Bob Massengale turned us on to this great website that allows you to listen to a variety of great music. The real stuff!
If you start playing a song, it will continue with a selection (playing entire songs). Nice way to start the day.
There’s a whole bunch of gospel music that was put up for Easter. I’ve mentioned it before, but the gospel singers are the ones who got the true message of Jesus, the love and joy and harmony. As opposed to the Catholic church et al.
This is the back cover of a new Abrams book titled: Artists’ Handmade Houses, by Michael Gotkin and Don Freeman. It shows my late cousin Mike Kahn’s sculptural house in Arizona, which he called Eliphante. The other houses in the book are not as wild as this. It’s a pretty nice book, worth checking out in a bookstore.
Yogan, a carpenter in France whose treehouse will be in our new book, turned me on to guys riding these new type of sk8boards, and it turns out they are made in my hometown, San Francisco. They have six wheels, and check out what riders are doing:
Got up early, did about 3 hours office work, then took off around 9 AM for the hills on my new mountain bike. I swear, this thing is like a motorcycle, a joy to ride. First stop was a pond of my acquaintance, brimming with recent rains. I stripped down and swam underwater to the water lilies, floated there for a few seconds. Cold, maybe 52-53°. Got out recharged, as always happens: when you get in cold water, your body goes into circulatory overdrive when you get out.
Miners’ lettuce for salad
Got to this impenetrable trail closure. (I’d already had to lift my bike over fallen logs a bunch of times.) Hadn’t been on this trail for years. It used to be clear all the way down to the paved road. I dragged my bike into the woods on both sides, looking for a way through — no luck. It’s rare that a decent trail gets closed down like this. Deer, coyotes, etc. will usually make a way around it. I had to backtrack, phew, by now tired.
From years of training in the 80s-90s, I remembered an alternate route. Otherwise it was going to an extra 10 or so miles, part of it down a trail with flapping nettles. Here’s the entrance, and what used to be a clear shot turned out to involve hauling my bike through thick brush at times, including poison oak, for a couple of miles.
I was really tired, but felt good. Had a chicken sandwich on home-baked bun, and miners’ lettuce salad.
And now I gotta get to work. The tiny homes book — whew! It is cookin! Everyone is on board. Some new pages from last week are spectacular.
I picked this up on Loaded Boards website this morning. Great way to start the day, watching these young magicians! Whew!
“A beautiful tale…. 4 total strangers coming together (Dustin Hampton, Alex Tongue, Ethan Cochard, Alex Limbach), having never skated together before and riding together close in a pack, having complete trust in one another. Alex Limbach makes a brief appearance; wish we could have captured more with him–in due time. Tried out something different in this video than my usual “clean” style. This video is raw, dirty, a bit rough on the edges, pretty much all filmed with follow shots (I killed a pair of shoes). All the editing is done while in action with no breathing room. I had the guys always enter the frame a certain way (convergence of action); skating in synchronization, so to speak. I was stoked to try something different and push my level of follow cam skills, and I learned a great deal. Hope you enjoy.” – Adam Colton
This is a simple small book on Brian “Ziggy” Liloia’s construction of a cob cottage at an ecovillage in northeast Missouri. This is a Blurb book, a way anyone can produce high-quality color books. It’s expensive for such a small book, but cheap for the fact that they are printed one at a time.
Ziggy’s cottage is really nice, and I recommend the book to anyone contemplating a cob cottage. (It’s also one of the buildings featured in our book on tiny homes.)
Note: if you use the promo code “NEWBLURB”, the book is 20% off.
I had 3 great things happen on my birthday yesterday:
1. Lew found a stunning treehouse for the tiny houses book. We’re doing a full-bleed, 2-page spread of the interior, and it’s so far the best two pages in the book.
2. I went skateboard-sailing with my umbrella. Tried various streets and directions and found a 2-block stretch along the ocean where the wind pulled me along rather smartly. Fun! Made me think of rigging up a lightweight junk sail that I can unfurl.
3. We watched Der Blaue Engle (The Blue Angel), the original German version. Oh what a movie! Marlene Dietrich is stunning, a luminous presence. I couldn’t help but think of all the special effects krap movies of today by comparison. The power of black and white…
Cow skull on left from Canyon San Bernardo, near the town of Miraflores in Baja California Sur, 1988; 16″ horns. The skull at right is from a horse I found near Diana’s Punch Bowl hot springs, which is south of Austin and Highway 50 in Nevada. On the shelf in front of the shop window is my growing collection of skulls. The latest two are a bobcat and a fox. I’ve learned how render the skulls (if fresh), then bleach them in hydrogen peroxide. Each one is so beautifully constructed, with unbelievable joinery of skull plates on top, and each one is so different from those of other species.
Bob Massengale turned us on to this great website that allows you to listen to a variety of great music. The real stuff!
