Building houses

A long-delayed post from the program I as at this summer.
One day of the program, we learned to build a house. Though not the kind of house you're thinking of. It's made of a material called cobb, rather like adobe. It's a mud-like mixture of sand, clay, straw, and water. You blend it all up (with your feet). Part of the house was already made. The earth beneath had been prepared beforehand, with a trench dug beneath where the walls would be built (in a large circle). The clay in the soil goes directly into the cobb to build the house. Then the ditch is filled with gravel to allow water to drain out. The floor is spread with gravel too (though it's gonna be covered with a different mud mix later).
The cobb wall is made incredibly thick. You make big balls of cobb and sort of smooth them into the wall. There's a certain pattern to it. It's hard to explain. But it was very cool. Everyone said how neat it is to feel the earth in your hands (or under your feet), and those who'd built houses with wood say this is so much better.
And it's incredibly cheap to make a room out of cobb. Plus you can do it in one summer, and then add more rooms every year. And they're really earthquake-resistant. Unlike wood beams, which pull apart, a cobb building just wobbles. It might crack a tiny bit, but it's easy to patch up.
Awesome house, right? Guess what? They're illegal to build.
What the frack!!!!!
Even with a permit, you're not allowed to make this kind of house in America!
The real reason is because if everyone made cheap houses of cobb, no one would be buying their lumber. Gee. What a tragedy.
Another reason our government can be so stupid. We should petition for cobb houses to be made legal.
Speakign of stupid rules, I hate youtube. They took another of my Ling videos off and say if I put up one more video that breaks copyright, they're gonna deactivate my account. Jeez! Those were the only videos I had up that were worth anything! Everyone else does stuff like that! It's not like I make any money off of them! So I had to take them all off. Not there's nothing good up there anyway. Grumble. I don't want to lose my account cause I have lots of cool favorites that I don't want to have to track down again.
So... pictures.





I haven't played in the mud in ages. I don't know if I ever really did, actually. But it was fun. I kinda wanted to have a mud fight, though I kind of didn't want to.
However, I did get to lob gobs of cobb at people (gently, so they could catch them).