breathing room

Wow, a weekend to sit still.  Between island fun, circuses in my backyard, and goodbye parties there has been little time to settle down and process all that's been happening.

I guess the last couple posts haven't really been ultra-revealing about what I'm now up to, so I'll make an attempt at clarification.

I now live on Lopez Island in the northwest corner of Washington.  Puget Sound surrounds our fifteen-mile long piece of submerged mountain and provides a mild summer climate of low temperatures and little humidity to this island group, the San Juans.  The days are breezy and the nights chilly, but the sun is warm in the cloudless sky.

I'm three weeks into an internship here, building affordable housing with a mix of traditional timber framing, strawbales, and earthen plasters.  The organization that I'm with buys land and builds homes for local folk who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford to build for themselves on this island of rising property values and small, mom & pop style businesses.  I'm one of almost twenty young people from all kinds of backgrounds who have been drawn here by the prospect of learning to build sustainable homes in a low-impact way.  The goals of the organization in the project include minimizing costs with materials and implementing a net-zero energy consumption program over the next several years.  We've been spending our days the past few weeks building walls with stacked and cut strawbales, compressing them, and then covering them with plasters made with clay dug from the building site, island sand, and manure and straw from local farms.  Most of the work of cutting and placing bales, mixing plaster, and then applying it is done by hand; we crowd into the framed-out houses as the bales rise higher and then huddle shoulder-to-shoulder against the new walls to cover them with mud before each new layer begins to dry in the sun.

My afternoons have been crammed nearly everyday with workshops, information sessions, potlucks, goodbye parties, and even small trips to the beach parks on the island, each more beautiful than the last.  When there isn't something to occupy my time in the evening, I'm sharing dinner with my hosts, a generous couple who put up interns in their post-and-beam home they built with friends.  They like to cook and the meals are always delicious, usually featuring fresh produce from the garden I help tend as part of my work exchange for my housing.

So that's the paradise I find myself in right now.  What's new with y'all?