Idea File Pull

From an ad on craigslist.  Large windows for solar gain, brick floor for thermal mass

Catching rainwater from the carport roof

From Lloyd's blog: drying rack and dish storage in one place!

Bed platform and back rests

From beyondadobe.com: cisterns and gutter attachements

found on tumblr, great ladder

Sorry for the lack of credits on some of these pictures.  If you know where it's from please let me know.

Sketch-up

I'm still getting the hang of using Google Sketch-up, but here are some rough outlines of the planned "Phase 1" building.  After we save enough money to build "Phase 2", this will become the music studio.   This building's interior is 14' x 22'.

In the above picture you are looking at (from left to right): the bedroom (pretty much the size of our king size bed), a 1.5' thick bookshelf, built-in couches (can double as guest beds), the coffee table which will be used for art making and dining while seated on the floor, a computer desk, a small wood stove, and a bench for taking off shoes.

From this angle, left to right, we're looking at the kitchen area, large shelf for food storage, and the bathroom with composting toilet and sink.  Above the bathroom and bedroom is a loft (with ladder) for the kids.

There will be a door on the bathroom!  Shower will be outdoors, as well as laundry facilities.  Imagine a lot more hooks and shelves on the walls as well.

Holiday Weekend

Fascinated by the insane amount of advertisement inserts in the paper

Star Wars kids table

Cahokia Mounds

On top of the largest mound (100 feet up)

Water only washing

In keeping with my desire to move off-grid, water conservation (as well as money conservation) is consistently on my mind.  So awhile ago I decided to give water only washing a try.

Here's my experience:

-First, I just stopped using any products.  No shampoo, conditioner, bed head manipulator, Giovanni mousse or any of the other stuff I had been accumulating.

-It got greasy!  Like a waxy, hairy brick.  Luckily it was long enough for me to attempt a slicked back "Sade bun".

From the "Your Love is King" video

-I brushed it once or twice a day using both a plastic brush to get out tangles out and gather up loose hair, and a boar bristle brush to redistribute the sebum (your friendly, natural hair oil).

-I tried to get it wet as little as possible during this waxy period, water just seemed to make it worse.  The brushing was all the cleaning I needed.

-It took about 6 or 7 weeks for my hair to regulate itself.  One morning I woke up and it was back to normal.

-Maintenance is super easy at this point.  When I do get it wet in the shower (every 3 or 4 days), I massage my scalp a bit.  Then I brush at night.  DONE.

(It's not totally perfect every day, what it wasn't when I was shampooing consistently either.  A the very least it's easy, free, and possibly more healthy).

Profile pic and product-free hair

No foam here!

Carmen Carrera (gif from here)

One of my very favorite shows is "RuPaul's Drag Race" (new season in January!), which I watch online at logotv.com.  I really think it's got some of the most feminine-positive messages of anything happening in pop culture today.  Curves are good (whether they come from foam, fat or silicone), strength and confidence are essential, and with a little creativity you really can become anything you want to be.

Also loved this tweet from my drag queen crush, and winner of Season 3 of Drag Race, Raja:

I think most women would benefit from hearing a lot more messages that their bodies are beautiful, no matter the size.  Here's hoping that drag queens gaining more of a public eye is just the start of this movement.

Books for wanna-be owner-builders

I'm planning on building an adobe house in Northern New Mexico within the next 2 years (we'll be looking at land to purchase next month!).  I really don't have much building experience, so I've had to do a lot of research.  Here is a list of books that were particularly informative.

How-to's:

1. Building Green by Clarke Snell and Tim Callahan

Excellent book, huge amount of clear, color pictures that show their process of building this little house with different materials on each wall.  If you've never seen anyone build a foundation or a roof it's highly informative.  They are also very honest and talk about their concerns and what worked and what didn't work in the building.  Beautiful end product as well.

2. Living Homes by Thomas J. Elpel

I love a building book that tells someone's life story and how they built their house.  This is one of those, Elpel and his wife built their house little by little without taking out a loan.  There are some good general ideas in here as this guy seems to be a bit of a free thinker and an experimenter.

3. The Hand Sculpted House By Ianto Evans, Michael G. Smith, and Linda Smiley

This book focuses on building with cob, which is a similar material to adobe, but it's built up chunk by chunk while wet instead of being made into bricks and dried first.  Their "Heart House" is small, which I love and built around the occupant's needs.  This book gave me the idea for a "Phase One" building, which I am implementing.   Really, it's about more than just cob, a lot of design stuff here too.

