The important thing to remember when dumpster diving rain barrels is that you need to know what was in them in their former life. Because if their former contents were poisonous, then you don’t want to be using them to collect water for your garden in, no siree. So in the case of rain barrels, it’s good if you have a connection at the trash depot. We do, and he (high fives for you awesome trash guy) sometimes puts barrels aside for us when he knows that the contents were harmless. Some of these came from him, and some of them used to be other people’s rain barrels. Who knows why they tossed them. But who knows why people toss a lot of things.
Have you scavenged anything good lately?
Read about why I do a “dumpster find of the week” series here. Or check out some of the other treasures I’ve pulled out of the trash here.
I’ve been working on lyrics for the same two Black Diamond songs for months. And all I’ve managed to come up with is a chorus for one of ‘em and a whole bunch of awfulness that has served as kindling for ye old wood stove more than once for the other. Thing is, I have too much baby on the brain, and babies make really lame song subjects. (Though maybe someday I’ll tackle the subject in an attempt to prove myself wrong and write a non-cheesey, deep and meaningful song about reproducing. But somehow I doubt it. Anyway.) At least that one chorus is pretty good.
Whenever I’m facing the creative void, I start listening to (or reading, if the case is with a writing project) the music of all my incredibly talented and super-inspiring friends and relatives. A few songs of theirs in my ears, and I may not find myself with finished lyrics, but I do find myself totally excited about working on what is starting to feel like an endless case of writer’s block (and it’s just these two songs, *tears at hair*, as in I’ve written lyrics for other songs in the meantime and these two are still tormenting me), find myself remembering why I get excited about making music in the first place. So I thought I would share. They’re all DIY folks who deserve all the free promotion they can get, and they all lean in the folk-y direction. Hip hip hoorah!
Where do you turn for inspiration when you find your creativity in tatters?
Sea Couch. These are two of the nicest people OF ALL TIME. Maybe someday the Beard and I will form a married-people country music duo too and tour the United States and tattoo pictures of each other playing banjos on our arms and have the honor of playing with them. You can order their recently released album here. This is my favorite song of theirs, Tired Train:
Ti Femme. I’ve shared this video with you all before, and I’m doing it again because there aren’t that many videos of her stuff (hey Handbasket where’s the video of your number one top pirate hit?) and because this song is just fucking brilliant. Skip to about 2:50 if you aren’t into the artsy noise parts. And check out these lyrics: “Predator prey the world has its way, and I’ve got nothing but time. Spit out the bones of a life that’s grown cold, and I’ve got nothing but time. Hunter gatherer sing this song, I’ve got nothing but time. You don’t have a home so you might as well roam, and I’ve got nothing but time. Heaven’s a sickness that must be cured, and I’ve got nothing but time.” Oh fuck yeah.
Baltimore String Felons. They make such fucking perfectly old timey country music you’d think they just stepped out of a time machine. Finally got to see them perform at my Uncle’s wedding during the Beard and I’s last trip to the States and hot damn were they good. Guessing contest as to which one of ‘em I’m related to.
Uncle Meat and the Highway Children. They’re calling themselves something else now, but when I met ‘em, they were named after the Zappa album. I put on a couple of shows for them, and every once in a while they show up at the door with a new constellation of members, more awesome songs, and an even homier van. I can’t find the link to their current project right now, but I highly recommend going here and listening to the Bolsworth Blues as well as watching this video of them covering Leonard Cohen.
Gregor MacBurns. A fellow I’ve never officially seen play, but who blew through town on a Baltimore connection. He makes beautiful music. He should come back and play a show. This is my second favorite song of his, Drink Anything. I think Baltimore musicians have a fighting chance at world domination, you know?
And since this list is getting pretty long, and I know that the internet has made a big world of small attention spans, I’ll just say, if you liked this stuff, you should check out Old Seed, Bird, and Blackbird Raum too.
Now, to go see if that didn’t do something for the lyric-writing juices. We’re planning on recording our next album in January, so, you know, no pressure to get them finished or anything…
No, your eyes do not deceive you. That wagon is fucking HUGE. And manuevering it through the tight spaces it had to fit through to get from A to B involved creativity of the kind that always makes me proud to be part of a network of such brilliant mad scientists.
It started out here:
No one was really sure if the tractor would be able to handle pulling it. It worked when we shimmied it into that spot the first time (this particular ship has only been on our Wagenplatz for about a year), but since then it has been filled with boxes and over a pallet full of wood briquettes. Despite the weight the tractor managed it (though a handful of people had to stand on the back of the tractor to keep it from bucking).
