Getting settled in

As of today we are once again connected to the internet. It's been a little while since I have been able to sit at the laptop and post an update. Somehow sitting in a hotel parking lot with the laptop balanced on the steering wheel just is not conducive to writing...

We have decided to stay here for a while. The area is just so beautiful and the more we explore the more we feel at home. The weather has been a bit rainy the past couple of days, but everyone is still very excited about the area. I have tons of pictures - there is just so much to photograph. I may have to get a bit better camera so I can really capture some of the Oregon Coast.

Brookings Oregon

We safely arrived in Brookings Oregon a few hours ago. We're checked into an RV park and soaking in some of the gorgeous weather. It's breezy and a nice and warm 72 degrees. We had lunch at a little pizza parlor near the harbor and took a quick tour of the town. Everyone in the family is in love with the scenery and so enjoying the sunny springtime weather.

Tonight is relaxation time. Tomorrow we move to a better RV park for the week and then head out exploring the area.

Traveling

Hitting the road is always a little nerve wracking for me. The longer I sit in one spot the harder it is to relax when it comes time to move again. Somehow it gets into my head that something is going to break down on me or that the road will be too dangerous for me to drive on. I don't know where the feelings come from, but they happen every time to some degree or another. They subside at some number of miles down the road. After watching in the rear view mirror and being aware of every little odd noise for some period of time I start to relax again. Even if something were to happen I feel confident that I could handle whatever it was, but it's the anticipation of some unknown event that prevents me from just enjoying the scenery from the very beginning.

I have a similar feeling about the future. I know that our civilization will have to move again in some other direction. Find a future home and settle down in a more sustainable way. I know that it's inevitable and needs to happen for the benefit of everything living on this planet, but I still spend all of my time focusing on the little things that might foretell what event or circumstance will cause us to all have to move quickly and solve whatever problems may come up. I still worry about where I will be and if I will be prepared for it instead of enjoying the current situation.

So moving from time to time reminds me that we can move. That we are not stuck in one place and unable to adapt. Challenging myself to think about everything differently and working outside of the normal work, debt and class roles helps me to keep moving and accept change as a part of everyday life instead of allowing a never ending routine to lull me into a sense of permanence. There is no way that we can all continue to live as we have been for the past few hundred years. It has been a roller coaster ride, a fun house, a wild adventure for some. Most of us have just worked and forgotten how to have a real and meaningful life. I am doing my best to unlearn the lessons taught by a society driven to distraction and to embrace change and natural cycles as part of my re-education. It's a hard lesson to pay attention to when you are surrounded by people that all think that this is some kind of amusement park.

Time to move again...

Finished Bears & Family

AJ and Kathy stopped in for a visit on their way back from California. They brought us some goodies from where we both grew up. AJ helped me diagnose a problem with my saw and then we worked together to modify the chain to remedy it. I'm able to do plunge cuts a lot easier now. I may still have to modify the chain a bit more, but for now I am happy with the way it seems to be cutting. We'll hopefully see them once more before they catch a plane back to Minnesota for the Summer.

I finished carving the signs and got all of the bears burned and details added. There's one bear that I decided to not finish the base of and it turned out to be one of my favorites. I'll have to try doing that more often and see if I get the same results.

Tomorrow we're planning to hit the road again and head toward the coast. We're not sure exactly where we want to stay or if we'll head North or South once we get there, but we're due for a move and need to go exploring in another area for a potential spot to settle. Cave Junction is a possibility, but we're still in the exploring phase and don't want to pick any favorites until we feel we've got enough to choose from to be relatively satisfied with our final choice.

More Carvings

Yesterday was a long day. I spent about 8 hours carving bears and tutoring one of the RV park owners on how to carve a bear in the process. They're paying me to carve them 4-5 bears while I am staying here. They wanted to trade for rent, but since we're leaving this spot within the next few days to go to the coast, it didn't make sense to work for lodging credit. They're going to re-sell the bears in their trading post. I negotiated for a price per bear that seems fair enough. I don't have to finish them with varnish, so it's a bit less work than I am used to having to do.

