About Hastings County, ON

Are you suffering from the mid-winter blahs yet? If you happen to be reading this from anywhere north of the Carolinas, chances are you probably are. I know I am. Today I decided to write about something a little warmer, and just thinking about it makes me feel better.

Chattel houses can be found on a few Carribean islands, but for the most part, it is the sunny island of Barbados where they are best known. The plantation workers would build small houses that could be moved from one plantation to the next. As we all know, "chattel" means "movable property", and that's exactly what these houses were designed to do.

They are constructed entirely out of wood (except for the tin roof) and no nails are used to keep them together. Thet can be disassembled fairly quickly and moved to another part of the island in short order. This is because the workers rarely owned the land upon which their houses were built, and should better employment surface elsewhere (or perhaps a dispute with the landowner), away they went. They are usually set up on blocks or a groundsill.

These days, they are more or less permanently placed as employment conditions have changed over the last century. Many of these houses still exist and the owners will make additions from time to time. A lot of pride and craftsmanship went into the building of these houses and some of them are very old.

Having ones "ducks in a row" is an expression that I hear quite a bit in the office. In Realtor's parlance it refers to having everything set up so that a transaction can occur smoothly. To become organized, one has to prepare things in advance so that when the time comes each segment will occur in a natural progression without a hitch. An important part of this is to be aware of possible pitfalls that might happen once the wheels are in motion and having a planned course of action should something out of the ordinary happen.

There are several theories about how this expression originated. The one that makes most sense to me is the one concerning the old carnival game. A set of plastic ducks would be set up on a conveyor system which moved at a moderate speed. The participant would then try to shoot the ducks with an air gun attempting to find a rythme conducive to shooting as many ducks as possible. Of course the task was made a lot easier when his ducks were all in a row.

Another theory concerns an early version of bowling. In earlier times the bowling pins were much stubbier than their modern counterparts and were nicknamed "ducks". Before we had automatic pin replacers, it was usually the job of a boy to re-set the pins so that play could resume. It made no sense to play any further until one's "ducks were in a row".

As with most ventures, it's much wiser to plan ahead and have everything lined up ahead of time so that once a course of action is underway things will go smoothly. If we don't have our ducks in a row, sometimes the results will be less than satisfactory.

I couldn't resist posting this picture. I thought it was quite funny.

Apparently some fellow snapped this while trying to pay his fare to ride the subway in Toronto last month. He waited for a few minutes and took a couple of pictures. The poor ticket collector never woke up and missed quite a few people who were jumping over the turnstyles in order to avoid paying their fare.

The ticket collector certainly seems very comfortable. While I'm very amused by this photograph apparently the management at the Toronto Transit Commission are not. The employee in question is in a bit of hot water.

Right now there are about one million people without homes in Haiti. There are many more people around the world (shamefully enough we have our fair share right here in Canada) who also are in dire need of temporary housing. A group of young people in the U.S. are promoting a very good idea. They have redesigned the traditional yurt into something that is economical and well worth looking into.

You might know yurts in the more traditional sense. They are sturdy tent-like dwellings used primarily by nomadic and semi-nomadic people all the way from Mongolia to the lands formerly known as Persia. In Turkey, the word Yurt means "homeland" as well as being a synonym for "abode". More famously, the armies of the great Genghis Khan would shelter hemselves in makeshift camps consisting of thousands of yurts as they swept through Asia and Europe. They have withstood the test of time, and various forms of yurts are still being used aroung the world, particularly in Mongolia.

A modern day Hexayurt can be made by using twelve sheets of plywood. Twelve four-by-eight sheets would build a 166 square foot dwelling that is sturdy enough to last for years if properly constructed. There is absolutely no waste of wood when building it. The cuts are all incredibly simple and the finished product is very sturdy because the weight of the roof is evenly distributed and keeps the walls in place.

These structures have become a common sight at the Burning man festival in Nevada. People use them because they can be built quickly, cheaply, solidly and in keeping with the spirit of Burning Man, without any waste.

From the Hexayurt website

Here are the key points.
Hexayurts can be built in plywood/OSB for less than $100 for a 166 square foot (15 sq meter) building. See the Plywood hexayurt how-to video.
Hexayurts can be made in a variety of sizes using simple tools from industry standard 4'x8' (1.2x2.4m) sheets with zero waste and can be made successfully from many different materials, like plywood, OSB, coroplast, composites, hexacomb cardboard or other honeycombs and polyiso insulation boards.
Hexayurts are public domain with no copyright or patent, meaning anybody can build as many as they like for free.

Why not just check out the website and see some of their quick videos about Hexayurts?

Here's some pictures of Burning man

I was driving along a rural stretch of road the other day. There were fields on either side and the snow was blowing all around. I wouldn't quite say it was a "whiteout" condition, but it was fairly close.

Can you spot the polar bear eating a bowl of vanilla ice cream in the corner of my windshield?

No? Neither could I. In fact I couldn't really see much of anything. Great time to take a photo though.