Many of my friends and readers who followed our earthbag house build last summer have asked, “So, how much did you get done before winter?” The short answer is “Lots, but not as much as we’d hoped.” In this post I’ll share our final projects up until we wrapped things up just before Thanksgiving of…
Below is my account–as written in e-mails at the time–of my final weeks with Stella the Starling. Monday, June 19, 2000 I am playing a CD of 50 bird songs. You should see my birds! Stella is listening intently–I can see how she would start imitating them if she heard them enough.
Just in case you haven’t been following my blog lately, I recently published my first children’s book, Stella the Starling. I’ve delved into my old e-mails to find things I wrote about Stella while I raised her. Here are weeks 5 and 6 of “The Stella Diaries” from the summer of the year 2000. Enjoy!
We’ve recently moved to Dickinson, North Dakota for a few months of work. While Keith puts in 70 or more work hours per week, I plug away on my books and business, cook our meals, keep the house motorhome in order and do my best to keep everything running smoothly. To prevent myself from completely losing my…
Thankfully, the cough/sneeze that John mentioned on May 25 cleared up. By Stella’s fourth week of life, she had really developed a personality, and quickly endeared herself to everyone around! Here are some notes I wrote during that week. If you’ve read Stella the Starling (my children’s book), then you’ll no doubt recognize where…
My little Stella grew so fast! Since Mrs. Wolf, the master teacher in the classroom where I student taught, was uncomfortable with me bringing the bird to school, John volunteered to take over Stella’s care for a few days. Here are another couple of weeks’ worth of e-mail exchanges between me and John (the illustrator of Stella…
I’m so excited that my children’s book, Stella the Starling, based on a real-life wild European Starling that I hand-raised, is finally out! Writing that story brought back many memories. I went hunting through my computer e-mail archives and found quite a few detailed messages that I had sent to my friend and fellow bird enthusiast,…
In this post I would like to share a list of the resources we have used for building the earthbag house. I’ll update this page as we continue the project, so check back later or sign up for my newsletter at the end of the post to be notified when I add something new!
Papercrete? What’s that? Papercrete is a mixture of paper and Portland cement. It has a light, spongy, airy feel and it’s a great insulating material!
Greetings from Fort Collins, Colorado! I started this 2014 “holiday letter” about a month and a half ago and things have been a real whirlwind since then! Let’s see…where was I? After many months of working on an earthbag house in Kansas, Keith is back to work in on an official, paying job. He worked…
We install doors and windows a bit differently in an earthbag home than in a normal house. Watch the video below where Lee explains how it works, and enjoy the slideshow afterward which shows the doors and window frames in the earthbag house we are building:
A few weeks back I wrote a post about the rainwater cistern we’re building. We’ve made a lot of progress since then! My newest video shows the cistern from dream to (almost) done! This cistern, made of earthbags like the rest of the house, will be the primary source of water for the house. We’ll…