Travel with JoY

W e are building a family cabin in northern Wisconsin and some of the interior work is being done while we are gone.  They are assembling a loft in the great room using more than one hundred year old barn beams.  The loft will need a railing and I had drawn a design that mimics the lines of a birch forest. The last time I was in Kenya my daughter Ella, took me to Anselm Glass at Kitengela, in an arid rural  suburb of Nairobi.  The railing that I designed and discussed with Dan at Creative Metalworxs in Durand, WI was to have glass panels that represented some of the trunks of birch.  Anselm could possibly custom make these panels.  So we went out to Kitengela, riding the spine jarring rodes to discuss with Anselmo the owner, the design.  A day later he sent  samples via email for us to give feedback on futher production. We plan on five panels, each about 4 inches wide and 30 inches tall.   The first sample. We weren't en...

We've been in Kenya for  a bit over a week now, visiting our daughter Ella and her family; Liam our grandson and her husband Kenfield. Today Ella and I made a trip to downtown Nairobi to the Textile Market.  We had as our agent, so to speak, Moses who acts as sort a broker between clients and seamstresses.  Available in this more than bustling market area of the inner city are streets offering drapery in one store, zippers, buttons and the like in another, traditional Kenyan prints beside another with rolls of denim and canvas stacked in aisles so narrow one must turn sideways to pass another. Turquise or Black Canvas? Overhead are more rolls blocking the spare florescent tube lighting.  I nervously noted the simple nuts and bolts holding all this weight above our heads imagining a suffocating under the bolts...did I ever say that I not only drive defensively but sort of live defensively? But our true destination, the luscious Ghanian Wax cloth prints, was t...