Trailer Park Girl

So here I am in the downtown library, not my neighborhood SoCo branch. Downtown library is nice, big, clean, well-stocked (full of language tapes among other things!), but NOISY. First there’s some French woman on a cellphone, recounting her woes at length in detail to the customer-service flunky of some vacuum-cleaner-bag company; then the security guard(!) posted at a desk near the entrance is jabbering on the phone with a co-worker; now some dude is blasting AC/DC at all of us through the earphones of his walkman. The striking thing was that in all of these cases, it took me at least a couple of minutes to notice: “Hey, that’s not the normal noises in here!” I guess that I too have become (to some extent) inured to the default din of the modern world.

And don’t even get me STARTED on the subject of public libraries needing to have security guards …

A bit of housekeeping administrivia … I have switched to a different spam filter, which I hope will screen out spam WITHOUT blocking comments from legitimate posters. Although SpamKarma seems to be very vigilant when it comes to screening out disreputable pharmaceutical links and such, it also screened out several comments that a friend tried to leave. Not only that, it didn’t even offer me the option to manually override the erroneous screening-out. I can’t have that! So I’ve switched to something called, I believe, AKismet or something like that. We’ll see how it works.

Long story short – if you have tried to post comments but gotten discouraged/disgusted, please try again. And thanks for your patience.

Photographer Michael Wolf treats us to images of 100 apartments, each 100 square feet in size, located in Hong Kong. Hey, such small dwellings may not be everyone’s cup of tea (and probably are some people’s nightmare, especially some Americans who seem to view the “supersize-everything” life as a birthright), but I think it would be a good thing if the option at least existed in more places. The availability of mini-flats would make for a more robust housing stock and more (architecturally and socially) diverse cities.

The fact that the photos include the residents themselves adds to the voyeuristic appeal of this intimate peek into homes that are a world apart from most people’s (at least here in the US).

Thanks to Gia, my fellow permie (and a gardener and knitter extraordinaire), for turning me on to this distant universe. By the way, one of my dwellings in Tokyo was a room in a rooming house. (10 residents shared a toilet and shower.) The room’s dimensions were about 6 feet by 7 feet, including the closet. I lived there about two years — it was paradise in most ways.

All right! Works great! How funny that it took me so long to figure out how easy it is to create a linked graphic from scratch. Now that I’ve surmounted this techno-barrier, I will be a linked-graphic-generating FOOL!

Except that the station ID should be *NINETY-ONE POINT SEVEN FM*, not 97.1

Why do I always get those numbers transposed?

d’oh!

OK, back to the old drawing board for a minor modification to the original Adobe Illustrator file …

***

OK, it’s fixed. Now to figure out how to position it the way I want to at the top of my blog. But not right now – I am headed out for some hilarious entertainment in the form of BORAT: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. (If my Kazakh ancestors are rolling in their grave at this, I hope it’s with laughter. Even super hardcore badass nomadic tribespeople of the steppes need to be able to laugh at themselves, dontcha think?)

I am coming around to a decision to go completely motor-vehicle-free. Over the past few days my intuition has urged me strongly down relevant paths. As anyone who reads this blog knows, I am deeply emotionally attached to my precious Truckie-pooh [blush] and would only let her go to a good home.

That said, I’ve become extremely interested in getting a sturdy bike with a bike trailer that can carry about 200 pounds. Some amazing sites about bike trailers – some commercially produced, some homemade – have come to my attention. (Thanks Birch!!!)

The best site I’ve seen so far is Community Bike Cart Design – Pedalpeople, which includes detailed plans as well as a nicely worded manifesto about why we should and can free ourselves from motor vehicle dependence and use bikes.

Bikes Across Borders has a great site including instructions for building your own trailer out of old junk. I am mechanically illiterate and all those illustrations of nuts and bolts make me go cross-eyed, make no sense to me. However, the website says that Bikes Across Borders has an “Open Bike Shop” at the Rhizome Collective on Tuesday and Thursday nights. Surely one would learn something and hook up with the right people there.

In the realm of commercially produced trailers, I am interested in the Xtracycle. It looks narrow, like it wouldn’t be able to carry much stuff, but my friend Birch says he loads all kindsa weird-shaped bulky items on there and that it can carry up to 150 lb.

Can you imagine the Permaculture booth arriving at the farmers market or other event by human power! What a great advertisement for sustainability. (Currently I am transporting the booth by truck.)

OK, just found this – add Bikes at Work to the list of inspiring and practical sites about human-powered transport of MASSIVE cargo (as in two mattresses stacked on a trailer!) They advertise a book about how to start a bike-based business. Check out picture of bike hauling a refrigerator!!!

As much of an insistent cyclist as I have been most of my life, I really never knew bikes could carry so much. If I had known the options, it’s possible I would never have purchased a motor vehicle.

Some people who know me might say, “Oh sure dragonfly, you can contemplate this lifestyle because you’re strong and healthy.” But when I think about it, I realize that a big part of why I am strong and healthy is BECAUSE I ride my bike and walk a lot.

Speaking of walking, the other day I logged about 11 miles going to my radio show and permaculture talk. It had been a while since I had walked so far (5 miles is a more typical day of errands and such). My feet got a bit sore but I scored lots of free fuel along the way. Ripe pomegranates (public fruit!!!) and a big box of nice chewy sesame-and-chocolate energy bars (turns out Austin is not a total bust in terms of dumpster diving after all), for example! One great thing about the fuel for human-powered transport is that it’s much tastier than the fuel for motor-powered transport.

Oh, and if I’m ever tempted to use weather or somesuch as an excuse, I can refer to this photo of the Bikes at Work folks hauling 500 pounds of recyclable scrap through the snow.

The best pagan shop in the whole wide world just got EVEN BETTER. Austin-based witchy sorts fretted when Natural Magic closed up its brick-and-mortar location, but now Natural Magick – note the K at the end – has gone online. By virtue of being Internet-based, Cedar’s new incarnation of her part of the shop has widened its reach. It offers the meticulously crafted potions, oils, incenses, and miscellaneous mojo that pagans of all stripes have come to rely on Cedar for.

The website is going live TODAY, Thanksgiving Thursday. (Now isn’t THAT something to be thankful for!)

Friday, November 24th, is International Buy Nothing Day, so the new website will close the shopping cart that day. You can look but you can’t buy. (Oh, Cedar, you TEASE!!)

Here’s to the new Natural Magick! May it live long and prosper!

****

UPDATE: Something weird seems to be going on with this blog entry and maybe others. If you see garbled sentences, know that I’m trying to figure out the problem!