Fly the Flag High and Proud

CNN: U.S.: No Afghan troop decision made; UPI: IEDs are main threat in southern Helmand; BBC: Japan to boost aid to Afghanistan - It's time for President Obama to make good on the only campaign promise he should keep, and commit to winning the war in Afghanistan. Everyone credible, even the perpetually skeptical Michael Yon, says that the war is winnable. He should abandon his misguided quest to butcher health care, abandon his misguided quest to fix America's economy by ruining it first, and commit to the only campaign promise he made that was worth even half of the breath that he expended to make it: he should commit to winning in Afghanistan, and give the generals and the troops the resources they need to do their jobs.

UPI: Riyadh ups the ante by joining Yemen war; AFP: Yemen rebels say Saudi jets using phosphorous bombs; BBC: Iran warning over Yemen conflict - It appears that Yemen is the new front in the cold war between Riyadh and Tehran. Wonderful.

BBC: Money talks: What does China want for its $10bn loan to Africa?

BBC: Turkey to announce PKK peace plan

BBC: Anglicans welcome offer from Rome

To those of you in the audience who are veterans (Father Time being the most notable), thank you for your service to this great nation. Happy Veterans' Day.

And, as an added bonus, an E-mail that I spent some time writing to a friend who I met at [Generic State University].

[Athena],

> Yes, I'd like to hear about your someday house in Wyoming. :)

That's it, huh? :)

I want to build a house out of recycled shipping containers. About twenty-three of them, to be exact: three in the basement, eight on the first floor, eight on the second floor, and one in each corner. The ones on the corners will be upright, and serve as sort of "towers", for lack of a better word, but even upright they'll be about the same height as the two floors. Two of those corner containers will contain spiral staircases (on opposing corners), one of the others will be part of the garage, and the other will be a conservatory with an open ceiling, windows, plants, and a couple of chairs.

The house will be roughly square, with a 20'x20' courtyard in the middle. All of the guest areas would be on the ground floor: living room, dining area and kitchen, garage, at least one guest room, and a few other things. On the second floor would be the master bedroom and master bathroom, possibly a second bedroom, a library/den/study, a small armory, and whatever else ought to go on the top floor. I don't know if there will be a deck or something on the roof, but I've thought about a balcony or porch in lieu of one of the upper deck containers.

The basement would consist of two regular containers, and one fallout/storm shelter, not because I'm paranoid about nukes hitting Wyoming or anywhere else (I'm not), but just in case something comes up - a tornado or whatever.

Now, it should be noted that I don't intend to have them actually look like a collection of shipping containers. Probably without exception, the inside will be finished like the house, and the outside will be finished like a house, maybe with logs to make it look cabin-like, maybe with some other type of stylish and normal-looking exterior, and a normal (for Wyoming) yard and everything. Probably no punji-stakes. I think.

Not only would the shipping containers be strong, and heavy, but they would be a good use of recycled/sustainable material. I'm absolutely no enviro-weenie, but I think that sustainable and responsible use of resources is precisely what we as good humans and good Christians should be doing, as good stewards of the planet. Building houses with shipping containers is actually a growing trend, though I doubt it's what one would call "mainstream", and most of the designs that people come up with for shipping container houses are ugly modern art jobs, but the concept is sound, and it's cheaper to build a house out of containers than it is to build using traditional building materials. I was first introduced to the idea when I was working in California, because the villages out there are almost entirely built using pre-fabricated housing units that are built out of shipping containers and arranged in various configurations. For example:

[link redacted]

And you can see pictures:

image

image

image

My house obviously wouldn't look like those, but it gives you an idea of the structure and how they've gone together where they've been used by the military. Here are a few sites for companies that specialize in supplying them to the military, both for training sites and for pre-fabricated buildings for deployment overseas. That last link, for Safecastle LLC, is a company that (I'm pretty sure) turns shipping containers into tornado and bomb shelters - for example, there were people who used their shelters to ride out Hurricane Katrina.

Fort Irwin buildings

Allied Container

CMOUTS LLC

Strategic Operations

Safecastle LLC

So, there you have it, the basic nuts and bolts of my pipe dream for building a sort of retirement home/castle in the wilds of Wyoming - somewhere in this vicinity:

link

Thoughts? Admit it, you think I'm completely and totally insane.

- The Fly

Happy Veterans' Day. Have fun.