Toymaking

Wednesday, October 3, 2007

I will post these again when they’re finished, but I started today on my Russian nesting doll project (after about a month of nervously wondering whether my order from Russia would actually arrive). It’s a ten part set based on “I know an Old Lady“, put together in the order of the song so it can be sung as the set is disassembled. Here’s a shot of my sketches for it —

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I know an old lady who swallowed a cow,
I wonder how she swallowed a cow?!
She swallowed the cow to catch the goat,
She swallowed the goat to catch the dog,
She swallowed the dog to catch the cat,
She swallowed the cat to catch the bird,
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider,
That wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her,
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly,
I don’t know why she swallowed the fly,
I guess she’ll die.

I know an old lady who swallowed a horse,
She’s dead, of course!!

The last line in the song is why the innermost piece is a tiny little skull. The smallest ones (the cow and the horse) don’t look like much in my sketch, I know, but they will be quite cute when I’ve had a chance to paint them.

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It can’t possibly be worth it…

Wednesday, October 3, 2007

The following comment comes from Earth-Sheltered Houses by Rob Roy (who also expands on this subject in his brilliant book Mortgage Free).

More than a third of the average American’s after-tax income is devoted to shelter, usually rent or mortgage payments. If a person works from age 20 to age 65, it can be fairly argued that he or she has put in 15 years (20 in California) just to keep a roof over their head. With a piece of land, six months’ work, and — say — $35,000, he (or she) and his family could have built his own home.

To save 14½ years of work, you cannot afford not to build, even if it means losing a job while you do it. Granted, the land (and the $35,000) has to come from somewhere, but this amount is no more (and probably no less) than the down payment on a mortgaged contractor-built home, and about half the cost of a new double-wide mobile home (figuring either option as being about the same square footage as an earth-sheltered home).

And what do you get for your time and money? You get a comfortable, long-lasting, energy-efficient, environmentally compatible, low-maintenance home. You get the design features that suit you, so that the house fits like an old slipper. You get built-in fire, earthquake, and tornado insurance. You get intimite knowledge of the home so that when maintenance or repairs are required, you’re the one best placed to make them. You get tremendous personal satisfaction. And you get freedom from a lifetime of economic servitude.

Rob Roy actually sits on the “expensive” side of DIY underground construction — earthships and various other super-cheap underground homes are well below his $35k estimate and certainly well below the cost of, say, a new car. Couple that with inexpensive land from a company like Dignam Land (in Canada), or various other companies around the world selling rural land from tax sales, logging properties, and so on, and the whole project can be done for less than the down payment on any home would be…

So… why don’t more people do it? Is it really worth giving up 15+ years of your life (and I’d say for many people, more) to pay off the house you live in just to save yourself the effort of having to do it yourself?

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Surely it can’t be that a life of 9-to-5 indentured servitude is so wonderful that one can’t give up a summer or three building a house like the one above, which I believe came in at about $20,000… And with an increasing percentage of people defaulting on their mortgages and losing all of those years, even on a risk management level it seems completely nonsensical.

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Children need the country

Monday, October 1, 2007

When I was a child, my father bought a large farm in order to allow my brother and I, and later my sister, to grow up in the country. It’s my believe that especially today that’s of incredible importance. I don’t know if the “especially today” part is political — because we’ve become a people with a paranoid obsession with safety (is it worth spending billions on child seats in cars to save five hundred lives over twenty years?) — or if the world actually is a more dangerous case, but the fact is that “freedom to roam” is becoming very much a thing of the past. With this loss, I think deny children the ability to learn to become full adults.

My daughter loves hearing stories about growing up on a farm, and asks me to tell her about all the different experiences and to illustrate them at length — which helps keep all my kooky meals getting consumed. Today I cooked my own version of a Manwhich — a curried rice and fresh veggie dish on raisin bread. People laugh when I use raisin bread, but I figure if you can cook most dishes with raisins, you can serve most sandwiches on raisin bread, right?

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Those are Highland Cattle by the way — wonderful little furry indestructible beasties… She wanted to hear the story about the one-eyed bull (one of his cowfriends poked his eye out by accident at the hay feeder)… Here in the city we mostly have squirrels. I suppose it’s better than nothing, but they’re not particularly exciting.

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There’s also a fat raccoon — one of many on this block — that appears to live on my neighbor’s porch. He’s quite happy there and doesn’t seem to leave much, and curls up in a little ball in the base of that umbrella to sleep. Not such a bad life… No predators other than the government.

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Shrimp and Tomato Rice Salad

Sunday, September 30, 2007

The main body of this salad contains approximately the following, although it could be modified quite a bit… the gist of it though is that it’s a mix of shrimp, tomatoes, and rice, with other vegetables added as you like them:

1/2 pound of shrimp
1 1/2 heirloom tomatoes
8 grape tomatoes
4 mushrooms
1/4 red onion
2 cups of rice

The dish is served cold so the shrimp and rice should be cooked in advance. Total cost for the above for me was just over five dollars and it serves two to three people depending on hunger — just mix up the above and add a light dressing. I had already made the dressing in advance for another salad that was a mix of 1/4 mayonnaise, 1/4 lime juice, 1/4 balsamic vinegar, and 1/4 olive oil, with a little red pepper and sea salt. A delicious, inexpensive meal. Terrible photo unfortunately…

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Bunny Revolutionaries

Friday, September 28, 2007

I read about how the DMZ, the border between North and South Korea has become an amazing nature reserve because for the last half century this quarter million acre zone has been virtually untouched by humans… not many other places on the planet can say that. I’ve read that to some extent the area around Chernobyl has similar characteristics.
But in the city? The closest we come in the core of the city are the small strips of land surrounding the railroad tracks, which like Chernobyl, are a little polluted, but go through wonderful bursts of growth as their maintenance is neglected for long periods. For the many warehouses that dot the tracks, this also provides good cover for artists who choose to improve property values.

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