I didn't quite get the bears finished yesterday, so today I have about an hour or so more carving to do - mostly signs for the two bears that don't have them already. I could have carved a few more, but it took some extra time to stop and walk Lyle through the blocking process and answer questions. It was worth the extra time though because his bear turned out pretty good and he gained some confidence. It was also a good introduction for me to the world of chainsaw carving outside of the shop environment. It looks like it will be fairly easy for me to find work in this field and earn some cash as needed.

Carving in Cave Junction

One of the reasons that I went to Minnesota was to learn how to chainsaw carve from one of the masters of the trade. There are many kinds of carvers - some of them very detailed and refined and others more rustic and known for speed. AJ is known for speed and staying true to the art by using few tools outside of the chainsaw itself for carving. He also has a reputation for being ridiculously fast and capturing a certain movement that sets his work apart from the rest.

Yesterday I felt the need to practice again. It's been a month or so since I touched the chainsaw and I was starting to feel like the skill was slipping away from me. I also wanted to try carving exclusively with the electric saw that AJ set me up with before I left. Up until yesterday I had always done the major blocking of my carvings with a gas saw and then only finished up a few dozen or so with the electric saw. A gas saw is more powerful and has a much higher chain speed than an electric saw and to be honest I wasn't sure that I could get a bear done in a reasonable amount of time with just the electric...

I guess I should explain why I went fully electric instead of just going with a gas saw and making life easier... Well, some of it has to do with my distaste for the smell of gasoline. Mostly though I wanted to be able to chainsaw carve without having to spend a lot of money. Gas saws are temperamental and require a lot of maintenance as well as a constant supply of gasoline. I thought that it would be pretty cool if instead of gasoline I could somehow make use of the extra electricity we make from our solar panels. So, AJ and I did some testing and found out that I could run an electric saw for about 4-5 hours a week off the electricity that we make via the solar panels. Since I can carve a bear in about 45 minutes, I can easily carve at least 5 bears a week and not spend a single penny on the energy required to do so. That was the theory until yesterday at least...

So, I asked one of the RV park managers if I carved them a bear would they give me the wood, and let me carve a few bears for practice.

I found a piece of oak on a pile of firewood that seemed relatively solid and worth a few cuts to see if I could make a bear out of it. Oak is fairly hard as far as woods go. So far I had only cut fairly soft white pine and cedar with the electric saw. Lyle (one of the park owners) wanted me to grab an 18-24 inch piece of oak, but I didn't think the electric saw could handle it so I pushed for a more modest 12-14 inch piece. I think he may have been a bit disappointed, but then you really can't ask too much of an electric saw...

I cut off a 3 foot section or so and set it up on the concrete slab next to our trailer. There was a fairly deep crack of somewhat rotten wood that divided the piece roughly in half, so I decided to make a small bear and put one paw up in the air so I could remove the crack and still make use of half of the wood. The piece was cut at an angle on the end and I followed that cue and made the head tilted to one side on roughly the same angle as the cut...

The first 3-4 cuts I was really nervous. I had some idea of what I was shooting for, but honestly I didn't yet see the bear that I was trying to carve out of the piece of oak. By the time I moved back to the front of the bear and was cutting out the piece for under the chin and arm I had a clear picture of the stance of the bear in my mind and was able to relax a bit.

15 minutes into the carving I heard the pitch of the saw change and started to smell heat coming off the wood. I stopped to check the oil level and sure enough I was out. I refilled the oil tank and checked to make sure that oil was pumping to the chain, but nothing was coming out. I took apart the saw and checked the oil pump (which was working fine) and then noticed that the oil slot in the bar was clogged. After 20 minutes or so (and a bit of help from Alan digging out sawdust from the oil hole in the bar) I got oil flow back to the chain and went back to carving again. It took a lot of patience to get the plunge cuts between the legs done. I forgot to file down the rakers on the chain, so the cut was really slow and hot with quite a bit of smoke. I managed to get through it anyway...

By the time I finished texturing and putting the last minute details on the bear it was getting dark. I should have done the bear around noon instead of starting at dinner time. The last step was to give the bear some eyes. Alan held a work light for me while I burned in some eyes, eyelashes and added some detail to the nose. We decided that it was too late for me to carve a sign for the bear, so we called it a night.

