Skills For Good(s) With Rod Strickland
Last night at 411 Pelissier, the first instalment of Skills for Good(s) began with one of our favourite skill-filled friends, Rod Strickland. This series of skill share sessions will be hosted by Lucy and I every other Tuesday out of Civic Space. Our hopes are that it opens up the floor for discussion on an array of skills and knowledge about everything from Earthship Architecture to the best way to make pie.
Skills for Good(s) is based on the idea of barter based education. Presenters share a skill/knowledge that they have and attendees bring barter items in exchange. Above, Lucy helps prepare the space before Rod begins skill sharing.
For each session, barter items are requested by the presenter. Tonight, Rod chose food!
Stocking up before the talk starts.
Rod decided to share his skill while sitting among us instead of standing at the front. This made for awesome discussion and a more casual/relaxed setting.
Examples of an earthship from the outside south side, where the green house is located. This new way of building sustainable homes is something Rod has been interested for a long time. He has been researching sustainability for over a decade!
Another example of an earthship. The organic aesthetic of these homes are quite beautiful.
Discussing.
The very first step in building an earthship is pounding tires…lots of them. Rod said that a 2 bedroom earth ship has around 1,000 pounded tires!
Discussing building code protocol.
Rod takes to the front to demonstrate how the thermal masse systems work inside earthships.
The water, heating/cooling, and green house systems make this type of living space completely self sustainable.
After the presentation, more discussions break out in smaller groups.
Earthship talk.
It was such a fun night with lots of new friendly faces. Stay tuned for an announcement about the next presenter and in the meantime, come out to Rosina’s Zine Night tonight at 7:00 pm. See you there!
















![SRSI, Day 29: It’s The Last Friday Friday was the last open house for SRSI. Norman Eberstein read some of his log entries written during his job, Emily made some amazing snacks for us, Kero busted out his Lemur, and Laura did another payphone intervention. Norman was feeling not quite himself on Friday morning when he came in. He got his nose [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/DSC_0873-150x150.jpg)
![SRSI, Day 12 &13: Tactics, Presents and Garden Party Plans Lea Bucknell arrived from British Columbia to take over the window display of 424 Pelissier, Andrea Carvalho sent pictures of her last tactics in Windsor from Montreal, and SRSI participants get a surprise gift from a local fan. During the last few days of Andrea’s residency, she performed public interventions at bus stops and inside [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/DSC_0660-150x150.jpg)

![SRSI, Day 9 & 10: Berries and Pies! We had a lot of changes happen this weekend down on Pelissier Street. Eric Cheung’s Interior sod was uninstalled Saturday, Leesa Bringas’ Indian Road Postcard project launched, and Merry Ellen Scully Mosna’s pie-making was a big hit on Sunday. < Eric’s sod was picked up Saturday afternoon. He placed an ad on Kijiji for free [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/DSC_0967-150x150.jpg)
![Cardboard Letters Continued We were only about half strong this week, but Josh, Rosina and I plowed ahead on the letters, this time focusing on just the front and back faces of the letters K, A, E, T, and I. We figured that since we had the projector set up anyways, it was worth doing as many faces as we [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/IMG_2985-150x150.jpg)
![City Share Conference in Chattanooga We’re packing up and heading down to Chattanooga, Tennessee tomorrow to attend CreateHere‘s City Share Mini Conference. What the conference is all about: “City Share is a conference for seeding innovative projects.We bring great minds from across disciplines together in Chattanooga, Tennessee to teach, share, plan, and change. The result? International knowledge-sharing; a growing network [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Screen-shot-2010-02-16-at-11.50.51-AM-sm-150x150.jpg)
![Detroit Deals I’ve been thinking about Windsor – Detroit tourism lately for our How to Forget the Border Completely project and since LivingSocial did such a good job advertising to me on facebook, I signed up for weekly Detroit deals and coupons to be e-mailed to me. I’m on week 3 or 4 and so far I’ve [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/michelledetroitdeal-150x150.jpg)
![Creative Cities Summit: Using Art to Change Cities in Lexington, Kentucky In just a couple days, Danielle and I will be headed down to Lexington, Kentucky, where I’ll be presenting at this year’s Creative Cities Summit as part of the Using Art to Change Cities panel. The summit runs from April 7 – 9, 2010, I’ll be presenting on Friday, April 9th. Here’s the panel description [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/lexington-150x150.jpg)
![Two Tales Of A City: Hamilton History Hunters Michelle and I headed up to Hamilton to continue the research portion of Two Tales Of A City. The three and a half hour car ride gave us plenty of time to develop a working plan of exactly what we wanted to accomplish for the next two days in Hamilton, Ontario. To get a [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/IMG_5855-150x150.jpg)
![Fun with Cardboard Letters To continue the progress of our cardboard letter project, I took the remaining pieces home on the weekend to finish T, E, and R. Though the first stage may be over, there’s still plenty left to work on in terms of researching and experimenting with various materials which I looked into as well. After constructing [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/IMG_3279-150x150.jpg)

