First, a tip of the hat to The Unlikely Mage who, besides being awesome in general, is also writing a forthcoming book on lifestyle minimalism and management.  We chat a lot, sometimes with actual subject matter that can be read by polite society (shocking, I know), and once upon a time we were figuring out how many shared interests we had together.  One of them was Tumbleweed Houses, a company that specializes in low square-footage homes (sometimes as low and compact as 90sq ft.).  I’m a fan of them, since some of them are portable, encourage you to live a bare-bones lifestyle taking only that which you need, and can be used as supplemental buildings or apartments for a larger land space.  Some are pre-made, and some are just the plans to build by oneself.  High schoolers build these things as projects, so they’re not particularly hard with some basic carpentry skills.

One of these days, once I finish my college loans and build up a small fund for myself, I’ll get some land to cultivate and a decent home.  I’d like a dedicated temple space, if for nothing else to perform my rituals and keep a library in, but keeping it in my main house would require to use that much more space that could be used in other ways, especially if I ever have a family.  I think a Tumbleweed house might be perfect for use as a temple building, and one that I could happily use to separate out different parts of my life and focus strictly on study and Work inside.

Well, I think I found a competitor to Tumbleweeds.  Pacific Yurts makes, well, yurts, Turkic/Mongol/Central Asian kind of large round tent used by the nomads and shepherds in that part of the world for thousands of years.  They all have the same basic style and are more-or-less easy to assemble, and this company makes modern yurts for temporary or permanent settlement.  I think they’re pretty nice, surprisingly, and, being one large room for most of them, can encourage more minimalism in a lifestyle or for a temple.  Plus, the round shape would lend itself naturally to a permanent magic circle in the center of the center.  Assembly takes a few hours for the smaller ones and a few days for the larger ones, and the price for them (a decked-out 24′ yurt I drew up would be about $13k) makes them a definite choice for a future temple building.

But that’s in the future.  In the meantime, I’ve got to deal with an apartment with elephants above and infernal TVs below, hooray!