Sometimes I just lay in bed and grin, happy and astonished that the wagon is finished, that I have such a cozy place from which I can nestle beneath heaps of blankets to look out at the world. In those moments it’s as if I’ve just returned from a long trip, conscious for the first time of where I have arrived. In bed, with a grin on my face—so began the weekend. And now I find myself back in bed again, feeling brain dead but content, three concerts in two nights behind me, and nothing but this blog post between me and a long night’s sleep.

The weekend went something like this: show, whiskey, sleep, show, show, whiskey, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep. Friday night our stage (we being Black Diamond Express Train to Hell) was a tractor trailer that we rolled up in front of Haus Mainusch, and it may have been our best concert yet. Sure, the sound wasn’t so good, but the space was packed, and everyone in the front row seemed to know all the words to our songs’ choruses, and much screaming, dancing, and singing along ensued.

Nothing inflates a writer’s ego like a hoard of people screaming word’s she’s written with fists in the air. Nothing except being begged to actually autograph one of our CDs after the show, which may have been the most absurd thing to have ever happened to me to date. I’ll be the one carrying around my ego in a wheelbarrow.

Saturday night we’d agreed to a gauntlet of concerts (note to self: do not ever do this again). First a birthday party in the Reduit in Mainz, then a birthday party in Wiesbaden’s Kreativ Fabrik. The show in the Reduit was fun, but overcast by the pressure to play and get out before the clock struck midnight and our car turned back into a bottle of whiskey.

On time, we arrived in Wiesbaden to discover we’d be playing much later than expected, and if it wasn’t for a very precisely calculated mixture of beer, club mate, and whiskey, I would have fallen asleep in the parking lot, and they would have had to carry me onstage in a stretcher. As it was we all managed to stay awake and minimally disgruntled until our turn on the stage came, where we quickly fought our way through the set before fleeing into the night to our respective beds.

Last week you might have noticed I wasn’t around as much as usual. It was because I was working on a new Black Diamond website, where you can see more pictures of our shows and read reviews and (coming soon) listen to a few of our mp3s without having to visit MySpace, which is getting shittier and shittier by the day. Good riddance, hello helltrain.info. Stop by and say hello.

We interrupt your regularly scheduled dumpster find o’ the week post for this important news bulletin: Click Clack Gorilla is now available on the Love and Trash blog. (Wohoo!) My first post there can be seen here—all the Frankenstein-inspired recycling for the apocalypse ravings you’ve come to expect, with some pictures that will look familiar to those who’ve been around the gorilla block.

Love and Trash is a pretty frickin’ awesome collection of blogs about diy-ing, and I am several shades of flattered to find my writing among such good company. My posts will be appearing there each Tuesday, so keep your mouse poised and ready if you like what you see.

We now return to your regularly schedule program…dumpster find of the week: pretty box turned shoe corral.

I can’t remember who found them, but one day somebody came home with about a dozen of these wooden boxes. Something about the little metal handle on the end of each made me fall for them immediately. Each had a thin sheet of cardboard-y wood that slid in and out on small tracks as a lid, and some had a small metal square meant for inserting a small label.

I had initially planned to turn them into shelves, but decided that they were too heavy to screw onto the wall. Instead one became a shoe corral, and several others were sent to sit in the corner of my shed until further inspiration struck. As inspiration has yet to strike on this point, I’m turning to you, my inventive readers, to ask what should I do with the two in the shed?

It was easy for me because I started at zero. When I moved from the United States to Germany six years ago, I didn’t save any space in my suitcase for kitchen items. That first year I lived with a host family (who had their own designer mega-kitchen), and once I got my own apartment, the trash very quickly provided all the pots, pans, plates, silverware, and cups I needed, and regular visits to the flea market added a few other things that I didn’t need, but loved dearly for their textures, weight, or aesthetic.

My first apartment in Germany had a minuscule kitchen (I’d estimate it was probably about five or six square meters total). A dorm-sized fridge fit beneath the little counter space against the far wall. An electric double-burner/oven combination rested on top of a short stack of shelves set at a right angle to the fridge. Next to the oven was a sink, at a right angle to that the door, at a right angle to that a folding table that just barely allowed entrance when open. Against the wall that led out of the kitchen and into the rest of the one-room attic studio were floor to ceiling shelves that I happily filled with dried foods in glass containers, true to my food-hoarding habits.

