When I bought 4.3 acres of heavily wooded land in Crossville, Tennessee in April 2023 it did not have what’s called a 911 address. House lots used to have a mailbox and hence a mailing address. Now with ambulance services and the need for law enforcement and fire fighters to respond to an emergency, house lots are assigned a 911 address. Mine was assigned after I had the lot partially cleared and a gravel pad put down for the 911 address technician to pull in off the roadin July.
I usually always thought in numerology that you add the numbers.
3 + 3 + 9 + 6 = 21
2 + 1 = 3
So my house, It thought would be 3 = a lucky number for a writer and for anyone who wants to be creative which is one reason why I bought the land. I want to go all out and spread my crafts and art projects out everywhere.
Looking from a numerological perspective, the energy represented by the 4-digit number 3396 is a notably positive energy. It resonates with well-defined patterns of creative power and marked vibrations of enthusiasm. It’s also regarded as a number of jubliance and fun. It spreads laughs, positivity and thrills.
The number 3396 also has a very good-natured energy as well”.
I’m not going to dwell (pun intended) on the negative aspects of 3396.
What drove me to write today was a post by
When I bought the land I didn’t look up the name of the road! Looking back in my memory I think I figured it was just a place name. I worked briefly as a librarian in a college in south Jersey located in a rural town named Pomona. I had heard about Pomona, California.
What I did NOT know was Pomona was a ROMAN GODDESS whose feast day was yesterday, November 1st and that she did not have a Greek counterpart, hence why I probably had not heard about her.
“Pomona: the muse of many
Her paradisiacal garden and the temptation of her virginal beauty made her a subject of fascination among European sculptors and painters from the 16th to the 19th centuries.
Rubens, Bloemaert, Goltzius, Francesco Melzi and Rosetti all depicted the maiden in her garden, shunning her most persistent suitor, Vertumnus. This is Monna Pomona Monna Pomona 1864 painted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti 1828-1882 and can be seen in the Tate Britain, London.
Writers have written her into plays, poems and novels, even inspiring a character in Harry Potter. Interpretations differ from artist to artist but she is always synonymous with rich, fantastical landscapes and a voluptuous sensuality”.
I must have been out to lunch for decades! HOW could I not match up the first name of my favorite Hogwarts’ teacher with my street name????
I haven’t worn perfume in decades, but maybe once I get to POMONA road, I just might seek out a store and at least sniff this!
I just have to deal first with getting a water tap, getting my deposit back from Armstrong Steel because the land will not support a red iron (steel) structure of ANY kind not even a garage, and put my house on the market, sell it, and move. Hopefully, the Goddess Pomona will smile at my efforts and tell Mars to postpone World War III at least until I can have a greenhouse erected and the rose garden I always wanted planted!
When I bought 4.3 acres of heavily wooded land across from a mom and pop gas station that sells the best broasted chicken in Cumberland County, Tennessee, I knew the land dipped down from the road. BUT my realtor thought the middle was level enough for a barndominium. Once it was cleared, however, we discovered it would need 78 loads of dirt for a 30 x 60 steel building, an RV pad, and a garage. Plus it would need 5 loads of gravel.
Another contractor went out and said that the land was NOT conducive for a barndomiinium much less a steel one – too steep, the cleared area wasn’t large enough and to widen it to the east wasn’t feasible because that was the area marked off by the state environmental engineer for a secondary drainage/leech field for the septic. To widen it to the west won’t work because there is a gully there. Cumberland County does not have a sewer system except in the downtown areas and my land is “out in the country” a term I learned in San Benito, Texas and here in Spring Creek. TOWN versus – well I don’t know that’s pretty far out there (wait what? five miles is far???
So, I got referred to a family owned business that builds sheds, small barns, and cottages and that’s how I learned about shed homes. Hours and hours of research and doing cost estimates and I still could not find anything that could be built quickly so I could drive 2,100 miles from Nevada to Tennessee with three dogs of my own, three cats of my own, and Ännie’s two dogs and have a place to stay with a bathroom, a catio with an insulated cat house, and two dog exercise areas with insulated dog houses. Bandit plays well with my dogs for awhile, but he’s been known to “go off” on a playmate especially if another dog gets too close to his mom. Oz is food aggressive but plays well – you just can’t feed her anywhere near another dog.
Ännie is coming with me to live for up to a year while I write her biography and she helps me set up the property and teach me how to live off grid in the event the nationwide grid goes down. We also plan on going ghost hunting on Bimini and in the surrounding areas. And I said that with a straight face. I want to get the high speed camera Joshua P. Warren recommends, and go exploring while I still can walk – with a cane but I can walk.
When I started this project of moving, so I could get out of my mortgage and downsize and prepare for my last 15 – 20 years – something you MUST do when you get close to age 70, Russia and Ukraine were at war. Yesterday, Israel was attacked and this morning they declared war. The vision I had in 1972 of the United States ceasing to exist by 2025 is no longer some 17 year old’s flash in the pan “vision of the future”. And so I’ve decided on a yurt.
