Got up at 6, just as dawn was breaking. Wish I could say I do this often, but I don’t. When I do I get 3 times as much done, everything is so quiet, exquisite, as the day unfolds.

  As I write this, right now on BBKing’s Bluesville, “I’m Tore Down” by Freddie King. “I’m tore down, I’m almost level with the ground.” Next: “Temptation” by Kelly Hunt. Shit, what great music!

 Change in the weather last night. Feels good. Been unseasonably warm. Fog now in, storm coming. Rain, rain (+ neg ions), come our way…

   I gotta say, the election was a huge relief to me. For the future of Supreme Court, for just one thing. In fact I’m pretty fucking overjoyed to think that the Koch brothers and Carl Rove and the Tea Party and Fox and the Money Guys and Trump/Limbaugh/other mean-spirited, controlling people couldn’t buy (and lie their way to) the election. This just happened in America and it reminds me that there are things that I love about this country.

Now on radio, Buddy Guy with “I’ve Got Dreams to Remember,” done live in the Sirius blues studio. Great vocal harmonies.

Tiny Homes On the Move: Water & Wheels We’re in full gear. I’m corresponding with dozens of contributors. Material is coming in daily. Much from the UK — lot of nomads there. I’ve got about 50 pages roughed out. The book has come to life, as our books do once underway. Mojo workin.

   It changes from day to day. About 25% so far are “Water” (houseboats,sailboats, tugboat); 75% “Wheels” (house busses, house trucks, RVs, trailers, vardo, vans). I sort of schizophrenically juggle this blog, all the necessary pub biz necessities, and working on the book (and getting out to the beach). Both Lew and Evan are starting to work on the book. Lew on various vehicular homes, Evan on snowboarder Mike Basich’s truck/camper and 39′ sailboat, and some bike guys.

Tiny Homes at San Francisco Green Festival this Weekend We’ll have a booth, be selling Tiny Homes (plus other building books) for 20 bucks, giving away the mini (2″x 2-1/2′) books. Lew, Evan and me. It’s at a great venue, the SF Concourse Exhibition Center, which is like a big steel and timber barn. Sat-Sun, November 10-11, details here.

Stretching, the eBook Rick Gordon is putting the finishing touches on the iPad version of Bob and Jean Anderson’s book Stretching (which has sold over 3 million copies and is in 23 languages). When Rick started putting together our 1st eBooks, none of us realized that he was going to do such a masterful job. Jeff Galloway’s Marathon is head and shoulders (in design and ease-of-use) above any other running eBook in Apple’s library. Then he did Tiny Homes and it’s spectacular — even on an iPhone. The electronic Stretching looks really good. It’ll work on an iPad, also on an iPhone (dial up “Airplane Stretches” during your flight, or “Hotel Stretches” when you travel…).

Green Smoothies We just got a Blendtec super-powered (3 hp) blender. I’m making drinks with fresh fruit and greens (parsley, kale, spinach, dandelion roots, or carrot tops). A lot of times I get going in the office and skip lunch and this is a great solution. Interesting comparison between a juicer and a blender. With the latter, you get all the fiber. When I realized that, it was, like, duh…Not just carrot juice, but the whole carrot.

   Yesterday I made pancakes by adding 1 cup of oat groats, eggs, buttermilk, and baking powder (+ a little baking soda) —  blending, and voila — batter. This is a wonderful tool (better late than never). I got it with two books by the Boutenkos which are exceedingly relevant in explaining the principles and providing recipes. Here it is on Amazon.

Elegant Mini Reading Glasses You can put these on your keychain; I keep a pair in my fanny pack. They fold up tiny. For whenever I don’t have my backpack (with regular reading glasses). Discovered here on CoolTools (my favorite blog in the world). NOT available from Amazon; let’s hear it for the manufacturers!

As I sign off, it’s Slim Harpo doing “I Got Love If You Want It.”

12:30 PM Monday

I just talked to Jay, who’s in Nantucket. He said they’re going to take it (model shown here) into the East Village tomorrow, He said hooking up with the Occupy folks turned out to be too complicated. “It’ll be a tiny house protest…” — against McMansions, heavy mortgages, high rents, overconsumption, energy and material wastage in housing as it’s been practiced in America in the last 20 years.

For New Yorkers: Jay will be speaking in Manhattan at 1-4 PM tomorrow. Details: https://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/see-a-tiny-house/tiny-house-in-manhattan/

Politics: I cringe somewhat when posting political stuff, but I’ve never been good at sticking to one subject. I just happen to be all over the place. Once in a while something in the political arena strikes me. I don’t claim to be right and in fact, have a record of naiveté and even polyanna-ish hopes, but these thoughts and observations are all part of my world. Give me Obama, disappointments and all, over any of these dangerous creeps visible in the Republican media circus. I don’t have time to get into dialogues on “comments.” Just puttin it out there…

Music de este Domingo: Jimmy Reed, “Big Boss Man”

Big boss man,

Can’t you hear me when I call?

Big boss man,

Can’t you hear me when I call?

Well you not so big,

You just tall, that’s all…

Fishing:

It’s a great crab season. At night there are a dozen or more lights out in the ocean. Pulling crab pots. Think of the competence and resolve of these fishermen, out on the black ocean at night, getting knocked

around if seas are rough, hauling in heavy traps. tossing under-sized ones, and dumping the rest into boxes, then back to port, Not for the faint-hearted. San Francisco crab dinner: cracked crab, salad, sour-dough garlic bread, red wine.

