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I know, I’ve been pretty quiet on here. Work’s been…well, I’ve had night shifts, and they kill me. And we’ve been doing a feasibility study on some land that the owners accepted our offer on. It’s scary. And tight. And we’ll need a loan, almost certainly, to be able to build.

There’s a slim, slim, slim possibility that if every single thing came in at the cheapest end of the quote and the fees from the county were at the lowest end, then we might – just might – manage to do without a loan. But in reality, a loan is in our future.

Also, it turns out, you can’t build an “accessory structure” until you’ve got a structure for it to accessorise to. Which is frustrating, because we were contemplating popping up our to-be-studio building first, which would have given us somewhere to kip overnight, because the place is a good half-hour from where we’re staying.

However, it seems like an RV/Caravan (aka Travel-Trailer)/Tiny Home might be acceptable, as it’s portable. And even if they did grump about it, then we could just move the trailer. Which is much easier to deal with.

Anyhow, so we’re doing a bunch of things – got quotes for wells, some limited ground clearance, getting a power supply connected, a place for poo, those kind of small insignificant things. I had a good tramp around doing our version of beating the bounds – trying to find the flags that mark the corners of the lot. Given that it’s basically raw woodland, this was quite the challenge.

But it was beautiful, and we’re hoping to be fairly minimally invasive – enough land for us to have a little garden, enough clearance for solar, and a medium-small house. US small, UK medium.

In other news, our quest for an EV has been fulfilled. We have a 2002 Rav4 EV – which is – well, it’s clean inside, but startlingly dirty outside given how it looked in the photos. It’s white, so its permanent state is probably going to be ‘dirty’.

I’m waiting for Kathryn to get home, because then I can get her pawprint on the title document and go licence the wee beastie. But I took it on a little pootle earlier today and I can safely say ‘it both goes and stops’. It’s actually a nice car to drive. It definitely feels like a ten thirteen year old car inside. It’s grey plastic and simple trim. And the charge timer / pre-aircon-control is – well – what you’d expect. Chunky buttons and an LCD display. But, all in all, it seems pretty nice. And it’s got four seats, and will do nicely for ferrying things around. Including a me shaped thing.

ETA – I forgot to say. Dear god do I miss the UK’s plugs / sockets. I have spent the last few days attempting to navigate the seemingly innumerable different plug/socket options here. You might, if you weren’t here, say, if you were coming from Europe, make the foolish assumption that there were only a few kinds of common plug.

Say your normal house plug, then maybe a high current variant, and perhaps even a very high current variant. And perhaps a legacy low-power variant.

But no. I’ve been taken down an entertaining path where I bought what I thought would be the right socket – given I’d been told it was a 3-pin dryer plug. Only what turned up was a four-pin dryer plug. Which is fine, only that’s not what I’d bought. So I had to trek out and buy a four-pin socket. But I still needed a three pin drier plug for the drier end. And it turns out you can’t (easily*) buy three pin dryer plugs – you can buy plugs with a moulded lead attached, but not just the plugs themselves. Which means that I have hideousness of the first degree – a dryer plug (which has neutral and two ‘hots’) which goes to a junction with household style wiring (because I couldn’t really afford or justify 35 foot of 10/3 flexible cable) running to an exterior style box, into which is inserted a four-pin dryer socket – with the *shudder* ground and neutral linked together… which is apparently the way you get around these things…. (ugh).

Still, it all worked and nothing got terribly hot, and the car charged up just fine.

Now I just need to build some kind of portable rolly thing for the charger to live on, because it weighs approximately 87 tons.