The very first tiny house I ever inhabited. All thanks to encouragement from a friend at just the right moment.  Here you can read about how I decided to move into this adorable blue shoe.  Oh, and if you’re wondering what the hell a Wagenplatz is, I explain it in detail here and here.  (Hint: It is an autonomous community of people living in various small houses, “common” to Germany.)

My second tiny Wagen was in a different community in a different city.  I shared it with my partner.  (Still do, as a matter of fact, though now there are three of us living between these red walls):

Some black cats are good luck. Though be wary if you catch them drinking vodka.

After a while, I was offered this Wagen for free (the one with the black door in the picture below). I took it and spent about a year renovating it (and learning everything about building from scratch while doing it).

It looked quite different when I started. For one it was green. But you can read about the entire refab process here.  (Pictures too.)

Then we moved to another city, they very same where my tiny house adventures had begun, but to a different community.  And we bought a third Wagen that I am planning on Frankensteining onto the red Wagen, our main living Wagen, this summer.

And now, I can barely even fathom even living in a house again.  Although I sometimes do dream about little cabins in the woods. Sweet, sweet, summer tiny house life.

Oh, and if you’re coming over after having watched Deek’s Tiny Yellow House feature on my little house, then by all means, subscribe to the rss feed.  Come back soon now.

Reconstruction Lenape Hamlet, Waterloo, NJ, the eighties.

My Dad is an archeologist, so as a kid I spent a lot of time doing things like this. Family legend has it that I won a prize at this particular event for eating more than my weight in roast buffalo.

Anybody ever built one of these?

You can’t get anything done by doing nothing.  It’s our country.  They’ve taken it from us.  The terrorists who attack us are still free—but we’re not.  I can’t go underground for a year, ten years, my whole life, waiting for freedom to be handed to me.  Freedom is something you have to take for yourself.

-Little Brother, Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow, where have you been all of my life?  I know, I know.  You’ve been publishing the shit out of a bunch of  books, doing tech activism, loving on creative commons, giving away ebooks, running Boing Boing, and saying important things about technology, copyright, privacy, security, and surveillance.  Tor published Little Brother in 2008, which means I have spent at least five years of my life with no idea that an author with potential to become a favorite was waiting just off my radar.  It took an interview on the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy Podcast (best sci fi podcast ever, fyi) to get me to sit up and download some of his books already.

As far as I can tell, Doctorow is a kind of superhero in the tech activism world, and his school of thought is a really good reminder about the positive side of technology.  Technology can be awesome.  Yup.  Nikki-who-dabbles-in-Ludditery just said that.   The narrator in Little Brother puts it like this after pulling another badass move using modern tech: “The best part of all this is how it made me feel: in control.  My technology was working for me, serving me, protecting me.  It wasn’t spying on me.  This is why I loved technology: if you used it right, it could give you power and privacy.”

Oh yeah, technology is only fucked when, for example, the government insists on using it to monitor people, when it becomes a tool of surveillance and control.  It is a reminder I need to hear, often.  I mean, I actually really like a lot of technology, and I have a hard time reconciling those feelings with the worry that the stuff simultaneously plants in the pit of my stomach.  It is the “dystopian” (haha, I mean real life) shit that governments do with it that scares me.  (As well as the dependence it creates on finite resources, but that is another issue.  We don’t need to have that conversation every single paragraph.)

But back to Little Brother.  The premise is this: a high school kid who is really good with technology is in the wrong place at the wrong time, and gets taken in by a fictional version of Homeland Security for a bombing in San Francisco.  Bad things happen.  He is released.  He fights back against what is becoming a very totalitarian state of affairs.  Besides being an engaging, page-turning story, Doctorow peppers the plot with information about how you can make technology work for you, how you can hide what you’re doing on the internet, how to do a number of small but neat hacks, where you can learn more, and why a deep understanding of the tech you use can work for you and help keep tech positive rather than scary.  I immediately added it to my mental list of “books to get for every young adult I ever need to buy a birthday present for” list (see also, Earthsea).  This is the kind of stuff that makes me wish I had a parallel life in which I could have become a programmer.  It is that engaging.

Doctorow’s perspective on copyright is intriguing as well.  And I quote (from my totally free, totally legally downloaded e-book file introduction):

The Creative Commons license at the top of this file probably tipped you off to the fact that I’ve got some pretty unorthodox ideas about copyright.  Here’s what I think of it, in a nutshell: A little goes a long way, and more than that is too much.

