Instead of working, this?

The job search is not going well. I've been wondering if it came to the point of not being able to get a job, what could I do instead? There are actually quite a few resources out there that could make a life without "work" feasible. By "work" I mean conventional 40-hour, cubicle type work, because some of these options are work.

• WWOOF - I could relive my La Huerta days working on organic farms, doing it all over the world. I could work on one for a period and get to know a new community and learn about growing food. Then move on to another location.
  
• Rainbow Family - I do not know a lot about the Rainbow family, but I'm certain from what I do know, that community and friendship and a place to be could be found here periodically.
• Campground hosting - I actually applied for one of these jobs. They do not pay a lot, but they are paying, seasonal jobs. I could spend time in nature where my expenses would be low in some beautiful location in the summer. Then as long as Greeneridge continues to need analysts, I have a winter seasonal job, too.
  
• Mom and Dad - not ideal, but my mom keeps asking if I will help her be a trail angel during the summer and my dad would like someone to take care of his cat on his 14 acre farm on the Salinas river.
• Housesitting and couch surfing - I have not tried either one, but they both seem promising.

All these things require a life with minimal possessions and attachments. When you own no things, the only thing you need is a place to sleep and food. I'm not to this point yet, but I could go there if I needed to. I'm almost giving it consideration just for the adventure of living that way.

What a strange world we live in where something like computer programming is beginning to seem like a dead-end job and living an itinerant lifestyle is seeming more like a promising future.

Divide Peak and fantasies

Today I did a little hike to Divide Peak. Divide Peak is a peak overlooking the ocean near Murietta Divide. Murietta Divide is the boundary of the watershed between Ojai and Santa Barbara. It is also the same trail I hiked on the first and second day of my 2009 hike from Santa Barbara to the Pacific Crest Trail. I walked right by the place where I slept on my first night of that adventure. It was nice to be back.

At the summit of the hike, we were at the top of 4700-something foot Divide Peak. Peaks and ridges surrounded us all at similar elevations. I was on the Crest once more. Two ravens floated by cawing. For a minute there I felt like I was back on the PCT in the So Cal section. I felt happy and at home. Everybody I was with (and it was a big group) sort of disappeared for a moment and I was back on the trail.

Lately I have been engaging in little escapist fantasies about living in an RV on the road spending all my time touring BLM and forest service lands. I have been wondering if I should get a van so I could have something to live in on the road. I currently own a pickup truck. Maybe I should get a camper shell instead.

It occurred to me today that an amazing adventure could be had with my truck and my backpacking gear. All I would need is my backpack and gear, a box with some extra gear for colder or warmer weather, a box with some extra clothes and a cooler to store some food. So a camper shell would be sufficient.

I could imagine myself parking at the trailhead and hiking up to Murietta Camp to spend the night. Maybe I could set up a stealth camp near the hot spring that was nearby. Backpacking feels so much safer to me than sleeping in a vehicle. Backpacking is respectable behavior. Sleeping in a car is practically illegal, at least around here. I could do this all over the place. Drive a little, hike in and set up my tent, pack it all up in the morning and return to my car, move on. Stay awhile somewhere nice. Do a few days of hiking at a time. What an awesome way to live that would be!

It's a great fantasy. Back to work tomorrow, sadly.

Poison Oak Relief

I got poison oak from hunting mushrooms last week. I knew I would get it. I try not to worry about poison oak too much. It's just a rash.

I've discovered a pretty effective home remedy for relief from the itching. I use a hot compress when the itching feels really bad. Tonight I had an angry red welt that itched like crazy. I put the hot compress on it and after a while, the itching subsided and the angry red welt was almost gone.

I've done this each evening when the poison oak seems to flare up. It really does relieve the itching.

During the day I haven't even noticed the poison oak for some reason. I don't claim this is because of the hot compress. I really don't know why it hasn't been very bothersome this time. I've got quite a lot of it on my legs.

I have an additional theory that poison oak is a good treatment for the common cold. I started catching a cold last Thursday or Friday. But it hasn't amounted to much. I had a sore throat for a day and a half. I had a little mucus for a day and a half. Otherwise, I've felt fine. My theory is the poison oak was such as assault, my immune system was in high gear before the cold could really take hold. It may have helped I took a lot of Vitamin C, too.

Homemade webbing strap sandals

Just to see if I could do it using my new patterns, I made a pair of webbing strap sandals. Before that I tried to make a pair of arch strap sandals but something went wrong along the way and the left one came out so tight I couldn't quite put it on. I may see if I can take them apart someday and finish them, but I'm not sure if it's worth it. But the webbing sandals worked.

I made them out of dog leashes from the dollar store, mouse pads and old flip-flops. The dog leashes were only $1.50 each and came with the buckles I needed. It is impossible to find buckles like that at craft or other store. They only seem to sell giant ones for making laptop computer cases or whatever.

Basically, the only part of my sandal patterns I used was the threading pattern for the straps. Otherwise, the instructions expect you to use leather and to stitch the top sole to the mid sole and use little nails for strengthening the stress points. I just threaded the webbing through the mouse pad then glued it to flip-flop soles, taking care to leave spaces for the continuous strapping to remain adjustable.

I have no idea if they will hold up or fall apart. I can always re-do the top sole and re-glue it to the flip-flop, perhaps use better materials and do the stitching and everything that is in the instructions. I just wanted to see if I could do it.

They work, so I'm happy I gave new life to an old pair of flip-flops. These were the flip-flops I bought in Cabazon when I was hiking the PCT in 2008. I wore one of them for 15 miles one day because my blisters were so bad. I hate flip-flops and have never worn them again. These ugly dog-leash sandals will give them some sort of new life. Unfortunately, mouse pads are really heavy, so their new life won't include becoming camp shoes for backpacking.

Update: These fell apart after wearing them for about 3 miles. Also, my foot falls off the back. Why does this always happen with my attempts to make sandals. Any kind of sandal. This all started with me wanting to make a pair of huarache running sandals like Barefoot Ted, but even those had my feet falling off the back.

I repaired my own tire sandals

I bought some Vietnamese tire sandals a while back. They did not fit. The straps went through slits that went through the sole. Little ends of the straps stuck out through the bottom. It felt strange to walk on them. And because the straps went through the sole, the sandals were narrower than the sole and they cut into my wide feet.

I attempted to loosen the straps so that the sandals would fit better but I accidentally broke one. Every attempt to try and slide the strap back into the slit failed. I thought I ruined the sandals. They've been sitting in my closet for close to a year now, broken.

I browsed around google images for pictures of homemade sandals, handmade sandals and similar searches and stumbled on an African person wearing tire sandals. Their sandals had the straps nailed to the outside edge. I decided I would try that. I had just enough little nails in the garage to put all the straps back on. They feel pretty secure and fit well.

I may add more nails so that they are more secure. Or I may buy some leather scraps from Art from Scrap and make the sandals more stylish.

I kind of have this obsession lately to learn how to make my own shoes. Or at least to make my own sandals. I ordered a pair of real hiking boot soles and plan to make some hiking sandals. I like hiking in Chacos except the sole has very little traction. I fell down about 5 times on my hikes this summer. A couple of times I fell very badly. I'm going to make my own hiking sandals.

These tire sandals have no real tread. I think they made them from motorcycle tires and then just cut phony cross-hatches to simulate a tread. It doesn't even look like they tried to make the tread look real. So they won't work for hiking. But I am glad I fixed them. I almost threw them in the trash.

Plastic bag bag

I was poking around the Internet on the subject of plastic and found videos on how to make sturdy, reusable bags out of plastic grocery bags. I decided to give it a try. That picture is what I made.

We used to have a cupboard overflowing with bags but The Man recently cleaned it out. I do not know where all the bags went. I searched around in closets and found enough to make a bag of bags.

Basically the tutorials I found online, including this one, tell you to follow the following simple steps:

1. Cut the bottoms and handles off plastic bags.
2. Turn the bags inside out so the ink is on the inside, otherwise it will melt on the paper and make a mess.
3. Between sheets of wax paper, iron 8 layers of bags until they fuse together. Set the iron on something between polyester and rayon.
4. When the plastic is fused, you will have a strong material much like tyvek. Check the fabric for places that did not get fused and try not to over-do the fusing because that will make the material lumpy and hard to work with.
5. With the fused fabric, sew whatever you like out of it.

My iron did not have a setting for rayon so I set it on polyester. That seemed to be slightly too hot, so I set it lower. But even at a lower setting, the wax paper melted so I switched to newspaper. This caused the newsprint to get all over the plastic. In the future I think I should use paper bags for the fusing process.

The resulting material is smaller than the original plastic bags and it is stiff. It turned out a bit lumpy and I think there are a few places where the plastic didn't fuse. I figure that for a small shopping bag, this isn't a big deal since the original material was only 1 layer thick and worked just fine for shopping.

To make a bigger bag I would have to sew several fused pieces together. It would be nice to have a full-size bag. Of course this means that I will have to find a way to collect plastic shopping bags. We've already made the switch to reusable bags. It's easy to find plastic shopping bags, though.

It seems to me I could fuse long strips and then weave with it like a basket. Or create very thin strips and twist them to make a sort of twine and weave that. If I had a collection of nicely colored bags instead of the rag-tag bunch of white ones I had with logos on them, I could create nice bags that even my fashion-plate sister would like. If I could get the fusing process down so that it didn't come out so lumpy.

But, best of all, though, since the material created by fusing is so much like tyvek, I could make hiking gear. Perhaps a hydration pack or fanny pack, maybe a dry bag or camera bag, or really funny would be a rain jacket. I ordered a bunch of mosquito netting so that I could sew my own mosquito tent so maybe I can use fused plastic bags for parts of my tent.

Doesn't solve the plastic problem on the Earth, but I feel better about it knowing I can turn something that might otherwise choke and kill birds and turtles into something useful.

Community gardens

I had an idea today. I volunteer at a food garden at the Mission. I show up once a week and mostly just water and weed and sometimes I clean up the pathways or spread mulch around or do something that's relatively physical. I haven't really learned much about planting things. Which led me to my idea. We ought to have community gardens.

We have community garden plots now. You get your name on a waiting list and when your number comes up, you get a garden plot in on a communal property that you can garden all for yourself. The trouble is, it's all for yourself. What if there were community gardens where you showed up, put in your time doing whatever you are best at and earned a share of the harvest. That way, black thumb people like me who only know how to weed and water wouldn't end up without any food for our efforts.

When the end of cheap oil comes and we all have to depend on homegrown food again (have to? maybe the proper word is get to) it might be better if we could grow food as a community rather than in solitude. Doing everything solitary is too much like our modern society anyway. And not as much fun as doing it with others. We could also preserve the harvest communally and distribute our surplus to old and feeble people who can't help out at all. There's no reason we have to continue such solitary lives as we've been trained to live.

While I was working in the garden today, another one of those rifts in time and space opened up and there I was working in the garden, as my normal daily job, and I was taking piles of weeds to the compost pile and this was how we women were all surviving in the post-economic breakdown America. We were talking about canning and dehydrating and solar ovens. And we were happy.

Ultralight compression-sack backpack idea.

I had a crazy idea to use a compression stuff sack as an ultralight backpack. I tested it by putting all my stuff inside. It all fits.

So I tested it further by adding some nylon webbing to the compression straps on the back of the stuff sack to form backpack straps. I also added a waist strap to hold the pack to my body.

The result was a pack decent for a quickie overnighter that weighs about 6lb with food and 8oz of water included. Here is a picture:

In real life I would carry a larger water bottle.

Inside the pack is a torso-length of a z-rest pad, a bivy sack, a 20-degree down quilt, toiletries, full roll of TP, jacket for wind and light rain, down sweater, cooking set, fuel, matches, Aqua-mira, a day's worth of food and on the outside is a free-standing bug net. Missing is a poncho to use as a shelter. I don't have one yet. But I think I could replace the whole tarp/bivy/bug net idea with my The One tent anyway. It'll fit, too.

