Earth Building Classes!

...asonry. We are also looking at having an horno workshop in Los Angeles sometime this summer. Events October 2-4 – EarthUSA 2015, Santa Fe, NM: A reminder that EarthUSA, the premier North American earthbuilding community event is coming up this October. The event brings together expert practitioners, historians and conservation specialists from all over the world for lectures, classes, and field trips in the center of American adobe culture. Intere...

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Moon Gazing

...we can just all stand outside and howl at the moon. It would do us some good, I think. What is a blood moon anyway, you ask? It’s a moon stained red by the Earth’s shadow. What’s a super moon? It’s a full moon which is as close to Earth as it can be in its elliptical orbit, making it appear extra large in the sky. For more authoritative information on this lunar event, and for best viewing times and the like, check out Sky & Telescope. Erik is a b...

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Easy Scandinavian-Style Bread

...nse whole grain loaf with minimal effort. No starter. No kneading. No rise time, even. It’s a quick bread, essentially. It takes 5 minutes to mix up, then you plop it into a loaf pan and put it in the oven for 1 1/2 hours. That’s it. It lacks the sour flavor and chewiness you get from developed loaves, true, as well as the health benefits/improved digestibility that comes from the fermentation process. But you know, it’s still very good. And it’s...

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Everything Must Go: Tidying Up at the Root Simple Compound

...oint we remembered a book one of our readers mentioned, and which has been making the publicity rounds of late, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, by the tidying consultant Marie Kondo (aka KonMari–her method is called the KonMari Method). She’s from Japan, where people have the same hearty consumerist impulses as we do here in the U.S., but considerably less space for storage. When I first read about the book, I understood the gist of it, but...

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2014: The Year in Review

...na, but I haven’t used it much other than to check in on a local net a few times. I may have to table my amateur radio activities in 2015 in order to focus on other, more pressing, projects. April Easter Lessons Kelly wrote about a troubled project involving dyeing eggs with natural materials. Natural dyes are a subject that interests us both, and I suspect we’ll revisit this topic in 2015. May On the Documentary Fed Up and Giving up Sugar and the...

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