It was tiny, but it was incredibly cozy. It was too small to cook in with more than two people (and even that was a stretch), but to me it felt like it was just the right size. And lucky for me, it schooled me in leaving most of the kitchen ware I found in the trash behind for someone else to covet.

I’ve been involved with a number of kitchens since, but the smallest of all is the winter kitchen I currently use. (I call it the winter kitchen because in the summer the Beard and I go back to using a four-meter trailer as our kitchen base—in the winter the place just doesn’t heat efficiently.) It consists of a sideboard about 150 cm in both length and height, half of the storage space within it, the space between it and the ceiling (which includes one shelf of about two meters in length), and one wooden wine crate shelf. I’d guestimate it at four square meters total.

All in all, it really isn’t much space to work with, so how do I deal? I thought that today, for all the tiny housers and declutterers (present and future) reading, I would share my thoughts on how to keep a functioning kitchen on such a small scale. May I present to you: The Click Clack Gorilla Small Kitchen Crash Course.

Keep nothing that you’re not madly, wildly, irreversibly in love with (or use at least once a week). This meeting of passion and practicality is the most important tip for turning a big kitchen into a small kitchen. Don’t bother with stuff you feel neutral about. Life’s too short, and moving clutter from one place to the next too annoying. Do you really want to have to spend time cleaning stuff you don’t love? When you could be doing something you do love instead? (And remember, don’t confuse nostalgic sentimentality with love.)

Pare down your kitchen ware. If you’re a human with a kitchen and 18 or more years of birthdays behind you, then you probably have a heap of kitchen stuff that you’ve accumulated, bought, and inherited piece by piece ever since you first moved out of your parent’s place. And it’s probably a lot more than you really need.

If your kitchen is teeny tiny, then you need to think long and hard about practicality. Keep only cups that can handle both hot and cold liquids. Metal mugs, for example, are really practical. Not only can use them for both cold and hot drinks, you can set them right on top of the wood stove to turn the former into the latter. Unfortunately, neither the trash nor the flea market has yet graced me with one that I liked.

As for all the bowls and plates and silverware, don’t keep more than the maximum number of guests you would ever invite into your home at one time—in the case of a small home like mine, this number is going to be last-refrain-at-the-limbo-bar low, and remember, you can always ask guests to bring their own should you be taken with the idea of giving a 50-person dinner party. Choose plates with high rims that can double as soup bowls. Get rid of everything—and I really mean every single thing—that doesn’t fall under “violent loves” or “incredibly useful.”

Rethink the way you cook. If you are used to cooking exotic things with heaps of unusual ingredients, then you need to have space to store those ingredients in your cupboards. If I didn’t already have a pretty simplistic approach to cooking, a kitchen this size would probably result in more frustration than joy. But I like to cook as simply as I live, and I’m just not interested in chasing down, using, or storing things I don’t use at least once a week, and in return I don’t need as much storage space.

Think multi-function. The more tricks that pot or bowl can turn, the more welcome it will be in an itty bitty kitchen. No one-trick gadgets.

Imagine—if you like silly visuals as much as I do—that you are the CEO of a company being forced to downsize amidst economic recession. Your current employees (i.e. all the items in your kitchen) are interviewing for the few remaining positions. Look at each one sternly and assess their skills—those who are most versatile are going to get (re)hired. Everyone else will get laid off and will have to trudge to the unemployment office (the thrift shop) to find a job in somebody else’s kitchen. Sure, they’ll grumble and you’ll feel guilty, but the truth is that they’ll be fine without you.

The one place this metaphor can’t go, but my conscience demands my efforts to live small consider, is that I’ll give the most beautiful plate the job every time. While I wouldn’t recommend this to CEOs making decisions about lay-offs, I love being surrounded by beautiful things, and I find it important to maintain a balance of both beauty and practicality.

