New digs
Wow, I had intended to keep more current here, and it's been six months since I last did an entry. My apologies, and I will try to keep things at least weekly going forward.
I have moved again, and have been living for several months with Eric, who contacted me through a Discord server when I was telling stories there about how hard a time I was having finding a new place. The previous new place, with Mike and Chenoa, only lasted a couple of months before Mike told me that they had a new girlfriend, would rather have her in the room than me, and they would not be renewing my six-month lease. I suspect that the story behind the story is that the bad-Domme vibes I was getting from Chenoa were accurate, and my being about as subby as an avalanche was annoying her. But it didn't and doesn't matter, that's a decision they get to make, and they made it.
So I tarted looking, and the answers I was getting off CraigsList were getting ridiculous. I'll quote you one conversation in full:
Joel: "Hello."
Kathy: "Hi. You're an old white guy. Eeeewww. No. Thanks, goodbye."
Joel: "Bye."
I posted that on the Portland server on Discord, and Eric sent me a message saying he had a room he was thinking about renting, and why don't I come by and take a look at it? So I did, and it's nice, and Eric is very easy to get along with, and I moved in. This time I was very careful to not lift too much at once, and the process was without injury. I've been here about 3 months now, and if the biggest gripe I have is that the guy who built the shower was a foot taller than I am and I really need to reach to get the nozzle down, then life must be pretty good.
Most of my concentration at this point is on trying to get people really *enlisted* in Solarpunk Portland. I've got sixty subscribers on the server, and zero project managers. Two people initially volunteered, discovered the job was bigger than they thought it was, and downgraded themselves. I'm disappointed that the world happens to be shaped that way, but it is their decison to make, they made it, and I get to live with it.
So I thought about it, and realized I hadn't gone far enough with the stepwise decomposition on my project plan. Sure, *building* it all is too big for most people to get their minds around, but for most people the earlier step of writing the proposal and submitting it for funding is also out of their scope. I need to pull it back to something somebody graduating high school can get a handle on, and what they're looking at is "where am I going to live and what am I going to eat?"
So I came up with an idea. Here's a neat toy: https://www.designboom.com/design/zeltini-z-triton-electric-camper-house-trike-boat-05-21-2020/ . It's a project of a size most people can grasp, and if you build one for yourself and it's yours and you can take it with you, you at least have a safe warm place to sleep. 'Safe' is provided by the city having two huge rivers in it, and you can just ride your amphibian straight into the river, drop anchor fifty feet offshore, and not worry about it. (The Willamette is about Hudson-sized, and the Columbia is nearly Mississippi scale.)
I only posted that two days ago, and have no responses as yet. If I don't get any tomorrow, I'll start writing letters
to my sixty subscribers individually, asking them to tell me either what they didn't like about the idea or what they'd like better.
So that's it for here and now. Howzbyyou?