SunRay Kelley (featured in Builders of the Pacific Coast) just finished this stove in a strawbale house in Lake County, California. The design is the result of many stoves built over many years. The outer facing is soapstone. There are copper coils that heat water and as well, run hot water through pipes in the floor for radiant heating. At the top is a bread/pizza oven. This one unit heats the house (the air as well as the floor), provides hot water, and is an oven for cooking. SunRay says the soapstone “…takes on deep heat.” The floor is a “…heat battery” that stores heat. He calls it the Goddess of Contentment stove. He says it works really well, the floor is toasty warm and the pizza gets perfectly cooked.

SunRay and his girlfriend Bonnie were here last night, on their way to Santa Barbara, LA, then Mexico for 6 weeks, in their soon-to-be solar-powered camper.

Next up for SunRay in the stove department is in a new house he’s building on his own property in Washington: the same configuration stove, but with the addition of a steam boiler to run a turbine that produces electricity. We are into new territory here!

Photo by Bonnie

…SunRay Kelley and his girtlfriend Bonnie are coming by here today in their in-progress Tacoma hybrid biodiesel/electric/solar-powered camper. Watch for pix in the next few days.

…Heard good interview with Keith Richardson by Terry Gross the other night. he talked about using acoustic guitars, later electrified, to get the effects he wanted in some of their best songs. Also, that he writes for Mick, saying,  You know Mick, he’s this outsized personality, kind of across between James Brown and Maria Callas…and I just hope he’ll like the song…

…Which has just caused me to put on “Let It Bleed,” boy what a record, starting out with, ahem, Gimme Shelter. I’ll always associate this album with a brilliant sunny November Thanksgiving feast in 1969 at the renegade Pacific High School in the Santa Cruz mountains. There were about 50 kids and ten teachers and we were building geodesic domes for the kids to live in. I mean, it was a teen-age commune in the middle of the Psychedelic Times, and we putting up our own shelters, feeding everyone, and trying to keep some sense of order. Most people were stoned most of the time. Oh yeah! Anyway, we’d been at for 3 or so months, and on this Thanksgiving day everything came together. Steve the cook prepared the whole turkey lalapalooza, there was great great veggie fare, and we all sat around eating, listening to this album, watching the sun go down over the ridge. I remember listening to the words,

You can’t always get what you want,

but if you try sometimes, 

you might find, 

you get what you need.

and thinking how brilliant this was. No shit, really.

…Music this week: Howlin’ Wolf. I’ve been loving songs by him on radio lately. Also this morning, a great Jimmy Reed song. Plus see next post.

I’ve been walking over to document my neighbor Steve’s progress in moving a house onto a foundation on his lot. I discovered this great predator-proof chicken yard. Steve used rebar to form a dome shape (strength-in-curves) frame and covered it with chicken wire. We are about to build a new chicken coop for our bantams and I’m going to use this setup for their yard.

I worked until 4 today on the tiny houses book (which is humming along), and took off on my new bike for the hills. I haven’t been on a bike in the hills for many years, and this was like opening familiar synapses. Plus a bike that rides uphill like you practically have a motor, and absorbs shocks like one of the old Citroens, is a pleasure, to be sure. Hey, this was fun being able to cover so much more ground than running.

I ran across a couple out in the woods, he with a canvas bag on his shoulder, “Good hunting?” I asked. “No.”

Yeah, right, like your bag isn’t full of mushrooms, dude. Well, I’d do the same thing. So I rode out to beyond where I figured walkers would go and looked in the woods. Found some mushrooms, not sure about them, but the prize was a bobcat skull and other bones. Since I haven’t quite got my bike act together yet, I didn’t have a backpack, so I took off my shirt and rolled up and tied the mushrooms and bones in a hobo package (which meant riding home in the cold without a shirt). However, not only was I warmed up by the exertion, but on the way home the sky turned vivid pink, with clouds running horizontally, and a red band running vertically. When I got back on the pavement, cars were stopped on the road. Hallelujah to the solar system.

I’m going to bleach the skull bone white.

Bryce at Tam Bikes (357 Miller Ave, Mill Valley, CA) turned me on to this great helmet. Ultra-lightweight, with quick, easy adjustments to fit yr. head, plus an ingenious front buckle that can tighten or loosen the strap easily. Uvex helmets are made in Germany. My old helmet was so floppy I was afraid it wouldn’t be enough protection if I went flying. This one feels secure.