Conjure storage space out of thin air. Hang things! Hang things everywhere! I hang knives on a magnetic strip on the wall, wine glasses in a nifty wooden holder from the ceiling, and everything else with a handle or a hook from a bar affixed on the wall above my counter space. This frees up an incredible amount of room, and you’ll never have to move anything off the counter to wipe away crumbs or dust.

Share your stuff. This one can be a bit tricky because successful sharing (of anything really, but especially kitchen items) requires good communication skills and a healthy sense of responsibility. Everyone involved in the share needs to be able to use the item when they need it (for example, a permanent “spot” that where the item is always returned so it is easy for all to find and access), and everyone who uses the item (or items) needs to make sure it is clean and ready to be used again when they are finished.

You don’t want to find the pan you need encrusted with your buddy’s tomato sauce as much as the next person doesn’t want to find the bread form encrusted with last week’s rye loaf. This makes cooking frustrating and sharing (damn near) impossible. Shared kitchens are always one of the biggest contention points of communal living, and yet, if you can manage it, sharing kitchen items with your neighbors is also be one of the easiest ways to own less stuff.

Rethink everything—including the kitchen sink. I no longer use a refrigerator. I cook on one electric hot plate or on my wood stove. If I want to bake, I need to visit someone with a little more space in their kitchen. I wash the dishes in a large metal bowl that I hang outside when I’m not using it. Yes, these things are extreme. No, these changes aren’t for everyone. But they are possible. If having an itty bitty kitchen would make you happy, then just remember there is nothing in your kitchen that you couldn’t live without. In this case, the wheel can be reinvented.

The rewards. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t really love cleaning or doing the dishes. But with fewer kitchen stuff and a smaller space, I have less to clean. And because I really really REALLY fucking love every single thing I have kept, I find that when the dirty dishes reach critical mass, I no longer really mind doing them.

Anyone have any of their own tiny kitchen tips to share? I’m always looking for a new way to hang things from the ceiling or clear out shelves, and just writing this all down has me plotting a few changes in my kitchen niche to tackle as the spring air pumps me full of unprecedented energy.

This post was a part of Simple Lives Thursday at GNOWFGLINS.

Despite the weather’s continued lack of cooperation, the how-much-firewood-is-left-in-the-shed countdown to spring is over. The shed is empty, but the nights are still cold. So today I’ll be the one at the table saw behind the pile of pallets.

Should I be so bold as to venture down the hill and into the city today, I would find a costumed, drunken hoard. Though Fastnacht (what you probably know as Mardi Gras) officially starts on November 11th at 11 o’clock in Germany, Rose Monday is the starting flag for the officially sanctioned mass letting down of hair, donning of costumes, and public consumption of alcohol.

Not liking crowds, clowns, high cover charges, or obscenely drunken strangers, it ranks as my least favorite German tradition of all time. Though I admit that if I could hover around the city in a little bubble watching it all from on high, I would. What better place to witness all the best of human depravity?

Last week I, oblivious foreigner that I am, accidentally wandered right into the thick of Altweiber (this is the part of Fastnacht when women run around with big scissors cutting off men’s ties). Buses weren’t running as usual, and the market place was full of stands selling food and beer, of brightly colored carnival-style rides with blinking lights and loud pop music. My initial instinct was to turn around and retreat back from whence I’d come, but the streets were relatively quiet—most of the costumed folk had already drunken themselves into a stupor or been filed into one of the discos that had been set up in the city center for the occasion. On the bus ride home I sat between a sailor and a kangaroo.

Last year, after an afternoon of wheat beer taste-testing, I found myself on my way into the heart of Fastnacht with a drunken hoard of my own. The bus delivered us into a city so full, so ruckus, so colorful, and so thoroughly covered in trash that I didn’t recognize places I visit regularly.

It’ll take a lot of beer to get me into the city tonight, but the odds are higher than usual: there will be an Arabian Nights theme party in our house and our friends’ samba band is playing in the city. So, maybe, just maybe, I’ll be back tomorrow, not with stories of firewood and dumpster diving, but of circus clowns and Pfand (bottle return deposit) collectors, of samba music, Deutsche Schlager, and scheduled insanity.

