One thing that recently occurred to me is that now that I’m settled into my marina, I’m going to need to find a way to write about my own life while respecting the privacy of my neighbors.  I realize that I tend to put a lot of myself out there in the online world.  However, other residents of my little neighborhood may have very different preferences where that is concerned.  Especially considering that for many of them their floating homes are their vacation retreats and where they like to let their hair down.

So, if I’m sometimes a little vague with names and particular details, odds are it’s intentional and that I’m trying respect my neighbor’s right to not have their personal lives broadcast on the web.  (Moreover, if any of my neighbors ever reads something here that makes you uncomfortable, please let me know and I’ll either modify it or take it down.)

That being said, I got to experience my first little neighborhood party last night.  Apparently these are fairly common once the weather turns warm and I’ve been told that my ramp tends to be “the party ramp”.  In fact, two of my neighbors were bemoaning the fact that they “live out in the boonies from where all the cool stuff is happening”.  (They live another two ramps down the way.)  I’m not used to thinking of ramps having personalities so this is a new concept for me to wrap my mind around.

Some of these parties, like the one last night, are planned and scheduled in advance.  More often, though, they seem to spontaneously evolve.  One neighbor stops to talk to another.  The conversation continues for a little while and lawn chairs get pulled out onto the ramp.  Those two seem to be having fun, so another neighbor drifts over to join them.  Sometime soon after that a bottle of wine or some beer is produced and then, Voila!, you have a little party going.

In a lot of ways the phenomena reminds me a lot of the impromptu late-night conversations that would strike up in the dorm hallways in college.  That was one of my favorite experiences back then, so it’s neat for me to discover a similar phenomena in the marina.

Last night’s ramp party centered around a raucous game of Pictionary.  They went all-out including a gameshow host decked in a suit jacket, tie, Bermuda shorts, and bad faux hair.  Jello shots had been flowing freely for awhile by the time I drifted down.  There were no teams and the rules by which we were playing were pretty elastic.  It was great fun.

What stole my heart, though, was Boogie, one of the marina’s well-known canine members.  Boogie is an English bulldog and she’s carrying a few extra pounds on her already stout bulldog frame.  Boogie doesn’t walk.  She waddles.  And she reminds me of a giant, bighearted caterpillar with all her fuzzy ripples of flesh.

Last night Boogie was extra-friendly.  I suspect the 3 to 4 jello shots she’d partaken in prior to my arrival contributed to that.  (Like my cat, Rumi, Boogie apparently likes the taste of alcohol.)  Boogie is a very friendly drunk.  She waddled her way over to my lawn chair, perhaps a little less gracefully than normal, plopped her round little body on top of my feet, and slobberly demanded love.  So I had a very friendly foot-warmer for a good portion of the game.

If I’d thought I could have got away with it, I would have been tempted to spirit her home with me.  She’s a complete sweetheart.  But she would have made quite an armful and I suspect her mother would have objected strongly to her absence.

My neighbors who’ve been curious about who was fixing up my little place bombarded me with a series of questions including: Where are you from?  Why is your boyfriend not also up here? What do you do for work?  Why in the world would you move from the desert to here? etc.

It reminded me quite a lot of my mother’s little group of friends who hang out by the pool in the summer.  You want to know anything about anyone, ask them.  They have the best intel on everyone in the community.  I suspect there will be several more evenings of information-gathering before they feel comfortable that they have enough material for their files, and that’s perfectly okay.  One of the things I’ve really been looking forward in living here is being able build connections with my neighbors.

Anyway, last night was a great introduction to the marina.  This summer should be a lot of fun.  (And, Dan, it sounds like I just missed you and your wife last night.)

This is just a quick entry to share with you a glimpse of this morning’s sunrise along the Columbia River.

I’ve noticed that since settling into my tiny house on the water that my body clock seems to be shifting to the same hours as the sun’s.  When the sun goes down I start getting sleepy, even though it’s still pretty early.  In part I think it’s due to the fact that as soon as the sun begins to rise in the morning, it reflects off the water and then starts shimmering through the house. (Especially since I don’t have my front blinds up yet.)

Anyway, waking up to a view like this is the best alarm clock nature could devise

I was having a rather rough day yesterday which made what happened all that much more wonderful.  On top of my plumbing woes, things were piling up at work.  And then there was the small matter of getting caught in hail four times yesterday.

Moreover, all this was in the wake of having to unpack the Mini and carry all my stuff down the ramps in the rain on Sunday.

I don’t care if real Portlanders don’t carry umbrellas.  I’m carrying one with me everywhere I go from now on, dang it.  I haven’t been this soggy and pelted by the elements in the last twenty years.