I like the fact that copyright lets me sell rights to my publishers and film studios and so on.  It’s nice that they can’t just take my stuff without permission and get rich on it without cutting me in for a piece of the action.  I’m in a pretty good position when it comes to negotiating with these companies: I’ve got a great agent and a decade’s experience with copyright law and licensing…

I hate the fact that fans who want to do what readers have always done are expected to play in the same system as all these hotshot agents and lawyers.  It’s just stupid to say that an elementary school classroom should have to talk to a lawyer at a giant global publisher before they put on a play based on one of my books.  It is ridiculous to say that people who want to “loan” their electronic copy of my book to a friend need to get a license to do so.  Loaning books has been around longer than any publisher on Earth, and it’s a fine thing.

His argument goes on for pages and pages, and it compelling, but I won’t quote any more of it at you here.  (Like I said, you can just download the book with the intro here for free, and read it yourself.  Even if you don’t have an ereader you can download a program like Calibre for free and read it on the computer that you must be reading this on right now.  And even if you don’t want to read the book, download it for the introduction, and the copyright argument.)  Doctorow’s views on copyright just make me want to go out and spend money on all his books.  I mean, this guy deserves to have my money.  I want him to have it.  I want to financially support the man who is going out there and writing this kind of book and promoting this kind of thinking.  And that is exactly his point, when it comes to copyright and using Creative Commons, and giving your fans a little credit.  I can’t wait to read more of his work.

Have you read any Doctorow?  What do you think about his views on copyright?

Which brings me to solar power.  I would love to be completely solar powered.  But having always lived on Wagenplätze where electricity was just an extension cord away, I have been lazy about it.  Solar panels are expensive.  Rewiring your plugs is annoying.  Buying a computer capable of running on 12-volt juice is not something I am in the mood to do.  (After Mac Air, Mac Sun?)  For now, it remains a dream.  But if we could power our fridge in the summer (we don’t really need it in the winter) with solar power, imagine how much we would save!  Someday.

The first of what I assume will be many small steps toward solar power in our lives were two solar lamps.  (You can see a picture if you click the link.  Pickles wouldn’t let me get a good shot on my way out the door this morning.)  I’d been eyeing them for a long time, ever since reading Deek’s review of them over on the Tiny House Blog.  And shit, they only cost 15 euros (a bit more expensive over in America).  Another friend bought one when he started a new Wagenplatz sans grid electricity (this is actually the standard for most Wagenplätze, fyi), and it looked pretty sweet.

What you get is a lamp, a bit futuristic looking in that Ikea modernity sort of way.  A long bendable giraffe neck holds the bulbs, while a round base holds a small solar panel.  You pop out the panel, lay it outside in the sun, and wa-la!  Electricity.  I love that they are cable-less, I love that they come in black, and I love that my reading lamp is now solar-powered.  Win-win-win.  Win!

I will admit it: I am wasteful with electricity.  My main sin being that I sometimes leave lights on when it isn’t strictly necessary.   Though it isn’t much (particularly considering that we have light bulbs that use very minimal power), it is something, and that is always too much.  Shit, this electricity is coming from nuclear plants.  From coal plants.  Fuck!  I hate that shit!

We’ve had the solar lamps for about a week now, and already they have completely changed the way I relate to electricity.  Where before I might have turned on a lamp while it was still light outside because it was getting dim in the Wagen, now I think, well, if I turn it on now, and then want to read for hours and hours later, will the juice run out and leave me in the dark?  (The instructions say the lamp can do three hours, though my friend said he’s gotten four.)  Electricity and its consumption has instantly become more concrete.  If I remember to set the solar panels out in the sun, I will have light (nine to 12 hours charge time needed).  If I do not, I will have no light.  It is a simple equation, but one we are rarely forced to consider.  I can’t wait for the next solar step.

Pickles has an official first word.  Papa.  Oh, she’s been making word-like noises for ages, and she obviously understands most of what we say, but “papa” is the first word we’ve really been able to hear her using in context.  Of course she also sometimes calls me papa, but, hey, why not?

Thing is, she could be communicating with us already.  She could be telling us all sorts of things.  That she’s hungry or wants water or more or is tired or that her teeth hurt.  Not because we expect her to be some kind of genius who speaks before her first birthday, but because we’ve been teaching her sign language since she was three months old.

