I met a man and he looked like me.......

Random photo of phun from the family archive...

Honey Creek, Iowa, The Aeroplane Inn, Christmas 2008! What a party month, that one is going to be hard to top, but spirits are bright around here. We're so financially poor, but so spiritually rich and blessed with family and friends and Lounge-iness all around!  Also the running water is back after the week of deep freeze. We never take anything for granted out here but water. It's the wet side of Oregon for crapsake! But when the temp goes below 20, our infrastructure is one big FAIL.  Oh well. it's all fine now, except for I have no strings of holiday lights that aren't already deployed in the studio or outhouse or office or bedroom. I'm listening to our holiday album and I suddenly feel like decking the halls dammit! Guess I'll have to redeploy the illumination for Santa's landing lights or something. OK off to fondle light bulbs. In the rain. With a beverage from the lounge. Bzzzzzzzzzzt. Dashing all the way.

A New Album!!!!

Download this album for free.

Low tech utilities - getting & heating water

A water heater, LeisureLand style.

Our water supply is frozen at the surface. However there is still an ice-free spot on the river where we can get cold clear water to heat in the big pot on the stove to wash dishes and people.

The bricks on the hearth are what we call "heat batteries". Tucked into cat baskets, outdoor houseplants and cold beds, they radiate a soft heat for hours after being charged at the cast iron flanks of the FRONTIER stove.

That's a dry, seasoned round of red alder, a superior fuel that grows plentifully and quickly all over our land. 

The weather is warming up now, raining and in the lower 40's. But it's going to take a few days for the water supply pipes to thaw.  The river is full of floating ice sheets and the debris that rising water always brings.
But now that it's raining, buckets under the eaves collect the clean rain water. Time for a bath. :)

Not Available in Stores, eh?

December! Holy Shit! Holidays! Snow! Dear readers, are you still there? Sorry I'm not writing much, I continue to lounge in the grip of deep inner contentment and am also in the middle of a music project. There are only so many brain cells available for output phase creativity in any given day. Drawing  dunes, and camels and angels and arranging  guitar and cello bits and deciding which reverb goes on which bass guitar...... etc, meow, blah. So yes! The new album, Christmas@LeisureLand is due to hit the web in a week. Final mixing and mastering are occurring over in the studio, as pictured. This has been such a fun family project. As always, stay tooned.

Other than that, it's been a quiet month here on the Siuslaw. It's pretty damn cold right now, and forecast to get even colder, with potential snow for the weekend. Remember, our usual winter  day here at 44N 124W is 4C and raining, not -6C, dry and clear with wind-chills in the eyeball-freezing register.

But as usual, our rural preparedness lifestyle serves us well. Plenty of firewood, food, meds, games, book, and projects to do with or without electricity. My distance-learning medical transcription school experience is continuing to be interesting, though I don't have as much time for it right now. Too much Art in the way, but that's the nature of the holidays. Back to slaving over a hot digital audio workstation. :)

Randomly fun official words and signs

I have nothing profound to say about anything, so on to the comedy portion of our show!

This confusingly funny sign was spotted on the maintenance garage of the Harrison County Electric Co-op in Woodbine Iowa, January 2009.

AC or DC?


Alternative energy?


Shock me!

Another chai latte in the home wifi cafe.....

Not much new happening. I like it like that. Homeostasis is good.

My new favorite Oregon weather and climate site contains this tidbit:

Behavioral scientists at Oregon Health Sciences University are credited with the original research that led to the naming of "Seasonal Affective Disorder," SADS for short -- moody, down, gloomy, depressed, irritable, and hungering for heavy rich food and COFFEE to get through the sunless weeks without end.
 

They're obviously doing this sort of research in the right place.

If forgiving is letting go all hope of a better past, then don't keep the records.

I had to do it.  I spent a night reading my blog archive and decided to set fire to the whole thing pre-2009 No longer applies. History. Just like that apple bushel-box of longhand journals I packed around for ten or sixteenish years. Until one night, after a few shots of Jaeger they just leapt into the woodstove, wire spiral bindings and all. Words stood out starkly from the paper before vanishing into orange vapors and grey crumbling char; harsh words like FUCK, SHIT, GIG, CANADA, JACK, SEX, BOOZE, STEVE, JIM, WAYNE, ROAD, DRIVE, BORED, SHIT, FUCK, GIG, BOOZE depression, richard, anger, michael, blues, morgan, depression, booze, gig, jealous, drunk, bloody, shit, famous, fuck......

