Hi Lloyd,
This is the video link
to SunRay’s latest project. It is pretty cute. We are taking a trip to Seattle this week to get Ray the materials he needs to finish the sexy body shell for the SunRayzor.
SunRay just got a motorcycle wheel with a hub motor in it from this amazing designer builder Mark Gelbien and his company EnerTrac Corp. SunRay is conspiring to use this new hub motor to power a multi-person runabout electric vehicle. We will keep you posted on his progress.…
Love,
Bonnie
There are 3-4 places you can eat at the Harris Ranch. I like the the coffee shop best. It’s filled with pictures of the Valley around the turn of the century, as well as farm and carpenter tools and implements. Descriptions of this valley in the old days are heart-breaking. It was so beautiful, not over-farmed, before million-year old aquifer water started being mined to support crops that shouldn’t be growing in the desert. Some of the first grain crops were said to grow 6′ high. Driving down yesterday, things weren’t looking good. Where there were miles of lush fruit trees, you’d know agribiz is sucking unsustainable amounts of water from ever-deeper wells. Ah me. California you were so beautiful.
The pool here at the Harris Ranch is spectacular. Olympic size, not chlorined, perfect temperature. If I had a pool like this available I’d swim every day. I swam about 10 laps yesterday, crawl and breaststroke, exulting. I watched a little boy with his dad. The kid was a water sprite. He loved it.
It reminded me of teaching swimming (when in college). I specialized in kids who were deathly afraid of the water. There was a skinny little say 6-year old kid in Santa Cruz, and he’d probably had a water trauma, because he trembled when in the pool, wouldn’t get his face near the water. His mom really wanted him to get over it.
I started him blowing bubbles, then harder and harder until his face was getting splashed. Then floating a short distance to pool’s edge, face down. Progress. OK Eric, I said, I want you to ride on my back and we’ll swim around. After I got him to relax a bit and loosen up on his choke hold on my neck, I started swimming. Then blowing bubbles as we swam. He got comfortable. OK Eric, I want you to take a breath and close your eyes and we’ll go under water. We dove. Then under water with his eyes open, and voilà, Eric became a swimmer.
Pretty spectacular eh? Electricity without oil, gas, or coal burning. This is on Hwy 12, around Rio Vista, “…the Montezuma Hills of eastern Solano County” Details: https://bit.ly/windgens
Our next book (on nomadic living in the 21st century) is underway. The last few days I layed out 4 pages. It really feels good. It”s clicking, from the git-go (you never know until you start).
If you’ve got great photos and /or stories of nomadic living in these challenging times, send it to us. We’re rolling. The follow-up book to Tiny Homes.
I’m writing this from the Harris Ranch, a beautiful hacienda-style Spanish hotel and restaurant about 2/3 of the way south of San Francisco on Hwy 5 to LA. I took off mid-day today driving my truck to LA, for the funeral Thursday of my college buddy Dick Zanuck.
For almost 3 hours I cruised without the radio, a blended iced double-shot latte as well as light sativa cannabinoids to enable right brain function.
I got a Google Alert about a video on our homestead and office that had been posted on https://www.rootsimple.com/. The blog is by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen, authors of the very fine book (which I originally discovered on Boing Boing), The Urban Homestead, about raising food in a big city (in this case, LA). I enjoyed scrolling down the blog, seeing the eclectic mix. These guys are all over the place, like me.
Check out the swarm of bees on the Harley, and the swimming pool in the bed of a Chevy S10 pickup truck on a hot night (in LA, of course). The vintage photo at left is titled: “A member of the Woodmen of the World with his ceremonial axe…”
Scrolling around for Zanuck stories today, I ran across this photo of him when he was producing “Jaws,” and a quirky interview 2 years ago by a reporter with the pseudonym “Quint” (coincidentally the name of the shark hunter in the movie). They were supposed to be discussing the Tim Burton/Johnny Depp film “Alice,” but perhaps understandably, Zanuck was more interested in discussing Jaws. https://www.aintitcool.com/node/45317
I’m just heartsick to hear of the death of Hollywood producer Dick Zanuck, who was my college roommate and best friend for several years at Stanford in the mid-’50s. We decorated our room at the Fiji house with African masks and spears and South Seas artifacts from the set lot at 20th Century Fox. We went to movies almost every night. We took a surfing trip in a Fox jeep to Baja California in 1954, and then a Fox Ford convertible on a surfing trip to Mazatlan in Spring of 1955. We partied hard, chased girls, surfed, cultivated sun tans, and weren’t too serious about academic excellence.
We both loved the beach, surfed, played volleyball, were the same size (not, um, tall) — and competitive (we actually got in a few fistfights). We’d go to a party, get semi-drunk, and take off for LA, arriving around sunrise. His family had a large house on the beach in Santa Monica, and my first experience surfing was riding a 12-foot redwood/balsa board owned by his brother-in-law Bobby Jacks at the Malibu colony. His family had a beautiful Spanish-style home in Palm Springs, built around a pool, where we’d go frequently, and John the butler would wake us up each morning with glasses of fresh orange juice from trees around the pool.
One of our rituals was started by him when we were teenagers (60 years ago—gad!). He sent me a postcard from Hawaii showing a surfer, with the message “Ho!” (he was there and I was not). I started sending him “Ho!” postcards when I would be somewhere or doing something that would make him jealous, and he’d eventually reciprocate. In recent years I’d send him “Ho!” postcards of me skateboarding or doing well in races, and he’d call me right up.
In recent years we’d talk about how all our friends were retired and we’d both say how we loved our work and were never going to retire. He never did. I’m so sorry to hear that he’s gone.
Hi there. I’m a long time fan of the Shelter books. Builders of the Pacific Coast is like viewing a tangible form of my dreams. My husband, Rob Campbell, also recently reviewed the Tiny Homes book on his woodworking blog.
This is a long shot and I apologize for the intrusion if it’s unwanted, but it seems like you would know folks interested in a property like ours. We are trying to sell our coastal Oregon home. It’s a pretty amazing place in a pretty amazing community. We made a website describing it and due to the unique nature of the property, are trying to sell it without a realtor since someone not familiar with the place could never really do it justice. Anyhow, if you want to take a look and share it with anyone you think might be interested, here is the webpage.…
-Xephaniah Fiddlehead Nubbinsworth https://logy.org/house