4. Making the Adobe Brick by Eugene H. Boudreau

 Once you get through a lot of the general books and you figure out what kind of material you want to build your house with, you can start getting into the specialized books.  This one is a bit dated, but it's another story of a guy that just says (and I'm paraphrasing) "Fuck this, I'm just gonna build my own house for my family", which is basically what I said.  "This" being a mortgage, and jobs to pay for the mortgage, etc.  Also, how amazing is this cover?

5. The Owner-Built Adobe House by Duane Newcomb

Just some specific adobe information, nothing too fancy.  I honestly don't remember much about this book, but it's on my list so I must have gotten some good info out of it.

6. The Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins

Ok, so I haven't gotten around to reading the whole thing yet, but I get the gist.  Poop and pee in a 5 gallon bucket, cover with some sort of organic material that soaks up liquid, when it's full take it out to the compost bin and let it sit for a year or two.   When it's done composting, give it to your plant buddies.  It's available to read here: http://weblife.org/humanure/default.html

7. Create an Oasis with Greywater by Art Ludwig

This is my first greywater book.  I plan on doing rainwater catchment in addition to utilizing the greywater.  A lot of what we'll end up doing will depend on building codes.  Ideally, I'd love to just have a pipe coming out of the kitchen sink and the bathroom sink to a couple of fruit trees in the yard.  And an outdoor shower.  Keep it simple stupid!

Layout, Floor plans and Design:

8. Tiny Houses by Lester Walker

Great illustrations of tiny house layouts.  Most are really, really tiny.

9. Compact Cabins by Gerald Rowan

I found that books on cabins had the floor plan ideas I was really looking for: one large open room, a loft, simple and somewhat DIY-friendly.  A good range of sizes and uses are represented here.

10. The Cabin by Dale Mulfinger and Susan E. Davis

Another cabin book, the house on the cover is actually my favorite.  These are a little more contemporary (sometimes too contemporary, although this one doesn't get too far into architectural jerk-off territory).

General ideas and inspiration:

11. A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander

Wowzie, this book is crucial reading for everyone!  Not only are there ideas on putting together a nice feeling house, but ideas on how to put together neighborhoods and towns.  There is so much SENSE written in this book, it will make you feel even sorrier for the time and place you are living in.

12. Little House on a Small Planet by Shay Salomon

A good overview of small homes and a lot of the people in the small home movement.  It's really not about size, but about layout and how well things are put together.  Fun reading.

13. Home Work, Handbuilt Shelter by Lloyd Kahn

I love the books Lloyd Kahn makes (check out his blog under my favorites), they are put together in a fascinating, cut and paste scrapbook kind of way.  Tons of photographs and little bits of information about homes people have built for themselves, either very skillfully or just a bunch of stuff piled together.

Finding meaning for the Thanksgiving holiday

After watching "We Shall Remain" and reading 1491 by Charles Mann this year, I feel like I have a much better grasp on the actual story of the Pilgrim's and the Wampanoag's interactions and historic feast.

Screen shot from Episode 1 of "We Shall Remain"

But I honestly don't want to celebrate these English colonizers eroding the American's quality of life and destroying life in general with disease, Christianity, and war.  And I definitely don't want to celebrate their Puritan ideals which are still pretty pervasive in our society.

So I can either choose to not celebrate the day at all, or to find something, somewhere in the message that's relevant to me.  The giving of thanks is a good place to start.  Thanks for the harvest, thanks for the bounty of food that we are able to store for the winter.  Thanks for the turkey, cranberries, mashed potatoes, green beans, pumpkin pie, grits (traditional to my family's Thanksgiving dinner), hey wait, these are all foods native to the Americas!  One of my favorite subjects is food origins, so this realization that almost all of the traditional foods served at Thanksgiving dinner are originally American foods feels like something worth observance (although it seems so obvious).

Supai Red parch corn from my garden this year

Jalapenos from our CSA

For me then, the Thanksgiving holiday will be a celebration of uniquely American foods.  To give thanks and honor the land which I feel so tied to even though my ancestors did not evolve here.  We're traveling to be with family this year, but maybe someday in the future I'll be hosting my own Thanksgiving celebration.  So here's some ideas for my fantasy future Thanksgiving menu:

-Smoked turkey (preferably wild)
-Gravy made from turkey drippings and acorn flour
-Tamales with peppers and quail eggs (although eggs might not be in season?)
-Venison stew with potatoes and wild mushrooms
-Black beans and sweet potatoes
-Squash pie with a cornmeal crust
-pickled green beans

Options are pretty endless really...