Golden Seabright and two Silver Seabright bantams, our little beauties. Getting about a dozen eggs a day now. Both bantam chickens and their eggs are about half-size of full size chickens.

Jeez, has this been a shitty week. And jeez, am I a big baby. Yes. Any body part goes wrong and I’m devastated. I look at friends like Sherm in his wheelchair, can’t move a muscle or talk these days and he perseveres, and gets a twinkle in his eye when I give him shit. Or a bunch of my high school friends, who I saw recently at a 60th reunion. I should not complain.

  I had surgery to repair a rotator cuff repair a week ago,and it was only arthroscopic, for christsake, you know, “…minimally invasive.” Well I’ll tell you, my body does not like any kind of invasion. My arm’s been strapped to my side,with the bladder for an ice machine inside the bandage, all week. Can’t tie own shoes. Can barely sleep, have never slept on my back. After 3 days of the pain pills (oxy), I felt so groggy and shitty, I quit them. I don’t understand people taking oxy “recreationally”). Makes me feel like I’m in a hazy, fuzzy tunnel. I’ll deal with some pain in exchange for some mental clarity.

   Anyway, just started getting into gear last night. I had given Lucky Peach magazine several hundred of my photos to do a story in their next issue, which is on “the apocalypse.” The angle on me being homemade shelter, gardening, foraging, stuff you can do for yrslf in tough times. They let me comment on the 6-page layout (turned out great, they used about 50 of my photos), and I went through it with them yesterday (Sunday), and this got me back into the communication groove. Issue will be out mid-Feb.

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Cold Weather Layering Brrr! Cold. For California, that is. Sunny morning. California defaults to blue skies in winter, whereas I’ve found Europe in winter defaults to grey. These mornings, it’s 40-50° inside the production studio. Right now I have on 5 layers — silk undershirt, 2 different weight Smartwool Merino shirts, homemade vest, Patagonia down vest, homemade (fingerless) gloves, silk scarf and large wool scarf, homemade Alpaca wool knit hat. Oh, and Smartwool Merino wool longjohns, knee-length wool socks and Army fatigues (which I love for the pockets), Keen (the brand, that is) lightweight hiking boots. Actually, I never toted up all my winter clothes before. Layers. We have a couple of little 660 watt ceramic electric heaters which we use to heat the person, not the room. I leave mine on for maybe half an hour on cold mornings, then turn off. Take a walk to get blood moving.

Skinning Roadkill Fox The other morning a large ice chest appeared in our yard with a note saying, “For Lloyd from Nate.” Inside was a very large male grey fox that had been hit by a car. It had a beautiful glossy winter coat. There used to be lots of them around, then maybe 10-12 years ago, they all disappeared. Now coming back; beautiful, elegant little animals. They are to domestic dogs like buffalo are to beef cattle.

I skinned it, stretched it on a piece of plywood and salted it down. In a week I’ll send it off to be tanned.

Several people have sent me emails with these and a bunch of other photos of art made of firewood. (One of them is in our book Builders of the Pacific Coast, done by Alastair Hezeltine (p. 170).) I can’t locate where this group came from.

https://shltr.net/RTKnEA

Thanks to Ray Aldridge