To enjoy, including quite literally, the fruits of the warmer months' toil. It's a mythology we believe in and we're heading in that direction.
But in the meantime the canned goods atop the bookshelves are from the Superstore. President's Choice, No Name, Unico. Fair enough for this year but that can't continue. And the wine boxes aren't that cheap. Justifiable only when you're wise enough to understand they're a grocery item. One of your crucial food groups. But when you make it yourself it's also practically free.
Freedom is the whole point. Freedom to be where we want to be. Doing what we want to do. We used to drive to town every day and work our asses off. We made gobs of money but we never had any of it. And we had no asses.
We know we'll have to continue going off to make money for a little while yet. Got some old debts and some things we want to buy. There'll always be things we want money for, in fact, but our goal is to get to the point where we don't need it. Where, from the perspective of comfortable, contented survival, the state of the economy, or its continued existence for that matter, is irrelevant. This is partly out of preference and partly in preparation.
Weird times loom. The double-edged sword of peak oil and climate change is about to begin slashing great bloody chunks out of everything some of us are still dumb enough to take for granted. And if not, if we're the dumb ones, preference remains.
First and foremost, we're back out here in pursuit of self-sufficiency because neither of us can imagine a finer life. And, yes, we're still imagining most of it. We showed up late, and winter's like that for us homesteaders. We're in a bit of a holding pattern. Enjoying the fruits of the Superstore. Resting and reflecting.
Reflecting, among other stuff, on precisely what is meant by the phrase 'self-sufficiency'. As uttered by us. Here it is then.
Self-sufficiency means the ability to grow, raise, pick, kill, gather, preserve, prepare and repair everything required to sustain our lives in a style that the vast majority of the planet's population would envy.
Simple. Not that we'll probably ever do all those things at the same time. But at some time.
The point is to be able to.
And we'll do most of the things most of the time. Cause we can't imagine a finer life.
Except once in a while when we imagine a road trip or a flight to somewhere far or a distant mountain that's just gotta be climbed.
Any volunteers to water the garden and feed the chicken's while we're gone?
                                                                                                                                              -Dennis