Dear Lloyd Kahn and Co.,
My 45 year-old English husband, who has a log house-building qualification from the Log and Timber School in Vancouver, and I, a 35 year-old New Yorker with excellent knowledge of gardening and gathering wild foods (notably the growing of herbal plants), are looking for a suitable training opportunity to commence as soon as possible.
Yesterday was brutal. 100º. Us Northern Calif. coastal people are weather wimps. If it’s 90 we start melting. If it’s 35, we get frostbite. So this 3-day heat wave, where it went from high 40’s (at night) to 60º higher, was a shock. Lew and I worked in the office yesterday, whew! At the end of the day I went down to the beach. The water coming out of the lagoon was relatively warm, maybe 60s, and I stood waist-deep in the cool water. The stress of the day vapoorized. Dove in, body cooled. A young local surfer/skater bro came walking by in the shallows, and said, “Paradise!”
A few days ago, some doves flew off when Lesley walked out to feed the chickens, and she reached up and grabbed a feather in mid-air that was floating down. Very delicate little 2″ feather. Seemed like a good omen.
Here’s a rough photo of some rough layouts of the tiny houses book. I am having fun!
I am selling the 20 sided house that I built in Topham, VT ten years ago. The house is almost round and has great southern exposure with lots of windows on the south side. It has a massive central chimney made of old concrete road culvert tiles that holds heat well and distributes it throughout the space. The main timbers for walls, floors and roof are softwood poles harvested locally. The top floor is wide pine boards, with some 24″ boards. The sole source of heat is a woodstove and the water for the clawfoot tub is heated by a gas fired on-demand hot water heater. Water is gravity fed and comes from a spring.
Joe Golden
Traditional stilt house in the lagoon of Messolongi, Western Greece. Until 1700, Messolonghi was under the control of Venice. Its inhabitants were mostly fishermen who lived in cabins called “pelades, “made of a kind of waterproof straw and reed and standing on stilts above the water.
The weather completely changed yesterday. After two months of fog every day (since July 4th), the fog bank receded out into the ocean, and it got warm. It’s warmer today. This morning I hauled myself out of bed and walked over to the cliffs to watch the sunrise. The air smells delicious.
I’ve got rough layouts of 22 pages on the tiny house done now. Doing these layouts is my favorite part of my work. It took about a year to assemble all this information, and now there’s momentum going in putting it together. This is going to be a great book!
I fell in love with Silver Seabright chickens at a county fair a couple of years ago and now we’re raising a good number of them. This is one of our teenagers. On Saturday, I offed 4 teenage roosters, one we had for dinner that night, and three are in the freezer. We’ve also got about 28 juveniles (3 months old), and that will mean about another 14 roosters for the freezer when they start fighting with each other in a couple of months. We try to keep the ratio of one rooster to every 12 hens.
Made of willow branches and tule leaves, these were the dwellings of the Acjachemen Indians in the San Juan Capistrano area in California (south Orange County). In front are “gossip rocks,’ where women pounded acorns.
“In Museo Guatelli’s central room, a former granary, the collector’s traditional farming implements have been intricately arranged into expansive, interlinked patterns.”
It’s from Museo Guatelli: https://www.museoguatelli.it/
Spotted this at: https://is.gd/ewKGx
My blog had 20 hits from this website-with-great-name, so looked it up. It’s really nice. Simple, honest, human. You can relate to Monica and Brian. https://stoplying2me.blogspot.com/
Sample:
“We planned on sleeping out just one night, possibly two, and then going back to sleeping indoors on work nights, which are during the week for us. We were worried we wouldn’t get a good nights sleep, BUT, after being out there for two weeks and enjoying it so much, we are no longer worried about that.
I still find it amazing how the tiniest of efforts and just little changes can have a huge impact.
I’ve been three weeks today nursing a rib injury. I’ve learned how to stifle sneezes, because if I don’t, it feels like a red-hot poker in the ribs. But today, a sneeze slipped through, and there was just a tinge of pain. Yahoo! The body does recover…
What with a damaged knee (lower body), and banged-up ribs (upper body), it’s been a grim month. I need exercise, and when it’s lacking, the brain and energy level are flagging. Today things felt a lot better.
Also, I got six pretty good page layouts of the tiny houses book done. Definitely rolling.
Fire on cold night last week
Glenda walked into the office a few days ago and said, “It was 42 years ago today when I saw the Beatles in Atlanta.”
How did you like it? I asked.
“Oh, I was one of those screaming idiots,” she said.
Her words rang a bell. Later That afternoon, it popped into my head:
It was twenty years ago today,
Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play
They’ve been going in and out of style
But they’re guaranteed to raise a smile.
So may I introduce to you
The act you’ve known for all these years,
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
(Smile if you can hear the horns right now.)
Like when JFK was shot, I remember exactly where I was when I first heard that album. 1000 feet above the ocean on a Big Sur hillside, housesitting for friends on a dark night in June, 1967, fire burning. What is this? An out-of-the-blue album, a happy rock opera, with English music hall tradition, it was a jolt of joy.