California Drought

California is in the third year of a drought.  I report on this only because I live in California.  I like where I live right now because as you know, I build kayaks and kayaks need water and the place where I live, Alameda an island in San Francisco Bay gives me ready access to the water.  But the water is salty and not suitable for drinking. In Alameda, water for drinking comes from reservoirs which store winter rain runoff. When winter rains are insufficient, water from the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers is pumped into the reservoirs.

The picture above shows what California looks like right now to a climatologist.  The darker the color, the worse the drought.  As you can see, a good part of the state is in the chocolate condition.

Let us zoom out a bit for perspective.  Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico also have a bit of drought but nobody has as much chocolate colored drought as California.

The chart above puts names with the colors. Drought goes from Abnormally Dry to Moderate, then Severe, then Extreme and then Exceptional.  As the names indicate, California is having a drought that would not have been considered normal when the names for the severity of drought were made up.
We are told, furthermore, that in the past, Californian droughts have lasted from years to decades, maybe even centuries and nobody seems to know what sort of duration this particular drought will have.

Long term droughts are game changers.  The photo above is of a place in Camp Verde, Arizona called Montezumas Castle.  The people who built these dwellings apparently abandoned the area during a prolonged drought.  The people who lived there were primarily farmers, raising the usual southwestern crops, irrigated by the river that flowed at the base of their cliff dwelling.
The moral of the Camp Verde story seems to be that no matter how swell the place youre living in may be, if you dont have water, you go elsewhere.
So, even though this is strictly in the realm of speculation, prolonged drought in California could well depopulate the state significantly.  Californian climate refugees would move elsewhere. Farm workers would move back to the Spanish speaking parts of North America. North American cuisine would revert to what it was in the 50s, that is, lots of canned green beans in the winter and canned spinach and canned corn.  Vegetarianism would go back out of style.
The prime users of water in California are of course the farms and orchards that raise the 20 billion dollars worth of crops that are grown in Californias Central Valley.  If the Central Valley turned back to grasslands and oak savannah, perhaps some coastal cities could still survive on the water that was left over.  Who knows.  In the meantime, water use is being curtailed.  Lawns are going unwatered, trees are dying and so on. 

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Chairs Skin on Frame and Lashed

One of my readers sent me some photos of chairs made in Mexico by traditional means.

Full view of the chair.

Lashed construction holds the parts together

Lashings hold uprights to the bottom ring.

He writes in part,
I recently got back from a trip to Mexico visiting my wifes family. When down there we saw a style of furniture construction which reminded me of skin on frame, in that it involves multiple relatively poor quality pieces of lumber lashed together in a way that makes it both strong enough to do its job and is also very resilient to impacts. It seems to me that this chair and SOF (bicycle wheels as well) are so strong is because loads and impacts are dissipated by transferred them to multiple small, relatively weak, parts instead of concentrating them on one part that must be thus very strong. The type of furniture is called Equipale and was very common in the state of Jalisco. (I do not know if it is a regional style or a national one).
And Im adding some photos of two chairs of ours that were falling apart because the glue was coming undone. These were chairs where the parts were held together with glued dowels.  The glue failed and the dowels pulled out of their mortises one evening at dinner while a friend of ours was sitting on one of these chairs.  The dowels were still stuck on one end and drilling them out would have been tricky so I just reassembled the parts and lashed around the joints.  The chairs now have some movement in them since the lashings dont make completely rigid joints, but overall, they are hanging together.
This isnt skin on frame technology, but it is lashed and doweled construction where lashings take the place of glue or screws  to hold parts together.

Here I reenforced each doweled joint with a lashing.  Even if the glue fails, the joints will not pull apart.  The string lashings function like ligaments in animal joints.

Here, my lashings pull all the legs toward the center.  This approach is less work than lashing each joint individually. Now that I look at this photo, Im thinking that I should paint the lashing some color other than white.

Postscript: I first saw these two chairs at a neighbors yard sale.  I didnt care enough for them to buy them but picked up some lamps.  Next morning the chairs sat out in the alley next to his dumpster so I grabbed them.  Painted one red and the other one blue and reupholstered the seats in yellow vinyl. Subsequently painted the blue chair orange.  I believe the chairs now have a few more decades of life in them.

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