A start of a new chronicle, and the new comment feature gathers replies. Looks like the start of a forum to me.. Watch out, Rob! Be afraid, be very afraid!!

http://www.robgray.com/graynomad/issues/issue_066/index.php

Nov 5: Rob dicovers that it is possible to camp free in Western Australia (like he didn't know that already)

Jan 1: A few day's journal and three photos added. Rob's been having a big slack attack.

Feb 10: I've been cussing Rob for a few weeks, wondering if he would ever update his travels. Time and time again, I clicked in on the link to the chronicles index, only to see no indication of new information being posted. Tonight, I actually looked instead at issue 66, and found that there is indeed been an update, but that hasn't been included in the page header for the chronicles listing. Just goes to show that I should be using my blog links instead of browser bookmarks.

Feb 16: Rob and Chris go on a fruit and vegetables diet (at least until they pass an agricultural inspection station in their travels), the then head east, covering a lot of ground in four days or so. This brings to a close issue #66, ending up in Pt. Augusta on December 13th, 2011. Fingers crossed that we get the first of issue #67 soon.

http://www.robgray.com/graynomad/issues/issue_066/index.php#latest

Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest turns 50 years old this week.

To commemorate the half-century, the newspaper in Eugene ran a feature article in the Life section last Sunday.

Like Kesey, I had never seen the film based on the book, at least until recently. Need to dig the book out and read it again.

Welcome back to another exciting episode of "Complaining-about-something-that-you-can't do-anything-about-and will-have-to-get-used-to", also known as "Lousy Weather".

We last left off with December 2011's total, which, surprisingly, wasn't all that bad. I guess there isn't much to complain about this time, either. The chart shows that it was a not-too-bad month for PV production. In fact, if you consider that the average production total for January is somewhat skewed due to first an extreme high in 2009, and then an equally extreme low in 2010, things might have been not-quite "normal" (I always put that word in "quotes", what is "normal" anyway?).

Being a leap year this time around, February might not be all that bad, an extra day could make all the difference. So far, it's OK, so we'll see. Wonder what I'll do if the rest of the year turns out to not be so bad, weather-wise? Maybe rename this topic title??

Those of us who grew up and came of age in the 1960's had the (perhaps inflated) thought that we were making history with our Age of Aquarius ideas, musical directions, literary accomplishments and alternative living habits. There can be no denying that The Beatles and the subsequent British Invasion broke open a whole new way of celebrating and observing life, and the mind-expanding use of religion, drugs, and be-ing were the catalyst for much of what passes for ordinary life experience these days.

I've only just begun to write up my own contribution to the historical documentation of those times in the 30 Years in a Housetruck tale, available for your reading and perhaps enjoyment elsewhere on this site.

Another interesting insight into 1960's communal living is contained in the Digger's journalistic chronicle of "Home Free: A History of Two Open-Door California Communes". (Note: the Digger's journal "Home Free" should not be confused with the New Zealand book of housetrucks and buses of the same name.)

This is a rather long read, I actually took a week or two to read it slowly, chapter-by-chapter. There were quite a number of things described in the story that I could relate to from my own cooperative living experiences. Other events I could easily see happening, especially considering the wide and varied temperaments of some of my former fellow communists.

Here's a clip-and-paste from the introduction:

Not long ago, the local County museum had an exhibition focused on the 1960's and 70's in Eugene, Oregon. It proved to be a popular event, and the curators are discussing bringing it back, perhaps as a permanent exhibit.

Gee, maybe be were making history, after all. Changing the world? Well, not as much as I would have liked...

The Residents at the Schoolhouse organize their own political action committee and Occupy the Schoolhouse.

Read Rent Revolt to see how we got out of being stuck in a rut.

Several weeks ago, I got an email with information telling me that the Housetrucks New Zealand web site had closed down. I hoped that this information was incorrect, as Stu has maintained a site filled with photos and lore of NZ housetrucking for many years.

Alas, it was true! HTNZ was no more. I sent off a couple of impassioned pleas to Stu, using the few email contacts that I had, and got a reply from him. Apparently, he was of the impression that the site was generating too little interest to be of use any more. This, coupled with his busy schedule had driven him to the conclusion that it would be best if the site simply faded away.

Fortunately, I was not alone in imploring him to bring it back, and as of a few days ago, the site was back up and operating again. Thanks, Stu! It would be a shame to lose the galleries of New Zealand housetrucks and housebuses on your site. I also shudder to think of the results of allowing your recognisible domain name to expire, as it would surely become a porn site within a week. (Hmmm, Housetruck Porn, there might be some money to be made there...)

