posted by Jim on Jun 28
Take a minute and watch the video, and when your heart is moved to help build a school in Cambodia, help out. It feels good and I am glad to be a part of it. Spread the joy and love to these children. Proceeds from the sale of the download for the CD go to help the children of Cambodia. The download is 99 cents.
Here’s the direct link for the download. Every one helps! http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/DavidAult
posted by Jim on Jun 24
Long, beautiful, gleaming, steaming, flaxen, waxen… I adore hair!
James Rado and Gerome Ragni, Hair
The great ages of prose are the ages in which men shave. The great ages of poetry are those in which they allow their beards to grow.
Robert Lynd
Even a single hair casts its shadow
Publilius Syrus
People are like stained glass windows: they sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light within.
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
Thoughts from Jim;
This was a good hair day! They always are when you still have some hair left and are called a vintage man. Anyhow, being a good hair day, life is great, I have great friends and lots of work.
A couple of items that made it a great hair day was getting my hair cut, beard trimmed, and a call from Arkansas that is interested in purchasing a Tiny Green Cabin.
And guess what she wants to use it for?
A mobile beauty salon! Well, we have established a list of possibilities for a tiny cabin, and this is a new one and a good one. The cabin would pay for itself in short order in lieu of a lease on a store front building or cubicle.
Years ago, people in business frequently had a small building out in front of their home, Thomas Jefferson’s attorney had a small building out by the street, as well as many doctors, dentist, seamstress to name a few. Now we are seeing part of marketing by tiny house builders for stay at home businesses such as; garden offices for those that commute via internet, writers, poets, artists, lawyers, candlestick makers, etc. When I was in Alaska visiting my son, several years ago there were coffee shops in tiny building all around Anchorage. Some even sat on trailers so they could be mobile.
What use can you envision for tiny houses?
Speaking of tiny houses, and tiny cabins….Tiny Green Cabins is a custom cabin builder and tiny house builder. We have had several inquiries lately into building playhouses and garden sheds. Yes, we do build playhouses and garden sheds.
I was given by a dear friend, a book for reading titled “The Shadow Effect” and finding it very interesting and enlightening. So, besides my hair day, quotes that mention something about shadow work are interesting to me. After some reading and exploring, it seems to me that our government and businesses have a lot to do with our shadow sides.
posted by Jim on Jun 23
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, you are a leader.
John Quincy Adams
An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea.
Buddha
I have learned, as a rule of thumb, never to ask whether you can do something. Say, instead, that you are doing it. Then fasten your seat belt. The most remarkable things follow.
Julia Cameron
I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.
Leonardo da Vinci
Thoughts from Jim;
Are you ready for a quiz?
Here are 4 statements, which one is true.
Living in unusually tiny homes;
(a) Is advisable only for poor people in Third World countries.
(b) Is advisable only for people in the US who lost their homes or jobs.
(c) Is not much better than being homeless.
(d) Can help everyone break away from the debt trap that makes work, not fun, the central focus of our lives.
The answer is “D”
Think about it, living in a tiny house, small home means a radical reduction is expenses; i.e. no mortgage - heck in most cases your 20% down payment will pay for the Tiny House; you would own your home instead of the home owning you - which would free up your time to really do what you have been dreaming of doing. And think of all the others bills that would be reduced, heating, cooling, groceries, and so much more.
Think about the space in your home that you heat and cool and hardly, if ever use it. Take a formal living room, it may occupy 7% of your total home space and yet you may use it less than .005% of the time. Yes, I know, it is still nice to have, and yet when you start adding all the other costs associated with keeping that room up, and your energy expended caring for it, wouldn’t a person rather pursue what they really brings them alive. So, is this a wave of the future, like the airplane that everyone scoffed at, or the computers that people thought on a few would have?
What do you think?
posted by Jim on Jun 21
The art of living does not consist in preserving and clinging to a particular mood of happiness, but in allowing happiness to change its form without being disappointed by the change; for happiness, like a child, must be allowed to grow up.
