Strange Pleasures: Planting veggies I’ll never eat

April 4, 2011

In early February Joan and I unpacked our bags in the small 50-year-old house my parents own in Los Altos, California, about 30 miles south of San Francisco. It was going to be a six-week stay, so I’d brought a couple of editing jobs with me. But the primary purpose for the visit was to [...]

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April 1: Packards move into Ultra-Tiny House!

April 1, 2011

Yes, it’s true! Joan and I have been filming so many interviews with people in the tiny house scene that we have gone over. Two days ago we found an older ultra-tiny fixer-upper here in Indiana, not far from Joan’s father’s house. Our new house is so small you don’t even need wheels. We moved [...]

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Jay Shafer: The Politics of Tiny Houses

March 24, 2011

In February, 2011, Joan and I spent a couple of hours with Jay Shafer (Tumbleweed Tiny House Company), in his 96 square foot house-on-wheels in Sebastopol, California. Jay is one of the more well-known and successful tiny house designers, and there’s no denying the “curb appeal” of his designs. That appeal is generated by Jay’s [...]

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This Plum Blossom

February 20, 2011

February 20, 2011, Los Altos, California
I’d like to think I can still stand barefoot in the rain-wet, cold grass under a small plum tree an hour after sunrise and look at the blossoms without a thought, without feeling I need to think about the this or the that, only looking at the blossoms, going without saying [...]

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Tim Guiles: Conversations in a Tiny House

January 18, 2011

Seven or eight year ago Joan bought a 1981 VW Vanagon Westfalia. This is the self-propelled cabin that housed generations of footloose people from the 1950s through the 1990s, and those that are still running and rolling (the vans, not the people) are still just about the sweetest, if not exactly the most reliable, mobile [...]

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Pictures of Camels: A short story about giving & getting

December 25, 2010

By George Grafton Packard
Illustration by Donald “DB” Johnson
BEFORE she died a few days after her 97th Christmas, Barbara Kingsbury cleaned behind the Glenwood in the kitchen, painted the one white chair green to match the others around the table, and put the new batteries she’d saved away into the old Eveready flashlight. She ironed the [...]

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Riding the Cars: a stroll along the California Zephyr

December 13, 2010

We boarded the California Zephyr in Denver, with tickets to ride it all the way to its final western destination in Emeryville, California, just east across the bay from San Francisco. The Zephyr runs between California and Chicago, and that’s been a long run. If you are of a certain age, you’ll remember seeing ads [...]

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Sunrise, new moon, at Nederland, Colorado

December 3, 2010
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Little Mikey at Big Turkey Mountain

November 25, 2010

Little Mikey wandered into the kitchen about the time I took the turkey out of the refrigerator.
“Dude!” he said. “What is it and where’d you get it?”
Turkey, and I got it from a turkey farm, I told him.
“OK,” he said. “What are we gonna do with it?”
Well, I said, some of us are going to [...]

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Local Coal: The Cumberland River runs through it

November 15, 2010

Cumberland Falls is a lovely little waterfall, almost a miniature Niagara, on the Cumberland River in southern Kentucky, about 15 miles west of Corbin. And Corbin, of course, is the location of the gas station where Colonel Sanders opened his first fried chicken restaurant.
But I’m thinking about coal rather than deep fried chicken.
Just above the [...]

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