Within a couple of minutes it was out of its former parking spot:
And on its way to getting stuck in the extremely tight channel it needed to sail down:
(And here it is stuck there as seen from the other side, taken from about where my front door used to be.)
That’s when things got complicated. The first problem was that the tractor was on the wrong side of the wagon to be of any use. After some measuring, chain sawing, and a good deal of moving of wood, we cleared a path for the tractor so that it could drive between wagon sides. Because after a number of attempts it became clear that all we could do was try to push it’s ass-end the arms length we needed it to move to fit in the new space.
The second problem was that pushing and pulling weren’t doing a damn thing. That’s where the mad scientists came in with a brilliantly insane idea. We would put down some big sheets of metal and cover them with oil. Then we would push the back axle onto the oily metal (making sliding possible as it hadn’t been on the dirt) and then we would push the ass end with the tractor. It sounded totally ridiculous. And it worked.
Now it’s parked snugly in my old spot, making my wagon look like it was the size of a peanut, directly across from where the Beard and I’s sleeping wagon still stands. And because we didn’t actually need to move a wagon out of the way to get it in there (as we had thought we would), there are only two more wagons left to go in wagon dominos before we can move our sleeping wagon into its new, much quieter spot. !!!!!!!!!!
Want to read more about moving tiny houses? Check out these posts:
There is no one in Germany without health insurance.
This isn’t because, as many people falsely assume, Germany has some sort of magical “universal” health insurance system that automatically covers everyone. It is because the system has been designed assuming that everyone will get in line. Which means that if you’re not in line, you’re not on the map. Which in turn means that there are almost no resources for people with low (or no) incomes without insurance. So it’s not that everyone in Germany is insured, it is that it is simply inconceivable, within the system, that you could not be.
The myth that everyone in Germany is insured probably stems from two facts. The first is that if you become unemployed, you can (read: are expected to) sign up at the Arbeitsamt (I suppose the equivalent of the Welfare Office in America). After you’ve jumped through a series of flaming hoops (and the reason some people choose not to deal with them is because they make you do the paperwork equivalent of getting stripped down and hosed off as well as requiring mind-numbing resume-writing seminars and one-euro job participation), they’ll pay you money each month and sign you up for their insurance. Even if you fuck up, and they cut your money down to nothing, they are supposed to continue to insure you. Because, haha, it’s illegal not to be insured in Germany. Which is the second fact that contributes to the myth that everyone has health insurance in this country.
So, imagine you are in Germany and you aren’t insured, for whatever reason. If you are ever caught (which might happen if you simply defaulted on a German insurance policy—be warned, they will eventually come looking for you) or attempt to sign up for a new insurance policy, you will be required to pay the premiums for every month that you were not insured. The logic is highly social—the system can only work if everybody is paying into it all the time—but the application is incredibly fucked up, particularly for the extremely poor. You don’t have enough money to pay for insurance? Take some time to get back on your feet financially, and then find out that you have gotten yourself into crippling debt with the insurance company because of it. Have qualms with the entire insurance system and want to opt out of it completely? Sorry, but no. The strange bit of logic here is that you are also supposed to pay back these premiums because you were insured the entire time. Even though you weren’t, had no insurance card, and had to pay for all of your doctor’s bills yourself. It’s sort of an enforced insurance illusion. Just thinking about it makes my head smoke.
Of course, there are a lot of positive sides to the insurance system here. Because it is illegal to be uninsured, it it also illegal for an insurance company to turn down your request for them to insure you (though I have the impression that this only applies to state insurance—the system is currently a mixture of private and state insurances which is a whole other can of worms that I’ll get into some other time) or to kick you out because it turns out you are really sick or have what they call a “pre-existing condition.” They even pay for a lot of neat things that I never would have dreamed of having covered on my American insurance policies.
But I would still rather live in a world without health insurance. I would still rather cut out all those middle men and middle women and pay my doctors directly. My current daydream is that instead of an insurance premium, everyone could pay a monthly chunk directly into the salary pool of a hospital or clinic and then be allowed to go there for free whenever the need arose.