The nice thing about teaching your baby sign language is that babies are capable of communicating with signs long before they are capable, developmentally speaking, of using spoken language.  Fascinating, huh?  Babies are mentally ready for communication much earlier than their bodies.  Which of course leads to a lot of frustration.  There’s nothing worse than not being able to communicate something important to the people around you.  I was intrigued by sign on its own merit, but I also fell in love with the idea of it as a tool for avoiding parental frustration.

Around eight months Pickles used her first sign, “milk,” and she still uses it every day.  Oddly, she uses it to mean thirst of all kinds (she has seen “water” and “drink” and “juice” over and over, but has never used them) and sometimes, food.  Besides “dog,” which I have just gotten her using in the last month, she uses none of the other signs that we’ve both learned watching Baby Signing Time, a set of videos that are wonderful for teaching babies and which have horrible, horrible songs that remain stuck in my head for days and make me want to tear out my hair.  Ah well, it is a price I have been willing to pay.  (At least, as far as my recommendation of these videos goes, Pickles appears to be an anomaly on that front.)  Particuarly because it buys me a half hour behind a book.

I have theories.  The most plausible is that Pickles has enough on her plate, language-wise.  I speak English.  The Beard and everyone else speak German.  And then we both sometimes use hand signals.  It might be too much at once.  Then again, maybe she’s just lazy.  Then again, maybe there is just nothing besides dog and milk/thirst that she feels pressed to tell us.  I guess we’ll never know for sure.

Despite the fact that the Baby Signing Time videos make me a little crazy, they seem to be effective learning tools.  A woman explains and sings and signs and two cartoon babies and a frog accompany her, as well as myriad real live signing babies.  The songs are incredibly cheesy, but they are catchy, and Pickles lights up as soon as I take out the dvd.  If you want to give signing a try, but don’t want to buy anything, there are a number of clips available on youtube, and before my mom gifted us several of the official dvds, Pickles and I would just watch this clip over and over again.  She loved it.  She still loves it.

There are also a number of books, two of which I’ve read (Sign With Your Baby: How to Communicate With Infants Before They Can Speak and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Baby Sign Language).  Books are good for the theories behind doing baby sign language with hearing children, but ineffective for learning the signs yourself.  If you want to hear a more successful story of baby signing, then check out Katey Sleeveless’ blog on the subject here.  That shit is seriously awesome.

Have any of you taught your children sign language? Or learned sign language for other reasons? (Or of course, speak sign language as a main language.) How did it go?

If you decide that you want to order one of the Baby Signing Time dvds, you can simultaneously support Click Clack Gorilla by buying them over these links (amazon):
Baby Signing Time Vol. 1 – It’s Baby Signing Time
Baby Signing Time Vol. 2: Here I Go
Baby Signing Time 3

But within the corner of town where we live, there is beauty.  If I am picky about where I point the camera, it would be easy to pretend that there are no blocky post-war housing blocks.  This morning I set off under blue sky with my laptop on my back to spend a few hours at my favorite cafe (free wifi, vegan food with no soy, yummy local iced tea, fresh pressed orange juice…), only to find that the cafe wasn’t open for another half hour.  So instead, this:

(Above: These little plaques have the names of Jewish folks who were taken off and killed during Hitler’s jerk-regime.  You see them everywhere, and it is a really effective memorial.  Maybe America should do this for the native Americans…)

From now on we will be spending all day everyday outside.

From now on we won’t have to make kindling because we won’t have to light the wood stove.

From now on we will cook in the purple Wagen.

From now on we will eat outside.

All dresses all the time!  Vitamin D!  Sunglasses!  In the moment of spring, our living space increases twenty fold.  Welcome to mansion season.

But spring has snubbed me once already.  On March 8th I said its name out loud, and after one glorious t-shirted afternoon of sunshine, it slipped back into the shadows without a trace.  Does spring really mean it this time?  Will it abandon me once more?

Has spring hit you yet?

You want it in a nutshell, here it is. This book is fun to read. High cheese factor, shallow plastic characters, and hugely problematic depiction of women and anyone who isn’t white, but page turning.

But maybe you won’t think its cheesy.  Maybe you like electricity so much that you’d be swept up in the calls to “Give my children the lightning,” by the images of a hero on his death bed croaking about how important “the lightning” is before biting it in a dramatic public scene.  Ummm, “the lightning”?  What a romantic way to think of electricity.  Which brings me to the crux of this book: defending industrial civilization.  But let me back up.

