As The Crow Flies

This is a good book about how to sculpt your own dirt cheap house– The Cob Builders Handbook, and now it’s offered for free, online.

If I ever stay home for a summer this is the kind of home I want to make for myself.

Think you need a 3000 dollar system to compost your poo? No. All you need is bucket with a toilet seat lid, and this free downloadable book.

A link to the site: http://www.jenkinspublishing.com/humanure.html

And here is a link directly to the PDF.

Thanks to Richard for finding the links.

Related Post: Simple composting toilet

For people who love documentaries and all those movies that you could only see if you lived in a big city with an art house, Netflix has been a boon. They have everything. I live out in the middle of nowhere and my movies have a one day turn around. Netflix lets you rent, watch and return DVDs from home - Try free for 2 weeks Here is a list of my favorite documentaries:

• American Movie (1999) About a guy with no talent or skill but a passion for making movies and a contempt for those who don’t.
• Aileen Wuornos: Selling of a Serial Killer (1992) She worked as a prostitute and killed the men that raped her. Her advisers are a barefooted, singing lawyer and a religious woman that adopts her. Both of them sell her out and she ends up on death row.
• Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003) The story continues.
• Born Into Brothels (2004) Film maker teaches the children that live in a red light district of India how to photograph.
• Capturing the Friedmans (2003)
• Country Boys (2-Disc Series) (2002) Follows the lives of 2 Appalachian teens that go to a special school.
• The Cruise (1998)
• Crumb (1994)
• Daughter from Danang: American Experience (2002) Woman who was born to a Vietnamese woman and an American solider leaves Vietnam and is adopted by a Texan when she is eight. She is completely americanized including a Texas accent when she returns to visit her family in Vietnam.
• The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2005)
• Devil’s Playground (2002) When Amish kids turn 16 they drink, have sex, and shoot drugs until they decide to become Amish or not.
• The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2000)
• First Person: The Complete Series (3-Disc Series) (2000) EarlMorris films people, interrogation style, with his special built camera.
• Grey Gardens (1975) Two eccentric former socialites, who are related to Jackie O, live in their decaying mansion full of cats and raccoons.
• Hands on a Hard Body (1998) Documentary about a contest in the south where people stand around with their hand on a Nissan pickup for days until the last one drops.
• Hell House (2001) Christians set up a “house of horrors” about what will happen to you if you have sex.
• Jesus Camp (2006) Training children to roll around on the floor, talk in tongues, be annoying to non-christians, and praise Bush.
• Jupiter’s Wife (1995) Homeless woman that lives in Central Park.
• Marjoe (1972) Rolling on floor, talking in tongues, child preacher grows up and doesn’t believe anymore yet keeps preaching for the cash.
• My Flesh and Blood (2003) Single woman adopts all these sweet kids with disabilities and one little hellion that makes everyone miserable.
• Sister Helen (2002) Loud, alcoholic nun runs a halfway house for drug addicts and alcoholics.
• Sound and Fury (2000) Deaf parents are given the choice to let their deaf children hear via the cochlear implant but they want their children to remain deaf.
• Spellbound (2002) Spelling bee and the kids that compete in them. Suspenseful.
• Stevie (2003) Filmmaker goes back to visit the boy that he was a “big brother” to many years before. Finds a man that is more troubled then the boy he once tried to help.
• Vernon, Florida (1981) Small town Floridians are interviewed. Ha!
• When We Were Kings (1996) I don’t like boxing but this story of the Zaire match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman is so well told it’s like you are hearing a folk tale.
• Word Wars (2004) The rough world of the professional scrabble player.
• Wordplay (2006) The not so rough world of the crossword puzzle addict.

A happy upbeat musical movie about finding happiness, beauty, and individual expression in a world of prefab buildings, consumerism, efficiency, and clones. “There will be chairs for your convenience, so you don’t have to sit on your coolers.”

This is one of the best movies ever made.

