June 26, 2006

right livlihood

“You’ll be the only general contractor in the Flathead that drives a VW bus.”

With any luck this might become a true statement sometime in the relatively near future. First I need A) the VW bus and B) a contractors license and/or a place to build. And many, many other things. These days, however, every other truck that drives by has a lumber rack with some type of ladder or something strapped to it. As someone recently said, “Sears must’ve had a sale on hammers.”

I would like to think my vision is foresight and not astigmatic. The only thing I know for sure is that hindsight is 20/20. The way I see it, however, is that this current boom is unsustainable. The good times will be coming to an end and Home Depot will be wishing it had a stricter return policy. As a cabinet guy I’ve been able to see many different homes, most oversized, overpriced with owners who are overworked and underpaid. They can’t possibly own most of their things outright. They are mostly my age (give or take 5-10 years) and we’ve never seen a real strong recession. We’ve heard about our grandparents and great grandparents living in the depression and our parents have made slight references to the 70’s, but the market crash a few years ago wasn’t really felt because housing took off so much.

Now that we have all these big fancy houses with big fancy price tags, how we gonna pay for it? And, more importantly, where are we going to live when the bank takes over our $3000 a month mortgage?

My hope is to build affordable, small but smart houses for people. Eventually I’d like to take a course on straw bale building (or volunteer) to get the skills to help owners build a house themselves. I’d help with the big details and they help pack bales around. That’s the dream. We’ll see how reality meshes with dreams in a few months. For now I’ve got just under two weeks left at my current job. Then it’s back to building houses.

posted @ 8:46 PM

June 7, 2006

something

Some things I learned today:

Running a drill bit into your finger hurts.
People say very revealing things on the internet.
My cousin (who is like a [distant] brother) in fact has two brothers that I never knew about.

Ok, so the first two I sorta knew already. I didn’t know that a Torx head bit would shred so much of my cuticle, but one could probably have guessed this. And the internet thing is the whole appeal of weblogs. I find my own writing is more interesting when it’s personal. (I also find it less likely to be posted when it’s that personal.)

When I post I write like I never met you. This is because I have not met the majority of my readers (do I have any readers? I don’t know. Probably not. I don’t post much and it’s never personal. Plus I turned off comments due to major spam.)

It’s also just really scary these days, isn’t it? People can look you up and find out all sorts of stuff. They can take it the wrong way and maybe even take you to court. Who knows for what... talk about your job — watch out. Talk about your Friday night — watch out. Talk about your politics — watch out. [As a related note: Irwin tools owns the right to use blue and yellow, so... watch out if you have those colors on your website.]

You don’t have to be saying anything wrong or harmful. You just have to be talking... er, writing. I can’t seem to get a reply via email from my cousin the past couple of months. We haven’t spoken on the phone in about a year and we haven’t had a face to face in even longer. We’re busy in different places. If we lived closer we’d be great friends. But we haven’t really talked in about 12 years.

It’s interesting getting to know someone you think you know so well in such a ____ way. (I don’t know what word to use here... weird, different, foreign, exciting, public...)

I could be getting to know you while you’re getting to know me and neither of us needs to “check-in” with the other about the progress of our knowledge. Would you call this a relationship? If it is, then does the six degrees of separation thing just get reduced to one degree (if the other person has a website)? So, say Kevin Bacon posts something on his website, I read it. Essentially Kevin is “talking” to me. Just as I’m “talking” to you. I’m one degree from Kevin then.

Hmmm... something to think about.

posted @ 8:55 PM

June 1, 2006

in case you haven’t

In case you haven’t already discovered: Tibetan on the Mac Blog.

posted @ 8:04 PM