So, needless to say, I was rather cranky as I was returning down the ramps to my house after hail storm #4 of the day.  In the midst of feeling very sorry for myself, however, I noticed something odd floating in the river directly in front of my house.  It was slick, dark, and executing little joyful pirouettes. I would have thought it was just a random log drifting down the river but the pattern it was tracing in the water made no sense if it was just debris.  There was too much a sense of humor about the whole thing.

So I squinted and hurried down the dock.  Just as I got within ten feet of the mysterious black thing in the water, a whiskered head popped to the surface and stared directly at me with liquid eyes.  Both me and the whiskered animal did a comic double-take, and then, with a flick of a tail and a splash, it was gone.

My first reaction was: “THAT’S THE BIGGEST OTTER I’VE EVER SEEN!”

I have to confess that what it actually looked like to me was a seal.  But there was no conceivable way a seal could be paddling around outside my house… could there?

Turns out, it very well could.

I ran into my neighbor Mike a hour later and asked him about what I’d seen…  Mike didn’t even bat an eye under his baseball cap.  “Oh yeah.  There are seals all over the place right now.  They like to follow the salmon up river.”  And with that matter-of-fact explanation he ambled down the dock as though we’d just had a conversation as inconsequential as discussing the fact it was raining again in Portland.

Mike has obviously been here a lot longer than me.

My reaction went something a little more like the following: “HOLY FREAK!  I JUST SAW A SEAL! RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY HOUSE! A SEAL!!!!”

I’m not sure when the novelty of a seal meandering five feet in front of my house might wear off.  I’m not sure it ever will, and that’s perfectly fine with me.

Upon hearing the story on Twitter, the local fantasy author Kim Antieau said it was just the selkies way of welcoming me to the neighborhood.  I love that.

And sure enough, one quick visit from the selkies wiped away an enormous amount of frustration from the day, and I’m back to remembering why I’m here.  And that I’m right where I’m supposed to be, exploding toilets, bat colonies and all.

I’m afraid to say my first day in my floating home was a little less magical than my arrival.

To begin with, my “Open 24 Hours a Day! 7 Days a Week!” storeroom facility decided to be closed for Easter without sending any sort of notice to their tenants.  So, when I blithely showed up, keyed in my security code at the gate, and went inside, I ended up being greeted by a very flustered property manager who came barreling out of her RV, followed quickly by her husband/S.O. armed with a shotgun.

None of this was really disastrous other than the fact that all the bedding I planned to use for the night was behind lock and key and they weren’t about to let me in long enough to retrieve it.  I think what irked me the most is how nasty the manager was.  I just about got accused of breaking and entering.  She kept insisting that there was no way my security code should have been able to open the gate and that they told everyone when they signed up for a facility that they were closed on major holidays.  (Of which, Easter apparently qualifies in her world.)

I made my apologies and left.  I’ve got a bad feeling, though, that there’s going to be an ongoing series of issues between me and this women as I ended up getting the Death Look the whole time I was there yesterday to retrieve a few things.

It annoyed me that I was forced to go buy a cheapo comforter to get me through the night until I could retrieve my bedding.  Odds are I’ll end up donating it to one of the local shelters.

The real excitement on Sunday, however, involved my tiny house’s plumbing.  I was able to reach Kenny about midday and he showed me how to turn out the main water main to my house.  Kenny hung around for about fifteen minutes helping me make sure all the appropriate valves were opened and that everything appeared to be in working order.  I wished him a Happy Easter and he went off to spend the day with his parents and sister.

An hour later all hell began to break loose. My hot water heater made a noise that could only be described as a death rattle and then stubbornly refused to produce anything that could even be generously described as lukewarm water.  The hot water spigot produced water the same temperature as the river.

Next, the shower turned on by itself and no matter how I adjusted the handle, I couldn’t get it to less than a light, ongoing trickle.

This was followed by the kitchen sink sprouting a leak from the main pipe.  Having no pots or pans yet in the house, I resorted to putting my rice cooker under the drip to capture the water.  I then made a hasty trip to Wal-Mart to grab a few containers to catch water in until I could reach a plumber Monday morning who would charge less-than-extortionate rates because it was a holiday.

The coup de gras, however, was that, just as I was coming back through the front door from Wal-Mart, I heard a weird, cracking explosion from the bathroom, which made no sense whatsover.  I opened the bathroom door cautiously to discover that the lid of my toilet tank had shot off with enough force to hit the far wall and break into pieces. I kid you not.

Now, I’ve seen my handful of weird toilet malfunctions before.  I had also been warned by the contractor who had rebuilt my float that re-balancing the level of the house could result in some minor drips in the plumbing.  But there was no way an exploding toilet could be described as “minor” in anyone’s book as far as I was concerned.

The subsequent conversation with Kenny went roughly like this:

Me: “Uh, Kenny, there seems to be a problem with my toilet.”

Kenny: “What?  Is it not flushing?”

Me: “No.  It exploded.”

Kenny: “Exploded?  What do you mean by ‘exploded’?  Did you get backflow from the honeypot or something?”

Me, trying to keep my tone somewhere below the pitch of a mouse who’s just been sodomized: “No.  I mean, the lid just shot off, slammed into the far wall, and broke in half.  That kind of exploded.”

This pronouncement was greeted by a moment’s silence worthy of the news I’d just delivered.

Kenny: “I’ll be there first thing tomorrow morning with my plumber.”

Kenny was slightly more pragmatic on the subject of what I should use for a toilet until then, though.  He suggested I could probably still use it and just flush with a bucket until the cavalry arrived…  But I might want to be a little careful just to be safe.  Alternately, there was always the gym locker room down the street.  I’d mentioned I was planning to get a membership, hadn’t I?

I ended up making the minimal possible number of hasty trips to the bathroom during the night, keeping a watchful eye on the tank the entire time I was in the room.

Monday morning, Carey of Rhino Plumbing and his brother appeared as my salvation.  Apparently what happened is the squeegee-ma-bob–hey, I’m not a plumber and they just pointed at the thing–had shot up several inches with enough force to rip itself free of the tubing in the tank and send the lid flying.

Why exactly this happened, no one knows.  Not even the plumbers.  It could have been air or some sort of debris in the line.  But that’s pure speculation.  Upon further determined probing by me, both Kenny and Carey surrendered a few Man Points by admitting they’d never seen anything like it.  It was the damnedest thang.

The initial plan had been to simply replace the innards of the toilet and see if that fixed the issue.  However, then it was discovered that there was a crack running the length of the bowl on the far side.  Whether the crack happened as part of the explosion or sometime during the winter they don’t know.

Final verdict: my hot water heater could be saved with a new heating element.  Shower was magically shut off.  Leak under the kitchen was resolved.  The toilet, however, has been declared D.O.A.  Looks like I may be getting the spiffy new, dual-flush toilet I had been planning a little earlier than planned.  (And praying I don’t see similar canon-like activity from that.)

So that was my Sunday and Monday this week.

Now, can anyone recommend a good sacrificial offering to the local water gods to ensure there’s no more of this mischief?

My apologies for personal updates being a little thin over the last few weeks.  My mom being out to visit in New Mexico and getting ready to relocate full-time to Portland took up most of my spare time.  However, I am happy to report that I am now moved in (relatively speaking) to my lovely little floating home!

The journey began by packing most of the limited possessions I’ve lived with for the last year into my Mini Cooper.  It’s interesting to realize that with the exceptions of a few books, my cello, my Bose headphones, and a couple of good bottles of red wine, I really didn’t find myself missing anything I had in storage in Portland.  I think that probably indicates I should do another round of downsizing my possessions before moving everything into my house.

I drove a route through Utah and Idaho to reach Portland and the drive was gorgeous.  A good portion of it featured snow-covered mountains and rivers running alongside the highway.  I was so jazzed about the surroundings all around me that I drove a little over 800 miles the second day before realizing it was probably time to stop for the night.

Mojave, UT was just a groovy small town.  But let me just say I’ve never seen so many BAT’s (Big-Assed Trucks) in my life!  I swear I drove through town looking at nothing but mudflaps.  Definitely need to go back there sometime with Charlie and check things out.  Mojave strikes me as the bastard child of Sedona, AZ and Madrid, NM.

The final stretch of the drive was along the Columbia River.  I’d always wondered what things looked like east of where my house is.  The answer is some phenomenally gorgeous landscape.  It was late enough Saturday night and pretty enough along the river that I decided to stay in a hotel about an hour from my place and finish up in the morning.

I woke up just before sunrise Sunday morning, and made the final drive to my new home as the sun was rising over the river.  I reached the front door of my house to a fanfare of Canadian geese who had followed me down the dock.  It seemed oddly appropriate that I arrived at my new home on Easter morning, a date symbolic of rebirth in more than one religion

It was a good homecoming.

Well, the time has finally come to head up to Portland.  Tomorrow, me and obscene amount of computer equipment head out in the Mini Cooper.  I plan to spread the 1,400 mile drive across three days so it shouldn’t be too bad. Especially since my iPhone is loaded up with audiobooks I haven’t had time to get to.

The current plan is to be up in Portland until the end of April working on the kitchen, repairing/installing drywall, and painting.  I’ll return to Albuquerque the beginning of May to visit with Charlie and bring Rumi back up with me.

Unfortunately, my cat finds painting walls fascinating and he likes to help.  So he gets to stay safely tucked in New Mexico until the painting is done and I also have sonic fences installed over both doors to the outside.

I’ve both excited to finally be able to live in my tiny place full time and a little bit nervous.

There’s been a lot of renovations done to my place already.  However, until now I simply threw money at the problem and had other people do the work.  Now that balance is shifting more toward do-it-yourself.   And with Charlie’s work schedule this summer I’m not sure how much I’m going to be able to enlist his help.

