...and then the floods came

“Let The Drummer Kick” by Citizen Cope has been in my head ever since i saw a routine by a pair on "so you think you can dance", so this is a recommendation to readers and a reminder to myself and to download this song when i get home. back to business...

it has been a busy week once again, which was further complicated by the fact that it has been raining for longer than i can remember, and our tent leaks. nuthin a wall of towels can't fix. progress is being made on our building site in cedar. slowy. a stall for our composting toilet is almost ready, as is a solar showering area. its really cool because it has been woven into the surrounding underbrush. i'd take a picture, but unless you see it in 3d, it just looks like a bunch of sticks. so me and antonio have been shuttling back and forth doing this and that, but also getting our pedalling fix. oh, and i just eclipsed 2000km on my oh-doe-meter the other day since i left toronto. i was distracted by a beautiful sunset as we were riding back home, and neglected to stop and have a celebration by the highway side. aside from the building project, we have also been hard at work trying to figure out how to build a bike generator and scavenge the parts in preparation for our workshop in a week. amazingly, we found a beautiful red (hand-me-down) bike behind one of the local grocery stores which we claimed, cleaned up and are now putting into service as our soon to be electri-shyon genera-shyon sta-shyon. the stand for said bike was also recently built with much care (in the rain with power tools). we are now just eagerly awaiting the arrival of a alternator in order to turn our pedalling into power. but all that stuff was temporarily put aside for the weekend in order to learn about cob building first hand. we really got our hands dirty (and feet, and just about everything else) while attending a workshop on how to build cob structures. i am pretty pooped after spending the day dancing about on top of sand and clay, and then smashing it into a wall-like shape. the workshop was brought together in partnership with the mudgirls (www.mudgirls.ca) and earthmasters. And there will be more of these workshops to come in the coming weeks. we've also been offered jobs working with one of the premier alternative builders in this area named adam parry (www.hobbithomes.ca), which is wicked awesome, and i can't wait to take him up on his offer...when we get the time. aloha yall.

...let there be shelter

another exciting couple of days. its hard to keep track of it all. it guess it was 2 days ago there was some serious sun happening here in nanaimo that broke all kinds of temperature records. it was over 40 celcius and of course me and antonio were outside walking around and getting well lost. We eventually made our way to our destination, although a little bit late and sweaty for our meeting with Ian. Ian took us on a tour of his house pointing out, explaing and answering about all of the energy saving and other interesting modifications he has made, including a composting toilet, solar hot water heater, PV energy system, heat exchanger....tres. cool. it was nice to see all the stuff that we would eventually want to implement in the future in our own lives or on our test building site in cedar, happening and working in our own backyard. the rest of the day was spent melting and trying to do as little as possible.
The next morning we biked out to the work site. It was about a 20km ride and the weather was perfect. we explored the site to figure out what we would build and where, set up a tarp that was the best looking tarp setup i have ever been proud to be a part of (you would be proud charlotte), started building an outdoor shower, and were provided with yet another wonderful meal by Pauline before biking back home at 9pm. we slept well.
this morning's meeting was with an electrician regarding the planning of our future bike generator, and the workshop we will be holding teaching others how to build one. we don't know how to build one yet. so the afternoon was spent scouring the city's bike shops trying to find someone who did. no luck yet. but we did find a cheap deep cycle 12 volt battery.
and finally, it seems we may have another member of our team named eric, freshly returned from lasqueti island. more action to come shortly.

In The Beginning...

It has been almost one week since me (john) and antonio have returned to Nanaimo and were welcomed once again into the welcoming arms or Roz and Will, and we plan to stay until about mid August. We were here just a few weeks ago along with the Otesha Project on the tail end of our cycling trip, where we were met with an offer too tempting to resist...the opportunity to learn about and contribute to constructing sustainable buildings, starting from scratch. I know that is pretty vague but the premise is that we will try to build a variety of test buildings using different structural, energy production, water usage, heating and cooling techniques.
The first few days together were spent planning, talking, making lists, and talking some more, and also a lot of researching, phone-calling, and shopping...but slowly...momentum is growing. We have been living in a luxurious tent in the backyard eating delicious and plentiful food, reading copious amounts of luscious bookies (i currently have 5 green building related and 2 fiction books in various stages of completion beside my thermarest). We have made cookies twice and both times (with the help of 4 hungry mouths which appreciated their deliciousness) they have disappeared in less than 24 hours.
But speaking of food...we finally got to visit the site yesterday where we are hoping to create our first pilot building project. After some close misses connecting with Pauline, the owner of the property upon which we are planning to build, everything went wonderfully. She gave us a drive out to her place, tramped through the bushes with us for a little while as we surveyed the site, then served us a delicious meal, all the while exciting us with talk of how she helps regular folks like us to get the most of our investable money. We couldn't have asked for a better host for the day or for this potential project. And this is just the beginning...