Category Archives: Uncategorized

I just don’t feel like it right now, though…

Looking for ideas for my second blog, http://houseboatshantyboatbuilders.wordpress.com/, I did a Google Search using the word SHANTYBOAT Building (Shantyboat-one word). MY blog came in #5 on the list of 1,960 links! THIS blog came in at #19 (second page)

My last post mentioned two old friends that I haven’t been in contact with for years. In one case it has been 4 decades. Within hours I heard from both of them and through a comment in Skip Williamson’s blog (http://skipwilliamson.blogspot.com/ and http://open.salon.com/blog/snappy_sam)I got in touch with an old roommate from college.

Back in the hippy-dippy days of 1968 when I was living in Chicago I was good friends with two underground cartoonists; Skip Williamson and Jay Lynch. Jay used to have a fantasy of hybridizing and miniaturizing cattle until they were the size of mice. Then he’d be able to have a whole herd of them in his apartment. He used to talk about how he could stampede them from one room to another.

Of course, with a miniature herd like that you’d need to have a miniature range to graze them on. Today I ran across the answer. It’s called “Grass for your home or office desk: http://www.inhabitat.com/2009/05/16/grass-for-your-home-or-office-desk/

Do you need a little extra feng-shui in your home or your office? Why not try a grass square to brighten up your desk and give it a little something extra. These grass squares were designed at the Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, Israel, by Uri Romano and Assaf Yogev of nine99 Design as a way to combine nature and architecture. By bringing some nature indoors like these moss mats, the designers hoped to provide a grounding piece of nature.

The squares of grass were originally inspired by Frank Loyd Wright’s Fallingwater and how Wright continually strove to connect architecture and nature. All of the packaging for the squares is made completely from recycled materials. Openings on the corners of the package let the grass breathe and help give it a longer shelf life.

You can place these squares anywhere, or if you’re into feng-shui, place it in the right spot to balance your place of work or home. Grass is fairly easy to grow, just needs just a little water and sun. You might even find cutting the grass with scissors provides you a bit of therapy. For apartment dwellers, this may be a perfect way to get your outdoor fix and you don’t even need a lawnmower. Unfortunately, we don’t know if these are really for sale anywhere, but it would make for an easy DIY project.

I grew up in the small town of Orleans, Massachusetts. Orleans is thrust out into the Atlantic Ocean where the forearm of Cape Cod turns to the north and is the first town on the Cape to have water on two of its borders. Small as it is, Orleans has some historic  distinctions. The townspeople succesfully repelled an attempted British landing during the War of 1812. It was the western terminus of the first trans-Atlantic Telegraph cable and is the only place in the continental United States to have been hit by enemy shells during WWII.

Since it is one of the eastern-most points in the country it has also been the jumping off point for many maritime adventures. John Ridgeway and Chay Blyth departed from Orleans June 4th, 1966 and made it to Ireland in 92 days. Others, sadly, left Orleans’s shores and were never heard from again.

On May 19th, 2009, Charlie Girard, a Frenchman, launched his second attempt to row across The Pond and break the record of 62 days set two years ago by another Frenchman, Emmanuel Coindre in 2004. (For those of you who don’t know, the French believe that they invented wind, water and waves.) Girard tried the stunt in 2007 only to be rescued by the Coast Guard less than two days after his departure.

We can only wish him well.

As readers of this blog know I post on a variety of subjects.  Whatever happens to interest me at the moment. But one subject that is of great interest to me is houseboats/shantyboats. Building them, living on them and modifying them. New posts on a blog get driven to the bottom quickly as newer ones are added and the houseboat/shantyboat posts sort of disapper. So, for others interested in the same subject I have started this new blog:

http://houseboatshantyboatbuilders.wordpress.com/

Returning to Panama City today so we need a little bit of travelling music…

In the search for a place to live on a boat in Panama I saw that the area around Pedrigal has lots of rivers and islands. It’s on the Pacific side of Panama where the tidal range is about 19 feet. I went down there today despite the negative comments I’ve had about the place. They were right.

The marina is very small with floating docks.

The water is brown and when the tide is out it’s muddy all around and the mangroves would be a mosquito factory

There’s a nice restaurant at the marina. I had the mixed seafood platter consisting of shrimp, fish fingers (I didn’t even know fish had hands to get fingers from) and calamari. If calamari is cooked too long it’s sort of like chewing on rubber bands, but these were done just right…tasty and tender. After the Jubilado discount the dinner was $6.60.

The town itself isn’t much to look at and some of the houses are pretty bad…

But across the street was a flowering tree I’d never seen before

Bus trip back to Panama City tomorrow and plane ride back to Fort Lauderdale Saturday.