View from my room at Fitzger's hotel (in an old brewery), looking out at semi-frozen #lakesuperior last night

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I signed 100 copies of Tiny Homes for booksellers in the "Meet the Authors" event at the Winter Institute of the American Booksellers Association in Minneapolis Sunday night. What a great event this was, with INDEPENDENT booksellers, the heart(s) of the book world.

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Tiny Breakfast Restaurant in Minneapolis

This place is 10' wide, set in between 2 larger buildings. There are 14 stools at the counter. Good food, good vibes. I met my new friend Todd there this snowy cold morning.

Brass art downtown #minneapolis

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#countrymusic in #minneapolis

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Hunting, Foraging, Gardening, Cooking Wild Foods - Hank Shaw via Kirk Lombard

I found this great website via Kirk Lombard, the Sea Forager:

HI THERE!
My name is Hank Shaw.

"I write. I cook. I fish, dig earth, forage, ferment things, brew beer, raise plants, live for food and chase God’s creatures. I drink Scotch or Bud, eat burgers or dine on caviar, depending on my mood or what day of the week it happens to be. I spend my days thinking about new ways to cook and eat anything that walks, flies, swims, crawls, skitters, jumps – or grows. This is my story."

http://honest-food.net/

So true

Sign on wall in men's room at Brit's pub in Minneapolis last night:
"There's nothing you can do
That can't be done."

All You Need is Love, The Beatles

The times are STILL a-changin'

Mural in downtown Minneapolis by Brazilian artist Eduardo Kobra and a team of 5 other artists, 60' tall, 160' wide, 5 stories tall, completed in 2015.

Brrrr! Wearing 6 layers this morning in #minneapolis

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Copmobile at Minneapolis Airport

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UK National Trust Seeking Ranger For Remote Island

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "#shelterpublications world headquarters. #publishi...":

Might interest one of your adventuring readers:

http://www.charitytoday.co.uk/national-trusts-new-farne-islands-ranger/

Could you be the National Trust’s new Farne Islands ranger?

Fed up with the rat race? With no running water and thousands of puffins as your only neighbours, a new National Trust vacancy promises the ultimate escape.

it’s a wildlife enthusiast’s dream – promising jaw-dropping sunrises, a one minute commute and one of England’s largest seal colonies on your doorstep.

This job isn’t the normal 9 to 5. Being good with PowerPoint isn’t a priority.

“We’re looking for someone with a passion for wildlife and conservation – and who wants to share that passion with others.

Applications for the position of ranger close on 7 February, 2017. To apply visit:

https://careers.nationaltrust.org.uk/OA_HTML/a/#/vacancy-detail/46353.

Injury # 163

There's a line in Hank Williams's "Why Don't You make Up Your mind," where he says "The hide's gettin' scace" (pronounced "skayce"), meaning scarce. I don't know why, but it's stuck in my mind for years. In the song he's moaning about difficulties with his girlfriend, but I've always thought of the phrase as having to do with the body getting hurt.

My latest was tearing some shoulder muscles last week. No, not again! My body feels so battered from a lifetime of activity. -- sports, carpentry, adventures. Thank god I wasn't the football star I wanted to be. Yet still -- operations on both knees, right shoulder, right wrist (carpal tunnel) and the capper, a bad broken arm a year ago--all since turning 70.

OK so I'm whining here, but I'm on an up-note. After moping and gimping around for a week, dreading another operation, visiting the doc, dealing with pain, suddenly it turned a corner. Must have been the red wine in the evenings (plus big doses of Ibuprofen). But all of a sudden I could raise my arm halfway. Yeah! I'm gonna get better. Two things to convey here:

1. You always get better. Pretty much. So no matter how deeply depressed you are when injured, it's gonna get better if you do the right stuff.

2. Don't give up. Get right back out there on that bike, surfboard, trail, slope -- maybe with more caution and care. Because you're gonna lose it if you don't use it.

#buffalo photo on wall at Mt. Tam #orthopedic clinic, Corte Madera, Calif.