Lucifer’s Hammer is a big fucking comet, and it hits earth.  Earthquakes and tsunamis and hurricanes and floods destroy most of civilization.  A lot of people die, food is scarce, people start eating people—you know, the familiar backdrop and props of post-apocalyptic fiction.  We follow an almost George-Martinian number of characters as they flee from cities, looking for a safe place to bunker down, and most of them end up on Senator Jellison’s Ranch where a large group has organized in hopes of surviving the winter.

Meanwhile, a group that I thought of as Cannibals for Jesus believe that they have been called to complete God’s work and destroy the small pockets of civilization that have come through the crisis.  They attack the ranch, and then go after a nearby nuclear power plant that is, miraculously, still running.  And the people say, hark!  What devils are these that would dare attack the sacred nuclear power plant!  We shall band together, though it may mean the death of us all, to fight for the right to nuclear power!  Not only do Niven and Pournelle make nuclear power detractors (and environmentalists) completely unsympathetic, devilish lunatics, he makes sure to mention that even the hippies on the local commune change their back-to-the-earth tune once faced with the realities of a truly off-grid existence.  “Let me tell you, it doesn’t work,” says one ex-hippie character of the commune life.  Wa-waaah.

“It’s too much, don’t you see that?”  Owen demanded.  “Atomic power makes people think you can solve problems with technology.  Bigger and bigger.  More quick fixes.  You have the power so you use it and soon you need more and then you’re ripping ten billion tons a year of coal out of the earth.  Pollution.  Cities so big they rot in the center.  Ghettos.  Don’t you see?  Atomic power makes it easy to live out of balance with nature.  For a while.  Until finally you can’t get back in balance.  The Hammer gave us a chance to go back to living the way we were evolved to live, to be kind to the Earth.”

It sounds reasonable doesn’t it?  I happen to agree.  But I’d bet that Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle don’t, as they have one of the madmen Cannibals for Jesus saying it to ring in their unholy war on technology.  What the sympathetically portrayed characters say is, “Give us that electricity plant and twenty years and we’ll be in space again.”  Because the most important thing to consider when fighting for survival is getting the space program started again.  Religious zealotry and mania aside, I bet you can guess which side I thought the real lunatics were.

a feminist reading

And as for you, ladies, you’re just going to love living in the world of Lucifer’s Hammer.  There’s a lot of rape, and then, get this (says a largely respected and sympathetic character):

The only good thing about Hammerfall, women’s lib was dead milliseconds after Hammerstrike.

Wow, I’M SO GLAD.  That pesky women’s lib.  Umm?  Later a female character says: “It’s a man’s world now…So I guess I’ll just have to marry an important one.”  This book is a total feminist fail.  There are a number of female characters (though we only ever hear about the beautiful ones, and the women are always described in terms of beauty whereas the men are not), though what we see them doing most is having sex.  A few of them manage some heroics, but we never get to see this world through their eyes.

The only female perspective Niven gives us is Maureen, a beautiful (duh) woman who is thrust into the role of prize princess in the new group.  She battles with depression, particularly when she realizes that she is the trophy whose possession will determine the next ruler of the ranch once her father, the Senator, passes.  She is unhappy about it, but her criticism is fleeting and in the end she picks a mate and dons the new throne without complaint.  And did I mention the couple who didn’t get married before Hammerfall because the lady wanted to focus on her career?  But who get married and start having babies as soon as the world ends?  At the end of the story, it seems, marriage is a woman’s highest priority in this new, nuclear-powered world.  How very civilized.

and as for the characters who aren’t white

The place Niven and Pournelle give black people (he doesn’t mention any other non-white races) is strange and baffling.  Some professional thieves (all black) survive and rape and pillage and join the Cannibals for Jesus.  There are a few sympathetic black characters, but racism is everywhere in the new world, as if everyone had been waiting for a disaster to allow them to really get down with their racist selves.  Sheesh, Niven/Pournelle, just because you published this in 1977 doesn’t mean you get to be assholes.  Minus twenty thousand points.  Worse are the reviewers all over the internet who chalk this up to “1970s politics.”  So Niven/Pournelle’s racism (NOTE: A commenter recently thought it was too much to call them racist, and maybe he’s right.  I do not know where that particular line in the sand should be drawn, nor do I feel particularly qualified to be drawing it.  I will say though, that Niven and Pournelle have written a white-centric book here, which makes me assume that they too see the world this way.) is ok to ignore because everybody was doing it in the 70s?  Umm, right.

read it or burn it?