Today I cleaned up the carving scraps and sawdust and went to work carving a sign out of another section of the oak tree we used. No problem finding a suitable section of tree for my little sign, but there was some problem carving it without the use of the sign carving table at the shop in Minnesota. I ended up carving 90% of the sign right into the log face and then cutting the sign out of the log. It seemed to work out fine even though it was a bit of a pain in the neck carving on the ground instead of up at a comfortable height.

The bear turned out pretty well. It's very hard to judge how long it actually took to carve since I didn't look at the clock when I started or take note of how long it actually took to repair the saw. My guesstimate is that it took around an hour (including the sign) to carve the bear. There's another hour or so work in finish work to be done - which includes burning, brushing, sanding and varnishing the bear. I'm not sure if they have any good quality spar varnish here in Cave Junction, but I'm sure I'll be able to find something to make do with...

A quiet morning

I heard the charge controller click on this morning at 6:53 AM. Making electricity in bed is nice... I was laying in bed awake and thinking about what things I can do today. Maybe I'll go fishing again...

I'm up now. Everyone else is still in bed asleep. I've already had my shower and I have my cup of Mexican hot chocolate sitting on the table next to me. The Mexican hot chocolate has been a favorite of mine since I was in High School. My mom and I used to stop at Los Bagles in Arcata California on the way to school. I was frequently late for my first class - smelling of an everything bagel with cream cheese, lox, tomato, red onion and Larrupin mustard dill sauce. I would walk into class with just under a half cup of Mexican hot chocolate in hand - mostly due to the fact that it was so hot that it took nearly 20 minutes to cool down enough to drink - not that I didn't spend many a day with "cat tongue" anyway. I remember my first period report card saying something like 53 tardies, 25 absences and the comment "A pleasure to have in class". I honestly think that I might have made it to class before the first bell 2-3 times that year. I wish I had kept that report card... Those times riding to school with my mom are some of my favorite memories. We didn't talk a lot until after our bagel stop, but then we always managed to talk through mouths chewing and catch up. That was the only time I really had her all to myself. I also spent my learning permit time driving myself to the bagel shop in the mornings with my mom in the passenger seat. I nearly missed the turn to the bagel shop once - daydreaming about school, assignments, my girlfriend, fitting in, etc. - and screeched around the corner way too fast. There on the inside of the corner were 3 police cars at the local burger stand. My mom turned to them and gave them a "What are you going to do?" kind of look with her hands up in the air and then pointed at me grinning. They watched us go down the road a ways and then went back to eating their pastries. My mom never said a word about it to me...

Friends and Family

It's been very peaceful lately. Becky and I have been exploring the area where we'd like to settle and have been finding quite a few friends as we go along. There's quite a variety of people in the area (diversity is good).

My mom stopped in for a quick visit on her way to pick up my dad in central Oregon. She brought some gifts for us and spent a little while hanging out with us in the RV. It will be nice to be closer to some of my family again. I really missed the camping and canoing trips here on the West Coast. There's just no place else that I feel so at home with. Now that we've done quite a bit of traveling I think it's safe to say that we'll stay close to the West Coast as we look for a place to build a home base.

We had a great visit wit Bob, Arlene and Jocelyn who we met and became friends with back in Minnesota. We managed to rendezvous here in Oregon nearly 2000 miles from where we last had dinner together. They were spending a week or two in Oregon and visiting with family when we arrived and they made a special day trip down to our area just to visit with us.

We had a dinner/birthday celebration at the local Mexican restaurant. Erika turned 11 years old yesterday so we made sure that she had her moment to shine. I guess it's a tradition there to shove whipping cream up your nose (we all laughed out loud). Bob treated us to some (somewhat authentic) Mexican dance moves and many margarita's were sacrificed to the birthday gods.

Cave Junction

A couple of days driving and we've arrived in Cave Junction. This will be our home for as long as needed to decide if this is a good place to live.

I had to replace two tires on the trailer. The two newest tires - which were the wrong type and sold to us in Texas when one of the original tires on the trailer blew out... The tires were good, just the wrong type and didn't get along well with the radial tires on the opposite side.

Tonight - beer, movies and relaxation. Tomorrow - exploration...