Crossville is much cooler than the rest of Tennessee. It gets humid, but not as bad as Knoxville nor Nashville and nothing compared with Memphis. They do get snow – up to a foot, but it usually melts. They get a lot of rain. A LOT. And they get E1 tornados. Everyone who advised me on this or that failed to understand windstorm certification requirements. Plus, there is a private restriction on my land – no modular and no mobile homes. I also can’t have a pig farm.
Freedom Yurt Cabins are wooden structures – not fabric – and they are permanent – not portable. The best part is they are currently certified up to115 mph but they are working on getting them up to 155 mph which would be absolutely marvelous. And yurts are aerodynamic anyway.
Unlike Armstrong Steel who conned me into signing a contract with them, Trust Pilot has wonderful reviews of Freedom Yurt as a company. And I found one review from someone who lives in his yurt year round which is what I plan on doing.
What I hope to do is put my house on the market, hopefully FOR SALE BY OWNER, with my friend Brent using his new drone to film the cul de sac, fly over the house and back again and then fly around in a circle, and move the minute the house is out of the contingency period. By Spring I’ll have had all the carpet replaced with peel and stick vinyl flooring that looks like wood, and hopefully, I’ll have sold the African sculptures and Native American art and artifacts. I want to switch gears and stick to Smokey Mountain and woodland art.
I’ve reserved a Penske cargo van to transport the cats and my dogs, and Ännie can drive my Ranger with her two dogs and I’ll have a moving van move the rest. Everything can do into storage and we can board the dogs and cats for a week while a yurt is being erected and an attached shed is built for a bathroom.
This is EXACTLY what I want only in blueand tan like the one nestled in the aspens and pine trees.
My land, I think, can easily be graded so I can have a series of yurts, possibly connected to one another. I’m assuming I’ll need French drains and a series of retaining walls which are recommended anyway by Vastu experts when there is a downward slope from the road.
Vastu is similar to feng shui.There are many vastu engineer consultants now along with feng shui experts – Moni Castenda lives in Tennessee but she does not do house calls.
My idea, if the land will cooperate and because land and trees and rocks and earth are all energy like everything else, I do mean IF IT will cooperate, is to imitate what’s called “Vernacular Architecture” a “style that is designed based on local needs, availability of construction materials and reflecting local. traditions. At least originally, vernacular architecture did not use formally schooled architects, but relied on the design skills and tradition of local builders”.Specifically, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
I have fantasized about having a small fortune some day so I could build covered walkways like I walked through in the Summer Palace in Beijing in 1987 which went all the way around a lake. Years ago I watched Japanese tv series where the main characters lived in a traditional house with a courtyard and all the rooms opened into the courtyard. One. room was for cooking, another was a bedroom – there were several – another a Shinto shrine, and there was a sitting room. I was hooked. If can have one yurt as a bedroom with a guest room in a loft with an extension into a traditional stick built “shed” which will house the bathroom, then I could have another as a kitchen with a huge pantry behind a wooden screen or with doors, and a dining area, another would be for my 1904 Knabe grand piano so the cats can no longer damage it and I can play it, with my living room furniture, another for a library, craft room, office, and finally a small one for a “yoga” meditation room for the Tibetan thangkas where I can escape the dogs and cats and immerse myself in spiritual pursuits. It’s next to impossible doing that now with a cat hurling and a dog wanting to go out.
If I could have covered walkways or breezeways built between each yurt, then ths layout might work:
No more sweating about the slope. Click on each photo for the full article plus descriptions and other photos.
I have the platt survey when the land was registered as a two-lot subdivision, and the survey I just paid for. I have the septic permit and I paid for the water tap on July 25. There is a four to six month waiting list.I sent a formal request to Armstrong to refund my non-refundable deposit. There is a class action lawsuit against them that was sent to arbitration but that’s because no one compiled all the complaints into one color-coded dabase showing a pattern. I have. That battle is yet to be won, but I’m certain I will win.
My 2013 Ford Escape decided to not want to be driven anymore so it got towed to my friend’s monastery where it waits for me to get it fixed. Here is is on July 31, 2023 parked in the gravel. Thanks to Brian, I got to hear first just how steep the land is. Others then went out and said the same thing.
BUT that does NOT mean I cannot erect yurts and live in the woods.
The land is covered in white oak, red oak, maple, one chestnut unless it got cut down, and a lot A LOT of hickory. The wood pile is at the back where I’m told there’s a bluff that slopes down to a 100 acre farm. There’s a church next door and my property wraps behind the church lot and the farm wraps around both properties. A stream ends a few hundred yards west of the church. I wanted enough land so I would not have to deal with neighbors but I didn’t want to live so far out that there was NO ONE around.
The septic drain field aka leech field is apparently on the slope behind those logs. Not sure, but the waste will literally go over the edge once a toilet is up and in use.
I just have to make sure the septic tank is lower than the “BATHHOUSE” OMG I never thought I’d have a bathhouse. Better than an outhouse though.
A SPECIAL THANKS to Ännie Schade who has been trying to get me to think YURT for months and to Adam Leech and his father of Limitless Construction who wrote an email I forwarded to Armstrong Steel letting them know my land CANNOT support a steel structure of ANY kind no matter how small.