Despite Lucifer’s Hammer’s many failings, I enjoyed reading it.  The post-civ scenario is one I haven’t read before, as is the look into a mind very different than my own.  It is pop-y and cheesy and totally ridiculous over and over again, but I enjoyed spending time between the pages and the title would make a great name for a metal band.  But a fun read does not a good book make, and if you were to use its pages to start your wood stove, I would totally understand.

I am an American, and my skin is the color of Swiss cheese.  I  have married a German and have produced a Swiss-cheese-colored baby for the shrinking German population.  (Jawohl!)  I can prove that I have a job and insurance and stability and a place to live.  But what about the people who cannot prove these things?  What about the people for whom staying here is the difference between having a chance at a fairly normal life and being shot or bombed or oppressed or or or?  I don’t know where the immigrations people draw the line (are they more surly if you can’t speak German or if you can’t prove you have insurance, a job, and a rental contract?), but there are lines being drawn.  I doubt anyone is being given an armband and sent away solely because of the color of their skin, but I do know that the people being sent away are largely people whose skin more closely resembles hazelnuts than cheese.

According to this article, Germany deports 50,000 immigrants annually.  And before they deport them, they put them in special little deportation jails.  Ick.

Today, any foreigner residing in Germany without legal immigration status can be arrested and placed in detention pending deportation. This includes refugees who are refused asylum, civil war refugees whose right to remain has not been extended, and immigrants in the broadest sense, who either entered Germany without a valid visa or whose residence permit has expired.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, the law has allowed the detention of such people, in order to procure passports or travel documents before deporting them. Those affected are in a desperate situation lacking any recourse. The reason for their arrest is not any criminal offence they have committed, but restrictive German laws that turn them into “illegal immigrants.” Moreover, deportation detention can drag on for up to 18 months. …

According to the Initiative, over 50,000 migrants and asylum-seekers are deported from Germany each year, most of them by plane. Each day, 130 to 140 are returned to the conditions from which they fled—civil war, political persecution, dire economic hardship and regimes that suppress ethnic minorities and women.

Deportees are frequently accompanied by the paramilitary German Border Police or private security agents, who are prepared to use force. Those who resist are beaten, restrained and injected with drugs. A number have already been killed, but the culprits and the authorities responsible have so far escaped prosecution. The dead and abused refugees and immigrants are consciously accepted as the price of a brutal deportation practice.

Since 1993, 99 people have taken their own lives or died trying to avoid deportation, 45 while in detention.

Knowledge is power.  So what are we going to do about it?  Why are borders so important?  Why is keeping people out more important than keeping people alive?  Dog eat dog, survival of the fittest?  Nope, just an accident of birth.  I was born here and you were born there, so you better stay the fuck on your side of the line in the sand.  You were born into war and I was born into wealth?  Well, I must deserve it.  Or something.  Say it with me now…ICK.

It is a scenario that comes up over and over again in the apocalyptic books that I like reading so much.  And in a life-or-death situation, I can understand turning people away from your group.  If the choice is starving together or surviving a lone asshole, I know my instinct would urge me to survive as an asshole.  But guess what: Germany is not turning people away because if it doesn’t, all the Germans will starve to death.  We are not living in a post-apocalyptic scenario.  Germany is turning people away because it makes sense within this government-controled, border-patroled world.  Sad.

Meanwhile, back in the bubble of white privilege…I applied for what I think of as my “eternal German visa” a few weeks ago, or as the Americans call it, a Green Card.  Once it is approved (the paperwork is floating around in Berlin somewhere as I type) I will be allowed to stay here forever—though to my disappointment I will have to return to renew every time I get a new passport, ie once every ten years.  This is the award for three years of marriage.

I will be allowed to work any job, any time.  (Bet you a dollar that I’m still not going to be allowed on the state health insurance plan though.)  What a relief.  Not that there was ever any serious question of it being denied, which is where my priviledge in this situation lies: All of my visas have been fairly easy to obtain.  First there was a one-year au pairing visa.  Then a three-year English teacher visa.  Then I got married to a German, which gets you a pass for at least three years.  Though after seven years in Germany I could have applied for the same visa independently of the Beard, getting married made everything a lot easier.  Dual citizenship, however, is verboten.  I guess I am as close to being German as I’m ever going to get.