Cabin Life – The Want-Ad

Roommate Wanted!!

Experience the excitement of living off the grid, while enjoying the beautiful sights and sounds of Mother Nature right outside your door!

I’m looking for a roommate who isn’t afraid of roughing it and having some adventure!  You will get back to nature by having to venture outside to use the bathroom, regardless of the temperature.  Oh, and forgetting the warm toilet seat hanging over the stove when you go to the outhouse in the middle of winter should be the definition of adventure in the dictionary!  You will make faces and sounds you never knew were possible, but don’t worry, there won’t be anyone to see or hear you except the birds!  (I won’t be able to hear you because the outhouse is quite a walk from the cabin.  Privacy at its best right there!)

You’ll also become a lean, mean, healthy machine!  The quarter-mile walk from where you can park up to the cabin will ensure that you’re getting plenty of cardio!  It’s like a double bonus when you forget something small in the car and have to go back for it too!  You can walk almost a whole mile before you get to the cabin if you manage to just leave one important thing in your car!  Not only that, but you’ll be expected to carry a forty pound jug of water up the long, snowy hill to the cabin at least a couple of times per week, so your arms will be big around as tree trunks!

And speaking of tree trunks, you can really commune with nature by helping to cut down trees for our firewood!  Hippies rejoice!  You will literally be hugging trees every single day of the year!  You’ll help carrying the logs down to the cabin, get to gently caress them as you set them up for me to split with a huge metal maul, and then get to stack them in the most efficient and fast way possible.  You can then round out the beautiful circle of life when you bring the firewood in to burn in the woodstove!  Give your woodland buddies a little smooch before confining them to a slow, smoky, and brutal death!

And that’s only the beginning of the benefits!  Buy some books and get a library card because you will be the braniac your mom always knew you could be!  With no TV, movies, or internet, your brain will get to be as sharp as the chain on the chainsaw.  You can read about taking care of chickens or which type of lettuce will grow best in the garden or try to identify which type of snake just slithered in through the unscreened and open front door and other exciting things!  Gone will be the days of lying around on the couch rotting your brain on the boob tube.  You’ll be so starved for amusement that you won’t even be able to blink when there is a TV on near you due to the complete lack of visual stimulus that a completely unbroken white landscape provides.

As mentioned above, you’ll have complete and total privacy in the outhouse.  But living in the middle of the woods at the very end of a dead end road with a quarter mile of trees and hills separating you from the closest motor vehicle also provides a ton of solitude!  It’s so liberating being able to walk around naked inside the cabin with no fear of anyone just walking by and seeing your birthday suit!  Of course, since we’ll be roommates, we may have to figure out a birthday suit schedule.  The hours allotted to nakedness will depend on your facial hair and gender.

I’ll expect you to also do half of the household chores.  These won’t occupy more than fifteen or twenty hours a week, and really aren’t so bad.  You’ll have to help with the dishes, and as we have to carry water in to wash dishes, you will be tasked with making sure that you have enough water to actually wash the dishes.  Allowing my dog to simply lick the plates clean can only be done at my discretion.  Oh, and there is no indoor plumbing at all, so when washing the dishes, you will have to keep an eye on the bucket under the sink that catches all the water and waste from brushing our teeth and dishes and cooking.  When the bucket is full, just take it out and dump it on the compost pile, not so bad, right?!  But since you’re at the compost pile, go ahead and spend five or ten minutes stirring it.

There’s also carrying in firewood every single morning and night, and even sometimes in the middle of the night.  It’s a rare treat to see how clear the skies and how bright the stars are on a crystal clear, moonless winter night!  You’ll forget all about the bone crushing temperatures that would kill you in less than a half hour if you were to fall on the ice and knock yourself out!  Plus, you’ll get to know the cute girl at the hardware store because you’ll be there every week getting batteries for your headlamp.  In fact, you can probably get to know her well enough to ask her out!  Of course, convincing a member of the opposite sex to travel two miles down a dirt road to walk a quarter mile into the woods with you might be a tough sell.  But hey, weirder things have happened!

I’m not going to lie to you, it’s not all glory and sunshine and fun little jaunts to the outhouse.  There are a few downsides, too.  The cabin only has single-pane windows and no insulation.  But, this just means that you’ll get to snuggle up tight in your favorite sleeping bag with a rating of twenty below zero!  There is also no way for any sort of professional or volunteer help to get here.  That means that the cops, volunteer fire department, or ambulance will be around to help if you cut your leg with chainsaw or fall off the roof cleaning the chimney or break your ankle walking to the woodshed.  But you will become far more self-sufficient and your tolerance for pain will get to be much better!  Now that I think about it, it is all glory and sunshine!  Give me a call to schedule a meeting, I pinky swear I’m not a serial killer.

Rent is very cheap for females lacking facial hair and males with lots of facial hair.  The rent goes up depending on the combination of those two factors.

Be sure to like Middle of the Trail on Facebook for more pictures and daily updates and follow @JustinALevine for whatever it is I do on Twitter.

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