I asked Martin to snap a few photos of me.

I’m always so shy about asking to have my picture taken. Who do I think I am? Hogging the spotlight like that?!

(See my high school senior portrait to the left? haha)

My earrings are handmade. I don’t even know how old my dress is. Thanks to the No New Clothes Challenge, I know it’s at least a couple years old. I know it’s too bright to wear in Europe and feel local, but I’ve worn it at least ten times this summer.

I’ve never worn a dress so many times.

Have you?

One of the reasons I wanted to share these self portraits is because we should talk about authenticity. About being our authentic selves. And loving it. I’m convinced it’s the key to the happiest life.

We find confidence when we embrace ourselves just how we are. When you feel unsure, be proud of deep in your heart.

Here’s how I do it:

1. Accept your imperfections. Set a goal and didn’t achieve it? That’s OKAY. Really bad at something? Don’t understand? It’s okay. Don’t have this? Don’t look like that? Just stop it! Accept these things for what they are or change them.

2. We’re all busy. If you have something that you really, truly want, you can find a way. It’s a constant balancing game of doing what you need to do and most want to do while cutting out all the other stuff.

3. I know it can be scary. If you never just go for it, you’re always going to look back and wonder “what if?”. Besides, how often have you gotten brave, gone and done something, and then said, “Well shoot! I knew it would be scary… and I should NOT have done it.”

(that link above? scariest moment of my life)

4. Journal like crazy. It’s inspiration and motivation for the heart.

5. Ignore what you think you’re supposed to do or supposed to have. Switch your focus from society’s opinion and just celebrate yours. Seriously the best thing I ever, ever did.

Over the next few weeks, I want to dive into all of the questions you asked about running Gadanke and living an authentic life. I’m setting really big goals for the rest of the year. First, I’m sewing and sewing to bring you something new at Gadanke.

Psst… here’s a piece I wrote about starting a life you envision. It was the day I decided to stop being the co-pilot in life and grab the controls.

Do you struggle with being your authentic self and feeling okay with it?

Please share one of your goals for this year…

We’re sticking with the theory that you cannot (and should not) work every single day, no matter how badly you want the goal ahead. Every weekend, we stop decluttering the hangar. I stop making journals. Martin stops sketching the heating system plan. And we do stuff.

Sometimes it’s über nerdy stuff.

Like attending fly-ins.

In a car.

“Hi everyone! We’re Katie and Martin. We swear we’re really into airplanes and flying. That’s why we’re going to live in a hangar… and that’s why we just drove here. Don’t all rush over to meet us.”

“Really now. Don’t hurry too much.”

No. I’m just kidding. The truth is: I am floored by how incredibly kind and passionate people in general aviation can be. Martin’s going to demonstrate. He’s just strolling back to me in the above picture. (He’s the tall, skinny German dude in green.)

And oops! He got distracted.

Then the next thing I knew, he was off to chat with more pilots.

(You know you live in rural America when there’s a tractor pulling bales of hay at the fly-in.)

If you ever get the chance, check out an air show. Those folks sitting in folding chairs under the shade of their airplanes? They’re just sipping beer and waiting to answer any questions you might have about their plane. Or life. Or anything under the sky. (Well preferably, in the sky.)

They may also be scheming how they’re going to win the pilot bowling (you drop bowling balls from the sky… and it’s seriously so much fun!).

A lot of pilots will take kids up for a free flight. (Obviously not the pilots drinking beer… or the dorky ones who live at an airport but still drove in!)

Martin left with a pile of friends. I got some photos of him in his piece of heaven.  And then we left with a new energy for remodeling the hangar into our home. I told Martin, “Let’s do this again.”

What good things have you left the week with?

…we are seeing progress since this.

…we are emptying an upstairs.

…and filling a downstairs.

We are hauling boxes back to the previous owner.

We are emptying shelves and cleaning out clutter.

We are scrubbing the corners. We are piling and piling heaps to go to the recycling center and thrift shop.

It’s a busy time at the hangar.

What’s going on at your house (or future house!) right now?

