Dear People Who Write Articles Called Dear People Who Live In Fancy Tiny Houses

Dear People Who Live In Fancy Tiny Houses

I am totally going to respond to some of the topics in this post, lol.

Do you actually love living in a fancy tiny house?

Most of the time, I actually do! Mine isn’t fancy though. Mine was built a long time ago and is better described as “quaint,” “vintage,” “crusty,” “dusty,” and “being inexorably eaten by both plumbagos and termites.”

What the hell happens when your tiny house partner farts Mexican food farts, huh?

If you are a grownup: Do the decent thing and ignore it.
If you are a grownup and the fact cannot be ignored: Have an in-depth discussion about stool quality and tell yourselves that the ability to candidly discuss poop is an excellent indicator of the future success of your relationship.
If you are a kid: Shriek, giggle, attempt to shift blame to someone else, get into a fight about the blame-shifting, make a huge deal of it for the next three hours.
If you are a dog: Fart right next to Meg when she’s trapped working in her office. Look confused and hurt when she sends you out of the room. She is super unfair, what the hell.

Seriously, where do you put your shit?

Cabinets, cupboards, The Gorm, a variety of shelves covered with copious amounts of dust, the good shed, the crappy shed, and Goodwill. It’s ideal to let a bunch of random crap sit on every horizontal surface in the house, especially the dog crate in the office and the workbench that doubles as a kitchen counter, under the deluded impression that someday we are going to find somewhere tidy to put it.

And I know your house isn’t that clean all of the time.

My house is clean none of the time. I have a cute doormat that says “Home” but I could do with one that says “I can explain.”

In your pictures, it looks like you only own a tiny sofa, several throw blankets & pillow, one cooking pan, one antique book and one framed photo of you laughing in front of your tiny house.

We own no sofa. However we own enough dog hair to stuff a sofa, four pillows of which three are not presently mangled by Fly, and a trundle bed thing Josh insists on occupying in the most unintuitive and uncomfortable-looking position possible.

Hey. Do you have privacy in your tiny house?

You just seal yourself in the bathroom and pretend to be taking the world’s longest and most satisfying dump until someone bangs on the door demanding his or her own turn in the bathroom pretending to be taking the world’s longest and most satisfying dump.

Don’t you ever want to turn toward your lover or spawn and shout, “Get out! Get out of my tiny house!”

Yes. Kiddos, if you act feral in my tiny house, it’s INTO THE WILDERNESS WITH YOU. And by into the wilderness, I mean moping around the front porch, burdened under the weight of injustice, searching for bugs to be scared of and asking every 5 minutes if they can come back in yet.

What about guests?

We have lots of guests!

Where do you put your guests?

Lots of places! Like, um… outside…

Can friends and family even visit you?

Just kidding no they can’t.

Be honest: You just want to live out your life like a Wes Anderson character, don’t you? You want to be some eccentric full of whimsy who doesn’t need modern tools or resources to live a fulfilling life.

Not gonna lie, this is pretty much the ultimate goal.

Food Reviews: Fake Cheese 3

There’s been a dearth of fake cheese here at the TTH lately, on account of it’s inconvenient to come by. We do most of our shopping at the world’s only good Trader Joe’s store. Its location is a closely guarded secret for Josh and I to enjoy, while the rest of you suffer through cramped, suffocating Trader Joes, where the cheery, surf’s-up decor functions as an attempt to make you forget that you’re slogging through shopping hell in order to get your hands on an overpriced store brand and at least thirty items you want but will never find. While Trader Joe’s does sell non-dairy cheeses, I’ve been warned away from them by vegans who know everything, so I haven’t bothered to try. Whole Foods is obviously where you go if your local Trader Joe’s experience wasn’t hellish enough, and other than that, nowhere around here sold fake cheese. So no faux dairy for me lately, just a lot of crying about the unfairness and social permeation of milk products to friends and family members who are resignedly tired of hearing about it.

Until last night. Last night, we went to Vons.

Tiny House Living: No really, for real

I recently ran across a link entitled, This Thrifty Family Of Four Makes The Most Of A One-Bedroom Home. This Is GENIUS! 

Genius, you say!

Since I’m also a family of (sometimes) four living in a home which is in fact 22 square feet smaller than the home featured, I had to click the clickbait. Besides, the article’s title implied that families living in tiny homes are clever and frugal. I’m not actually either of these things to a remarkable degree, but I enjoy digital media which allows me to mentally associate myself with people who are, so I was eager to read.

Ultimately, the article disappointingly failed to revolutionize or reflect my own TTH life, which is always the case with these things. To inject a dose of reality into the whole Tiny Tiny House cultural zeitgeist, allow me introduce you to the TTH Mythology episode of this blog. TTH Myths: Fact or Fiction? You’ll never believe how this witty and devastatingly attractive couple lives with three dogs, two stepkids, and several spiders in their tiny tiny house!