Good fucking riddance.
Modern improvement; today's info purge is carbon-neutral. No flames, no waste, no gasses, no fuss no muss.
Onward.

Guest Story: I'm Gonna Die

Z.Kelley
ENG 3-4 HNRS
Autobio Narrative

    “I’m totally trapped” a voice in the back of my head said. I opened my eyes to the dulled image of a rocky outcropping about five feet in front of me. I was underwater, the sound of water rushing past my ears was deafening and I was quickly running out of oxygen.
My mind was racing, trying to find a way out. I was in a blue Dagger kayak; my paddle lost to the river when I flipped over trying to turn into an eddy, so rolling over to the surface was out of the question. My head was cocked against the sandy bottom of the bone-chilling McKenzie River, preventing me from rolling out of my kayak or moving. Ironically, I had gone into the rapid feeling somewhat confident. As I went through the rapid I noticed that my friend Mitchell was lagging behind me about 25 feet. Wanting to wait for him, I attempted to pull into the eddy to the right of the rapid, which housed an area of relatively calm water so I could wait for him.
 I forgot to lean, a costly mistake, which sent me down into the 50-degree water.
 “This is it.” The voice said, bringing me back to my predicament. I was really out of oxygen at this point and was left with no other option but to expel the air I had, leaving me with nothing.
Breathing water is very much like admitting defeat, except with a higher price. Some people would have called it an act of God. I call it good fortune that one of the guides that I knew quite well placed a hand on my kayak and after a moment of pulling my head, broke the surface of the river. I felt the comforting feeling of the cold October air filling my lungs.

“Are you okay?” shouted Mitchell, pulling into the eddy with ease. He had always been better than me. I still had a death grip on the sides of my kayak as I coughed water onto it. I took one of my still-trembling hands and in several jerky movements managed to hit my helmet twice, the universal symbol in kayaking to let him know that I was okay. He grinned and slapped my now-soaked windbreaker, causing me to cough up more water. I turned to my instructor and mouthed a “thank you.” She looked me in the eye and said “people make mistakes in life, and you chose a good time to make this one.” Mitchell threw me my paddle and entered the rapids heading down to the rest of the group. Dipping my paddle into the water I followed him.

I pondered this experience once while staring into the Colorado River 3 years later in August 2009. My line of vision to the river was interrupted by a raft pulling into the boat ramp where I was sitting. At the back of a river raft, leading a guided tour, sat the very same woman that pulled me out the McKenzie river 3 years prior. She gave me a brief little smile and walked off dragging the raft along the sand to the parking lot.
I find it amazing that her paths and mine crossed after 3 years right at the moment that I was thinking about my experience on the McKenzie.
Nothing is ever a coincidence.


-zwk-

Things are biggerly smaller in Texas ...

... at Tiny Texas Houses. These wonderful tiny homes are built entirely of salvage material. As the owner and founder Brad Kittel says on the website;

"After a generation of having it all and wasting so much, perhaps it is time to consider keeping it small and preserving what we have before we waste more of our limited resources. Please check back as I unveil my ideas for a simpler world built from the past with the best trees we ever grew, the best hardware we ever made, and the best ideals we once had, when we lived life in a different way."

This site is very inspirational when it comes to this nascent phase of designing my own tiny studio Queen Anne cottage, with visions of Gold Rush Seattle and high-speed internet service all rolled into one. Everything we build around the farm here uses salvage, some of it over a hundred years old. It's what's available. The concept is not new, but our buildings have fallen into hippie-hobbit-hillbilly non-style categories for so long, I'd like to construct something with a specific identity and cohesive design yet incorporating site-specific detailing and constructed to fit my own short physical proportions and activity needs.

Art Gallery - The Artist Feeds The Cats

Ok, so i don't have many pithy or pissy words lately. But I do have pictures, boxes of weird stuff and thanks to Mom, a scanner.

Time to get some of the art out of the box and onto the net. I dunno why. Less likely to get lost?