The whole thing works, meaning that I can wear it and my gear fits inside. But it isn't very comfortable. I think if I can find a decent old pack in a thrift store I could put real backpack straps on for a much better fit. As a test, however, it seems promising so far.

As for this post meeting the requirements to be categorized as boring news, the news is that today is my birthday. I'm 44 now. Half my life may already be over.

Gourmet salt can stove

I made my own stove. And I took a lousy picture of it.


It's not terribly light, but it solves an issue with the dang pot stands. Pot stands tend to be the weakest link in a stove. They are shaky or get in the way or burn away after a while. My stove has the pot stand built in.

I used a small can of gourmet French sea salt from Trader Joes. The can was lined with plastic and the top was partially plastic so you could see the gray salt inside. I removed the plastic (and the salt) and drilled holes in the sides. There are three nuts screwed into the top of the tin, their heights adjusted by extra nuts. The pot rests right on the nuts without extinguishing the flame or toppling over on some rickety stand. I can refill the stove without burning my hands trying to remove the pot stand because I don't need to remove it. And the whole unit fits right inside my pot.

I tested it and it did boil water. I did not time it, however, as the time is not important to me after a point. It'll boil water as fast enough. It's really just a basic, unpressurized alcohol burner.

I also tested it without the screws and after it heats up it works great with pretty blue jets coming out the holes. I may remove the built-in pot stand. I'll have to see how things really work on my trip next week.

Being a producer in a consumer culture

I found this interesting article online today. Ten More Quick Ways to Make Money. The article excites me not because it's a get rich quick scheme but because it speaks well to the complaints I have about our culture. Complaints I can never quite articulate well. We are all consumers, not producers. Our consumption not only ruins the planet but it is unfulfilling. I think this article does a good job of shining light on the unfulfilling part of it. Our culture wants to make us dependent and weak. If my hike showed me anything it's that I feel a craving to be strong and independent.

I love Web development, but sometimes it is too abstract. What real value does it provide to society? Not much, really. I enjoy it because it is creative and involves my mind. It pays well, too, at least sometimes. But it is not tangible.

Doing Web development day after day, month after month, 8 hours a day I end up feeling like my life is passing me by without meaning. It's one reason I left my job and hit the trail. When I returned to the trail it was months before I could bring myself to do Web development again. After living in a tangible world, doing something so abstract was difficult. I turned to organic gardening and working in retail. I wanted to dig and sweep and move rocks and dust shelves. It seemed more real.

At the bird store where I work, I recently sold a tree stand. It is a stand for birds made of a manzanita branch stuck on a rolling base so that it forms a little tree for the bird to sit on. The stand cost $250. The builder probably made $100 or so. My boss says the builder is a flake. I was thinking that maybe I could make a tree stand. I need to learn how to use tools to build the base or else find something to use for the base. I have tried to build a tree stand in the past. Using a pot full of plaster of paris works but it does not roll on wheels and the pot gets full of food and poo that the bird drops. A saucer for a plant works as long as it is strong and not too heavy. These can be hard to find and expensive. The tree stands the pet store sells looks like the base is made of kitchen counter top material. I would have to learn to use power tools to cut kitchen counter top material. I am afraid of power tools.

Another thing I've been thinking of making are bird toys. I could find things at Art From Scrap and use papier mache and other items to make fun bird toys. I can test them on my finicky birds. Too many bird toys are made of plastic or just big chunks of wood. Birds need to forage for their food. This activity is called enrichment. The bird store sells papier mache toys that you can hide food inside. I could make those, too. I could make other toys, too, that are more than just chunks of wood and plastic. Art From Scrap ought to have some good ideas for me.

The idea isn't to make a million bucks on bird accessories but to use wasted time spent in front of the TV or the Internet to make a little extra money. I could spend that otherwise wasted time making something tangible. Then I would feel like I'm not just living in my head being abstract all day, depending on corporate nannydom for my livelihood. It would be one more thing to add to my list that makes money, earns me a little more independence from Corporate America and brings me one step closer to the freedom I seek. The freedom to fly the trail again.

Hey, I'm a farmer!

