We had a glorious storm, about 5-1/2″ rain in our yard, almost as much as all the rain so far this year. About 13″ total. We still need a lot more, but this was a good omen. The ground out in the woods is finally soaked. Don’t know if the chanterelles have given up for the year, but we’ll see.

A couple of rain songs:

I Wish It Would Rain by The Temptations on Grooveshark
Love the Rain by Toots Hibbert on Grooveshark

A friend of mine, an older runner, told me this story. He was heading south up into the coastal trail from the new Muir Beach parking lot last week. It was dark. He was heading on a route that he and his friends have been running for decades. There was a  new sign posted saying “No Entry After 6PM.” He saw a ranger’s SUV parked in the lot. Uh-oh.

   As he crossed the bridge, 2 rangers were approaching him with flashlights. As he got closer to them, one said, “Hey you can’t go out here.” He kept running. They probably expected him to stop, but as he pulled up abreast of them, he sprinted. “Hey, you, STOP!” — shining their lights in his eyes. He flew past them and kept running. He felt good, like he was a kid again, as their shouts receded in the distance.

   He says he’s tired of the increasingly intrusive and aggressive attempts at control by rangers. Sure, there are things you shouldn’t do in a national park, like chain sawing or dirt bike riding or disturbing seals during mating season, but a solo runner leaves no trace, bothers no one.

   He says he’s not going to submit to rangers’ questions or follow their orders anymore. He’s gonna run.

“Interesting article:

‘I wanted to physically make the world a better place,’ Janes said. With his family’s help, he bought 40 acres of forested land on Denman Island. It came with two trailers. Janes and a girlfriend he’s no longer with moved into one, and promptly sold the other — ‘a big, ugly, white vinyl doublewide,’ he said. They planted a vegetable garden and got some chickens. Self-sufficiency ‘was definitely an ideal,’ Janes explained, ‘but we were doing everything we could’ to achieve it.

-Mike W”

Click here.

I realized in the ”60s and 70s that self-sufficiency is a DIRECTION. You never will get there, even remotely. In those years we were raising a lot of our own food, and when I planted some wheat and went through all the steps to get it from the field to flour for bread (unlike potatoes or corn, which you eat just the way it comes out of the ground), I saw that self sufficiency is a myth. BUT that’s no reason to give up. The idea is to become as self-sufficient as possible. AND, we weren’t really doing it to make the world a better place. We did it because whatever we could produce was better and cheaper and more tuned in than what we could buy.  Like building one’s own house. AND in doing that, it turns out that it IS better for the world.

-LK

“In 2012 Alek Lisefski wasn’t sure where he would end up living, but he was certain that he didn’t want to pay a high rent. So the then-29-year-old freelance web designer took matters into his own hands and built a tiny house on an 8-by-20 flatbed trailer. In doing so he joined the tiny house movement — a growing group of people who live in houses around 200 square feet or less…”

Click here.

This just knocked me out. I’m sitting here at ritual Roasters in San Francisco, and this gave me chills. For some reason the back of my ears was tingling:

“Anonymous has left a new comment on your post ‘James Brown – Full T.A.M.I Show Performance, 1964″‘”

   I’ll have to watch this when I get home. But it reminded me of this great one too… did you ever see:

James Brown & Luciano Pavarotti – It’s a Man’s World ?

Peace

Gill

I’ve been on the road for 2 days, and here are couple of the songs I heard:

-“I’m a Rocker” by The Raspberries (A great band that never made it big-time. This song is such pure rock n roll, like Rod Stewarts “Hot Legs.”

-“Johnny Sincere” by The Dead Poet’s Society

In case you don’t know it, you can click on any of the Topics (like Music” or “Homesteading” down on the lower right side of this blog and you’ll get posts on just those subjects.

-LK