My friend Michael McNamara, who lives on Hornby Island, sent me this and said that he and Sally didn’t know I’d moved to Hornby and would I like to come over for dinner. Joking.
I think the confusion might be that I covered my favorite builder, Lloyd House, in the Tiny Homes book. Lloyd lives in a converted van on Hornby.
I mean, if I did move somewhere, Hornby would be at the top of the list, but I’m still here in NorCal, living in a house I built 40 years ago.
We had a great day yesterday. North into farmland, to Sebastapol and the Harmony Farm Supply, what a great place. Good tools, good additives, seeds, irrigation, etc. No foul chemical smells. Knowledgeable staff.
Then to the National Heirloom Expo in Santa Rosa. Unique event. Yesterday was the last of 3 days (Tues-Wed-Thurs). Tons of different heirloom fruits, vegetables, cheeses, on and on… goats, sheep, cows, turkeys and a huge display of bantam chickens. Food booths (and samples) up the kazoo. It’s a very together farming, gardening, food preparation and preservation show. Real food and respect-for-earth concepts and practices have come a long way in the last 25 years — progress. I’m going to this for sure next year, and we’ll probably get a booth and sell building books. Our kinda people.
Back through Petaluma and Heritage Salvage, huge amount of recycled lumber, including some stunning old barn timbers.
Got a lot of good pics yesterday, no time to do anything other than this with 3 of them:
This was on back road between Petaluma and Sebastapol.
I’m taking off next week on what I plan to be a 7-8 day backpacking trip in local territory. I haven’t done seriously backpacking for decades, so not sure how it will turn out, but it’s a trip I’ve been thinking about for years. Got a 2-1/2 lb tent, titanium pots, beautiful Western Mountaineering sleeping bag, freeze-dried food…equipment I couldn’t have dreamed of back in the 60s with Kelty pack and lots of poundage in Tuolomne Meadows and Big Sur forays.
I’ll be away from electronics, not to mention electricity, for a week. Paul Wingate used to talk about going to a remote cabin in the woods and getting away from “the 60-cycle hum.”
I’ve put up posts so there should be one a day while I’m gone. A friend asked yesterday, will you be taking pictures. Ha!
Friends of mine on the coast have a large garden and goats. Two nights ago they found this little barn owl dead in the goat yard. They’re pretty sure it was the work of a Great Horned Owl, a much larger (and territorial) owl. A raccoon got at it last night, and someone had taken the wings, and they were going to bury the remains. So I grabbed it. Look at those claws!
These are beautiful creatures, with a white face mask outlined with a heart-shaped ring of dark feathers (lower part of which you see here). I’m going to render the skull (boiling to remove flesh, immerse in ammonia for 10 days, clean some more, then in strong (35%) hydrogen peroxide to whiten).
Just a few drops last week in our rain-challenged state. I was surprised when I checked my rain figures that we had 24″ last year, but 41″ the year before. I’m hoping we get more rain this year. The early drops of rain like this are heavenly…the smell…the most wonderful example of this is rain in the Baja California desert. When the rain comes, it’s in big quantities. You can almost watch the desert bloom, and it’s ambrosial.
On Mondays I get to be by myself in the office (studio) and when I get the biz part of the day over with, I get the caffeine and music going and see where it leads. This morning started out gloomy chilly foggy, but around 10 the sun broke through, and I started looking through my photos. I have one or more cameras with me at practically all times and I can’t begin to comprehend the 10s of 1000s of images I have. One of these days…
My first photo, taken with a Kodak Baby Brownie when I was 12, was of Puddles the hippo at the San Francisco Zoo. Next when I went on a 3-month motorscooter (Lambretta) trip through Europe in 1957 was a Rolleicord (cheap version of Rolliflex). I spent 2 years in the USAF in ’58-’60 as editor of a base newspaper (Sembach AFB, near Kaiserslautern, Germany) and the secret service had a Leica they weren’t using and let me borrow it. (There’s just something unique about those black and whites.)
Next in the early ’60s I got a Nikon 35mm, then a Nikkor. I shot ’60s culture, and always, buildings. Then along came the Olympus OM-1. It was 50% smaller than the Nikons, with equal lens quality, and I ended up with a full arsenal of OM-1s and lenses.
This is an exquisite little book! The drawings are outstanding, and consistent. A primer on simple construction in a very small package. I just ordered 3 more copies. It’s made me check out (and order) other books by Wooden Books, Ltd., a wonderful collection.