![BCL Report – Nov 4, 2008 In preparation of the upcoming event, and in response to our sudden acquisition of 4 t-shirts, we spent Tuesday evening making stencils, shirts, testing Tetris 2, wheatpasting, and figuring out the logistics of a video game tournament. First thing on the list of to-do’s was to test my custom wheatpaste applicator. The results were mixed, though I [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/engage-and-disrupt-the-city-the-front-of-our-t-shirts-150x150.jpg)
![Working at & on (forgetting) the Border, Next Week is Show & Tell Meeting outside is the greatest. There’s talk of building some kind of mobile table / bistro to make this possible in other locations, but I suppose that’s further down on the to-do list. For now, we’re immersed in bringing together research and inventions around our How to Forget the Border Completely project to pull into [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/IMG_9987-150x150.jpg)
![BCL Report: April 1, 2011 (Forgetting the Border) We played catch up on How to Forget the Border Completely on Friday night. We invented new consultancies, planned interviews and events, and came up with new tactics for forgetting a border completely. It was much needed and so much fun!!! While Danielle hides behind her hand… She was also busy inventing these crazy contraptions [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/BORDERCONSULTANCY-150x150.jpg)
![Learning to Transplant Josh and I spent some of the day in the heat collecting some interesting flowers and plants to transplant for our magnetic planters project. Overall, it was fairly successful, as we did learn quite a lot about transplanting, but we’re still going to be looking for some more plants to finish up this stage of [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/IMG_46142-150x150.jpg)
![Researching Ribbons, Preparing for this Week’s Events Tuesday was all about research. We looked up some more details on ribbons and talked more about how we would move forward with the Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope event. We’re also getting ready for Sunday’s event, Listen to the City (remember, 8pm at Phog), and for Thursday night’s projection performance at Propeller in Toronto. We were [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/IMG_6776-150x150.jpg)
![Annotating Windsor From what I understand, Google Maps updates once a year or so (I’d guess even less than that). So, I think now would be a good time to start on a project like this, as according to these maps, Caesar’s Windsor is still under construction. That parking garage on the corner of Park and Pelissier [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/parkinggarage-web-textroof-150x150.jpg)
![How to Make a Randomly Assembled Text Back at the end of March, we went on an Algorithmic Walk with some brave folks (who not only trusted in our custom software generated algorithm, but also ignored the weather). I had previously posted a link to where you could find a custom-assembled algorithm, should you be curious to try it on your own, [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/picture-87-150x150.png)
![Red Paint & Testing Glass Beads We made a lot of progress tonight, not only getting a considerable way through the first coat of red paint, but also testing a variety of techniques for applying the retroreflective glass beads! We also got to spend some time talking through how we’ll be temporarily installing the letters in a variety of spaces. We [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/IMG_4441-150x150.jpg)