Hi there friends!  I’m back to dive into your questions from this post. Today, it’s all about…

DO PEOPLE ASK YOU ABOUT KIDS? CAN I?

Haha.  Like any newlyweds, we used to get those questions a lot when we first got married.  But then we started doing the sorts of things you’ve come to know – moving abroad, remodeling kitchens, flying airplanes.

When my grandma was 91 years old, she told me, “You know, raising kids is a heck of a lot easier than what you two are doing.”

(My grandma has 10 children.)

Now the only person “asking” us about children is our baby niece.  Someone will say, “Oh, Baby E wants to know when she’s going to have cousins.”  Or I’ve walked in on her “chatting” with my mom about how she really wants some cousins.

Our niece is 9 months old.

SO ARE YOU GOING TO HAVE KIDS?

You’ll have to ask our niece.  She seems to be go-to person on that one.

DOES YOUR FAMILY LIVE NEARBY?

We live in my home state.

My siblings have moved out of state.  :(  But as you probably guessed based on my grandma’s note above, I have a huuuuuge family.  I have not managed to live anywhere (including Berlin!) without having someone from my side of the family within a three hour drive at some point.  It’s totally crazy!

Like 1/100th of us crashing Girl Scout camp last summer.

DO YOU GUYS EVER SAY HOWDY IN REAL LIFE?

Martin does.  It’s awesome!

I’VE NOTICED A SHIFT IN SOME OF YOUR WORD CHOICES  - LIKE “FOLKS”.

You have?  Super.  ME TOO!  I’m soaking up the local flavor.  When I grew up around here, I thought it was totally normal to say things like “crick” instead of “creek”.

In fact, I pronounced a lot of words with the local dialect without even realizing it until I met Martin.  Ahhh… nothing like discovering “proper” English from a non-native speaker, right?!

Anyway, now I’m embracing those quirks all the more.  No one here ever seems to say stuff like ”the parents’ house”.  It’s “the folks’ house”.  I love that, and I’m trying to talk like that, too.  It just feels so much warmer – a deeper connection of sorts.

DO YOU EVER WANT TO GO SKYDIVING?

For some reason, we get asked this question ALL THE TIME.  I guess it’s because we like to hop into airplanes, right?  Martin’s got a canned do-you-sky-dive answer that works pretty well for me, too:

Raise eyebrows.  Tip head.  Sound really puzzled and say:

“Why on earth would I want to jump out of an airplane?”

DO YOU EVER GET SCARED?

I overcame my biggest fears when I did my first solo flight.  I think I unleashed so many hesitations then.

ARE YOU AFRAID THAT SETTLING IN ONE COUNTRY WILL LIMIT YOUR AND MARTIN’S ADVENTUROUS SPIRIT?

No way, Jose.  I mean, yeah, we’re settling into a place that we want to call home.  It’s really exciting to have a home base.  I’ve dreamed of it.

But we’re at an airport.

It would be like living at a water park and never going down the slide.  The temptation to just take off is too great.

WILL YOU HAVE TO BUY A CAR?

We’ve always had a car in the US.  Unless the grocery store in town decides to install a runway in their parking lot, we’re always going to have to have a car.

I should talk to them about that.

AND IS YOUR CLIMATE WARM ENOUGH TO KEEP A GARDEN?

It is!  Well… mostly.

IS THAT EVEN OF INTEREST TO YOU?

I have this dream of learning how to garden and can food one day.

Of course, the biggest issues are:

1. all those hungry deer and rabbits
2. overcoming my brown – not green – thumb

OMG WILL YOU GET A DOG?

Haha!  If/when we settle more, that could be something to look into.  But right now?  No.  :(

WHAT ARE SOME OF YOUR DAYDREAMS?

I’ve always wanted to fly in a hot air balloon.  It’s a dream that pre-dates marrying someone who loves to fly.

HOW DID YOU GUYS MEET?

We met on the internet.

I used to be soooo embarrassed to admit that to anybody.  However there’s a pretty good chance that you and I met over the internet, too, right?

I’m cool with it.

