No Bad Days - Kyle

7-24-11 Kathy, Terry visit, tiny houses, and reducing our footprint

It has been a busy and very fun last few weeks. My friend Kathy from Salt Lake came to visit me here in Dana for a week. She is a quick with a good pun, very smart, funny, active, overall a very wonderful and interesting lady. We have a huge amount in common, including hiking, camping, and sea kayaking, although she had not spent much time on a sailboat. She has been taking an active interest in “tiny houses”, homes as small as 100 or 200 square feet, designed for maximum space reduction, simplicity, and energy efficiency, and was amazed at how No Bad Days was so similar to what she had been seeing of tiny houses. She was amazed at how well you can live in a tiny space, without needing the “improvements” of refrigeration, hot running water, and space for massive amounts of stuff. (and yes, she does know that I do have piles of stuff stashed in my garage back home. I am not totally pure of stuff yet…), and she mentioned wondering now what she was going to do with her big house and mountains of stuff back home.

Her visit and our discussions made me imagine that my life here could become in some small way a poster child of tiny space living and the inspiration some people need to reduce their lifestyle to more simple, less expensive and less resource-intensive ways of living. There is so much talk about recycling over the last many years, while we as a world are busy using more and more and more, creating more and more and more stuff to recycle. The little “3 curvy arrows that create a circle” icon is about much more than just recycling. The other 2 arrows represent Reduce and Re-use. Recycling is only a very small part of the concept. Long before we think of recycling, we need to think about reducing our needs to much lesser levels. Reducing our “footprint” is not just about trying to reduce the amount of carbon we use while taking up the same space (although that is important). I think we need to have very frank and open public discourse about reducing the actual amount of space we take up on this planet and the stuff we use. I am not too much a fan of IKEA, but I am impressed at the mock-up furnished tiny houses they have on display there. I guess they are European sort of designs, where people seem to be much more comfortable living in small efficient spaces. Here in America we seem to look down on people living in small spaces and driving small cars, and encourage them to upgrade to the “American Dream” of the big house(s) and the big yard(s) and the big car(s). Unfortunately this is turning into the America Nightmare, both personally for each family, and collectively as a society, as we use up all our resources and pollute our environment, and the rest of the world races to match our unsustainable lifestyles.

OK enough of a rant from my soapbox for today. I don’t want to run you all off. But do think about what you can reduce. Please?

Anyway, back to Kathy’s visit. We had a great time., We sailed up to Newport and anchored there for a few days. We dinghyed to shore, crossed the peninsula, and walked the beach for miles. It was a weekend and very crowded. Great people watching. It was interesting that at one spot, the entire beach seemed to suddenly turn into a designated Hispanic beach. Very odd. I could see no apparent reason for the segregation. The beaches looked the same, the water was fine, parking was good, it was just that all the Hispanic folks were on this side of the pier, and all the Caucazoid folks were on the other side. Very interesting. Everyone was doing the same things on both sides of the pier. We saw the same family picnics with the same blowing sand in the same buckets of KFC, same umbrellas blowing away and collapsing, same little brothers teasing the same sisters trying to sunbathe, same kids body surfing, same kids burying the same dads in the sand. It was all fun. All good. Just segregated by some factor not apparent.

We also took the dinghy and rowed up into the Newport estuary and bird watched a bit, although we had slept in and by the time we got there all the birds had wandered off. Bird watching is best in early AM or late PM, but I find it very hard these days to set an alarm to get up see birds. I am getting lazy in my old age.

Kathy and I had a great time together. We have so much in common and had so much fun, and she is so easy to be with , even in a “tiny house“, that the time flew by all too soon and she had to get back to her job as a nurse at LDS hospital in SLC.

The day after Kathy left my brother Terry flew in for a visit. He has been shopping for classic VW camper vans and most of the old ones in Utah are all eaten up by rust (from the salt we use on the roads) but Southern California seems to have a bunch available and he has been searching online and had a few lined up to go see. We drove hundreds of miles all over SoCal but didn’t see any he liked in his budget. Huge disappointment when we pulled up to one place and the perfect van at the perfect price had just been sold minutes before we got there. ARGH. That will teach us to stop for lunch on the way!

We did get out and sail for a few days, and Terry was a big help with a few hardware installation projects that require 2 sets of hands to hold a screwdriver topsides, and a wrench down below. I now have my engine fuel tank locked down, and my safety lines more conveniently installed in the floor of the cockpit. I hope things never get so bad that I need them, but like seatbelts in your car, it is nice to have them for that time when bad stuff happens. It was great spending so much time with Terry. In years past we have been on long climbing adventures together and spent many long hours and days talking about all that is important to us in our lives, but it seems that since then our visits all tend to be short chit chats between other responsibilities that pull us away. This was very fine to get REALLY caught up again