Huge corporations have risen out of a universal fear of sickness, pain, and death and the only reason they sometimes seem to care about our health is because the healthier we are, the less money we cost them (though they like to thwart this logic as well—for example a midwife’s 250 euro fee for doing a home birth is not covered despite the fact that a home birth costs thousands of euros less than a hospital birth), and we all know what happens when you end up needing an expensive non-traditional operation to stay healthy—then you get denied coverage and are left to rot, at least in the United States. And it’s because of just such issues and cases, as well as the fact that I used to work for a publishing company whose clients were all insurance companies, that I’ve never felt like health insurance offered me all that much, well, insurance. And it is because of just such issues that I can tell you first hand that, yes, there are people in Germany without health insurance.
When people here hear that you are uninsured, their reactions tend to range from shocked to angry. People get rude. They say things like “you’d have to be stupid to not be insured these days.” The receptionists at doctor’s offices—who ask you which insurance company you are with when scheduling an appointment as part of their standard script—generally need to pause and take a deep breath before they are capable of continuing the conversation without comment. The only people, I’ve discovered, who don’t react adversely to the uninsured are doctors because the doctors know that people who don’t have insurance are people who pay their bills themselves, which at the end of the day often means more money in their pockets (there being different levels they are allowed to charge depending on state insurance or private or selbstbezahler, ie “self-payer”). Smart bunch.
Do you have a love/hate relationship with health insurance? Have a better idea? Couldn’t imagine life without it?
Tomorrow check back for more ramblings about the German health insurance system and my experiences within it.
On Monday a reader named Dave requested a few full shots of our tractor. So here you go, Dave. Enjoy.
This is the vehicle that we use to pull the trailers around, as well as what we just used this morning to haul a bunch of tree bits off to the tree bits trash on the back of (in a tractor trailer of course).
Moving is a pain in the ass. When I think of moving I think of packing boxes, of stress, of never having enough room in the car. Moving a house on wheels is a relief in comparison. You put all the breakables in boxes on the floor. You make sure the cabinets are sealed up tight. You get a jack and remove the blocks holding your wheels up off the ground. And then you hook up a tractor or a big truck and whisk your house off to it’s new spot. No packing involved. To move and be able to go right back to living as you did, to knowing where everything is, to unpacking maybe a handful of boxes is a luxury indeed.
My trailer presents two problems when being moved: the cellar box I built to store my firewood is really poorly placed and rubs up against one wheel when making hard right turns (whoops) and the axle occasionally sticks (I have no idea what the technical terms are for this stuff, but there’s a circle part that allows you to steer and it sometimes gets stuck on the straight part that holds the wheels). I would have taken the cellar box off, but the rubbing is minimal and doesn’t block progress. As for the axle sticking, we solved that when it happened by rocking the trailer slowly back and forth until we got enough space to quickly shift the towing bar into the desired position. Otherwise, she’s in real good shape. Not too shabby for a 61-year-old trailer, eh?
At first I wasn’t particularly excited about the new spot. As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been feeling rather resistant to any change beyond the scope of the coming baby. (How do pregnant ladies handle moving??! I’ve heard plenty of stories of people doing it, and I just have to say, wow. I couldn’t handle it. Moving right now would turn me into a weeping wreck.) But I’m sitting in my trailer in said new spot right now, and I have to say I love it. There’s more light, there’s just as much lovely green, and the feeling of change has me feeling exciting about everything. Excited about doing a little pre-winter cleaning, excited about building a new shed for the baby carriage and bike trailer, excited about the terrace with outdoor sink I have been waiting on building for the last five months. Below you’ll see the new spot pre-my-trailer, and then a shot from about the same spot with me snuggly parked.
I was pretty light-handed about my preparation. I took all of the glass jars down off of the shelves and put them in boxes, and I tied the doors to my built-in cabinets shut, but I left all of my books on the shelves and the wine glasses hanging in their rack on the ceiling. And despite the bumps, the fact that the trailer almost tipped over completely at one point during the move (I have never been so close to a heart attack), and our rocking to get the axle in line, not a single book fell off of the shelf. One picture fell off of the wall, but otherwise, everything remained as I had left it. The picture below was taken after the move was complete.
The period of waiting is over, and I’m riding the momentum of the change on into the long to-do list I had been ignoring. Having needed to remove my wood stove pipe for the move, I was inspired to finally clean it (as you really should do before the start of every heating season, ehem). And while I was up there I even started cleaning out the gutters. Today I’ll finish cleaning up the remaining chaos inside, and tomorrow, if the weather holds, I’ll start building the new shed. Ah, isn’t she purdy? Only four more wagons to go…
Want to read more about moving tiny houses? Check out these posts:
