It’s A New Dawn, It’s A New Day…

This is the most vital, vibrant time of my life. A lot of things are falling in to place, or about to.

I look around these days, at the garden, or the book production process, or attempts to gather, hunt, or fish for food, or my workshop—and think, this is pretty good. A lot of it a long time in the making.

The book SMALL HOMES continues to unfold before my eyes. I’m in daily touch with, typically 4-5 contributors (as many as 25 emails in some of the folders), getting large enough photo files, editing text, doing pasteup. Not in any special order — well actually, in the order in which it comes in.

I’m really excited about getting a new iPhone 6 (s Plus) (hoping tyo make my way through the AT&T maze so as not to pay full price — I have another year to go on my present contract). I think Instagram will be perfect for my daily photos, I may be wrong, but it seems Instagram is replacing blogs — at least with the millennials. BTW, there’s a good article on this age group (11-33-year-olds)by James Wolcott (an excellent writer) in this month’s Vanity Fair. I think I can get a journalistic flow going this way, and use blog for the writing impulse– like here (and link them together).

We’re revamping our website (being built in SquareSpace as we speak by Sean Hellfritsch) and it’s lookin elegant. By the end of the year, we’ll have a completely different looking internet “presence.” It’s important for us because we have so much”content” — maybe 15,000 photos, a good portion of these on homes and building. We’re also going to redesign theshelterblog and make good on my promise of getting mostly original stuff there, rather than recycled material that’s already been posted (much of which, however, is great and worth sharing).We’re going to build it, with the hope they will come.

I’m negotiating with publishers in Russia,China, and Brazil about foreign translation rights for our book Stretching (now in 24 languages).

Got my (12′ Klamath aluminum) boat with15 HP 2-stroke recently rebuilt Evinrude motor working well and improving my lame backing-up-of-trailer technique.

Going to build a sleeping platform. I got really excited yesterday laying it out — 10’x10′, — just putting 4×4’s on pier blocks, 2×6 joists on top of them made me realize that I miss building. This is gonna be fun!

The Monarch butterflies are back in greater number than years, there are big flocks of quail patrolling every corner of the garden, a beautiful young fox appeared this morning, scaring the chickens, and them scaring him too. At the beach yesterday, windy, high tide, I got 3 weathered 2x4s, 3 bird skulls — each a different bird — a lot of dead birds the last month, big bag of seaweed for garden, and check out this bit of avian skeletal artistry, what is I believe the sternum with cortacoid/clavicle still attached by one remaining tendon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfJRX-8SXOs