In which I introduce the main characters and flesh out the setting

Last year the enigmatic Mr. W. and I looked around our life and decided that it had become too complex to be fun and too expensive to maintain.  Since then we have been slowing inching back the complexity of our lives hoping to get to a place where we can enjoy a certain level of freedom.

To be clear about this, our life is pretty complicated.  We live on a small farm just north east of Denver Colorado and much of the complexity is related to the farm itself.   Farms have a tendency to accumulate animals, things, and Stuff That Has To Be Done.  Naturally all these things are also expensive, or at least they are en masse.   Let this be a warning to people who think they are going to move to the country to make life simpler – this is not true.  Life in the country has many perfectly excellent rewards, but simplicity is not among them. 

Let’s review where we started with this project.  First off we have a house, not a huge house by any means.

We live in only the upstairs of the house (about 1600 square feet) and usually rent out the walkout basement.  This helps pay the mortgage but it also means living in very close proximity to people that you may or may not like.  Our last bunch of tenants nearly drove me mad so one of the things we want to do to simplify is to get a smaller house that does not require us to have tenants to make the mortgage payment. 

The house sits on about 10 acres and is zoned for all kinds of critters.  At the time we decided to simplify it was home to 4 horses (3 of them mine and one belonging to my sister), 4 goats, a small flock of chickens, 3 tenants, Mr. W. and myself, 4 indoor cats, and two dogs.   Because Mr. W. has no interest in the farmish side of living here we also hire a ranch hand to help out a few hours a week. 

I stay home and mind the farm (long story) and Mr. W., does work as a consultant traveling to other cities roughly every other week.  He makes an extremely nice living doing this however we have found that are closer to “living from paycheck to paycheck” than we would like.  Additionally Mr. W. does not want to have to keep doing this forever but would rather be able to choose his work.

To sum up the situation, we tend to complexity and would like to move to simplicity.  The goal is to create a life that is minimally expensive while meeting our needs and which takes a minimum of our time to conduct.  Now how are we going to achieve that?