In keeping with the Brotherhood of Beach Builders: no nails.

This is the most vital, vibrant time of my life. A lot of things are falling in to place, or about to.

I look around these days, at the garden, or the book production process, or attempts to gather, hunt, or fish for food, or my workshop—and think, this is pretty good. A lot of it a long time in the making.

The book SMALL HOMES continues to unfold before my eyes. I’m in daily touch with, typically 4-5 contributors (as many as 25 emails in some of the folders), getting large enough photo files, editing text, doing pasteup. Not in any special order — well actually, in the order in which it comes in.

I’m really excited about getting a new iPhone 6 (s Plus) (hoping tyo make my way through the AT&T maze so as not to pay full price — I have another year to go on my present contract). I think Instagram will be perfect for my daily photos, I may be wrong, but it seems Instagram is replacing blogs — at least with the millennials. BTW, there’s a good article on this age group (11-33-year-olds)by James Wolcott (an excellent writer) in this month’s Vanity Fair. I think I can get a journalistic flow going this way, and use blog for the writing impulse– like here (and link them together).

We’re revamping our website (being built in SquareSpace as we speak by Sean Hellfritsch) and it’s lookin elegant. By the end of the year, we’ll have a completely different looking internet “presence.” It’s important for us because we have so much”content” — maybe 15,000 photos, a good portion of these on homes and building. We’re also going to redesign theshelterblog and make good on my promise of getting mostly original stuff there, rather than recycled material that’s already been posted (much of which, however, is great and worth sharing).We’re going to build it, with the hope they will come.

I’m negotiating with publishers in Russia,China, and Brazil about foreign translation rights for our book Stretching (now in 24 languages).

Got my (12′ Klamath aluminum) boat with15 HP 2-stroke recently rebuilt Evinrude motor working well and improving my lame backing-up-of-trailer technique.

Going to build a sleeping platform. I got really excited yesterday laying it out — 10’x10′, — just putting 4×4’s on pier blocks, 2×6 joists on top of them made me realize that I miss building. This is gonna be fun!

The Monarch butterflies are back in greater number than years, there are big flocks of quail patrolling every corner of the garden, a beautiful young fox appeared this morning, scaring the chickens, and them scaring him too. At the beach yesterday, windy, high tide, I got 3 weathered 2x4s, 3 bird skulls — each a different bird — a lot of dead birds the last month, big bag of seaweed for garden, and check out this bit of avian skeletal artistry, what is I believe the sternum with cortacoid/clavicle still attached by one remaining tendon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfJRX-8SXOs

Saw this beautiful painting by Bill Holm* last week at Fort Ross. The Russians brought the hunters, most of them from the Kodiak Islands, to hunt sea otters at Fort Ross in the early 1800s. The kayaks were made of sea lion skins, the parkas (said to be waterproof) of sea lion intestines, the hats resembling birds.

“…The Kashaya Pomo called the Alaskans Underwater People because their boats sat so low in the water it seemed as if they were coming out of the sea. The iqyan (kayak) they developed is still studied today and its design is incorporated into modern shipbuilding. The Russians called these skin boats baidarkas.

The Alaskans were expert sea hunters. They honed their skill over thousands of years while living on isolated islands and waterways. RAC sent Alaska Natives along the coast to hunt for otter and fur seal pelts. They traveled great distances by kayak, including the Farallon Islands 35 miles southwest of Fort Ross across the rough open ocean, where the Alaskans stayed for months at a time. Alaska Natives used a spear with a detachable point tied with sinew to an air bladder made from a sea mammal’s stomach. After the animal is speared, hunters track the floating bladder, waiting for the animal to come up for air.…”

–https://www.fortross.org/native-alaskans.htm

*Represented by the Stonington Gallery; Also see his book, Northwest Coast Indian Art: An Analysis of Form

I’m rolling with layout of Small Homes. It’s like magic: I start with a bunch of photos and columns of text and start assembling. I’ll pick a lead photo and blow it up on my little (inexpensive)  6-year-old Brother DCP-9040CN color printer/copier and start laying things down, getting pics to size on the copy machine, shifting stuff around, adding text, taping it down with Scotch removable tape and voila, it’s lookin pretty good.

Note: we want to hear what people are doing about shelter in cities (other than paying $3500/month for a studio apartment in San Francisco). Email us at smallhomes@shelterpub.com

I’ve got so much going on right now, what with the book production, and also due to the fact that our sales have dropped off (in the midst of incredible feedback), so we’re working on marketing. Goal is to get people in bookstores just to pick up one of our books.

I’m back in the water after about 20 years of running (mostly on the mountain). Swimming and paddling my (12′ Joe bark Surftek) paddleboard, which whisks through the water. The other day I got in a strong outgoing tide, paddling hard, and was going at least 10 mph, if not 15, water spraying from the bow, pretending I was a speedboat. The water in the ocean is uncharacteristically warm right now. Some days 65 degrees. Am I in LA?