Food Reviews: Fake Cheese 2

Did the last series of fake cheese reviews leave you with an insatiable hunger for more non-dairy options which don’t suck too bad? Are you a dairy-eater who feels that your cheese is too delicious, varied, and melty, and you’d like to discover some options which are worse in all three respects? Do you feel like you’re just not spending enough money on groceries, and would like ways to ensure your shopping trips are more frustrating and expensive? Read on, because it’s fake cheese review time again here at TTH.

Country roads, take me home

A good number of my posts lately have been about city people things like non-dairy cheese and Ikea furniture. I’m starting to feel guilty about it because the header of the blog promises Country Things, and inexplicably, people I don’t know are occasionally liking stuff on this blog now. They’re probably here for the moderately bucolic pleasure of reading about a stranger’s life populated by filthy ranch dogs and charming, useless chickens who still won’t lay eggs, so, far be it from me to deny my audience what they’ve come for.

I chose Life, love, dirt roads, dogs as the tagline for the blog because all of those things impact my life on a daily basis. Most of them you’ve heard about already, with the exception of the dirt roads. Let me tell you: the dirt roads are a thing, and they have a profound daily impact on life.

Food Reviews: Fake Cheese

Those of you who know me are probably aware that I can’t eat dairy. No milk, no cheese, not even any items like Cheez-its where you have to question whether that food has ever encountered a legitimate dairy substance anyway. As near as I can figure out, the culprit is a milk protein called casein, and it causes me migraine headaches. As a disclaimer here, I’ve never had a doctor confirm this. But through rigorous scientific research involving stuffing ice cream, yogurt, cheese, milk chocolate, and packaged desserts into my face (and then not stuffing them into my face), it’s become very clear that dairy = headaches and no dairy = no headaches. I don’t have the symptoms described for lactose intolerance, and Dr. Internet leads me to believe casein is to blame.

As you can imagine, this is a tremendously distressing trait to discover in oneself, and it seems pretty unfair. I’m of European descent. We are the dairy people. We are the people anecdotally causing conflicts with other races throughout history by poisoning them with well-intentioned milk (prior to giving them smallpox). Milk is my heritage, and it’s spectacularly upsetting that all its enchanting permutations are off the menu.

Josh has been very supportive throughout my troubled relationship with casein. Because he is concerned with healthy eating, except where healthy eating requires giving up pancakes or his addiction to questionable Mexican candy, Josh too has given up dairy consumption at TTH. Together, we are beginning an exciting journey into the world of dairylike substitutes! Take off your shoes and sweater, and join us in the land of milky make-believe.

The Gorm and the Gormless

One of the things about setting myself up in a new place, simultaneously obvious and astounding, is that everything is mine. The fridge is mine, the bookcases are mine, the decorations are mine, the wafting piles of dog fur lurking in all the corners are actually Indy’s and/or Jet’s, but since they’re unlikely to pick them up themselves, those are mine too. Of course, Josh shares ownership in all these domestic delights as well. But since this post is largely regarding home decor, we’ll go with mine as the possessive here, and perpetuate a century of gender-based stereotypes by assuming men have limited agency in the decoration of their homes. However, this gender segregation is not an entirely unfair representation of decorating at TTH, since Josh is pathologically easy-going:

M: Here, I got this, I want to hang it on the wall.
J: Okay.
M: What that means is I want you to hang it on the wall.
J: Okay. Here?
M: A little to the left.
J: Here?
M: No, actually, I think in line with the other thing?
J: Here?
M: No, it needs to go back where it was, to the right. Oh gosh. I just don’t know. No. More to the right.
J: Okay.
M: Down a little. Oh, that’s good. Do you want to hang up this other thing which belongs to you, so you have something on the walls too?
J: Nope.

Invertebrate life at the TTH

I love walking outside barefoot. The feeling of the sun-warmed dirt between my toes, the sharp pain in my heel as I unexpectedly encounter a rock, unidentified plant matter stuck to my feet with sap, I love it all. The soil is soft and silky with the rich silt that makes it such good agricultural land for the neighboring farms, and I like the look of my poorly-applied toenail polish sparkling in the sun.

“Are you walking around outside barefoot?” Josh asked me, the other day.

“Yes,” I smiled, “I feel connected to nature.”

“You’re going to get hookworm.” Josh is less sentimental about my connection to nature. Or maybe Josh just has a better understanding of how many hookworms nature has in it.

Coexisting in the TTH

The Joshlings went back to school this week, which means that their paternal unit is now home with me on Tuesday mornings (Tuesday is his day off). Since you know that we love each other to a saccharine degree bound to end in a Ryan Gosling movie, Nicholas Sparks novel, or all of our friends unfriending us from Facebook, you can imagine that we’re glad for the extra time together. This is how we spent today.

Picture time! (Part two, the great indoors)

There are porta-johns rolling along the farm road outside my house. Because I can’t see the truck or tractor pulling them, they look like large, stolid blue beasts placidly moving on their own initiative to a new pasture, wherein they hope to find a greater number and variety of humans to poop in them. These are the things which are important to migratory porta-johns.

But enough about that, you want to see some pictures of the inside of the Tiny Tiny House, don’t you?