I’m doing a joint presentation with Jay Nelson at the Mercado Sagrado Fair in Big Sur this Sunday June 9th, on nomadic vehicles — called Hit the Road, Jack.
Jay will show and talk about his many road vehicles (including this rig he designed for Patagonia).
I’ll show slides from Tiny Homes on the Move, and we’ll talk about homes on wheels.
Going up to “Cardiac” section of trail last week. The Dipsea Race, from Mill Valley, Calif, to Stinson Beach, was first run on 1905 and is the oldest cross-country race in the USA.
The second from left photo is a rock channel for water runoff.
Some agency (California Conservation Corps?) is doing some heads-up trail work. (Although I hope they don’t “improve” the root-enhanced upper section shown in photo at right.)
For some reason, the spacey structure goes OK with the doric columns. Will be interesting to see it from the inside once the glazing is done.
Photo by Matty Goldberg. (Check Matty’s Instagram account for great photos.)
Shea Nyquist and his electric motorcycle at The Maker Faire Sunday. He is aiming at breaking the world speed record for electric m/c’s of 250 mph. See him on YouTube: shltr.net/elecmc
I’m doing presentations on:
The Maker Faire, in San Mateo, Calif., on May 17-19 this year, is always a great event. Kids totally love it. Check it out at: www.makerfaire.com.
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I never know what a book will be like until I start putting it together. I don’t do an outline or have much of an idea how things will turn out. I just start, two pages at a time, and let it organize itself. This one, covering almost 50 years of building, gardening, cooking, foraging, fishing, crafts, and other aspects of our lives, is maybe two thirds finished now, and I’m stoked. Due to the way publishing wheels turn, it won’t be available until March, 2020.
How did I ever get so old so fast? I’m a little stunned, to tell the truth. Some observations:
I never thought I’d be driving a Mercedes; I’ve always been a truck guy. But I’m currently driving a 20-year-old Mercedes E320. 170,000 miles on it. I got it for $3500, put about $2k into it, and it’s a revelation. My first ever automatic shift, and surprisingly I love it. I’ve read about some E320s getting a million miles on the motors. It gets 22-23 mpg. It’s got so many well-thought-out features and is so comfortable, I am not worthy of this car.
This scrub jay and I have known each other for a couple of years now. I’ve trained him to take peanuts out of my hand. When he was younger, he would come to the office door and make a racket. Now, he hops inside, perches on a rafter and waits for me to come outside with a peanut. He flies down from the apple tree and in one move, lands on my hand, grabs the peanut, and takes off.
Jays are members of the corvid family, which includes crows, ravens, and magpies. They are remarkably intelligent; their brain-to-body ratio is just slightly lower than humans.
It seems like all of a sudden, people are backing off of 24/7 phone availability and social media usage. It’s all gone too far, n’est-ce pas? It snuck up on all of us. A NYT writer recently spent a weekend in the woods sans phone and felt regenerated. There seem to be articles appearing every week. People rediscovering real life.
I’ve cut way back on checking Instagram. I’ve never used Facebook, although all my Instagram posts get put automatically on Facebook and Twitter. I don’t carry my phone a lot of the time these days.
Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees by Roger Deakin
A “…remarkable celebration of the transforming nature of trees, exploring the ‘fifth element’ of wood as it exists in nature, in our souls, in our culture and our lives.”
How to Catch a Mole: Wisdom from a Life Lived in Nature by Marc Hamer
The second part of the title is key here. Marc has lived a rich life in the natural world, and the book is full of his observations, as well as poetry and lovely woodcut-like drawings. I have an advance copy and find myself going back and rereading sections. Pub date October 1, 2019.
Idiot Wind: A Memoir by Peter Kaldheim
The publisher gave me an advance copy (pub date August 1, 2019) and I read it straight through. A true story that reads like a novel, Kaldheim went from editor in NYC to drug dealing to prison time to fleeing the city to escape violence and bumming across America, living in flop houses, eating at storefront shelters — to finally turning his life around. It’s as authentic and gripping as On the Road.
Listening to this just now, I got a chill. Ray Charles doing “Am I Blue” live in Tokyo in 1976, along with Johnny Coles on flugelhorn.
Ikigai (生き甲斐) is a Japanese concept that means “a reason for being.” The word ikigai is usually used to indicate the source of value in one’s life or the things that make one’s life worthwhile. The word translated to English roughly means “thing that you live for” or “the reason for which you wake up in the morning.…” –Wikipedia
After a two-hour run with Doug on little-traveled trails through second-growth redwoods on east flank of the mountain, I took the waterfall treatment:
Remove all clothes, lower self into pool, come up under waterfall, let it hit you on the head a while, maybe less than 10 seconds under water.
Emerge chi-ified for high energy rest of day. It’s free!
Tussock moth caterpillar this morning, about ½″ long. It was on a cup on an outside table, so now we put him on a milkweed plant, known to host caterpillars.
Recently, I went by 154 Ulloa Street, San Francisco, the old family home. I lived there until age 16. There were 26 kids on the block, and we played street games, baseball, football, rode Flexi racers. No parental supervision, no Little League.
During WW2, we had a big communal “victory garden” next to the house. I think we paid $9,000 for it new.
I used to put on a dish towel for a cape, swim trunks over Levis, and play Superman by jumping off the balcony to the grass below.
