OmegaDad and I met in Northern New Mexico while on internships at Los Alamos National Laboratory. While we were falling in love with each other, we also fell in love with Northern New Mexico. We spent our weekends touring the area, piling into Blue, the pickup truck, grabbing a map, and wandering. We visited Taos, Santa Fe, Chama, fell in love with Bandolier National Monument, the Valle Grande (the caldera of an ancient volcano), the Rio Grande River--everything about Northern New Mexico enchanted us. The mix of old Hispanic culture and good ol' Western U.S. traditions with modern, new age thinking was intoxicating. I daydreamed of working at the Santa Fe Institute, doing intriguing work on artificial intelligence. OmegaDad daydreamed of jobs with the Nature Conservancy, or working with local ranchers to help them manage their lands in a more environmentally conscious manner. And then we discovered Earthships(c). What a daydream! Living off the grid...having a completely self-sustaining system where we could live more in tune with the Earth, leaving a smaller environmental footprint. Water gathered from nature...recycling the water we used...solar power...gardens indoors...huge windows for drawing the outside in. OmegaGranny, being a skeptical sort, always asks, "But what about maintaining all those systems?" If you do a search on "maintenance earthship", most of the information you pull up is how maintenance-free these wombs are (no gutters, no painting, etc. etc.). Very frustrating--you can't find info on long-term housing issues. How often do you need to fix the pipes? What if the central water system gets, say, caliche'd up? How dependable are the toilets? This guy has some very good information about how to modify standard earth ship designs to avoid roof and window leaks, which are apparently a problem in the original approach. Some of the designs are more out there, woo-woo, and "hippeyesque" than the Omegas would be comfortable with. But so many of the more recent ones include the comforts of modern homes in designs that have less of the woo-woo. We wouldn't want our home to Make A Statement--we want it to be comfy. This last weekend, we toured Arcosanti, a grand (though extremely slow!) experiment in arcology design. (I will devote a separate post to that--pics are on our old computer, and we haven't transferred them over yet.) And it re-sparked our yearnings for an earth ship. Some day...some day. This is our daydream. Categories: [This 'n That] [Mr. OmegaMom]