I had to wait for my friend,, Ännie, in town so I pulled over into the shade opposite the Elko County Public Library and went inside. I hadn’t been in for a very long time and it had been remodeled. I used to devour the cozy mystery series, so I went into the stacks and found the latest Domestic Diva Mystery about cheesecake and spied a book by another favorite author.
Click on the cover and it will take you to Susan Wittig Albert’s webpage about the book. If you are interested in herbs as remedies, this is a GREAT book. It’s about the Shakers and it’s impeccably researched and includes excerpts from diaries kept in the 19th century.
What I did NOT expect to learn was that the Shakers were HEAVILY involved in mediumship and contacting spirits! Yes! And not only that, they drew spirits and there are a few surviving works left.
In searching for images of what Albert describes in the story, I found a blog post about THE ALL SEEING EYE!
I tracked down the this illustration which is no longer on the page, but you can download the jpg – someone at the museum hasn’t kept up the website very well. The blog is by a photo editor named Susan Donahue who is also a very good writer and researcher if this one blog post is any testament to her skills. Click on the image and explore her blog. It’s a wonderful exploration. I particularly loved readingabout Sargon the Great’s daughter who was a priestess of the Moon Goddess!Considering I’m typing this 54 hours after the peak of the Supermoon in Aries (2:58 am Pacific, September 29, 2023) which, according to Yasmin Boland falls within the 72 hour window where one can still feel the full effect of a full moon, there is NO SUCH THING AS A COINCIDENCE.
I guess I only knew about the Shakers as being celibate. Pictures in history books depicted their dances and growing up in New Jersey and volunteering as a docent at Miller Cory House, I had seen lots of Shaker furniture, but I never knew they were MEDIUMS nor that they held séances!
Here is an excerpt from the website that just blew my mind away especially since I had just JUST heard someone on the radio talking about the Salem Witch Trials. When I was in K-12, we still had prayer, still sang songs from the 1700s-1900s, and we HAD to read the Albert Miller’s The Crucible and had to watch the play! Thirty days from now is Halloween so this is the season for all things witches, etc. To learn that the Shakers were heavily into communicating with THE DEAD and drawing the messages just has me speechless!
“As illustrated by the journal entry above, the Shakers attended séances and invited mediums into their communities. They communicated with Spiritualist preachers, particularly James M. Peebles, whom they considered their “dear friend.” They experienced their own religious revival in the late 1830s and 40s, when a young girl at the South Family in Watervliet received spiritual visions. The Ministry was confused by this sudden upswing in spiritual activity, not least of all because it was not them receiving these messages, but a young novitiate. During this period, public meetings were temporarily closed to avoid any misunderstanding and misinterpretation by the outside world. This Era of Manifestations, also called Mother Ann’s Work, was and is a controversial time in Shaker history. Many of the decrees that came out of the revival were later abandoned, including several spiritual texts. However, an incredible amount of art (“spirit drawings”) and music was created during this period.
The Shakers were very diverse in whom they communicated with during these visions. The journals record messages from a number of Native American spirits, as well as African, Arab, and Chinese spirits. The “instruments” also communicated with “celebrities” like George Washington and foreign royalty. According to the Shakers, Washington had posthumously converted to Shakerism, along with the Marquis de Lafayette”.
As a who the BLEEP cares side note, I am related the George Washington’s wife – he was childless, and I got to go inside the Marquis de Lafayette’s house in Tredyffrin Township, Pennsylvania in the 1970s. It’s not open anymore.I used to try to go in every old building I could up and down the Eastern seaboard and whenever we went West. But I never got to visit a Shaker village. The only still operating one is in Maine. The China Bayle mystery takes place in Kentucky.
When I get to Tennessee, this is a MUST trip. I have got to see this in person.
Albert includes the first lines of the NOW famous Shaker hymn. I remember singing it in grade school. Aaron Copland made it famous but we did sing it as little kids back in the OLD days.
I’m only up to the part in the story where China is being introduced to the other characters in the story. There’s been an arson and some vandalism. But no murder YET. I hope to learn a lot about the Shakers as the story unfolds. And I hope to delve further into the history of spiritualism in the United States. Craig Parker Hamilton in England and his wife, Jane are the only spiritualists I know.
FINALLY today, August 30, 2023, a friend sent me a Facebook video by Ninjas Are Butterflies.
In it Andy DeNoon,a content coordinator for Sunday Cool, Carll Hooper with two “l”s, and Brock Hoper tell their audience that someone with AI facial recognition software determined that these are NOT the same two women. I did a search and since Dustin uses the 6% number the Hoppers mention, I trust I found their source.
And now for the reference to someone who tested out the IP address for Tiffany – the woman Mail Online and all the other news outlets are now “following” like baby ducks.
Stew Peters is someone the Left loves to hate. His Linkedin profile is cut and dry unlike those who attack him. He’s mostly hated because he came out early, as I did, about COVID. I trust he did not track down the IP for no good reason. He was in law enforcement so dismiss at your own risk to your sanity.
WHAT is going on? What happened to the REAL woman who saw something that was NOT REAL on the plane?
Librarian's Guide to the Multiverse! 