Stopped at Tomales Bay Oyster Company Tuesday and picked up a dozen small oysters from Gina Warren, shown here. I gave her a mini Tiny Homes book. She looked at it in delight, laughed and, like a lot of young people, said she’d been thinking about tiny homes.
“Nice hair.”
“I curl it myself.”
I took off Tuesday in my car (Honda Fit, such a pleasure to drive) heading north along the coast. Overcast day, the colors best then (blue-sky sunny days wash out the color). Visual treat as i headed along the country roads, subtle colors, summer gold of the hills, green patches where there’s a bit of moisture; bales of hay, sheep grazing.
Gotta admit, I like driving (Calif. boy, started at age 14). With Sirius radio. Away from office and phones, mind can wander.
Turned on Outlaw Country for truckdrivin music — bingo! The Meat Purveyors singing “Burr Under My Saddle,” all the reasons she’s (they’re) dumping this guy… next song, “Zip-i-dee-doo-dah,” — “wonderful feeling, wonderful day.” Upbeat. The Coasters doing fabulous version of “Zing Went the
Strings of My Heart.”
Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart by The Coasters on Grooveshark This all put me in my best polyanna mode. Glass half full. Acc-en-chu-ate the positive. Can’t help it, optimism’s part of my m.o.
There must have been 100 boats out along the coast. The salmon are back in a big way. They’re fat and large. Best in a dozen years. Guys catching them out of kayaks. Good news in this bad-news-filled world. The ocean here is healthy.
Tons of material to report, will try to filter some of it out this week. Went for my first paddle in 6 months Saturday. Injured shoulder still recovering, but it’s a start. Beautiful evenIng, warm weather, warm water, I looked down and saw this crab, jumped off board and grabbed it (have learned how to do this from the fishermen). Had nothing to put him in, so took off my hat, stuffed crab inside, and tied it onto the board’s water bottle carrier with a piece of ice plant vine. Had him for appetizer last night.
Two years ago I did a “1/4 acre homestead” talk at the Maker Faire at the San Mateo County (Calif.) Event Center). This time around, I have a lot more material, plus URLs on all the tools I’m going to show. I’ll be doing a presentation on the Maker Faire Stage, at 2 PM on Saturday, May 18th, and at 2 PM Sunday, May 19th. Information on the Faire: https://makerfaire.com/. Reviews of the Faire: https://www.yelp.com/biz/maker-faire-san-mateo.
I’ll be showing slides of our homestead, and the various tools we use around here in the kitchen, garden, and shop — from 40+ years’ experience. I’ve picked the tools I think are unique and maybe not so well known, and left off all the ones that I think people may already know about. We’ve posted the URLs on our website here: https://www.shelterpub.com/_homestead/tools.html and I’ll be passing out cards with a QR code so people in the audience so they can check out any of these tools when they get home. I’ll also have copies of our Tiny Homes mini book (2″ x 2″) to give out.
Lew and Evan will be manning a booth (#4925) in the Expo Hall. This is the largest hall, and our booth is at the back. We’ll be showing the process we use in producing books, including the first draft layout pages done with scissors and scotch tape. We’ll also be selling copies of our building books, and giving away mini books.
Photo: draining dish rack in our kitchen built (20 years ago) by Lew Lewandowski
For some reason there were a bunch of really fast, really good motorcyclists on Hwy One last night. Not in a bunch, but one by one. One guy passed me (over double line) like a rocket. Zoom! Out of sight in a blink. Another passed me, then took the corner leaning halfway off the bike. They were at one with their bikes, and at high speed.
The fog was creeping in from the ocean and every foghorn was going off, all different tones, like they were talking together. Moaning. One night, I slept in my truck down by the Palace of Fine Arts, close to the GG bridge, and the foghorns were astoundingly deep and loud. Window rattlers. Somehow comforting.
Yesterday Lew told me he went for a run by a local creek, heard splashing, and came around the corner to see a huge female salmon spawning, and 3 males jockeying for insemination position. Pretty good for such scant recent rainfall.
This garden figure along my hike last night.
When a friend came over this morning, he said, “Red sky in the morning…,” referring to the phrase:
Red sky at night, sailor’s delight,
Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.