Cough cough, hack hack, slurp, gurgle, wretch… If I could just wrangle the last of the phlegm out of my god damn throat, then I’d be ready for the next heap of concerts that we’re playing with Black Diamond Express Train to Hell (bluegrass pirates of yore!), starting tonight in Mannheim. Sometimes I wish I played an instrument that wasn’t a part of my body. It would make being sick a hell of a lot easier to deal with.

The schedule for the next two weeks looks like this:

Friday, March 4: Manneheim, Germany // ASV
Saturday, March 5: Wiesbaden, Germany // Hectic Society Fest @ Kultur Palast with Pascow and other punk riff raff

Friday, March 11: Mainz, Germany // Haus Mainusch with Civil Victim and Gunmob (once again country plus punk)
Saturday, March 12: Wiesbaden, Germany // Kreativfabrik (somebody’s birthday party, but apparently open to the public for a cover charge)

And coming soon, so very soon:

May 4: Wiesbaden, Germany // Schlachthof with Austin Lucas and Digger Barnes
May 13: Mainz, Germany // Ventil Verlag with the lovely and hilarious Phoebe Kreutz

If you’re in the area, you should come by. And if you read this blog and we’ve never met, by all means introduce yourself. Sometimes after I post these little notices, I spend half the night wondering if the person smiling slyly at me from the corner is a blog reader too shy to introduce themselves. Of course, until now, they have just proved to be creepy, but YOU could turn the tide tonight! As I always say, come for the music and stay for the whiskey-fueled bar fights…

When the Beard and I were in America last fall, we spent a couple of days stuck in Philadelphia. Saved from ruin by the kindness of an old high school buddy, we had a place to stay, and a few days to fill with city wandering. Those wanderings inevitably brought us to South Street, which then brought us to the Magic Gardens.

Though I’ll admit that most of the time I’ve spent in Philly has involved racing wheely chairs up and down university hallways while waiting for my dad to finish teaching—that is to say, I haven’t gotten out much—I would give the Magic Gardens the prestigious title of Nikki’s Number One All Time Favorite Tourist Spot in the Whole City. Despite my lack of gorilla experience in the city, having been brouht there on numerous class field trips throughout my school years, I can say with certainty that the Magic Gardens are a thousand times more interesting than the Betsy Ross House and the crack in the Liberty Bell.

You see, the Magic Gardens aren’t actually gardens at all, but a sculptural experience the size of the (once) empty house lot on which they were built by artist Isaiah Zagar. Let me tell you, this man knows how to make a dazzling mural. He also knows how to build walls out of old bottles, bike tires, and other shiny miscellanea. Really, words can only sum it up as such: the place is fucking insane. And amazing. The kind of place where you could spend days just staring at the walls.

On the side of a completely normal looking street, you find this:

Peering through the metal gate, you get a glimpse of the labyrinthine madness that awaits you inside:

I was happy to pay the five dollar admission fee. Did you ever see the movie Nothing But Trouble with John Candy and Chevi Chase and Demi Moore? Well, this is like the set of that movie, but friendly. And tell you what, the set of that movie is about the only reason it’s worth watching, but it is such a good reason that I actually own a copy. But I digress.

The story of the Magic Gardens goes something like this: “Zagar started working on the Magic Gardens in 1994 in the vacant lot nearby his studio. He began by constructing a massive fence to protect the area from harm and then spent the next fourteen years excavating tunnels and grottos, sculpting multi-layered walls, and tiling and grouting the 3,000 square foot space.”

In 2002 the owner of said not-so-vacant-anymore lot noticed that property values on South Street were rising and decided to sell. And in one of those touching “and then the neighborhood came together and won out in the face of real estate speculation” stories, the folks who appreciated Zagar’s work did just that and became a non-profit organization so that anyone who wanted to could come by and give Zagar’s work a good thorough ogle.

Below is a view from inside the lot looking back out onto the normal buildings across the street.

Into the labyrinth…

Down the stairs to the grotto and through one of the little tunnels…

This is recycling for the kind of apocalypse I would very much like to be a part of. Maybe someday I’ll have a little piece of wooded land on which I, too, can build creepy trash-n-bottle labyrinths into which I can send all my writer’s block to shrivel and perish.