Expect a lot of entries this summer on things like stripping wallpaper, laying wood floors, and trying to figure out how to install a new shower.  I’m just crossing my fingers and praying that I have my mother and brother’s aptitude for power tools.

One of the regular readers of my blog and a fellow small home enthusiast, James (aka NomadRip in the Comments section), forwarded me the following video. I haven’t laughed as hard as I did while watching this video in quite a while.

The self-proclaimed Moron Brothers’ are bluegrass musicians who live on a self-built shanty boat which is featured in the video below.

Thank you, James, for reminding me that no matter how modest (and currently torn up) my little floating home may be, there’s someone out there living in something even more humble.

And I just have to say that even though their little shanty boat is a little more… rustic… than what I eventually hope to end up with, these two totally understand the appeal of living in a little house on the water.

I am also  more than a little tempted to send the video to my father and a few coworkers as an illustration of the place where I’m living.  However, I doubt that would help their difficulty in understanding my choice in a home.

“Henry David Thoreau is a singular character — a young man with much of wild original nature still remaining in him; and so far as he is sophisticated, it is in a way and method of his own. He is as ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and somewhat rustic, although courteous manners, corresponding very well with such an exterior. But his ugliness is of an honest and agreeable fashion, and becomes him much better than beauty.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The American Notebooks

Henry David Thoreau may be a minimalist who died over a century ago, but he apparently is hip enough to be using Twitter.   Twitter users who are as a big fan of Thoreau as I am may want to consider checking out ThoreauPage.

On Twitter, Henry describes himself as “an American author, poet, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, philosopher, and leading transcendentalist”.  His twitterfeed includes photos of places important in his life, quotes from his writing, and a variety of intriguing links.  Recent links have included books and poetry inspired by his work and a link to the Thoreau Farm Trust.

As someone who deeply regrets not having the opportunity to have had tea with Mr. Thoreau in his humble cabin, I think it’s great fun to have little snippets from Henry show up in my TweetDeck.

Thank you to Shedworking for this Friday discovery.

I have been a fan of architect Michael Graves for a long time.  I’ve even braved Target during Christmas season for a couple of his designs, and that’s high praise, indeed, in my world.

I couldn’t resist sharing this pavilion design of his…  With the amount of glass employed in this little structure it would take some creativity in order to make this into a home.  But at 171 square feet, it’s larger than most of the tumbleweed designs.  Moreover, I could easily see a sleeping loft in this structure providing additional space.

The roof and wall colors in which it are built are customizable.For additional details on this and two other Michael Graves designs, check out ecirclehomes.com or call call Gabriele at 800-700-9856.

I just returned from a week-long camping event in Arizona.  I’m just now catching up enough at work that I can focus on catching up here, as well.  When I was out in Arizona it seemed like all the friends I ran across wanted to know what the latest news was on my house.  And, more to the point, when I would be DONE with the renovations.

DONE is becoming a very nebulous concept in my world, guys.  I expected to be DONE a long time ago.  And with a substantially smaller total bill than what I’ve racked up so far.

My job seems as stable as anything out there right now.  Perhaps even more than the norm.  But with the world as topsy-turvy as it is right now, I really don’t want to tap any more of my rapidly hemorrhaging savings to finish off the house.  So I’m doing my best to lower my near-term ambitions which, I’m afraid, is not something at which I have much practice. But I’ve giving it my best effort.

In the next week or two I plan to drive my Mini Cooper up to Portland.  I’m just waiting to see if the class near Charlie’s place on wiring your house for solar power gets canceled or not.  If it does, my timetable moves up and the car gets moved sooner.

As soon as I’ve got the car up there, I’m going to spend a few weeks in my house focusing on getting the new paint, wallpaper, and flooring done in the front half of the house.  (I have a feeling my annual bonus from my job is going to be spent on wood flooring.) That’s all that’s really holding things up in terms of it being comfortably habitable.  I’m sick of not being able to move most of my limited remaining furniture in.

Once I’m settled in the front half of the house, I can focus on finishing off the new back office space.  Some of that, like the dry wall, I know I can do myself.  I’m not sure I’m up to the task of re-framing the expanded bathroom, though.  I may grit my teeth and recruit Kenny and Gene for that particular task when I reach it.  That’s probably going to have to wait awhile, though, as the funds I had allocated for that budget got devoured by them running significantly over-budget on the last.  (Anyone know an inexpensive framer in Portland?)

The thing is, I don’t really need the back office space in my house to be completely finished off, right now.  Sure, it would be nice.  But it’s not a “gotta have” kind of thing.

What is a “gotta have” is being in my house by this upcoming spring and summer.  I can’t bear the thought of another summer passing with me still biding my time in the desert rather than near the water.