In other words, a storm is coming.
Caused me to think about this saying, familiar to coast dwellers and especially sailors and fishermen. So, why does a red sky in the morning mean a storm is coming? I looked it up here, on Wikipedia:
“In America:
Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.
In Great Britain and Ireland:
Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight,
Red sky in morning, shepherd’s warning.…
Weather systems typically move from west to east, and red clouds result when the sun shines on their undersides at either sunrise or sunset. At these two times of day, the sun’s light is passing at a very low angle through a great thickness of atmosphere, the result of which is the scattering out of most of the shorter wavelengths — the greens, blues, and violets — of the visible spectrum, and so sunlight is heavy at the red end of the spectrum.
Caught 2 eels Friday, plus these nice little rock crabs (with 20′-long bamboo poke pole). Then I got a 10-lb. salmon from local fisherman (who says there are salmon up and down the coast right now—yahoo!). I smoked salmon and eels.
Went surfing Saturday, too many people for me. That’s one thing that really was good about the ’50s: uncrowded waves. Think 8 feet and glassy at Steamer Lane, 4 of us out. (Oh I gotta stop this!) So I did a lot of paddling Saturday, working on shoulder(s) rehab. It’s always a plus to get in the ocean, in any manner. Surfing, paddling, swimming, diving…super energy gain.
“Date: 2012-07-08, 10:12AM
THIS HOUSE IS ON THE BEACH OF THE SEA OF CORTEZ OVERLOOKING 19 BEAUTIFUL ISLANDS. LAUNCH YOUR BOAT FROM YOUR OWN BEACH. WINTER TEMPERATURES NICE AND WARM AT AROUND 85 DEGREES.
THIS SALE IS A TURN KEY SALE WITH ALL HOUSE HOLD FURNITURE IINCLUDED. DIRECT TV AVAILABLE AS WELL AS COMPUTER ACCESS. THIS HOUSE HAS A SHOP THAT HOUSES A 19′ BAYRUNNER BOAT WITH A NEW 115HP EFI FOUR STROKE MERCURY OUTBOARD WITH A 25HP MERCURY KICKER. AS WELL AS A FORD BRONCO FOUR WHEEL DRIVE IN EXCELLENT CONDITION, ALSO INCLUDED IS TWO HONDA QUADS, ALL FISHING POLES, REALS, LURES AND THE SHOP IS FULL OF EXTRA PARTS, OIL, ETC. THE COST OF THE LEASE ON THIS HOUSE IS $1000 PER YEAR.
I BUILT THIS HOUSE 15 YEARS AGO. THE HOUSE IS MODERN WITH HOT AND COLD RUNNING WATER. KITCHEN HAS MODERN APPLIANCES. A DECK SPANS THE FRONT OF THE HOUSE WITH LOUNGING FURNITURE. MORE DETAIL AND PICTURES ARE AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST. TELEPHONE 541-608-8864
Location: BAHIA DE LOS ANGLES BAJA MEXICO. https://bend.craigslist.org/reo/3126235481.html”
From Lew Lewandowski
On Sunday I took my little (12′) aluminum boat (15 hp 2-stroke Evinrude) up to Tomales Bay to go clamming. A couple of near disasters: Backing up with a trailer has always been a problem for me; you have to turn the truck in an opposite direction from from your instincts to angle the trailer correctly. So after much travail and embarrassment (all the other boat launchers did it perfectly), I got my boat trailer down the ramp and boat in water. After parking returned to find 6″ of water in the boat. Forgot to put drain plug in. Estúpido numero dos. Bailed it out, headed for clam beds. The bay is beautiful, sandy beaches reachable only via water.
Sign made of license plates on Grandi Building in Pt. Reyes Station
This was my first foray with my clam gun, and I ended up getting 7 horse necks and one Washington. The gun is a piece of 4″ PVC pipe with a handle and plunger that pumps mud out and gets you down to the clam without doing a lot of shoveling. This week I’m gonna practice backing up trailer in a parking lot. I’m upping my intake of food from the sea (including seaweed) these days.
Left: nifty door latch of plumbing parts in Fertile Grounds coffee shop this morning in Berkeley
