Driving for 10 days on the wrong side of the road in Scotland was really stressful,  I think partly because I’ve been driving since age 14, over half a million miles of doing it one way. Ingrained habits…

I picked up a car in Edinburgh and was immediately terrified in the “roundabouts.” Cars pouring in from 4 directions, weaving in and out. “Give way to the cars on your right,” said Diana, and I used this as a mantra in the roundabouts. I ended up driving the last 2 days in a part of Scotland (near Irvine) that was peppered with roundabouts. Sheesh! I got better with experience, but it was still stressful..

The cabbie on the way to the airport navigated them smoothly, hardly slowed down.

It’s such a relief to be back the right (sic) side of the road.

There were maybe 100 of these, some serving as memorials to people or pets.

*So titled after San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen’s Friday columns, called “Friday Fish Fry;” Herb was master of 3-dot stories…

Water It’s raining this morning,

Praise the Universe.

We’re up to 28″ this year, more or less normal. Our well is working again. We’ve installed a 5000-gallon storage tank which collects water off neighbors’ roof. The California hills are an almost chartreuse green. Creeks are running.

Scotland Ho! We’re off

There is a festival of architecture in Scotland now, sponsored by the Fife Contemporary Arts Center. It’s called “Shelters,” and features an entire room exhibiting our work, with photo and page blowups, and our building books. It’s open now at the Kircaldy Galleries (about 12 miles north of Edinburgh), on the east coast of Scotland) and runs through June 5, 2016.

I’ll be doing a slide show presentation on May 10th, at Kircaldy Galleries, titled “50 Years of Natural Building,” chronicling our building books from Shelter in 1973 up to the present.

We’re leaving Tuesday via Virgin Atlantic. On Saturday, we’re taking a ferry to the tiny island of Eigg.

“Eigg (/ɛɡ/; Scottish Gaelic: Eige, [ˈekʲə] ( listen)) is one of the Small Isles, in the Scottish Inner Hebrides. It lies to the south of the Skye and to the north of the Ardnamurchan peninsula. Eigg is 9 kilometres (5.6 mi) long from north to south, and 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) east to west. With an area of 12 square miles (31 km2), it is the second largest of the Small Isles after Rùm.

Notably, Eigg generates virtually 100% of its electricity using renewable energy.…” -Wikipedia

Our hosts have arranged for us to spend a week in “Sweeney’s Bothy,” a tiny home looking down to the sea. Am I excited!

There are about 80 people on the island, there are kayak and mountain bike rentals, sheep, there are a couple of restaurants, the Whale’s Head Community Pub, and I am sure, plenty of kindred spirits. Yes!

I’ll be Instagraming and blogging, so stay tuned and ride shotgun with us during the month of May.

Social Media I’m doing less blogging and more Instagraming these days. Less writing, more photos. I like the immediacy of Instagram, still learning the techniques (don’t like the square format), trying to figure out how to use hash tags and get more followers…Check out our new Tumblr presentation of large beautiful photos: https://shelterpub.tumblr.com and https://shelterpub.tumblr.com/archive, set up by Sean Hellfritsch and now managed by Brittany Cole Bush…Check out The Shelter Blog, https://www.theshelterblog.com/, managed by Evan Kahn, and improving daily, with an ever-increasing flow of original material…we continue working on the digital side of our communications…while producing real life hold-in-yr-hands books…

Small Homes, the book We are 3/4 through with layout…about 154 pages so far and counting…Rick will be doing Photoshop work while I’m gone and then we’ll hit it again in June…this is shaping up to be a great book, I kid you not. You can see some sneak previews at: https://www.theshelterblog.com/?s=sneak+preview 

A gude beginning maks a gude ending. (Scottish proverb)

We are running photos of our French carpenter friends Menthe and Yogan documenting the trip they took this summer along the Northern Pacific Coast, exchanging their carpentry skills for room and board.

This is a tiny home they built in 10 days on an old Dodge flatbed truck in Humboldt County, California.

We are posting one of their projects each day for a week here: https://www.theshelterblog.com/

I was shooting photos of the old one and Louie said, Hey, the one across the street is identical. Sure enough. Twins. On the ocean side of the highway in Fort Bragg.