Who’s Writing This Website?

The internet can be so impersonal that I want to give you a bit of my background…

Simple & Green Living since the 70s

Kelly and I met in the 70s when he was living in a remodeled school bus  on a friend’s land by the ocean in California, and I was a librarian in Santa Rosa. Not only did I fall in love with him, but also with his alternative lifestyle. I soon moved in and took up gardening in a parachute that cut out the persistent coastal winds, making homemade bread, and other simple living joys. I was hooked, and it’s a good thing because Kelly has always been outside of the box in how he thinks about things.

Fast forward past the intentional community at Sunshine Camp in Forestville, where we lived with two of his sisters and their husbands, kids, and dogs, for about seven years. Fast forward past Kelly’s and my years of llama ranching in the mountains outside Ashland, Oregon, where I began self-publishing books and Kelly began creating videos on llamas and on citizen diplomacy with Russia. Fast forward past our experiment in city life, in Olympia, WA, where I gave talks on voluntary simplicity and wrote a walking guide to the area.  Fast forward past our years of living and traveling in a former Gray Line Hawaii bus that Kelly turned into a fabulous home.

Green Home Building and Mexico

The bus took us to Crestone, Colorado, where we — okay, mostly Kelly — built us an earthbag-papercrete house.  He also turned a commercially purchased four-person bicycle into a solar vehicle. During this time, he became passionately involved in natural building which led to his creating several websites on different aspects of this topic.

I had a bee in my bonnet to spend time in Mexico, where I had first gone when I was a child. After several trips early in this century, we sold our earthbag house in Colorado. That got us out of having a mortgage, which has been lovely, I must say! Later we came across a sweet little two-room cabin near Lake Chapala, Mexico, with a tropical garden of banana, lemon, guayaba, lychee, pistachio, and other trees. We bought it and added a sunroom and several year-round organic vegetable garden beds.

That was home until we returned to Colorado in the spring of 2010.

About Compensation and Disclaimer

If I recommend a product at Amazon or another vendor, and if you click through and purchase it within a certain time frame (varies from one company to another), then I receive a commission at no cost to you. I appreciate your business.

Also be aware that if I say something has worked for me or for someone else, it does not mean that it will work for everyone. Common sense.

Rosana “Zana” Hart