Blogs

In car-collector circles, a "barn find" is a vehicle that someone put away in storage, under cover and safe from the elements. Years later, some lucky enthusiast stumbles upon it, makes a deal with the owner (who may or may not know the true value of the piece), and then runs and tells all his buddies about his amazing "barn find" before restoring to to some resemblance of it's former beauty.

Steve didn't have to go too far to find his restoration project, and he didn't have to haggle with the owner much, either. Truth was, it was as close as his own family's barn in Ohio. The car, a 1925 Studebaker, belonged to his grandfather, who had it custom built as an early car-camper, so he could enjoy trips to Canada to fish.

Jan 16 A couple of weeks back, I posted about a very nice Victorian housebus that had just come to my attention. The builder and owner of the bus, Paul has decided to put up a "build page", showing a large selection of old(ish) photographs of the construction of the bus and detailing some of the custom modification that help make it unique.

Paul started with a bus that already had a rough start at raising the roof, then added an obligitory VW microbus graft. Fortunately, he saw the light before it was too late and cut the bus down to a bare frame so that a proper dwelling could be built.

Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest turns 50 years old this week.

To commemorate the half-century, the newspaper in Eugene ran a feature article in the Life section last Sunday.

Like Kesey, I had never seen the film based on the book, at least until recently. Need to dig the book out and read it again.

Those of us who grew up and came of age in the 1960's had the (perhaps inflated) thought that we were making history with our Age of Aquarius ideas, musical directions, literary accomplishments and alternative living habits. There can be no denying that The Beatles and the subsequent British Invasion broke open a whole new way of celebrating and observing life, and the mind-expanding use of religion, drugs, and be-ing were the catalyst for much of what passes for ordinary life experience these days.

I've only just begun to write up my own contribution to the historical documentation of those times in the 30 Years in a Housetruck tale, available for your reading and perhaps enjoyment elsewhere on this site.

The Residents at the Schoolhouse organize their own political action committee and Occupy the Schoolhouse.

Read Rent Revolt to see how we got out of being stuck in a rut.

Several weeks ago, I got an email with information telling me that the Housetrucks New Zealand web site had closed down. I hoped that this information was incorrect, as Stu has maintained a site filled with photos and lore of NZ housetrucking for many years.

Alas, it was true! HTNZ was no more. I sent off a couple of impassioned pleas to Stu, using the few email contacts that I had, and got a reply from him. Apparently, he was of the impression that the site was generating too little interest to be of use any more. This, coupled with his busy schedule had driven him to the conclusion that it would be best if the site simply faded away.

Each week, I spend Sunday mornings over coffee combing through the statistics for this site, seeing how many pages were served, which files are the most requested, and where people are finding links to my pages and clicking though from.

For quite a while now, a good percentage of my page views have come from vonslatt.com, a bus-related page owned by Jake Von Slatt.

This morning, I saw that I had 256 referrals from something called "steampunkworkshop.com". Of course, I had to follow the link to find out what the linked page was and who/what a steam punk was.