Truth Beauty Math Coffee Blog

You’re sitting in your favorite café. The kind with mismatched chairs and a shelf of lending library books near the door — dog-eared paperbacks, a few hardcovers with cracked spines, the occasional journal nobody claimed.

The numbers appear on the screen. Five of them. Then they’re gone. Three seconds. That’s all you get. Then a joke shows up — something about a bear with no teeth or a seafood diet — and by the time you’ve read it and smiled (or groaned), the numbers feel like they belonged to someone else.

It happened. A robot — a Tesla Optimus, to be precise — walked into a classroom somewhere in America, flanked by cameras and the First Lady, and the whole thing was presented as a vision of the future of education.

The Pentagon has a new name. Well, an old name. The Department of Defense is now officially the Department of War again.

Two sketches had been sitting on my desktop for months — separately, doing nothing. One generates rugs: deformed tangram grids, each cell filled with hatching, colors drawn from a random palette, tile edges warped by a slow sine function so the grid breathes instead of sitting still. The other draws mandalas: radial curves that follow the mouse, a handful of parameters controlling how the arms splay and bend and spread.

The CDC has been tracking COVID-19 by measuring RNA concentrations in sewage. No, really. Public health departments collect wastewater from treatment plants, test it for SARS-CoV-2 genetic material, and publish the data. The idea is that people shed the virus in stool days before symptoms show up — which means wastewater is an early warning system that doesn’t depend on anyone getting tested.

Last month the snow was still thick on the ground when Bella and I pushed through my favorite cafe, Brew Haha’s door.

Let me be honest about something up front: I’m not really a piano student. I’m a keyboard student. There’s a difference, and it matters.

The desert did not applaud their arrival. It did not rustle or bow or shift to make room for them. It simply continued being what it had been long before paws and pickup trucks and good intentions. A vast, pale ocean without water. A silence so complete it felt engineered.

In Is Generative Art Now Quaint? I ended with a question dressed up as a statement: I’m genuinely curious what’s possible now.

This one starts with a failed project. A while back I wrote about MAGA Mick — a cartoon character I was building in CreateStudio4. A flannel-wearing Republican voter, slowly reckoning with the gap between what he’d been told and what he was seeing. Satirical cards, one after the other. The premise was solid. The execution? Brutal.

Wherever there is number, there is beauty. Proclus wrote that somewhere between 412 and 485 AD. I’ve been carrying that line around for years. Not because I’m a mathematician—I’m not—but because I feel it. The beauty in numbers. The strange alchemy of turning equations into images.

When the Tool Evaluates Its Own Critics Here is a short essay on the problems with AI today, followed by an exercise in critical thinking demonstrating logical fallacies. I found the essay somewhere on the internet (don’t remember where), then I asked an AI to look for logical fallacies in the text.

Got Notes? # Most note-taking systems are designed for humans. You write notes, organize them, and hope you can find them later. But what if your AI assistant could be a full participant—reading your notes for context, writing new ones, and helping you build a knowledge base over time?

I found this one at the dump. I reminded me of my great-grandfather, Joe and his eldest son - my grandfather, Forrest. The painting is real and the story is true-ish.

Meet Fabric # Fabric is an open-source tool by Daniel Miessler that provides 230+ reusable AI prompt patterns for common tasks like summarizing content, extracting insights, improving writing, and more.

Meet MAGA Mick Something new is brewing. I’ve started work on an animated cartoon—limited animation, to be honest. We’re talking slow blinks, head tilts, awkward shuffles. The kind of movement that mirrors the mental gymnastics of a man caught in a moral midlife crisis.

I’m migrating from Blogger to Hugo to get full control over my content with MD The Plan # I’m migrating because:

It started, as these things often do, with a book. Not a new book, exactly—just new to me. One of those titles that practically taps you on the shoulder from across the digital aisle:

The mountains don’t care about your festival. They were there before the fairgrounds and they’ll be there long after. They just sit above Quincy, California, the way they always have — patient, enormous, indifferent — while somewhere below, a fiddle starts up and people who’ve driven three hours from the Bay Area shuffle toward the sound.

We made it. Shrek the Musical opened this weekend—and somehow, despite all the chaos, all the costume changes, all the quick cues and frantic prop swaps—it came together.

Just in case you always wanted a Markdown Guide # A quick reference for learning Markdown, the lightweight markup language used for formatting text on the web (e.g., GitHub, Reddit, and many docs).

Lucky me. It only cost $25 this time. And three hours of my life I won’t get back. Every spring, the house reminds me who’s boss.

Getting there. We’re about a month away from the premiere.

Rainy all day, but they need their exercise. The park, emptied of everyone except me and the dogs— tails up, noses down,

It happened too fast. My little dog Beatrice—BB—was ahead of me, doing what she always does in the park: sniffing, patrolling, trotting just slightly too far, like she’s got her own errands to run. I was trailing behind, letting her be her scrappy, independent self.

I decided to test out some of Google’s newer AI tools—specifically, NotebookLM. I was curious about their podcast generation feature, and figured: why not throw something personal into the machine and see what comes out?

I love getting together to play ukuleles with this group of fun people. For Valentines Day we met as we usually do at our local toy store and sang torch songs together. Bella loves going there too, especially since the place doubles as an ice cream shop (she’s fond of vanilla). Look for her. She’s partially obscured. I’m in the santa hat. (For Valentines Day ???)

There’s a particular cup at my favorite café in Quincy, Brew haha. It’s not just a cup, it’s the cup—the one they always seem to hand me, even if I don’t ask. Red on the outside, patterned like someone took the time to make something decorative just for the joy of it. Thick-walled. Just the right heft. It fits the hand like it knows the weight of slow mornings and second chances.

Well, it happend, I’m back in another production at the West End Theatre in Quincy, CA. This time it’s Shrek: The Musical—a tale of love, layers, and swampy redemption—and I’ve landed a small but mighty role as Papa Ogre. That’s right, I’ll be kicking off the show as Shrek’s dear old dad, paired up with my longtime friend and frequent stage partner, Michelle Pfingston, who’s playing Mama Ogre. In this go ‘round, we have the dubious honor of sending off our 7 year old son (Shrek) alone into a hostile world while celebrating it in song. Ain’t show business somethin’!

So… I’m auditioning for some kind of role in Shrek the Musical. That’s right. Community theater has pulled me back in—this time with ogres, dragons, talking donkeys, and musical numbers that are catchier than they have any right to be.

In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and mountains of the Mexican border I’ve followed the calls of birds that don’t exist into thickets

Starbucks buzzes loud, In coffee cups, flowers bloom— Secret gardens hide. - LFB + AI

I sat on the bank of the Middle Fork, My line cast in the shimmering pool, Like hopes thrown casually into the future. I thought about how truth, slippery and elusive, Was a lot like the trout I never caught.

Chains of routine bind, Dreams of wild, open skies call, Soul yearns to break free. - LFB + AI

River winds its course, Life’s push and pull shape its path, Flowing to the sea. - LFB + AI

Old man in the dark, Rain whispers of lost loves past, Tears blend with the storm. - LFB + AI

I’m not sure what this is. It started as a dream, I think. I wrote some words down about the feeling I had, about the character that appeared. I thought it might be a song, but no. It’s just this:

My friend Judith survived the conflagration that was the Dixie fire of 2021. It devastated her home town of Greenville, CA. She can’t leave as she has no one to take her away. So she walks and remembers. I think of her. I worry about her.

Didn’t I know you? Before. Ages back? When we stood together, incarnate? Didn’t I know you? Before the pitch pine dried up,

She used to talk to me. About her life. Happily sometimes, Sometimes not. Scenes from her inner landscape. I would marvel at the delight she took

Our latest book to read is: It would be great if we could be on the same page (pun intended) by all reading the same book although I understand this isn’t alway possible.

Dear Sophie, I was deeply moved and enlightened by your latest book. Your vivid and flowing prose brought the story to life, and it was clear that you had poured your heart and soul into your research. Your decision to travel to Israel and walk on those ancient paths was a testament to your dedication to your craft. Your love of this planet is palpable. The implications you have unfurled for understanding the true history of Christianity is enormous.

And my own body felt more alive than it ever had, as if the woman’s long-nailed finger had reached into my chest and kindled the flame in my heart. I could hear every sound around me again, painfully. I swallowed, tasting each particular smell. Human piss. Dirty wool. The sweat of a person about to die. Gummy and blue, like rainwater caught in a stone’s cleft. Bird droppings. Balsam perfume. Galbanum incense. The dense, moist center of yeasty bread.

LACUNA A small comfort to know you already have lips, eyelashes, a bellybutton, a way of taking coffee; already have friends, ticket stubs, scars,

We have a loose rule that everyone in the club gets to choose a book for us all to read. We’re in agreement to read it - or some of it, even if we don’t like it.

Thanks Sue. Nice book. You gutted me. The cover of the book is innocuous enough, but wading into those pages, I found myself wandering through a landscape both haunting and visceral. It was far from a meandering journey of fiction, but a raw traversal through history’s harshest terrains. Each word, each account, felt like a shard of glass, piercing and cutting me.

Sitting on your deck with your laptop now, you realize there are so many possibilities in spiral-making. *From wikipedia: * Some of the most important sorts of two-dimensional spirals include:The Archimedean spiralThe hyperbolic spiralFermat’s spiralThe lituusThe logarithmic spiralThe Cornu spiralThe Fibonacci or golden spiralThe Spiral of TheodorusThe involute of a circle spiral

You’re sitting on your back deck. It’s mid-morning in late Spring. You have your coffee in hand and the local paper on your lap. You’re looking out over the back 40. You decided not to plant corn on this parcel to let the soil recuperate a bit.

In numbers, there lies a beauty profound, In spirals, this beauty is perfectly wound. From sunflower fields to the galaxies’ twirl, The spiral is nature’s own charming whirl.

I started a book club along with my buddy Brian. Years back I was originally involved with a blog called Quincy Writers Group with some local writers. The new blog is called Reading, Writing and Arithmetic Club. We are readers and writers and people who have a fascination with numbers and images (although this isn’t required to be a part of the group). We want to read good books and get together to discuss them. We also want to write essays, poems and just about anything. Some of us love numbers and like to write code to generate pictures and maybe write about that too!

Out in some math-born corner of the void, the Blobs float. They spin. Pulse. Change color like they’re listening to music only they can hear.

There once was a little black dog named Beatrice who had spent most of her life living in a shelter. She was a sweet and gentle dog, but unfortunately, no one had ever come to adopt her.

I’ve been wanting to go biking for weeks, but the weather has beaten us back to the interior of the house. Until today. Sunny but chilly, I took advantage of the break in the weather. The next 5 days look awful for biking, so it had to be today. 

We’re Dog On It, Johny McDonald, Ken Cawley, and myself. And we’ve been asked to play at the Drunk Brush on Fridays recently. Some good ol’ fun going on! Trying new stuff, new sounds as well as some old ones, of course. Why Dog On It? Because between Johny and I, we own 7 dogs.

I asked ChatGTP and DALL-E to generate a story and illustration about an old man being grumpy about it being too cold and snowy to go out and ride his bike.

It’s totally my fault for not buttoning up the house. I have several places where any critter can get access to the crawl space. So, they’ve moved in whoever they are, and BB is going crazy trying to figure out who/what it is. I think she is worried they may make their way inside.

Outside my front door. I guess it’s not summer anymore. The once-endless days of sunshine and warmth have given way to a cool, crisp breeze and the changing colors of the leaves. The air is filled with the aroma of burning wood and the distant sound of geese flying south.

The world changed a few days ago. OpenAI released ChatGTP, a conversational AI open to everyone. It’s blowing minds everywhere.

It’s been 3 long years since the last Plumas Homegrown Americana Festival. One year was canceled due to Covid, the next due to the Dixie Fire. This year it was hot but we pulled it off and it was fun! I have my own section of the festival with a stage as well as several pop-up tents for work/play shops. Rickety Bridge on Barky’s Stage

Dragging BB around in a trailer behind an e-bike. I borrowed this bike and trailer, ‘cause I want to build or buy my own. Thinking about possible different configurations. This could be a new, fun hobby for us!

Plumas County is commemorating the one-year anniversary of the Dixie Fire. I’m organizing and MCing the Friday night event which is a show and tell for locals to express their sentiments about their experience of the fire in song, dance, prose, etc.

Photo from 2008 ‘Twas fun. We worked on our tunes, which we’ve accumulated over the years. My favorite from last night was probably Cricket On The Hearth into Sadie At The Backdoor.

I just started playing at JJ in E. Quincy. Solo (so far), 6:30ish Background music. Vocals. Experimental.

Some months later, Lucky found a new home. A nearby ranch had what I was told—quite delicately—was a “hen-heavy situation.” Dozens of ladies. No gents. The kind of imbalance that called for… let’s just say, some poultry-level testosterone.

The Dixie Fire has devastated us. It will be forever until we bounce back. I was worried that my favorite local hiking trails had burnt, but most of them didn’t!

I finally finished this electrical rebuild in the Beaver. I ordered all the parts I thought I needed, did more research, and started cutting, splicing, and crossing my fingers.

It’s been much longer than I expected but I have finally gotten around to working on the electrical rebuild of the Beaver, my ancient RV. It was back in December of 2017 I started implementing a plan to upgrade the electrical system. I bought books, I studied, I ordered parts, I jumped in. Then it got too cold and other projects seemed more important so I let it go. I figured it was a good enough start.

It crowed. That was the beginning. Lucky D. Clucky was supposed to be a she. Soft-spoken. Egg-laying. Hen-like in all the traditional ways.

I just finished this one. Really fascinating story well written.

# “To understand recursion, you must understand recursion.”

This: and this: based on this:

The latest image from my generative art series was a nice surprise. It started as this: for (i in 1:500) { x = x*((0.98)^i)*cos(i) y = y*((0.98)^i)*sin(i) } which is simple R code that generates 500 x, y points that spiral. That code gave me this:

I have a friend that likes to bring me coffee from various places in Latin America that he visits. Took me about a week to drink this one up. Tasted like a medium-dark roast, slightly bitter. Good, not great to my palette. Thoroughly enjoyed it however.

I consider myself a fledgling geometer. That is, someone who is inspired by the beauty in numbers and wants to make stuff in that realm. Geometric images and like that. Some call it Sacred Geometry. I prefer to call it Inspired Geometry. So, I’m an Inspired Geometer? Okay. I can go with that.

Michael Finkel, Author “It’s the ending, I believe, that Knight planned. He wasn’t going to leave behind a single recorded thought, not a photo, not an idea. No person would know of his experience. Nothing would ever be written about him. He would simply vanish, and no one on this teeming planet would notice. His end wouldn’t create so much as a ripple on North Pond. It would have been an existence, a life, of utter perfection.”

Hanging out at Midtown Coffee in Quincy, Ca. Rainy day. Reading, drawing, and this: Coffee: Ethiopian dark Grub: Cherry turnover

Found a can of this at C.A.N.: It’s delicious, smoky, and hot, man! I’ve been adding it to spice up my fixin’s and I’ve learned to moderate it.

I can’t very easily put to words my regard for this man. I’m still reading, discovering, exalting in, and being astonished by his work. I’ll let some of the words of others that have experienced his thoughts live here:

Grass high under apple trees, The bark of the trees rough and sexual, the grass growing heavy and uneven. We cannot bear disaster, like

We cannot know his legendary head wide eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside,

A curve that starts from a point and moves farther away as it revolves around the point is called a spiral.

Coffee: San Francisco Bay French Roast beans (Costco) Adulterated with: Kirkland Organic Virgin Coconut Oil Kerrygold Pure Irish Butter (unsalted)

A friend who had pancreatic cancer (and has since passed away) created a campaign to raise awareness and research funds called Purple Stride. I wasn’t able to make the walk so I let her know I was thinking of her …

Let’s use math to draw pictures, shall we? There is a wonderful world out there of representing patterns in nature, especially flowers, in mathematical terms. Ever gazed into a sunflower? I hope so. I’m learning and exploring as I go along here, so I’ll start with simple circle plots and move on from there. But where to start? How about Pythagorus?

Can there be beauty in math? I think so. I want to experiment with this idea for awhile. So, here goes a new series: The Beauty In Numbers. I’m going to off on a tangent (!) and study mathematics and art together.

"… it’s Ok for our hearts to be broken over the world. What else is a heart for? There’s a great intelligence there. We’ve been treating the earth as if it were a supply house and a sewer. We’ve been grabbing, extracting resources from it for our cars and our hair dryers and our bombs, and we’ve been pouring the waste into it until it’s overflowing, but our earth is not a supply house and a sewer. It is our larger body. We breathe it. We taste it. We are it, and it is time now that we venerate that incredible flowering of life that takes every aspect of our physicality."

Must … not … let … this … go! I haven’t been working on learning the fretboard for months. Probably gone backward as a result. 

*as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds. *(John Keats)

Work? I don’t have to work. I don’t have to do nothing but eat, drink, stay black, and die. This little old furnished room’s

Was She chanting for Bread? Was He shouting “Liberty”? Was It demanding Social Justice? The majority might pretend to own moral values, but if it closes its eyes to hunger, dictatorship, and injustice, those values are not mine. The yes-men of the state might try to stand between us and God, but my God does not rub shoulders with dictators and their enablers. I worship the God of Bread, Liberty, and Social Justice.

Yet beauty’s visitation affects us and invites us into its rhythm, it calls us to feel think and act beautifully in the world: to create and live a life that awakens the Beautiful. A life without delight is only half a life. Lest this be construed as a plea for decadence or a self-indulgence that is blind to the horrors of the world, we should remember that beauty does not restrict its visitations only to those whom fortune or circumstances favour. Indeed, it is often the whispers and glimpses of beauty which enable people to endure on desperate frontiers.

For the last 5 years or so, I’ve been mixing coconut oil and butter in my coffee. And, I love it.

We, too, cry falling to the edge of the earth. But we don’t store our voices in old jars. Nor hang mountain goats

Cafe: Alleycat (closed) Grub: Dark coffee of the day, black, served with sticky bun

This is the last day in a month you will never see again in your lifetime. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

I usually don’t like cooking in the Summer. Heats up my kitchen. Since I don’t have A/C I want to avoid this. Here is a solution. It’s kinda fun to play around with different food stuffs to cook. So far mostly it’s been veggies and chicken.

We know that sound results from the vibrations of air molecules moving through the air to our eardrums, that the speed of those vibrations is referred to as frequency, measured in Hertz, and that pitch is the relative highness or lowness of a sound. But what is music?

This seems tragic to me. Roughly one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year — approximately 1.3 billion tonnes — gets lost or wasted. 

Learning the names of the modes (why are they sometimes called the church modes?). So weird. Making a smart flashcard deck. DPLMAL is a mnemonic.

Industrialized and developing countries dissipate roughly the same quantities of food — respectively 670 and 630 million tonnes. 

Again, weird that I haven’t learned this by now. So, here we go. First I want to learn the Pentatonic Scales all over the neck.

I started learning the notes on the guitar fretboard. Harder than I thought! I have the basics down but I have to keep drilling. I looked around for ideas on how best to learn – there are many ideas on how to do this. I tried making smart cards, which I think may be beneficial, but I ’m not certain I know which method is ultimately the best.

I occasionally work for a local food bank called Community Action Network. It’s a great service to a community that has people in need. They distribute food for free to folks that need it. I like to help out and I get some free food. I’m amazed how much overproduction of food there is floating around. The are a lot of canned goods, but loads of fresh foods too. Much of it is approaching expiration. If you go look you can find surprises there.

I’ve been playing guitar more or less continuously for about 15 years. Amazingly and ashamedly, I haven’t bothered to learn the notes on the guitar fretboard. The whole fretboard. That ends this week.

I’ve been avoiding this. I have had a love-hate relationship with the guitar for years. I’ve been playing it because it is easy and there is something undeniably beguiling about the instrument. But everyone plays guitar and it is so difficult to distinguish yourself among the crowd.

Today, I’m a raw nerve. I am a 360 degree, fully dimensional person. I feel things, I react, I acknowledge, I let them go. I don’t know if it’s bio-rhythms, phases of the moon or some other force, but I am emotional today. I feel like a hut on a beach with no walls in the tropics. The wind blows through all day in different strengths and from different directions carrying scents from far away.

YOU. ARE. WHAT. YOU. THINK. Buddha: “get a grip on your mind” Me: “dude, I’m trying”

Yes, I did it again. Decided to take on another role in a local community theater production of … wait for it …

Last Fall, as I was closing down the garden irrigation for the Winter, the valve broke (plastic!). Luckily it broke in the off position. I held out hope I’d be able to clamp onto some part of the old valve with a pair of vice grips and turn it back on. But looking at it closely: nope. It was going to be a project. I started digging.

Taking a little hiatus from weekly projects for a bit. I think limiting each project to one week is too confining for my taste. So, they will be back but with a change. I’ll probably just call them Projects.

This week I continued working on some hand separation exercises. There wasn’t much time devoted to it, but what I did do was surprisingly effective. I’m really encouraged and will keep working on this.

Last week I started working on one of my pet peeves, my inability to attain the dual processing that is required to play piano or accordion (or some other similar instrument).

Great project to work on but it was shortchanged. I had a performance on Friday, then got sick on Saturday.

This is a biggie for me. As an adult learner, I don’t have the benefit of a young, plastic brain to have learned the “dual processing” that is achieved when a young person becomes proficient on the piano.

This week I split my efforts between two musical pursuits: practicing for a performance and practicing chord inversions on my accordion keyboard.

This week’s project is of a musical nature. And it has two parts, somewhat unrelated.

I tried taking on a rewiring project for my old RV. It appears I bit off more than I could chew for my experience level and the time I had. The weather was a partial factor. Anyway, it’s far from done. I did learn a lot though and I’m keen to continue ‘cause ’lectricity is fun!

For this week’s project I’m going to begin rewiring the Beaver! The Beaver is my 1973 Dodge RV. It is my mobile hovel away from the hovel. I have never done anything like this before and I’m looking forward to whacking on this thing.

For this week’s project I read 3 books and enjoyed them all. When Breath Becomes Air is an emotional and moving memoir by a highly recognized Stanford neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi, who becomes sick with lung cancer and struggles with meaning in his last days of life. It was a beautiful, haunting, indispensable and compelling read. I say indispensable because I think we could all benefit from asking this question of ourselves: what is truly meaningful and worth living for? This book takes that on and more, and made me think a lot about this. I’m sure I will keep pondering the central message of this book, and for that I’m very grateful.

Weekly projects. This is a new effort. Must needs I focus on my activities or I am likely to go off and scatter. Here is my plan. On weeks when I choose to commit to a project, I’ll announce what I am going to do and what I want to achieve. I’ll start on Monday of that week, work some amount on it daily, then finish up Friday or Saturday, and write up my thoughts on Sunday.

I’ve had this 35 ft 5th wheel trailer in my driveway for 14 years! I bought it about a year after I bought the house so that my parents could come to stay without having to deal with coming into a … filthy hovel.

Long time no post, eh? But I’ve been busy, trust me. Here’s a little bit of what I’ve been up to: Siding and painting,

I set up my living room to be my bedroom. Because it was warmer, more convenient and I just felt like doing it that way.

When I first moved in late 2002, it seemed the obvious choice for a bedroom. Now it is the obvious choice for a music room.

Hanging out with the pups Rehearsal with the band

As Summer winds down, I want to reflect on where I am with this house of mine. It’s been a busy 6-8 weeks of work, starting with mudding, texturing, then painting the walls of the living room where I sleep. Next came the decision to pull out the carpet and lay down flooring that matched the kitchen. Then I built a bed (more on that later).

Found in the side yard rubble. Unimaginable as it may seem, I finally moved into my own house, a place I have referred to as a filthy hovel for years. Over an 8 week period - April through May, I made a concentrated push to get the most important tasks done that would allow for a minimal, man-cave-ish existence.

The hovel is without a real water heater, so I rigged up a solar water warmer with black tubing on the roof.

And no play, will make the old hovel a home some day. I hope.

Before I get a real water heater, I’m rigging up a solar variety - a very simple one - using a black hose on the roof. Of course this is nothing new. It’s done all over the world and makes such sense. Why wouldn’t you want to cut pollution and save money by letting the sun heat, or pre-heat your water?

Happens to be of the solar variety. Gonna hook it up myself.

Grrrr…

Paleo diet - beef and veggies.

Small steps forward and back, along with help from friends (thanks so much Lorne and Chris!) and here I am. My kitchen is forming and so close to being usable - in a man cave sense. Just finished the floor. I should have cold water working in the sink today, with warm/hot water from passive solar working by end of next week. Then I’ll move on to putting up pantries and figuring out what to do with these plywood counter tops. Next, maybe some painting and cabinet doors.

Today, I vow to finish laying down my new kitchen floor! It’s taken me about a week. More pics to follow.

In order to move into The Hovel, I must have some kind of working kitchen. While I could simply eat out every day, assuming I actually wished to prepare any food at home, I suppose I could get by with a sink, a hot plate, and a camping cooler (been there).

**June 2nd **is the DROP DEAD move in date to the hovel - come what may. Have: Roof (leaky) electricity fridge * range * some furniture cold water in bathroom working toilet

Hard to believe I’m still working on this, but I am. Must do something about this floor. I’m resolving to resolve it within the week.

So, you want to own the home you live in? You’re not alone, but things are changing rapidly. Big decision and it can be painful to change your mind. I can’t give you any help here except to say that I personally prefer to own my home, which is astonishing considering I don’t even live in the home I own - no one does, because as you know, it’s an empty wreck (a FH).

There they are again. Small green insistences pushing through soil that still looks tired from winter. Late March is mostly mud and memory. Nothing grand. Nothing showy. And yet these bright threads rise as if they’ve received a private memo from the sun.

I image most of us like to think we’re different in so many ways. We’re absolutely incomparable on some level or another. But are we? Look around. We all dress remarkably alike, especially us guys. In a culture that tolerates diversity, we don’t really express it much. Why?

… in the midst of the not-so-pretty.

Start the season with pruning.

I decided to go with another gas company to save money. Mistake. Didn’t save money because of turnover costs. More importantly we discovered a large leak in the pipe under the house. We could smell and hear it, but not see it. I’m really glad I asked the gas dude to turn it all on and light the stove pilot light because if I did it I wouldn’t have noticed the leak and it probably would have accumulated under the house until it blew. It probably would have been an explosion large enough to blow me to Mt. Lassen.

Sometimes, things move along so slowly and the end seems impossibly distant. I want to just hang it all up. I mean, I literally got the idea to stop all this silliness and just hang up hammocks everywhere. Just use the house as a shell to hang around in. 

I moved out of my house right away. Not because of the Sav-More situation and the lack of facilities, but because the place depressed me. Why? It’s a filthy hovel. 

I moved into the hovel. Something needed to change. I just had to do it. Things haven’t progressed in months. I figured if I live there I’ll have to deal with it. Even though there is no water and minimal electrical. I have to go to Save-Mor to poop and the coffe shop to wake up. Like I said, insane.

Nothing is simple in this place. I just wanted to texture and paint a tiny 4’ X 6’ room - a laundry room.

Things have been busy at the hovel the last few weeks. Leslie and I built 2 new planters for growing veggies. Just for fun, and just in case civilization takes a serious dive soon and we start experiencing food shortages.

Barney lends a hand! New framing and some sheathing My entry was in rough shape. Barney has been telling me he would stop by to give me a hand. He did last week and we decided that working on the entry would be a good project. We quickly decided to peel off a layer to see what was going on underneath. Before you know it, the whole thing was demolished.

Some people are afraid of color in their homes. Or maybe they just don’t care about color. I was one of those people. I thought that walls in a home should just disappear, that it’s what you hang on them that matters. Maybe color on walls can take away from whatever it is you want to hang on them. But life is too short to live in a beige world, I think. 

While working on the house, I’ve been working on these two as well. It’s getting better. Spanky (the cat) want to snuggle, while Rou wants to herd. This is the compromise. A somewhat tenuous truce but the beginnings of a real truce nonetheless.

Although I’ve had to scale back my expectations for the hovel as a livable space in the near term, I do have some goals. I want to be finished with the entry, media and living rooms as well as have one working toilet before 2011.

When I first bought this place, it was a tragic wreck. But I didn’t care. I was actually considering stapling AstroTurf to the floor and walls, adopting ten dogs from the pound and turning it into a big playhouse with balls and sticks, plenty of good food and fun - lending credence to the term rough-housing. It was going to be a space devoted to dogs, guitars, and beer.

My hero Greg has left town. Going back to school after a short summer working on my house. He (we) got a lot done. I owe him huge for his creative efforts.

We had been planning and plotting how to get this 300 pound gorilla in the house and into place, then we decided it was overkill. More beam than we needed, so Greg shaved off about 6 inches, reducing the weight by maybe 30%. Then another friend happened by to ask a question about audio interfaces and offered to lend a hand with the beam. So, we just did it! Ahead of schedule!

The beam is up! The beam is up!

In producing the as-built drawings, we discovered the roof was being held up by momentum. That is, there wasn’t much real support holding the roof up, so it looks as though the roof is staying up because it already is up. Since it’s sagging and big snow events may happen in the future, I decided to put in new supports. This means tearing out the old ceiling. A big mess. It also means new structural support, not only for the ceiling but for the floor, because support must go all the way to the ground.

Alone in the hovel today - tearing it apart. Feeling a mixture of relief, anxious anticipation and revulsion. I wish I had done this right away after I bought this place. I would have known what this thing is really about. But I was not in a position to do it at the time. I was a full time student and reeling from some major changes in my life.

Now that Greg Willis is here to help me with this … project, we have developed a plan. The first step is to map out what is here and put it down on paper in the form of drawings. This is often called “as-built” drawings. Important to have these for communication purposes. This will probably take another couple of days to finish up.

When it comes to the hovel, I’m afraid of things I don’t know and don’t understand. I have put off doing a thorough inspection of this house for years. I guess I didn’t want to know what is really going on under the floor and above the ceiling, partly because it is a huge mess and partly the feeling that I wouldn’t understand what is going on anyway. The stuff I’ve looked at so far just doesn’t look good. What frightens me is the prospect of finding things that will require a huge amount of work and expense.

Finally, help is on the way and this means that the hovel is moving to the next stage!

Did I say that I’m in funk? Did I mention the weather moved inside me— no forecast, just gray.

I just can’t seem to get it together to fix my plumbing. Same old thing. I come to the house, I feel overwhelmed, get distracted, then leave.

Gotta go back down there, I thought to myself. No choice. I assumed if I inserted myself in that hole again I would feel a little more comfortable. So I did. I needed to squirm into the next bay to get access to the problem. I had stuck a light down into the hole from above so that I could see the point to which to crawl. When I managed to get into the bay, I just lay there for a bit. Looked around.

With my friend Tony helping me out, we prepared to go down under. I borrowed a pair of coveralls, and we got lights and some tools in place.

Some water pipes broke. Again. Winter, apparently, holds a grudge. The break is in a cruel spot—just under the bathroom floor. Close enough to hear the drip, far enough to be unreachable by any civilized posture. I peer through the access opening and see what appears to be a metallic bowl of spaghetti assembled by a sleep-deprived raccoon. Pipes crossing pipes, angles defying reason. Nothing labeled. Nothing obvious. Just a cold, damp riddle.

Tomorrow is D-Day. I’m going down under!

I knew the cold weather was coming. Worried about yet another broken pipe fiasco, I decided to turn off the water at the street knowing I wouldn’t be around to check on things while in New Mexico for Christmas. I don’t like turning off the water that way. Keeping the pressure in the pipes is good for the system, I think. Less likely to break something? When I turn it off, then on again with the pressure surging in all at once, I cringe, imagining old joints giving way. It has happened before.

I thought it would be a good idea to replace my outdoor lamp with this one which features a daylight sensor that will turn the light off in the morning and back on at dusk. I wired it in and tested it and it works! I’m feeling fine. Problem #1: the lamp sits so close up under the eave that the light goes on even in the middle of the day if it isn’t a bright cloudless day. I’m going to try to put a piece of aluminum foil or something above the sensor to reflect more light onto it. Problem #2: neighbor from across the street shows up at my doorstep the next day and asks me to turn off the light at night because it shines right in her bedroom window and keeps her up at night! WTF! I laugh and explain incredulously that I just put it in! We talk and laugh about it for awhile. We come up with some options. How about I try to paint the outside of the globe to dim the light a bit? If that doesn’t work, I could hang something in front of it. She agrees. I rummage around and find some yellowish paint, take off the globe, paint half - the half facing her, let it dry, then remount the globe. I called her and told her it was up and to let me know if it works for her or not. She says she has plenty more paint in various colors if I need it. It looks kind of funny, but she hasn’t complained so far.

this house is my wound shame blocks the sharing of it no one can truly see it i can’t even bear to take it’s true measure

There’s something deeply satisfying about flipping a switch and having the room obey. Got some lights working. Wired a few myself. Not bad for a man whose previous electrical résumé consisted mostly of “successfully plugs things in.” Now I’m shopping for sconces like I have opinions about ambiance.

In order to finish the wiring job, we had to get under the house to run the new wiring to the panel. Looked around and discovered no easy way to get under. This surprised me. Although I’ve never been under there, I thought I’d be able to when necessary. Nope.