How would you answer some of these questions? I spilled my guts. Now tell us a little about you. Share your blog. Share your daydream or your green thumb. I wanna know!

So about that geothermal heating system…

Those of you who have been with me through the winter around here know that it gets crazy cold.  The temperature drops, and it can take days for the thermometer to work its way back up to zero degrees Fahrenheit.

(Peek in some winter journal pages here if you’re about to pass out from the heat right now.)

It’s a little hard to be thinking about heating systems right now, but it’s actually our #1 priority.  If we do not have heat, we cannot live in the hangar. We cannot work in it.

But when you have a space this huge, what is the most economical heating system?

Or what happens when you open the door to let out a plane?

Whooosh.  The place is ice cold.

The hangar has always been heated by a waste oil burning system. The temperatures could constantly remain about 55 degrees with this system.  It was a seemily perfect strategy while it worked. Used airplane oil had a place to go.

Yes. Scrubbing the walls is on the mental to-do list!

Unfortunately, the system is really old; it needs serious, serious maintenance or an entire replacement with something else. As Martin’s intense I’m-a-German-engineer research found, burning waste oil is undesirable from an environmental and logistical perspective.  There isn’t enough airplane oil in the area.  The hangar’s previous owner had to rely on local businesses for used auto oil… something that’s getting harder and harder to get.

So Martin started researching other options and picking brains of all sorts of experts.

Well except not in this picture… he’s listening to his cooing nephew back on the other side of the ocean. But you get the idea.

And you know us. We’ve got three major requirements:

1. We want something cost effective.
2. We want something environmentally friendly.
3. We want an overall system that can heat two different zones: our home to a comfortable living temperature and hangar warmed to a functioning temperature.

Martin came up with geothermal open loop heating.  What is it?

Geothermal open loop heating kind of reminds me of donating plasma.  Are you familiar with how that works?  How they take the blood out of your body, remove the plasma, and put everything else back into your veins?

Okay.  That sounds really creepy!

But basically that’s what geothermal heating is. But instead of plasma, we’re snagging the heat. There’s one well that brings the warm water up to us, and another one returns the chilled water back to the ground.

Not to totally shock you or anything, but lately we’re hearing about a lot of new construction in Germany that’s incorporating this technology.

Even in March while it was still crazy cold outside, our ground water was about 55 degrees.

In the summer, the loop can extract the cool temperature from the water to cool the house.  (We will not be cooling the hangar.)  It will be the very first time I’ve ever lived somewhere with air conditioning.

When I start talking about technical matters, I start using the sophisticated language of “doo-dad” and “thingy”.  Drive Martin CRAZY! So if you want to know more about geothermal heating, this wikipeida link is pretty thorough.

The system obviously needs electricity to operate. It’s so insanely low impact otherwise. And the amount of electricity? So much less than anything else out there.

Our state offers several grant and loan programs for installing renewable energy systems in homes and small businesses. So when we’re not decluttering, we’re filling out grant forms and Martin is sketching out plans and calculations.

Our original hope was to hire subcontractors to help with a lot of the work. Everything in our plan is coming together so well except this part. We just cannot afford the labor estimates we’re getting. Hey, we’re DIYers after all, so what the heck!  It looks like it’ll be Martin, his muscles, and me.

The goal is to have the system operational by October.

You know.  Before THAT WHITE STUFF takes over the valley.

(Geothermal drawing from here.)

I love summer evenings.

They’re cool and breezy. They’re perfect for kicking up feet after a long day at the hangar. They’re perfect for doodling ideas and journaling stories. (I’m using this journal in pine bark.)

What are the best moments of your summer evenings?

They’re perfect for wandering across a valley without a plan, without a direction.

I guess they’re really perfect for snapping an awesome photo, too! I’m still wondering how on earth *I* managed to snap such a shot of Martin.

And good news!  The EPA has approved our geothermal system for the hangar!  A geothermal heating system basically pulls water from the ground, extracts the heat, and returns the chillier water to the ground.

Now the EPA clearly states that with this permission to dig our well and operate the geothermal system, they are “allowed to examine our fluids at any time”.

Does that not sound a little funky?