LIVING SMALL: THE JUST ENOUGH THANKSGIVING

St. Helena, CA

Every holiday calls for its own festive decor, but that decor doesn't have to come from a store. In the interest of living small and shrinking our footprint, we made tracks -- and collected our own centerpiece.

I threw the turkey in the oven and off we went to meander the streets of St. Helena, enjoying the crisp fall day and foraging for flowers, leaves and berries.

Put it all together...

... and just add wine!

Picture perfect.

TODAY I'm grateful for Napa bounty.

LIVING SMALL: THE JUST ENOUGH LIVING ROOM

St. Helena, CA

After living for four years onboard our beautiful Cara Mia, with all her warm teak and built-in furniture, setting up camp on land has been more challenging than I anticipated. Our tiny, 512-square-foot house seems so cavernous, echo-y and stark white.

We don't want to own a lot of stuff, but we want to be comfortable. When we moved in, we made a commitment to living small, an exploration of the foggy space between stark and too much.

What is the minimum requirement for living comfortably? Is clutter a human condition? Is it possible to live small, to avoid the escalation game?

In this Living Small experiment, I've listed the contents of the bedroom, kitchen and bathroom, but the living room hadn't reached that heady space of just enough. We were lacking a table.

Our tiny space called for a flexible table, small enough to be inconspicuous, but big enough to seat four in anticipation of all the new friends who will grace it. That flexible table also had to serve as my desk by day and our dinner table by night. A contracted search for a vintage drop-leaf table tried my patience, so after five months of going table-less, IKEA came to the rescue. I thought I'd outgrown IKEA, but that's just one more of life's happy surprises.

This beaut has the perfect dimensions and blends right in with our gold/black/red motif.

Here's how we ended up:

Couch
Trunk/coffee table
Rug
2 barstools
1 table
2 chairs
2 posters
1 lamp

Voila! A tiny room with two spaces to eat and work, room to entertain and lounge in comfort.

We might be one comfy chair short, but stay tuned. For now, I'm calling it just enough.

And now the real challenge: NO MORE STUFF!

Today, I'm grateful for: a table and pumpkins.

LIVING SMALL: THE DOWNSIZING DILEMMA

St. Helena, CA

Those who have been with us (suffered with us?) since the early days will remember our extreme downsizing effort. In 2008, our challenge was to liquidate a four-bedroom house, two cars, a thriving wine shop and the ridiculous amount of stuff that filled them all up. By October 2010, we had ridded ourselves of the whole kit and the caboodle too, sailing away with what fit in a 38' boat.

Now, four years hence, I've made a bit of a cottage industry out of writing about my experiences.

In an article for Gannett's NowU.com, I talk about the weighty emotional toll of getting rid of all my stuff and offer retroactive advice to myself about how it might have been easier:

8 Steps to Free Your Home (and Life) of Clutter

There's always a back story, and in my case, it comes in the form of blog posts. In the article, I mention the measuring cup that made me cry and the bird's nest that held a hidden message about my own safety at sea. Now you can read the rest of the story.

Part two of the series details the actual nuts and bolts of how we disposed of all our stuff:

Secrets to Gifting and Listing All You Stuff

I mention frantically searching for a box to ship my office chair, and here's the whole hilarious story. Then there's the time I listed all our furniture on Craigslist, not expecting people to show up the same day to pick it up. And our poorly timed first yard sale on the hottest day of the summer and the second.

Those were intense days, full of hard labor and heavy dreaming. But oh how I love a story with a happy ending.

Leaving Manteo at sunrise, October 2010.

WINE COUNTRY: SHAKEN, NOT STIRRED

St. Helena, CA

Unless you've had your head somewhere unmentionable, you probably know we had a significant earthquake in Napa Valley last weekend. At 3:20 a.m. on August 24, a strong 6.0 quake rolled through, the California equivalent of hazing for new residents. Welcome to our state, where living on land sometimes simulates living on a boat.

We were fine here in St. Helena, just over 20 miles from the epicenter, but it was a BIG one. Our little cottage was creaking and the (four) dishes in the cabinets were rattling. We had no doubt about what was happening.

Napa, the town, only a few miles from the epicenter in American Canyon, took the worst hit, but perhaps the greatest casualty was truth in the media. As they tried to make sense (and the most) out of the shakeup, there were some ugly missteps.

One local TV station used a photo of grapes on the ground, reporting that the earthquake was big enough to "shake the grapes right off the vine." The photo showed bunches that had been pruned -- intentionally, something anyone in Napa could have told them, had they asked. Okay, breaking coverage on Live TV, but....

... et tu, Washington Post? An early article from WashingtonPost.com claimed the quake, "couldn't have come at a worse time," which was their attempt tie the quake to California's drought. However, had they asked, they would have learned that the quake hit at the best possible time (if there is one?): Most fermenting tanks were empty and waiting for imminent harvest. And most significantly, the timing at 3:20 a.m. meant that wineries were empty. Had the quake occurred during the day or even a few days later during harvest, the story would have been quite different.

Certainly there was significant damage, and some wineries had devastating losses, but only one week later, Napa Valley Vintners reports on Twitter that 95% of wineries are back in business. Something you would not know if you read Outside magazine, the worst offender and the publication that prompted me to write this post. Last night on Twitter:

I added the NOT TRUE, lest I perpetuate a falsehood.

"With Napa out of commission"?!?!? It's been a week with ample opportunity to vet the impact of the earthquake on the Napa wine industry. This was Outside's second volley on Twitter promoting this lame article, an incredibly lazy interview of the Whole Foods global wine buyer, the sole source, who, contrary to the inflammatory Tweets and headline, says the earthquake will have no effect on supply. On the first Twitter post, I was the only one who took Outside to task, but fortunately on the one above, others started chiming in. Disappointing, lax "reporting" from Outside, a magazine that I've previously respected.

Of course, there was some non-shaky reporting going on, among the best was AFPs Glenn Chapman, who grasped the nuances of how things shook out, so to speak, even in a breaking story. Ironically, he also quoted Chip, my Chip, who works at Silver Oak: "I think our wine tastes better after being shaken, not stirred." Chip always knows the right thing to say.

Here's a roundup of local paper front pages from wash post, a visual that underscores the significance of this story in the local market.

*As a bizarre footnote to this earthquake incident, we were in one other earthquake, three years ago by one day. That whole incident was much more alarming and has a much stranger (and longer) story.