It seems like a hundred years ago and just yesterday that an old college buddy dropped by for a few days to say hello. I had just put down the last coat of yacht seal on the floor and the trailer was still empty and pristine. One afternoon she kept me company while I built this bed. Thanks to her you guys get a picture this time around with an actual human in it. That was during the “holy shit I can almost move in” blind euphoria stage, as you might be able to decipher in my facial expression.

I had been saving the wood for this project for months as not long after we pulled my wagon home I had found a homemade wooden bed construction in the trash across the street. I unscrewed all of the slats and put them, along with the two longer beams that had served as a bed frame to the previous owner, in Frankenshed. One of them later replaced a rotten beam in the outside wall, while the rest—along with several other bits of wood dumpster dived at the building supply store—became this bed.

I had been uncertain as to where I would get a mattress. The first mattress I’d had in Germany I’d picked up off the street. But, when I moved into my first wagon, I gave it to the friend who had been kind enough to let me store all my crap in his basement for months and months and months.

A lot of people are squeamish about dumpstering mattresses, but I judge by the area, the surrounding trash, and the mattress itself, and then I take my chances. I wouldn’t, for example, take a mattress from a pile of old nasty (wet/moldy/food-splattered/etc) looking trash because I would expect that the mattress had probably just emerged from the same dark crevice as the rest of the debris surrounding it and/or been laying outside for days.

I found my first mattress in one of Frankfurt’s wealthier quarters, neatly stacked with some other “trash” (re: treasures) that were very obviously being tossed because of a move or an upgrade. I carried the mattress home balanced on my head, and slept well on it for the next three years. The point is, not every dumpstered mattress is full of bugs, but you should do yourself a favor and “read” the trash around it thoroughly before you take one home: your skin will thank you when it doesn’t end up crawling with scabies or bedbugs.

Eventually a mattress came my way in the form of a present from another friend who was moving house. And the rest is trash history. All my pillows, all my pillow cases, all my blankets, all my duvet covers, and almost all of my fitted sheets came from the trash across the street. Come moving day, students just wrap up their entire beds in the bottom sheet, tie a knot, and throw it in the bin just like that. (Rumor has it that afterward they enjoy burning the entire contents of their wallets.) Then along comes a Nikki, who fishes them out, washes them thoroughly, and sleeps happily ever after.

A few days ago the Beard and I passed a mattress store on a walk through the city. Bins in front of the store advertised “Pillows on sale for 10 Euros, Previously 25.” I pointed to the sign and did a quick calculation: Five pillows on my bed, four pillows on the Beard’s. “So if I’d bought all our pillows new, I’d have had to spend 225 Euros, 90 if I’d gotten them all on sale. Which means I’d either have had to work a hell of a lot more, or that we’d only have two pillows between us.”

Quit your job, become a dumpster diver, and wake up to find you’re suddenly living like a hedonist? Not what you’d expected from a career in trash picking, is it?

Calling all scavengers and extreme recyclers…

I’m almost out of submissions for dumpster show and tell, and I want to hear your stories. Take a look in your local dumpster. Take a look around your place. Then take some pictures of your dumpster booty, and send ‘em to nicolettekyle (at) yahoo (dot) com with some words about where and how you found the stuff in the picture and what you’re going to do with it. And for safety’s sake, better put “dumpster find of the week” in the subject line.

Tell me a little bit about yourself if you’d like (I’ll keep things as anonymous or blatant as you indicate I should). Tell me about your first time diving, your favorite dumpster, or anything else that seems appropriate at the time. I’ll take your emails and your photos and turn them into a blog post that will show up here, one each Wednesday until one of us stops caring.

Submitting your photos and words to me indicates that you have legal rights to said pictures and words, and that you are giving me legal permission to post your pictures and quote your words on Click Clack Gorilla. If you don’t hear back from me within a week, it means the internet ate your mail and you should try again.

So in the words of the esteemed Dolly Freed: “It’s feasible. It’s easy. It can be done. It should be done. Do it.” Go dumpster diving and come home to your favorite gorillas to brag about it.