One of the first things I did upon moving up to Portland was to join a Artist’s Way group led by Ingrid Kincaid.

The Artist’s Way is a book written by Julia Cameron. It is a program of “artistic recovery” and involves a twelve-week structure of exercises. I first did the program roughly a decade ago when the book first became popular in writing circles. I find it useful to repeat the exercises every couple of years. Moreover, I really enjoy being part of an Artist Way group because they tend to attract a fascinating mix of people I enjoy getting to know and spend time with.

The one thing I dread in the program is Week #4 because one of the exercises for that week is a week-long media fast. That means: no books, magazines, NPR, TV, movies, music with lyrics, email that is not work-related, frantic reading of the back of cereal boxes, etc. The point of the exercise is to disconnect from the constant stream of information our modern brains are constantly bombarded with so that one can more easily listen to one’s own internal voice.

Now, I don’t own a TV and I can fairly easily go a week without that or movies. Music is slightly more difficult as I really enjoy it, but I’ve got plenty of music without lyrics. However, I love NPR. And I’m thoroughly addicted to the written word. I am a voracious reader. Books are my sustenance and connection to the outside world. The thought of going without them, my news feeds, or non-work-related email for a week sends me into fits of anticipatory withdrawal.

Which, I’m afraid, also means it’s likely I’ll learn something worthwhile from the exercise. It’s hard to say, though, as I’ve never actually made it the full week before when I’ve completed the program. I’m going to give it my best shot this time, though.

Because I received a decent amount of email related to this website, I will be checking my personal email twice daily. I will also be online long enough to submit posts to both Coming Unmoored and the Small Living Journal. But if I seem a little scarce online the upcoming week, you now know what’s up.

The good news is that this exercise should free up some time to both work on my house and also to do more actual writing (rather than my obsessively following every bit of news related to the small home movement). I’ll keep you posted on how things progress.

Much to my delight, my copy of Jay Shafer’s new release, The Small House Book, showed up in my mailbox two days after I ordered my copy from TinyHouseBlog.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised considering the aethetics of the author, but The Small House Book is diminutive in size and stunning visually.  It is packed full of glossy, full-color pictures of Shafer’s designs and examples of small architecture.

For anyone who’s familiar with Shafer’s earlier three-volume release of The Small House book, some of the original material is included in the new release but there is also a bunch of new information, much of which is the same information Shafer covers in his two weekend workshops.  This is especially true of his design workshop.  If you are thinking of building your own tiny house and you’re not going to be able to attend one of his workshops, I’d highly recommend picking up a copy of the book and also the construction DVD I hear Tumbleweed is currently developing.
What I appreciate the most in Shafer’s new edition is the expanded section on his thinking about where we are currently as a society in terms of housing and neighborhood design, and what more modest architecture might be able to offer as solutions.  I also appreciate now having a collection of Shafer’s work in one, concise volume (rather than the three prior volumes, a separate portfolio of his homes, handouts from his workshops, and a bunch of print-outs from his website).

While I didn’t mind paying the $37 price tag for a 196 page book, I could see this being an issue for some purchasers.  Especially considering the book is only 7 x 7 inches and 197 pages. No doubt, the many color pictures in the book drove production costs up quite a bit.  One thing I think the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company might want to consider is offering a second, lower-cost black-and-white edition of the book which any pictures that aren’t needed to support the text.  (Or possibly even a PDF or E-book version that could be downloaded from their website.)  Considering many of the readers may already be familiar with Shafer’s work, I suspect many would be willing to forgo the photographs for a lower cover price.  However, with Shafer’s unrelenting standards toward beauty, I have no idea if he’d be willing to consider such a thing.

I also found myself wishing there had been several more chapters on Shafer’s thoughts and experiences with tiny architecture.  I can pretty much guarantee that should he ever publish a longer book on tiny homes, I’ll be the first one in line when it’s released.

All in all, though, The Small House book is a lovely volume and a great addition to the small home literature.

The official launch date of Jay Shafer’s new tiny house book is April 1st.  However, for the next two weeks you can order an advance release copy via TinyHouseBlog.

The Small House Book is a collection of Shafer’s knowledge and thoughts on designing small homes.  It also includes his personal story and his portfolio of designs.

The book is priced at $36.95 and included several full color photographs.  It’s 7″ x 7″ in size, about a 1/2″ thick, and 197 pages in length.

Admittedly, I’m a huge Jay Shafer groupie, but I think every small house enthusiast should own a copy!  Mine is already on its way.

Some of you may recall that I have teeny-tiny crush on Tim Ferriss. (Well, okay, perhaps just comfortably short of being worthy of a restraining order. But who am I to get hung up on details?)

Anyway, as part of the promotion campaign for Leo Babauta’s book, The Power of Less, he just posted an interview with Ferriss that is well worth a listen.

What I found the most interesting about the interview is how Ferriss has consciously chosen to architect his environment in such a way as to make it almost impossible to focus on anything other than what he’s decided is his top-priority at that given time. I’m talking monastic-level severity.

I’ve spent several hours today mentally kicking around his approach to work and I still can’t decide if I’m intrigued by his methods or terrified by them on a deeply visceral level. What’s punching my buttons is the realization that the place in which I’ve traditionally been able to achieve a flow state and be my most productive is 180-degrees diametrically-opposed to Ferriss’.  (About the only thing that makes this a little less true is he apparently likes to have a movie running silently in the background.)

I am an information addict and I tend to want to be connected to what I deem my important sources of information at all times while I’m working. I want to be able to flip to my news feeds, email, or the phone number of my cat’s astrologist with a single keystroke.

I normally am reading somewhere between 5 and 10 books simultaneously. Bookstores actually send me thank-you cards around the holidays.  (Although their ardor has begun to cool somewhat since I started getting roughly 95% of my books from the library.)

It’s a necessary survival-skill for anyone I date to learn how to safely navigate around the circumference of books, notepads, and laptops (generally there’s three running simultaneously) surrounding my usual roosting spot without either killing themselves or unplugging anything critical that will result in me killing them.  (Yes, the three laptops are after I downsized my belongings.  There used to be four.)

After reading The Four Hour Work Week, I tried scaling down the times I checked email. I decided to start small and simply have my machines only check every half-hour rather than every minute. I think I made it a day and half before I started experiencing Delirium tremens. People I’m close to generally know they can fire off an email at any time of day or night and stand at least even odds of getting a response from me in under a minute.

At this point, I’m not sure I could write a grammatically-correct sentence without simultaneously having to keep a yowling Balinese cat from stepping on anything critical on the keyboard.

I could go on, but my main point is that I have made the conscious choice to work in an environment where there are almost always multiple demands on my attention at any given time.  Of course, it is also highly possible that my chaotic working style may be one of the contributing factors to why I felt the need to seriously simplify my life in the last year.

I can follow the argument in Babauta’s The Power of Less that you’re likely to have more energy to direct at a particular goal if you tackle only one goal at a time. Certainly a finite amount of energy directed at a single target is more effective, right? And no one is given more than 24 hours in a day.

I guess I just don’t buy the assumption that the amount of energy we have is a constant whether we’re working on one goal or multiple ones. In terms of my personal proclivities, I’m not certain how much enthusiasm I’d have for any one project without others hovering interestingly in the wings.

Bright, shiny distractions are an energetic shot-in-the-arm to me. They give me enough juice to keep plugging away at whatever I currently need to get done.  If I shackled myself away in a room somewhere safe from all distractions, I think I’d feel compelled to chew off my own leg in under five minutes. Then I would hobble away and refuse to think again upon whatever it was that led me to that situation in the first place.  (Thank god ADD was just becoming a popular concept when I was a kid or they would have drugged me to the gills with Ritalin. As it was, I spent most of my public school education banished to the school library.)

Of course, I also think I’ve chosen to engineer my life in ways to weed out what I perceive to be meaningless distractions. I don’t own a T.V. I refuse to track or even understand anything related to American sports teams. I couldn’t tell you if the Dallas Cowboys are a baseball or rugby team. (Actually, I know the answer to that one. I’m just trying to make a couple of male friends howl in protest.) If you force me into a mall, I shop like a man with fifteen minutes left to live, and I’ll never give a damn about anything involving a shoe with heels. I couldn’t bowl a strike or make Baked Alaska if my life depended on it. I am capable of sitting with a friend or loved one in an hour or more of companionable silence without feeling the need to fidget. And I absolutely refuse to give even another minute of my life to trying to understand differential equations.

So I guess I’m capable of being zen-like in particular areas. But abandon my books, email, and newsfeeds?? Inconceivable. (To borrow a quote from The Princess Bride.)

Still, I catch myself spending quite a bit of time and energy considering things like Babauta’s book and Ferriss’ interview wondering if there is, in fact, a better way I could be choosing to manage and use my limited time on the planet… I’ve got a feeling that this may be an area where I continue to evolve my thinking over the next couple of years.

And, before my extended navel-gazing on a Friday night gets totally insufferable–yes, I still think Ferriss is munchable.

(Image from tinksworld.org)

Carolyn Roberts was a 40-year-old mother of two teenage boys when she found herself suddenly divorced with limited financial resources. Unfortunately, this is situation is far too common in the U.S.. But then Carolyn did the radically uncommon–she built her own strawbale home in the Tucson desert. Perhaps more amazingly still, she built her house for $51,000 (not including land) which translates to $37 per square foot.

When interviewed about her story, Carolyn said: “I was fed up with life after many dead ends. I was determined to find a way to live independently, close to nature, and with dignity. I was so resolute and had such a short timeframe in which to build that I charged into this construction without really understanding what I was doing. I went through many trials for this reason, but I made it through them all mostly as a result of sheer resolve, a good consultant, many people who came to help, and divine intervention–not necessarily in that order.”

Carolyn had to pass 23 inspections before she was cleared to move from her construction trailer into the home, and it took another four years to complete all the finish-work. But she now has a lovely, charmingly colorful place to call home.  And every corner of it has the creative touch of her own hand and that of friends and loved ones who pitched in to help.

Carolyn has written a book about her experience–A House of Straw: A Natural Building Odyssey.  She also has a website full of pictures and information on green construction which I strongly encourage you to check out.

Below is a video she also put together that provides the high-level details of constructing her home.

Photos and video from AHouseofStraw.com

Considering his book The 4-Hour Work Week is on the New York Times Bestseller list, I suspect half the planet knows who Tim Ferriss is right now. He’s definitely the business guru of the hour. I suspect it’s a slightly smaller subset of readers, however, who would like to bear the man’s love child. I am definitely a member of the later set.

Okay, so maybe that’s a slight exaggeration. I tend to be prone to those. But you know those theoretical questions along the lines of: “If you could invite two people from any period in time or history to dinner, who would you ask?” Well, I’m afraid George Sand just got ousted from the list in favor of Tim Ferriss. (Although, Sir Richard Francis Burton still makes the cut for the other slot. With my luck, though, Ferriss and Burton would spend the night arm-wrestling, comparing scars, and plotting the takeover of Apple Computer with nary a glance in my direction.)

I enjoyed Ferriss’ book. I like the way his mind works and felt he presented several thought-provoking ideas I want to spend some more time mulling over. It has also felt like there’s been a bit of synchronicity at work with the book appearing just when it did in my life, as I’ve been giving a lot of thought recently to my personal life design.

Anyway, after reading the book on my spiffy new Kindle, I jumped over to Ferriss’ website to check out some of the supplementary information he hosts there and quickly became hooked on his blog.

I’ve always been a sucker for intelligent men with a predilection for dumping the status quo on its ass. Ferriss is clearly smart, driven, and well-read. He thinks in unconventional ways and has chosen to do unusual and interesting things with his life. He’s been fired often enough and broken enough rules to meet my bad-boy quotient. Yet he can talk intelligently about tech and modern culture. The fact that he’s heavily into martial arts is just icing on the cake.

OK. So his idea of a breakfast is microwaving egg whites and adding flaxseed oil. That’s awful enough to choke a rabid vulture. And he outsourced his online dating recently, which sounds like something my ex would come up with. A man’s gotta have a few flaws, right?

In all seriousness, though, if Tim Ferriss keeps going the way he has been, I suspect he may end up being my generation’s version of Ben Franklin. He’s unconventional and intelligent enough to come up with some radically innovative creations. I’m really interested to follow where he heads from here.

There’s more than an academic interest on my part, though, where Ferriss is concerned. He makes my little OCD, Virgo, cybergrrl heart go pitter-pat with his discussions of the Pareto principle, breakdancing, and Argentinian wine. And there’s been enough written about Ferriss, both by himself and others, to keep a Competitive Intelligence analyst with a burgeoning crush entertained for days.

Ferriss definitely hits the high end of my “Yummy!” scale. But I’ve also learned that when I’m this obsessively smitten over someone it’s rarely just about the person. More often than not my “crush” is an strong indicator that there’s something about the person’s life or conduct that I long to emulate in my own. That’s certainly true with Ferriss. I watch the YouTube of him tangoing with some scrumptious young thing in South America and think to myself: That looks like great fun. I listen to him rattle off four different book titles in an answer to an interview question and I think: I want to spend more time with my “To be read” stack.

I don’t just want to do Tim Ferriss. I want to do what Tim Ferriss is doing, if at least in the abstract sense. I admire his decision to live a consciously-chosen life.

I ask you–what more could a girl want? Eye candy, food for thought, and inspiration.

And just in case you have no idea who I’m talking about. Here’s a copy of his recent fireside chat at Google:

(Editor’s note for the benefit of my mother: yes, I am still happily dating Charlie. If he can coo over Cary-Ann Moss, I can swoon over Ferriss.)