The most significant work needs to happen in my kitchen. I need electrical and plumbing upgrades. A friend from my days as an FRC student came up to help me with phase 1 of a very much needed upgrade. This phase:

Earlier this Summer, things were moving along nicely. I went through almost everything I own, tossed a bunch, organized most of the rest, transformed my shack into an orderly place to store my belongings and tools, and was about to get some help on some substantial work.

I am forced to make a small change in my program. I’m moving my move-in date from Nov.1 2009 to Nov. 1 2010. Like I said. A small change.

Catatonic.

Before I have had an ongoing problem with my front door. It’s the result of poor design. The roof slopes over the entrance which means all precipitation including snow ends up dumping right in front of the door. I asked a carpenter friend to help out by coming up with a simple solution to extend the overhang to 3 feet in front of the entrance door. He did. It works. Couldn’t have done it myself.

Some time ago, I worked with a friend to lay some tile on my small bathroom floor. It turned out great! Made a big difference. The next day we walked into the bathroom to inspect the finished product. To my horror, it all cracked! Turns out the floor was slightly spongy - not enough to really notice. You can’t do that with tile. The floor has to be absolutely rigid. (Makes sense after the fact.) I didn’t know. I was catatonic. We had to pull it all out, add support to the floor and relay the tile. I tried to organize the tile to put it back in the original order. Glue got on top of most of the tiles. Not sure how I’m going to get it off. At least its solid now.

Completed a milestone today! I finished turning my shack into a decent, orderly place to store my stuff. In order to get here I had to clean it out first, which means I had to go through practically everything I own. That was hard. Then I started building shelves. Got better at that as I went along. Then I had to start packing it again in order to make room in the house to start the real construction.

Slowly and painfully, I go on. I’ve gone through about 85% of my stuff. Now I need to rearrange it somewhere. As I begin work on each room, I need to move the contents somewhere to free up construction access. So, the last few days I’ve been working on making shelves in the shack to more efficiently hold stuff. Got my drill and saw out. Making them out of 2x4s. Slow and crude, but functional. When that’s done, I’ll pack it and start working on the music room.

My house is not ordinary. It came from an uncommon start. My neighbor, having lived across the street all her life told me all about it. When the old mine shut down, the owners told the miners they could take haul their shacks off the mountain and do what they pleased with them. My lot, purchased by one of those miners was prepared for two of those cabins. The old man built a foundation and did a good job of cobbling together those cabins into a small house. My neighbor says she has photos somewhere of a wedding on the lawn in the 50’s.

The good, the bad, and the ugly. Good: I’ve gone through a lot of stuff, made several truckloads of stuff to the dump, given a lot of stuff away that I hope will be appreciated by others, and found some letters and mementos that made me smile. Bad: While pulling everything out in the open to sort, we were pummeled by rain and hail storms the last few days. Some books and things I value and have carried and sheltered for years got wet. I haven’t had the heart to find out to what extent. Also, I gave away some things that I regret; all my artist and architect materials. Gone. Ugly: Encountering images of myself in boxes and piles of papers. Me in broken relationships. Me in faltering careers. Me in a lost and lonely universe. Is it resolution I lack? I have a tendency to avoid unpleasant things. I turn my head and look for distractions instead of the gentle accommodation of inevitable change. As a result, the things I can’t face sit there in a box and wait. I resolve to resolve more. Just to take some time to say to myself, that part of my life is over. It’s okay. It’s okay.

The idea was to take a week to go through everything I own and get rid of as much stuff as possible. It’s taking longer that I thought.

Today was hard. It’s bad enough having to cleanup a space that has become the domain of semi-feral cats. Cat detritus. Cats fighting, fucking, and farting and leaving signs. They used some of my good coats as shredding posts. Then there is the smell. I thought I liked cats.

OK. Make a list. First on the list? Cleanup. When I bought this place, I dumped the accumulation of decades of stuff into it. This week I’m going through everything I own and toss.

Yosemite Mountaineering School wasn’t just a program. It was a cathedral tucked in the wilderness—stone fireplaces, wood floors, big beams that looked like they’d been lifted straight from the forest and blessed with permanence. The building itself breathed purpose.

This All Started with a One-Way Ticket to the Wild It was mid-July, 1974. I was 18, freshly released from Glendale High School with a diploma and a vague sense that something big was supposed to happen next.

Reinvention 101 So here’s something I didn’t see coming: I’m a student again. Yep. Backpack, class schedule, ID card with an unflattering photo—the whole bit.

A Change of Scenery, and Maybe Also a Soul It’s simple, really. Something had to give. I’ve just been laid off from Silicon Graphics. Again. That’s two layoffs too many from the same company, which feels like the universe whispering, Hey, maybe it’s time to go.**

The Whim That Stuck Well, I did it. I bought a house. In Quincy, California. It has a creaky entry, a roof that looks like it’s held together with good intentions, and a view that will inspire absolutely no one.