Saturday, June 20, 2009

ahhhh coquile, oregon!!!

what a week? kept working on the foundation of the maintainance shop, it's real good experience in dry stack foundation building, but man, is it back breaking! We finally filled the hot tub with water, which is now, the bamboo forest sanctuary,Inaugurated it with thoughts of what the homestead will be like in ten ears, twenty years, and musci. My music, anaka's music on her ukelele. My music, disney classics, among other things. Today is the summer solstice, longest day of the year, when light turns to dark. here in oregon, it's funny thinking that winter's just around the corner, when it seems like it just left, but that's the way things go here.

i'M LOOKING INTO DIFFERENT OPTIONS IN THE ASHLAND-MEDFORD GRANTS PASS AREA OF SOUTHWEST OREGON. I'VE GOT THE ITCH TO BUY SOME LAND, A LITTLE PIECE OF EARTH TO CALL MY OWN, AND I THINK THAT SOUTHWEST OREGON IS THE PLACE FOR ME. SO i MIGHT FIND A PLACE TO LIVE FOR A WHILE DOWN THERE, WHILE I'M LOOKING FOR LAND. I HOPE TO VISIT MY FRIENDS AND FAMILY IN ISRAE IN A FEW MONTHS, AND I'M REALLY LOOKING FORWARD TO THAT. OTHER THAN THAT, I'M GOOD. SO PEACE

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Street Painting, Cat Palace, Aquaponics, and Naked Bike Ride

So I went up to Portland with soem of the people from Mountain Home to tak epart in the Village Building Convergence, this 10 day event trying to make the city more community oriented, blah blah blah. it's really cool, neighborhoods paint their intersections every year, build public spaces out of cob and other natural or recycled materials, plant gardens, that sort of stuff.

So yesterday we helped paint a street mural, that was fun getting messy, and we saw a cat palace being built, basically a tower that cats can go into and play around in with an aquarium and solar powered led string lights, very fancy. the guys property by the way was awesome, with lots of cob structures,exterior walls of the house, guest house, some other stuff.

we saw a guys aquaponics set up. thats where you grow fish and plants together. the waste pf the fish is food for the plants. It was pretty cool, cause it's probably one of the best ways to get fish, other than having ponds or just plain going fishing.

we had dinner and a salsa dancing lesson at the vbc headquarters, and then it was off to the center of town to witness the Naked Bike Ride, held annually all over the world, thousands of nude, semi nude, or weirdly dressed people riding their bikes through town, with police escort to boot. It was wild, and liberating. I kind of want to do it myself at some point. And to come back to the VBC next year, we only caught the tail end of it and there were lots of free or low cost workshops that i missed out on. One mre day in portland and than bakc to the homestead.

Thursday, June 11, 2009

The WWOOF host of my dreams!

The Mountain Homestead has many friends, "Friends of Mountain Home", They say. One of them is Dave Christian. He's got a place outside of Fairview, Oregon. 26 acres of forest and pasture, a river runs through it. He just started hosting WWOOFers this year and has a half acre vegetable garden, apple trees, blueberries, who knows what else, Oh and chickens, ducks, goats, and a few llamas.

Dave is a neat guy, does tile and stone work, and I'm talking professional stuff. He also has a recording studio in the house, a yoga/dance studio, hot tub, badminton net out on the lawn(nice lawn, kinda big, but hey, it's nice).

Maybe I'll come out here for a while before I go back down to California.

I tell you, putting in a dry stack urbanite foundation is hard on the back, my whole body aches. Though we've been really knocking it out the last few days, found our groove or something. But I'll be glad when it's over. I could use a more relaxed work, like farming food. it doesn't hurt so much, and it's alive not dead.

Friday, June 5, 2009

UNTITLED

I added a few pictures, which i didn't take, but you can find them to the right of this entry. enjoy

Rant:

I must admit that while I have had good experiences at the homestead, and it is a wonderful place, I'm probably going to leave in a week or so. There's not a lot of focus in the work I'm doing, foundation work is slow and tedious and back breaking. Also the work is from 8 to 1 and then 2 to 5, and i can find other cool places that only ask for five or six hours a day, even less. So I'm looking at different options.

I'm going to Eugene this weekend. I'll be staying at a lady who has a house and is gardening and other permaculture type stuff. I'll tell you about it later. Eugene should be fun. It sounds like a really progressive town.