Here's a cartoon i drew about 5 years ago illustrating the ludicrous nature of feeding my cats.


Observe the rodent pieces in the foreground.


Observe that the felines are more interested in the human-borne kibbles, even though they've spent the entire night turning the living room into a charnel house.


Observe the silly cat-art on the walls and see that the human is hopelessly brainwashed into servitude for the feline nation.


Observe the deep nasolabial lines, messy hair, and honking schnozz that says yes, this is a self-portrait of your host. 


Observe the cutely cartooned cat scrotum.


OK, now back to medical transcription school, our regularly scheduled program these days.

=^..^= =^..^= =^..^= =^..^= =^..^= =^..^= =^..^=

Do anagrams reveal all?

Tracie Kelley
Create Likely
Ale Trickle Ye
Late Lyric Eke
Catlike Leery
Literacy Keel
Talk Relic Eye


try it yourself!@
http://wordsmith.org/anagram/

Home is where the Ham is

This is the Ham Nebula, where Meow Blah III lives, works, and naps. Balthasar and TRK live in an Airstream trailer about 50 feet east of this one. LeisureLand Community blooms in the house, about another 25 feet east of the Airstream. Other Leisurelanders live in their own little trailerish hobbit-villas and cabins scattered about the land in an ever more easterly direction.

Lately MeowBlah has been getting excited about closing in the porch of the Ham Nebula, adding a woodstove, frontier kitchen with cold running water, deluxe carpeted kitty-shelves and a picture window looking down to the river. Ever since beginning online coursework last month, MB has been spending a lot of time in Hamland. A complete interior re-arrangement and re-purposing of the space has changed it from a squishy psychic retreat to an efficient yet personable independent workspace complete with computer workstation, hi-speed wireless interenet, text reference library, nap couch, stereo, and snack bar.

Form follows function. It's time to begin the evolution from casual open porch w/Ham carport into a full-blown 200 square-foot off-grid tiny house, with solar panels, micro-hydro and a big-ass battery bank for my satellite internet. O the geekful technology! The Ham will then (with the re-installation of running lights and a current registration tag) become a mobile Away Pod, capable of vacationing down at the Old Town Campground at the Port of Siuslaw for a week when the forests of LeisureLand become too oppressively dark and drippy.
For now, gathering materials and making plans for the wood stove kitty-porch (Phase I) is a pleasant diversion from anatomy and disease terminology. :)

Local culture

Campfire. Beer. Guitars. Stars, in the sky, not on a poster. Local party, far far away from anything resembling a "scene". Beer beer beer & beer. I play because I want to, and remember what it's like to enjoy music. This is more like it. This is home. I see the Creator in the starry sky. I find my way home through the woods with no flashlight and convince myself to remember, please remember why drunk dialing is not a good idea. I thank God fervently and with renewed neediness for my still new-found moral compass, which is remaining strong even in the besotted face of the heart that remembers all the old phone numbers and reasons why punching this or that sequence would be rewarding on some level. Just say no. No. No. And again, no thanks. Listen to the record if you need to re-live it. Falling into a patch of blackberries in the woods in the dark while pissing down one's leg tangled up in overalls is a sign it's time to go home.
I can go back for the guitar tomorrow. It's just across the river. I love this neighborhood. ::)

Wasp Katrina?

I always like to know where they build each year. There are usually one or two visible nests in my walkabout zones. This one is on the road up near milepost 7. What's left of it, anyhow.
In this niche about 30 feet up in the cliffs of Tyee sandstone, a colony of Dolichovespula maculata thought they had found a perfect spot for a nest. A warm sunny ledge away from skunks and other predators. The nest grew slowly over the summer as more workers hatched to care for more larvae. The nest started to peek out from under the ledge, expanding to meet the family's growing needs. Bigger. More bigger.

And then it rained, a hard summer thunderstorm. Water cascading over the edge of the cliff and sluicing down the sandstone face ripped the outer coverings loose, washed weeks of hard work down the cliff in wet soggy wads. Exposed larvae died. The nest was abandoned. They did not rebuild in that spot.

Kind of late to rebuild at all, perhaps. Where do they go when this happens? Should I set up a cardboard box like a vespine FEMA shelter? Don't laugh, I have very few houseflies around here. Wasps eat them.