I decided to pick some avocados. We have lots of avocado trees. I picked them with a very long apple-picker. It is made of a long, telescoping pole with a wire basket on top. The wire basket has prongs that bend over on one side. You position the basket with the prongs around the fruit and pull down. The fruit falls into the basket.

I picked a large box of avocados. Then I made a collection box out of a shoe box. I cut a little slot in the shoe box so that people could put their money inside. I taped the shoebox to the big box of avocados. Then I made a homemade sign announcing BIG Bacon AVOCADOS 50¢. Because Bacon avocados are different from the Haas avocados most people are used to, I also put another sign near to the slot indicating that bacon avocados are ripe when green and soft. Bacon avocados really are huge so they tend to be popular. That's a lot of avocado for the buck!

I put the box down on the sidewalk. People driving or walking by can easily see the box. Anyone who wants to buy avocados can plop a little money in the box and take a few avocados. It's on the honor system. It's a win-win because even if someone stole all the avocados at least they would be eaten. Unless someone eats them they fall off the tree loudly enough to wake me up in the middle of the night. Then skunks and raccoons eat them instead. It would be sad if someone stole the money, but I check every few hours. Even if someone stole the money, it's not a lot of money and still the avocados would be eaten by someone.

So far I've made over $15 in just one day.

We also have Haas avocado trees. I will fill a box of those next. We also have a Valencia orange tree. I might try that. I suppose you could do something similar with squash or tomatoes or whatever garden bounty. And if you didn't have a garden of your own, any fruit tree that has branches over the fence into an alley or other public place is fair game for harvest. I know where there is an apple tree, plums, loquats and walnuts. I'm sure with a little stealthy bike riding I could find a lot more.

Passive income. I made the money while going for a hike, while relaxing in my home and eating dinner. It's not a lot of money but it's enough to enjoy a little treat.

Beach backpacking

I was thinking today that I could just load up my backpack and go. The PCT isn't the only trail in the world. But then I remembered it is August and August is way too hot where I live to go backpacking.

Then I remembered that I live on the coast and I could hike up the beach to El Capitan or Refugio or beyond to Gaviota State Beach. What would a beach backpacking trip be like? What about high tides? I know a few places along the way that can strand you at high tide. Planning something like this could be a fun challenge.

It's good to be home. I live in Paradise.

Blog Spam

I hate spam. If I could have a dream Tech job, it would be to put on a superman suit each morning and go out and kill spammers with my supreme technical abilities. If only I were that smart.

I have used Blogger for a long time, but I haven't actually used it in a while. I decided I would start using it again so that I may have a more anonymous forum for my thoughts and opionions.

Blogger blogs display an iframe at the top with a next blog button. It can be fun to just browse the blogs with the next blog button. You never know what you're going to get. I've found some really good blogs that way.

So yesterday I thought I'd go for a good "nextblog" walkabout, and what did I find? Spam blogs. Splogs. The ratio of splogs to real blogs was about 10 to 1. It made for a very impoverished treasure hunt.

What I don't get is how do they make any money? Who on Earth happens upon one of these splogs and thinks it would be a good idea to click on an ad? If I saw an ad on one of these sites I would not think the company doing the advertising was reputable at all. So who on Earth is stupid enough to buy from the advertiser? It's crazy, but then I simply don't understand capitalism sometimes. Why does everybody want to shop so much? What a waste of time.

Apparently there is a greasemonkey script out there that will restore the blogger navbar so that when you go to one of these sites you can report the blog. But that's too little too late. What I would like is for the nextblog button to be disabled, and that upon hovering over the nextblog link, it would automatically search the next site to determine if the content meets certain coniditions that constitute spam or objectionable content, and if so, forces nextblog to keep searching until a real blog is available. Then, without ever showing me the blogs, it could turn the button on, and thus let me know it's safe to click.

How's that, Blogger? Might be a slow and painful user experience, but nothing is slower or more painful then clicking nextblog, getting a spam site with no navbar, clicking the back button, clicking nextblog, getting another spam site with no navbar, clicking the back button, clicking nextblog, getting some teenager blog with embarrassing music blaring at me, clicking the back button, clicking nextblog, getting 10 more spam sites....