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'40s #bathingsuit #style #sutrobaths plunge at #oceanbeach #sanfrancisco. Photo on wall of #finalfinal #bar #sfo

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"The Pursuit of Delight" -- Stewart Brand's review of Steven Johnson's Recent Seminar in San Francisco

Humanity has been inventing toward delight for a long time. Johnson began with a slide of shell beads found in Morocco that indicate human interest in personal adornment going back 80,000 years. He showed 50,000-year-old bone flutes found in modern Slovenia that were tuned to musical intervals we would still recognize. Beads and flutes had nothing to do with survival. They were art, conforming to Brian Eno’s definition: “Art is everything you don’t have to do.” It looks frivolous, but Johnson proposed that the pursuit of delight is one of the prime movers of history — of globalization, innovation, and democratization.

Image: Perforated Nassarius gibbosulus from archaeological layers dated to between 73,400 and 91,500 years ago at Taforalt. Credit: Image courtesy of d'Errico/Vanhaeren

Consider spices, a seemingly trivial ornament to food. In the Babylon of 1700 BCE — 3,700 years ago — there were cloves that came all the way from Indonesia, 5,000 miles away. Importing eastern spices become so essential that eventually the trade routes defined the map of Islam. Another story from Islamic history: when Baghdad was at its height as one of the world’s most cultured cities around 800 CE, its “House of Wisdom” produced a remarkable text titled “The Book of Ingenious Devices.” In it were beautiful schematic drawings of machines years ahead of anything in Europe — clocks, hydraulic instruments, even a water-powered organ with swappable pin-cylinders that was effectively programmable. Everything in the book was neither tool nor weapon: they were all toys.

49ers Memorobilia

At the Final Final bar in San Francisco on a rainy Saturday night. Their greatness now a distant memory.

SMALL HOMES on Its Way to Bookstores

Our 1st book in 3 years - Small Homes - The Right Size - is finished, printed, bound, and 10,000 copies are now in transit on the high seas from Hong Kong, due in US bookstores mid-March. We got 10 advance copies via airmail. I'm taking 2 of them to the Winter Institute, put on by The American Booksellers Association Jan 27-30 in Minneapolis, leaving Friday.

Shameless Commerce Dept.: 30% Discount on All Shelter Books until February 23rd 2017

https://www.shelterpub.com/

#shelterpublications world headquarters. #publishing #books #rainbow

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A Song For This Sad Day

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJqgk2XAg4k

Music At The End of a Stormy Day

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gb-B3lsgEfA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxGNZnnwyCg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoBlmp9cOL4

Work. Walk 5 Minutes. Work.

Article in NY Times by Gretchen Reynolds "Stuck at your work desk? Standing up and walking around for five minutes every hour during the workday could lift your mood, combat lethargy without reducing focus and attention, and even dull hunger pangs, according to an instructive new study. The study, which also found that frequent, brief walking breaks were more effective at improving well-being than a single, longer walk before work, could provide the basis for a simple, realistic New Year’s exercise resolution for those of us bound to our desks all day.… https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/28/well/move/work-walk-5-minutes-work.html

Sauna framed like a spherical Pomo dwelling

Framing was covered with burlap, then plastic, then plastered with looks like adobe/clay with a bit of cement. I spotted in a walk in the woods yesterday.

Slice of #onion going into new batch of pickled #eel

Marijuana: Know Thy Grower

Years ago I reasoned that some commercial pot growers would resort to insecticides if they were faced with losing an entire crop due, say, to spider mites. I thought of people buying organic produce at Whole Foods, then smoking marijuana that had been sprayed with toxic chemicals. A friend of mine said, "They're smoking paraquat."

Pot smokers, beware. Here is a Google search I did today on the subject:
https://www.google.com/search?q=pesticides+in+marijuana&num=100&newwindow=1&safe=off&source=lnt&tbs=qdr:m&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjTmfLKg8DRAhUpiVQKHVoJD-wQpwUIFA&biw=1402&bih=974

The big commercial operators have a way different modus operandi than people who grow outdoors, with untreated water, compost, organic supplements, and sunshine. No electricity for light or fans, no chemical fertilizers or insecticides, no soil-less, hydroponic wizardry.

