Who are we and what are we doing?

 Greetings!

My name, at least on the internet, is Rusty Shackleford, and this is my wife Mrs. Shackleford and I out on the homestead:

Growing up inspired by books like My Side of the Mountain, I always wanted to run away to the woods and live off the land. It didn't help that I have an Uncle who decided to do the same thing, and acted as a great inspiration.

After living all over the world and the country because of the military, we ended up in the Southeastern US, and did the good adult stuff--we bought a house, and a truck, and then filled the house with dogs and cats, and the truck with gas. We got good jobs, made enough money to start paying off the debts we accumulated when we were younger, and everything was easy, simple, and uncomplicated. 

I mean, we also did the "get married to other people and then divorce them and then try again" thing, but that's just life--it's never straightforward, and saying it was easy or simple if a damn lie and you know it. Don't believe everything you read on the internet--my 20s sucked and so did yours. 

Turns out, being an adult isn't nearly as satisfying at they make it seem like it's gonna be.  Sure, you can drink beer and buy shit, and nobody else tells you your bedtime, but you also spend your whole day making money for somebody else so you can pay bills for things you don't like so you can make it to the weekend to pretend you don't have to do it all again in a couple days. 

The dogs are good, but the rest of it is really overrated.

This is the story of us fixing that.

We spent two years looking for land, and when we found what we wanted, we snapped it up, threw the dogs in the truck, and went off into the wild blue yonder to try and find our purpose in life.

Turns out, life is hard, and purpose is the wrong word.  We went looking for something, maybe call it purpose, and found joy, pain, struggle, fear (sometimes bordering on physical-sickness-inducing-terror), and a sense of happiness and fulfillment deeper than I ever thought possible. Whatever we found isn't purpose, but I don't want purpose anymore--I want what's out there in the woods. 

We originally planned on going out on weekends and vacations, putting all our PTO and savings into building the homestead slowly over the course of years, and then 2020 came along and convinced us to speed things up.

So we still put all our free time and savings into it, but at a less leisurely "we'll learn as we go" pace, and more of an "if it breaks, I'll build a new one" pace. 

This blog is our story. I'll show you our accomplishments, our missteps, our significantly worse missteps, and also just how awesome it can be. 

Please, if you're interested, come join Mrs. Shackleford, our dogs Tula, Peblo, and Nisba, and myself as we figure out how to avoid dying in the woods.