Here is an great BBC documentary available for download on youtube It’s the story of a church were everyone is related, most of them are lawyers, and they hate everyone who isn’t them. The most hated people in America.  I have a dial up connection; it took me 2 1/2 days to download it, but it was worth it.

Errol Morris’ First Person: the complete series. He uses this thing called an “Interrotron” - an innovative camera device Morris invented to maintain merciless eye contact with his subjects”. All they see is him on a little screen– no camera person apparently . It’s just the subject and the camera staring them in the eyes and they tell their stories. Haunting and disturbing stories like a woman who fell in love with a serial murderer.

Most of my Netfix selections have been documentarys. One I found particularly good was called “Country Boys”. It follows the lives of two Appalachian teens from the age of 15. After watching it, I went to the PBS/Frontline website for it and found the entire, 6+ hour, documentary available online for free. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/countryboys/

The Peace Pilgrim walked away. She left all off her stuff and walked. For thirty years she walked, walking until offered shelter; fasting until offered food. She never asked for anything. She only brought the clothes she was wearing, a comb, and her message: “This is the way of peace: Overcome evil with good, and falsehood with truth, and hatred with love.”

Her friends put together a website and a book: Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words. At the website you can read most of the book online or ask that a hard copy be sent to you. There is an hour long documentary to download, interviews and a 2006 calendar to download.

The peace pilgrim pamphlet called the “The steps to inner peace” can be read at and is offered in 8 different languages on the web site, as well. You can also request a hard copy be sent to you.

It would be impossibly expensive and take up too much room in my cabin to buy enough books to last me through even one winter. So rather than sit with my own thoughts, last year I bought a laptop, and a solar panel to power it, and headed to my cabin to be snowed in. I didn’t have a phone then, so I couldn’t connect to the internet, but I stayed happy reading the folowing.: Project Gutenberg DVD This is a free dvd with 9600 books on it, whose copyrights have expired. Most of the books are at least 80 years old but as long as you have power for your laptop you will always have something good to read. You can download it or they will mail it to you. There is also a CD version but with only 600 books on it. Project Gutenberg has 19,000 books at their web page that you can download for free.

Encarta Encylopedia Premium

I have the 2005 deluxe edition: a huge stand alone computer encyclopedia, atlas, and dictionary. Most of the authors that I would read in Project Gutenberg also had entries and often literary guides in Encarta. A search box can be docked on your task bar for handy looking up of words or subjects. I found it really nice to be reading a Project Gutenberg book and coming to a word I didn’t know, copying it and pasting it in the dictionary search bar and getting a definition with the option of also hearing it spoken. Often when I’m reading a paper book and I come to some reference, word or place that I’m not familiar with I just keep reading but with this handy encyclopedia, atlas, and dictionary it’s so easy to look things up.

This encyclopedia also has articles from magazines like, National Geographic and Scientific America. In addition to all this it has an extensive history of African Americans; the slave narratives alone will keep you in good reads for weeks.

And for any pragmatic advice on cabin living, I would turn to:Thirty years of Mother Earth News articles on CD

I first heard about Richard Hittleman’s Yoga: 28 Day Exercise Plan from Ray Jardine in Beyond Backpacking. He said that it was one of the things he did to prepare for a long hike. It’s not just a twenty eight day course, it’s a life long yoga program that will make you strong, flexable and healthy. The book is horribly dated; it’s from the seventies, but I can overlook that.

I’ve been watching a lot of documentaries lately: There is sequel out to the documentary “The Selling of a Serial Killer” It’s called ” Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer”. It takes the story up to her execution. Sad but a good documentary.

I also recommend “Spellbound” a documentary about the national spelling bee.

Another documentary was “A Class Divided” it’s an update and includes original footage from ” The Eye of the Storm” a documentary about a 3rd grade teacher that divides her class by the color of their eyes to teach them about racial hatred. It’s available online at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/etc/view.html