AND -- I've had conversations with people about vaporizers, costing between $200-600. "Oh, way too expensive." Well, how much are your lungs worth?

Waymore's Blues by Waylon Jennings

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YOdkDwqduM

Astonishing Athletic Feats

Mother's Little Helper -- Homeopathic LSD

Article in New York Times Sunday by Alex Williams “…'Mom, are you on acid?' her daughter asked sarcastically. Ms. Waldman froze. It was not yet the moment, she decided, to answer 'yes.' Ms. Waldman had discovered microdosing, an illegal but voguish drug regimen in which devotees seek to enhance creativity, focus and mental balance by ingesting regular, barely perceptible doses of hallucinogens like LSD or psilocybin mushrooms. Forget 'turn on, tune in, drop out.' To recent converts like Ms. Waldman, who recounts her microdosing journey in a new memoir, A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life, to be published by Alfred A. Knopf next week, it’s a new psychedelic era. For them, LSD is less a kaleidoscopic mind expander than a humble mood enhancer, as subtle and quotidian as Prozac.…" https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/07/style/microdosing-lsd-ayelet-waldman-michael-chabon-marriage.html?_r=0

Amethyst Laccaria Mushroom

These are a beautiful shade of purple. Here's one illuminated, turns pink.

Trump, Trapped in His Lies, Keeps Lying. Sad!

From the NewYork Times, article by Lawrence Downes, Jan. 10, 2017:

He hasn’t taken office yet, but Donald Trump is lost, wandering in a labyrinth of lies and trying to drag the country in with him.

Witness his reaction to being called out on Sunday by Meryl Streep. Speaking at the Golden Globes, she said she had been stunned and heartbroken to see him mock a reporter with a physical disability.

It happened at a speech in 2015 in South Carolina. Mr. Trump’s target was Serge Kovaleski, of The Times, who has arthrogryposis, a condition that leaves his right arm and hand bent and rigid. “You ought to see this guy,” Mr. Trump told his audience, flailing his own right arm and hand in the air, making spastic movements, disgracing himself.

The act was contemptible, and in a way unbelievable: a future president showing the maturity and schoolyard viciousness of an 8-year-old.

“I still can’t get it out of my head,” Ms. Streep said, “because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life. And this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kinda gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.” In early morning tweets, Mr. Trump attacked Ms. Streep and swore innocence:

"Hillary flunky who lost big. For the 100th time, I never "mocked" a disabled reporter (would never do that) but simply showed him......."3:36 AM - 9 Jan 2017

"'groveling'" when he totally changed a 16 year old story that he had written in order to make me look bad. Just more very dishonest media!"

Lake Shasta is at 75% Capacity

Or 118% of what is usually stored at this time of year. See the comment below from Steve. Above chart is from: http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cgi-progs/reports/DROUGHTSUM

Well, OK, I won't!

Aggressive lawyering, Lombard St., #sanfrancisco early this AM. #lawyer, #advertising #billboard

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Apartment house doorway on upper Lombard St., #sanfrancisco this early city morn, a few minutes after the flamin' lawyers. #architecture #designinterior #interiordesign, #interiordesigner

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Monterey Clipper with Christmas Lights

My brother Bob's Monterey Schooner, docked in Tiburon, Calif.
Description of these boats on Wikipedia:
"The Monterey Clipper has long been considered part of the local fishing fleet to the San Francisco Bay Area, the Monterey Bay Area and east to the Sacramento delta. The original hull design was introduced into the area by Italians in the late 1860s. The design came from Genoese lateen-rigged sailboats, known as silenas, then later referred to as San Francisco feluccas.

The feluccas were at first used to gather shrimp in the SF bay, but when this fishery was abandoned to the Chinese, they gillnetted for local bay fish, trolled for ocean fish, and pulled up the famous Dungeness crabs. During this period, they made up about two-thirds of the 85 or so fishing boats that served the city. Later, as the fleet grew, about 50 boats serviced just the crab fisheries.By 1890, there were about 1000 feluccas in the wharf.