I discovered this book at Builders’ Booksource in Berkeley last week. What’s unique is that there are scaled drawings with each barn shown, so you can tell just how each one was built.
If you haven’t discovered it, Builders Booksource is the best bookstore anywhere for books on, well, building. They’re on 4th Street in Berkeley.
A few months ago I got an email from a producer working on a series of short videos on “authenticity,” wanting to come and shoot some video here. It was for Sailor Jerry Rum. Hmmmm. OK, can I get a bottle of the rum? Well yes, and it arrived a week later. It was a spiced rum -oh oh – but I was surprised that it was pretty good. Reasonably priced and I made a great version of rum and coke, with the rum, spicy ginger beer, and lime juice. OK, I said, and 4 v. cool guys from Hold Fast Video (SoCal) showed up and we had a great 2-3 hours. Fun. Here’s the result; I like the snappy editing:
This is just a perfect little house, situated on a NorCal hillside, with a balcony facing south, looking down on a grassy downslope meadow, and out further to the blue Pacific. Pepe and his wife Pam live here. I love the dormers. They make an upper story way more livable.
This is about the last of my photos from last week’s trip.
Last night I traded a building book to fisherman Todd for these 2 beauties. How about that Pacific Ocean?
To conclude this good Sunday’s morning, from David Pescovitz on Boing Boing:
This belongs to UC Davis. According to a fisherman we talked to, it’s an enormously expensive boat.
Wednesday morning, these are beautiful little boats. I’m not sure if it’s called a schooner, but it’s a classic fishing boat for this part of the Pacific Coast.
(My friend Godfrey gives me shit if I don’t get all of the mast(s) in any boat pic.)
Here’s a great State of California report on Fisheries dated 1954, with vintage pics: https://is.gd/calfish
And you water people, here’s a fascinating photo-essay of a tanker getting bashed by a horrendous hurricane in the North Pacific in 1977, but staying afloat: https://is.gd/stoltsurf
I was born in San Francisco. One day after a high school swim meet at Fleishacker Pool (out at Ocean Beach) a guy named Jim Fisher* got me to swim out into the surf with him. I was stunned. The blue (cold) water, the waves, it was sunny afternoon, it was paradise. That clinched my attachment to this powerful body of water. I’m so in love with the Pacific Ocean.
I’ve travelled the coast from Vancouver Island down to the tip of Baja California, and found a similar spirit, brothers and sisters of the beach (you know who you are) everywhere along this coastal waterway. We share a lot. There’s a theory that the coast was settled by Indians in canoes. Could be. After all, the First Nations people speared whales from canoes made out of hollowed-out cedar trees.
*A powerful swimmer, Jim went to Hawaii in the ’50s and rode some of the biggest waves ever at Makaha.
