Friday Morning Fish Fry*

By Lloyd Kahn on April 22, 2016

*So titled after San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen’s Friday columns, called “Friday Fish Fry;” Herb was master of 3-dot stories…

Water It’s raining this morning,

Praise the Universe.

We’re up to 28″ this year, more or less normal. Our well is working again. We’ve installed a 5000-gallon storage tank which collects water off neighbors’ roof. The California hills are an almost chartreuse green. Creeks are running.

Scotland Ho! We’re off

There is a festival of architecture in Scotland now, sponsored by the Fife Contemporary Arts Center. It’s called “Shelters,” and features an entire room exhibiting our work, with photo and page blowups, and our building books. It’s open now at the Kircaldy Galleries (about 12 miles north of Edinburgh), on the east coast of Scotland) and runs through June 5, 2016.

I’ll be doing a slide show presentation on May 10th, at Kircaldy Galleries, titled “50 Years of Natural Building,” chronicling our building books from Shelter in 1973 up to the present.

We’re leaving Tuesday via Virgin Atlantic. On Saturday, we’re taking a ferry to the tiny island of Eigg.

“Eigg (/ɛɡ/; Scottish Gaelic: Eige, [ˈekʲə] ( listen)) is one of the Small Isles, in the Scottish Inner Hebrides. It lies to the south of the Skye and to the north of the Ardnamurchan peninsula. Eigg is 9 kilometres (5.6 mi) long from north to south, and 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) east to west. With an area of 12 square miles (31 km2), it is the second largest of the Small Isles after Rùm.

Notably, Eigg generates virtually 100% of its electricity using renewable energy.…” -Wikipedia

Our hosts have arranged for us to spend a week in “Sweeney’s Bothy,” a tiny home looking down to the sea. Am I excited!

There are about 80 people on the island, there are kayak and mountain bike rentals, sheep, there are a couple of restaurants, the Whale’s Head Community Pub, and I am sure, plenty of kindred spirits. Yes!

I’ll be Instagraming and blogging, so stay tuned and ride shotgun with us during the month of May.

Social Media I’m doing less blogging and more Instagraming these days. Less writing, more photos. I like the immediacy of Instagram, still learning the techniques (don’t like the square format), trying to figure out how to use hash tags and get more followers…Check out our new Tumblr presentation of large beautiful photos: https://shelterpub.tumblr.com and https://shelterpub.tumblr.com/archive, set up by Sean Hellfritsch and now managed by Brittany Cole Bush…Check out The Shelter Blog, https://www.theshelterblog.com/, managed by Evan Kahn, and improving daily, with an ever-increasing flow of original material…we continue working on the digital side of our communications…while producing real life hold-in-yr-hands books…

Small Homes, the book We are 3/4 through with layout…about 154 pages so far and counting…Rick will be doing Photoshop work while I’m gone and then we’ll hit it again in June…this is shaping up to be a great book, I kid you not. You can see some sneak previews at: https://www.theshelterblog.com/?s=sneak+preview 

A gude beginning maks a gude ending. (Scottish proverb)

About Lloyd Kahn

Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include Shelter, Shelter II (1978), Home Work (2004), Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008), Tiny Homes (2012), and Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:
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3 Responses to Friday Morning Fish Fry*

  2. I envy you, Lloyd! I love, love, love Scotland! What an awesome opportunity! Can't wait to see the pics. But I love your writing, too, and my vote is for more and not less of your writing!

    Reply

  3. US Government Declaring All Out War on Tiny House Living
    Take, for example, the growing effort to outlaw offgrid living in the U.S., as well as moves by local governments around the country to criminalize private rainwater collection.

    Now, the federal government is making a major move against the tiny house movement, seeking to give the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) authority to require tiny houses to conform to the standards of recreational vehicles (RV’s), of which one of the rules is that the vehicles may not be used or marketed for permanent living.

    HUD is seeking to regulate tiny house living out of existence or to turn it into a regulated industry by requiring that tiny homes be manufactured in factories, conforming to codified standards.

    http://csglobe.com/us-government-declaring-war-tiny-house-living/

    Reply

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