For those of you who haven't seen Stu's site yet, or those who have, and haven't been by to visit there recently, click up one of the links I've posted here and spend some time browsing the HTNZ site. Afterwards, register and post up some comments of encouragement. If you come across some interesting truck or bus related tidbit, post that, or let Stu know about it so he can include in the the site's content.

I know too well the difficulty of keeping sites like these fresh and stocked with current information. A site that doesn't change much is perhpaps like a musty mueseum, a place to view relics. Still, this is much better historically than an empty warehouse. The New Zealand Housetrucking scene is still rolling along, and HTNZ is a valuable window into that world. Stu has reopened the curtians and polished up the glass. It's up to the viewers to step up and look in.

A couple of weeks back, I posted about a very nice Victorian housebus that had just come to my attention. The builder and owner of the bus, Paul has decided to put up a "build page", showing a large selection of old(ish) photographs of the construction of the bus and detailing some of the custom modification that help make it unique.

Paul started with a bus that already had a rough start at raising the roof, then added an obligitory VW microbus graft. Fortunately, he saw the light before it was too late and cut the bus down to a bare frame so that a proper dwelling could be built.

There are many more construction photos on his build page: www.stuffibuilt.ca/StuffIBuilt/The_Mary_Ellen_Carter.html. As of this writing, he is just writing about replacing the light-duty front axle with a class 8 truck axle to improve the handling and provide power steering. Stop over and view the creation of this beautiful bus. Myself, I'm waiting to see the photos and hear the story about the fire...

Each week, I spend Sunday mornings over coffee combing through the statistics for this site, seeing how many pages were served, which files are the most requested, and where people are finding links to my pages and clicking though from.

For quite a while now, a good percentage of my page views have come from vonslatt.com, a bus-related page owned by Jake Von Slatt.

This morning, I saw that I had 256 referrals from something called "steampunkworkshop.com". Of course, I had to follow the link to find out what the linked page was and who/what a steam punk was.

What I found was a photo and written essay about the building of a bus into a retro-era RV. I didn't get very far into it until I recognized that the bus in question was Jakes. In fact, it appears that Jake has launched a new site, the very steampunkworkshop.com that I was viewing.

After I thought about it for a while, I realized that I'd been following referral links from time to time that lead me to some odd pages about people who take modern objects and hack them into retro-antiques, the point being to make them appear to have come from the time of the Industrial Revolution. Jake's site is just exactly about that.

For example, he has taken his computer keyboard and LCD monitor and worked them over until they actually look like something from the 1800's:

(I'm hoping that he doesn't mind me biting on his server's bandwidth to display that image here)

Tearing up old typewriters for keys could become a new pastime. The whole project is contained here: steampunkworkshop.com/lcd.shtml (I get a shiver up my spine thinking about the hardware in the offices in the movie Brazil.)

Now, once I got over the intrigue of this unique project, I wondered if there was any commercial prospect for turning out such products for people with less artistic skill than Jake. Turns out that someone else is way ahead of me on this one, check out Datamancer:

At any rate, if you have a few spare minutes, and haven't reached your internet providers bandwidth restriction this month, drop on over to the home page at Steam Punk Workshop and check out some of the other projects. I knew that Jake was deep into kerosene lamp repair and restoration, but now it looks like he has taken fascination with pre-electrification appliances to a whole new level. Anyone for an art-deco etched iPod?

There are a couple of crafts and music fairs making the rounds on both New Zealand's North and South islands. For some reason, I am frequently mistaken for one of the organizers of one or both of the popular fairs, and seem to get a lot of inquiries about the whereabouts of the individual fair, or it's travel itinerary, or asking how to contact that crafter who was selling that cute little striped sun dress that their daughter loved so well...

Well, since I'm in Oregon, USA, and have yet to attend, much less organize one of these events, I usually don't have a lot of useful information to impart to the curious folks who ask.

Until now.

I'm going to try and keep an updated schedule for at least the two most popular travelling crafts fairs, and see how it goes. Note that these listings are from eventfinder.co.nz, a web site that displays such information submitted by the event's own organizers. As I don't have any control over the accuracy of the information (I'm only relaying what I see on the Eventfinder site), I'm not responsible for wrong information, or the sad fact that they are all sold out of that cute striped sun dress you wanted so badly...

Each of the listing tables contains a short description of the particular event, as supplied by the organizers.

The locations and event dates/times in these tables were compiled from Eventfinder.co.nz

Events listed in gray with a strikeout (gray strikeout) are recent past dates the fair has performed.