Charles Langbridge Morgan
Cultivate your garden… Do not depend upon teachers to educate you … follow your own bent, pursue your curiosity bravely, express yourself, make your own harmony In the end, education, like happiness, is individual, and must come to us from life and from ourselves. There is no way; each pilgrim must make his own path. “Happiness,” said Chamfort, “is not easily won; it is hard to find it in ourselves, and impossible to find it elsewhere.”
Will Durant
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said. “One can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it half an hour a day. Why, sometimes, I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Lewis Carroll
It is very dangerous to go into eternity with possibilities which one has oneself prevented from becoming realities. A possibility is a hint from God. One must follow it.
Soren Kierkegaard
Thoughts from Jim;
The American culture has glorified the benefits of materialism and trivialized the heavy price that many of us pay for unthinkingly going along with the other sheep who perennially strive for ever more stuff. If you travel around the world, or speak to people who’ve done that, you will find folks in other nations who have much less money and stuff than we do, yet they are far happier. I have been involved in service projects in the Appalachians and got to know folks with a lot less stuff that were far happier than a lot of my friends and myself were in Minnesota years ago. So what do you really want? More and more stuff, or more time to enjoy what you have?
Living small in a tiny house, microhome, or tiny green cabin can give you the freedom and time to make some really creative choices. Want to write poetry, a book, take up painting, going back to school, or the freedom to live in the North Country and then move your home south when the snowbirds head south, or follow a whisper from Spirit to see where it leads.
Let your mind explore the possibilities, and maybe, just maybe you will have a lot of fun doing what you always dreamt of doing.
posted by Jim on Jun 20
Just play. Have fun. Enjoy the game.
Michael Jordan
A business has to be involving, it has to be fun, and it has to exercise your creative instincts.
Richard Brandson
I cannot even imagine where I would be today were it not for that handful of friends who have given me a heart full of joy. Let’s face it, friends make life a lot more fun.
Charles R. Swindoll
Environmental protection doesn’t happen in a vacuum. You can’t separate the impact on the environment from the impact on our families and communities.
Jim Clyburn
Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love.
Saul Bellow
Thoughts from Jim:
Living small….is it right for you?
The 1st thing that I hear a lot about is that a Tiny House being so small, it must be a breeze keeping it clean. Let us explode this myth right here. Living large in a large space allows a dish to be left out, a paper left by the chair, and the coffee cup unattended by the laptop.
My first learning experience: In small spaces, every dirty dish left on the counter, every pile of bills you set on a tabletop upon return from the Post Office, becomes-proportionally-a big mess. Unlike in a large house, they’re right there in your face. They might be taking up your only work space or eating area. Also, when all your activities are confined to one small space, that space will get dusty and dirty more quickly than when your activities are spread around 2,000 square feet.
While my ankle was mending after the cast was taken off, I used fir oil on the ankle for healing purposes. A friend commented that the aroma from the fir oil was an air freshener for the whole cabin!
So …
Ø Plan to cultivate neatnik habits. Find a place for everything and put everything in its place as soon as you’re done with it.
Ø If you can’t immediately put things away, then have a transitional junk drawer or cabinet where you stash stuff until you can file, fold, sort, or dispose of it. (This is in addition to your usual junk drawer where you keep odds and ends on a long-term basis. I know you have one; everybody does.)
Ø Above all, banish clutter from your kitchen countertops. Eliminate small appliances you don’t need. Stash those you do need inside cabinets. Buy the under-cabinet mounting types of appliances where feasible. Buy or construct a countertop “appliance garage.” An uncluttered kitchen is the biggest step toward small-space sanity.
Ø Don’t own a lot of stuff. If you can do without it, do without it.
Ø If you can’t do without it - Cheat! Rent some other space to hold some of the stuff you absolutely feel you need, or build yourself a garden shed, poetry shed, or a garden bin.
posted by Jim on Jun 18
“A land ethic…reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land. Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal. Conservation is our effort
to understand and preserve this capacity.”
- Aldo Leopold
“If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.”
-Loren Eiseley
“The first steps toward stewardship are awareness, appreciation, and the selfish desire to have the things around for our kids to see. Presumably the unselfish motives will follow as we wise up.”