   It was a much better year for fish in general. Salmon, halibut, rockfish. Great to see all these guys getting wild local fresh food.

Local Oyster Farm Controversy

The Drake’s Bay Oyster Company is being threatened by the same well-heeled “environmentalists” that recently forced the shutdown (in the next 5 years) of all trailers parked at Lawson’s landing. See my photo-report here: https://www.lloydkahn.com/2011/06/29/lawsons-landing-under-threat-by/

“…Some observers see a David versus Goliath struggle, with a federal agency and moneyed environmental groups picking on a family-run business.…” https://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2011/12/10/norcal_oyster_farm_dispute_spreads_to_capitol_hill/?page=2

For a very complete refutation of the National Parks Service’s bad science and underhanded tactics (in cooperation with the Environmental Action Committee) in an article by John Hulls and Todd Pickering, see: https://russianrivertimes.wordpress.com/

Homesteading 

They’ve Made a Better Rat Trap (2 of ’em):

The big problem I’ve had for years is that unless the bait is tied to the trigger, these cunning critters will spirit it away sans springing trap. I was sheet-metal-screwing a ½:”copper plumbing cap to Victor traps, but they would come off. Both these traps have got little cup/triggers you fill (I use Skippy peanut butter) and voila! The springs are also strong. (Got 2 rats last night.)

Woodstream M144 Power Kill Rat Trap

Ortho 0321210 Home Defense Max Secure-Kill Rat Trap

On this subject, here’s an article I wrote a few years ago on critters on the homestead for The Mother Earth News: https://www.motherearthnews.com/Modern-Homesteading/Protect-Your-Home-From-Critters.aspx

Homemade Sauerkraut

I got the book Wild Fermentation due to a Cool Tools review: https://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/005221.php

Then got this Polish-made crock: https://www.amazon.com/TSM-Products-Fermentation-Liter-capacity/dp/B002UUT4CI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1323633345&sr=8-1

It has a lip you fill with water to keep unfriendly bacteria out. Note: If you want weight (recommended), get the 20-liter stones, not the smaller ones. Anyway, sauerkraut (great for digestion) is composed of — cabbage and salt, nada mas. Simple! First batch worked great. Centuries-old low tech.

Is The Old New Again?

It’s not so much that “…the old is new again,” but that some of the old is mighty relevant in this day and age. To wit, Otis now singing “I’ve Been Loving You For Too Long (To Stop Now),” on a vinyl record, live in Paris, 1967, just sent a chill through me…

About a year ago I got whacked by a log sliding down a hill. ( https://lloydkahn-ongoing.blogspot.com/2010/08/wham-bam-accident-in-woods-friday.html). Didn’t knock me out, but struck my ribs and face, knocked me to ground. I drove home. The paramedics came and decided I needed to go to the hospital, so off I went in the ambulance. I wasn’t worried about cost, since I had Medicare. They ran me through a battery of tests, including cat scans of my head, chest x-rays. I’d lucked out, nothing other than a slightly cracked rib and cuts and bruises. I was out of the hospital in about 5 hours.

I got the bill yesterday, over a year later: $32,368,35! (Medicare paid all but $300.)

Some of the major charges:

-Emergency room: $8,997

-Trauma level III: $12,420

-CT scans head: $6,733

-Ultrasound $1,041

A couple of thoughts from all this:

1. Medicare works, at least for those lucky enough to have it. It’s a program the Tea Partiers and Republicans would never have allowed through, just as they’re trying to scuttle health care for U.S. citizens.

2. Ooo-wee, are hospital costs expensive! I’m grateful for the fine quality of care, but if I didn’t have insurance, I’d hold off an all this stuff unless things were dire. (Here they weren’t.) No one said anything to me about the costs while I was in the hospital.

I saw a guy being rescued a few years ago out in the hills, he’d been lost all night. A helicopter came and when they EMT came down with the basket, the guy asked the price and when told $6,000, he said “No thanks,” and the chopper flew off.

3. The big problem right now is not in making medical care available to citizens, but the high costs of it as it stands.

From Maureen Dowd’s Op Ed column in the Aug. 16 2011 issue of the New York Times:

“…After assuring Obama that she was a supporter, an Iowa mother named Emily asked the president at a town hall at the Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah what had gone wrong.

Standing in a setting that was Martha Stewart-perfect – a red barn with an American flag, surrounded by white pines, red cedars and pink zinnias – the president looked breezy in khakis and white shirt. But he seemed to tense up as Emily spoke.

“‘So when you ran for office you built a tremendous amount of trust with the American people, that you seemed like someone who wouldn’t move the bar on us,” she said. “And it seems, especially in the last year, as if your negotiating tactics have sort of cut away at that trust by compromising some key principles that we believed in, like repealing the tax cut, not fighting harder for single-payer. Even Social Security and Medicare seemed on the line when we were dealing with the debt ceiling. So I’m just curious, moving forward, what prevents you from taking a harder negotiating stance, being that it seems that the Republicans are taking a really hard stance?…'”

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/17/opinion/field-of-dashed-dreams.html?_r=1&hp