-Barbara Kingsolver
“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”
-John Muir
“The supreme reality of our time is …the vulnerability of our planet.”
-John F. Kennedy
posted by Jim on Jun 16
People travel to wonder at the height of the mountains, at the huge waves of the seas, at the long course of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars, and yet they pass by themselves without wondering.
St. Augustine
Wisdom ceases to be wisdom when it becomes too proud to weep, too grave to laugh, and too selfful to seek other than itself.
Kahlil Gibran
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius–and a lot of courage–to move in the opposite direction.
E. F. Schumacker
Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.
Sir Cecil Beaton
To live your life you need to risk it. And that means taking the chances that make us whole human beings.
Jim Wilkins
posted by Jim on Jun 15
“Measure Twice-Cut Once”
-carpenter law
“Carpentry is the Illusion of Perfection”
-anonymous
“The carpenter stretches out a line. He marks it out with a pencil. He shapes it with planes. He marks it out with compasses, and shapes it by the figure of a man, with the beauty of a man, to reside in a house”
-The Bible-Isiah 44
“Every nail driven should be as another rivet in the machine of the universe”
-Thoreau
That hand saw marks time
with the sound of poverty
late on a winter night
-haiku by Buson
“The self, though one, takes the shape of every object in which it dwells”
-Upanishads
“Make it simple to last your whole life long. Don’t worry that it’s not enough for anyone else to hear. Just sing, sing a song”
-Karen Carpenter
Thoughts from Jim;
Carpenter Gothic?
By definition from Wikipedia
Carpenter Gothic, also sometimes called Carpenter’s Gothic, and Rural Gothic, is a North American architectural style-designation for an application of Gothic Revival architectural detailing and picturesque massing applied to wooden structures built by house-carpenters. The abundance of North American timber and the carpenter-built vernacular architectures based upon it made a picturesque improvisation upon Gothic a natural evolution. Carpenter Gothic improvises upon features that were carved in stone in authentic Gothic architecture, whether original or in more scholarly revival styles; however, in the absence of the restraining influence of genuine Gothic structures, the style was freed to improvise and emphasize charm and quaintness rather than fidelity to received models.
We did mention Carpenter Gothic possibility yesterday, and Tiny Green Cabins has a preliminary plan for a Carpenter Gothic cabin. to read more click Here
posted by Jim on Jun 14
“Fundamentally, sustainable development is a notion of discipline. It means humanity must ensure that meeting present needs does not compromise the ability of future generations to meet their needs.”
Gro Harlem Brundtland
“Nothing is unthinkable, nothing impossible to the balanced person, provided it arises out of the needs of life and is dedicated to life’s further developments.”
Lewis Mumford
“The wise man doesn’t give the right answers - he poses the right questions.”
Claude Levi Strauss
“He who would travel happily must travel lightly.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Thoughts from Jim;
What are Tiny Houses? The Tiny House Movement? Tiny Living?
Simply put it is a social movement where people are downsizing the space that they live in. The typical American home is around 2600 square feet, while the typical small or tiny house is around 400 square feet. Tiny Houses come in all shapes, sizes and forms but they focus on smaller spaces, simplified living, and sometimes living off the grid.
People are joining…to read more click Here
posted by Jim on Jun 11
Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer. Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller and more of it can be taken in at a glance and a lack of harmony and proportion is more readily seen.
Leonardo Da Vinci
Any successful journey begins by packing your luggage full of imagination.
Kathrine Palmer Peterson
Imagination has brought mankind through the dark ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity. Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine, and the automobile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities. So I believe that dreams–daydreams, you know, with your eyes wide open and your brain machinery whizzing–are likely to lead to the betterment of the world. The imaginative child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to invent, and therefore to foster, civilization.
L. Frank Baum
Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say let your affairs be as one, two, three and to a hundred or a thousand. We are happy in proportion to the things we can do without.
Henry David Thoreau
From little spark may burst a mighty flame.
Dante Alighieri
Thoughts from Jim;
I have been reading excerpts from a book “Beyond Success” by Brian D. Biro. Brian is a motivational speaker on team building that used to be a United States Swimming coach in Southern Fernando Valley, California. Brian worked with athletes not for a season or semester, but year round. Some kids for 8 straight years, and during that time he had some incredible learning experiences. Following is one example, and her name is Allison.
Allison had been training, practicing, and working for 8 years on swimming techniques, and was always upbeat in attitude with a determination to work as hard as possible. One of her goals was to qualify for the Junior Olympics; she had come close a couple of times, and about the time she was really close, she would graduate or “age up” to the next level of competition. With each “age up” she had to start all over at the bottom. Finally she made it in her 8th year in the hundred-meter butterfly - the last year Brian would be a swimming coach. She hit the qualifying by 1/100 of a second. Any slower she would have not have qualified for the event. Brian was sure just the qualifying was the pinnacle of her swimming career and everyone on the team was thrilled Allison had made it.
Allison was a perfect example of what coaches call a drop-dead sprinter. She had good natural speed, but would inevitably “tie up” toward the end of her races. In other words she would die. Every time she would die, Brian would say in his most inspirational voice ” Allison, one of these days you are not going die.” Brian now refers it as great coaching moments. What happens is that the person this comment is directed to takes and only hears the part, of dieing at the end of the race. Unwittingly, Brian was directing both himself and Allison toward a belief she would die at the end of her races.
In warm ups, on the day of her race of Olympic Trails, Allison did a sprint that looked so phenomenal, that Brian bent down to her at the end of it and said ” Alison that was fantastic! Do you remember how you felt? Great! Remember how high you were on the water and how light and powerful you were?”
She yelled excitedly back “Yeah, Coach. I felt awesome! I can’t wait for my race!”
Then something was shook loose in Brian’s brain, and a new idea burst forth. He looked straight into Allison’s eyes and said, ” Allison, when you dive into the water for your 100-meter butterfly, I want you to remember just how you felt in that sprint. I’ll be standing right here, at the 75-meter mark. When you get to me with 25-meters to go, I’ll yell “NOW”. As soon as you hear me I want you to pretend that you just dove in to do that exact same sprint all over again. Can you see it?”
“Yes, Coach!”
When Allison was ready to race, something else happened, all of her teammates decided to help by being at the 75-meter point to also yell “NOW”. Allison saw the support at the other end of the pool, and when the gun fired - she shot out of the block as she had never before. She opened up a body’s length on the rest of the heat, and with every stroke she would increase her lead. The team was going crazy, and as she neared the 50-meter mark, Brian looked at his watch and thought “This is great! She can die, and still do her best time”
At the 75-meter mark, all the team members yelled “NOW” in one voice. At this point Allison always died, race after race, year after year, but something magically happened, she suddenly exploded and literally climbed on top of the water. She hit the end of the pool and did not see any other swimmers around. She thought everyone else had finished and climbed out already. Brian looked at his watch, and could not believe the time. She had cut 10 seconds off of her time! By the time all the heats had finished, Allison had moved from 64th place to 1st place. In the final heat, she would be touched out at the end and finish second.
This was not the end of Brian’s learning from Allison. The team was not expected to do very well, they were not even expected to make a decent showing as a team. But when the team stood and all yelled “now!” behind Brian, the magic took fire. One by one, the other teammates took their turns at their own events. And one, by one, they started winning. When all the events were done, the points tallied, the team that was not expected to do anything, took home the championship trophy. The team had caught the fire, the magic, the energy they gave to Allison.
Allison taught Brian never to underestimate what we have inside. The people we think we know the best are the ones that can surprise us when they surpass the limitations they - and we - have set for them. There are no overachievers; we all have an infinite supply of potential. We are only limited by what we believe we can do. My mother would tell me when I was young that I could do anything I wanted, I just had to want to do it. Sometimes, our perceptions of others limit them as well as ourselves. Instead of when an impossible deadline approaches and we mutter ” No Way!” - we should remember Allison and break through our barriers and surpass all expectations, and say to ourselves, it is as good as done, and picture ourselves standing along side Allison.