Hi everyone. This is a talk of the academic cooperation of Red Hat Research and Masary University in Bono. I'm doing my PhD in cooperation with Red Hat and Pavel is doing his bachelor's helping with the research. And we'll be talking about TLS certificates, the errors of TLS validation and the associated ecosystem. The talk will be, or we'll try to do it a little bit interactive. So there will be three polls in it and we will want you to vote during the talk so that we have some inputs from your side as well. So let's start. You're browsing the web. Oh, sorry. Did it work? Yep. You're browsing the web. And most likely you're doing a secure connection to the website. When you click the lock icon, you see that the connection is secure. You can see the details of the certificate. All the signatures valid and stuff like that. What would it be like if the connection was not secure? Well, you would see something like this connection not being private with all sorts of information and an error. This can happen not only in browsers, but anywhere when you handle certificates. If you have a certificate and try to validate it using OpenSSR in a command line, you can get something like this. Error 34 at zero depth lookup, unhandled critical extension. And I guess you know what that is. You probably don't. Well, believe me, I've asked a lot of developers and it turns out that not many people know from the top of their head what unhandled critical extension is. But we don't worry. We have Google for that. So, Googling, unhandled critical extension, OpenSSL, what do we learn? Well, unhandled critical extension. Thank you, Mr. Recommendation. That wasn't particularly helpful. But I don't want to be picking on OpenSSL because other libraries are not ideal either. For example, BlueTLS has an error saying the certificate presented isn't the one that you expected tofu. And it doesn't mean this kind of tofu. So again, you're left with wondering what the tofu means if it's not the piece of food that you will not have afterwards. Which brings us to the first question that we want to ask you. If you were to guess how many errors related just to certificate validation, do you think there are in OpenSSL? Try to vote in the poll section on the right of the hopping screen. I see four votes so far. Those 30 people in the room, so we'll give it a couple more seconds. Mostly going for 20 to 40 or 60 to 80. Though I see that nobody thinks that there's at most 20 errors. I can definitely say that there is more than 20 errors. The reality is that, well, one person thought that now. The reality is that there's 78 errors just related to certificate validation in OpenSSL altogether. And that's quite a lot if you want to browse through them or they need to find something. Or if you are debugging or testing a software of yours that uses certificates and needs to handle all these errors properly. The situation is rather different in different libraries. OpenSSL is one of the more error-based library with GnuTLS and MBAT being about 20 and NSS having actually over 100. Though the precise number is complicated to guess because the errors overlap. So I've kept it at 100. We've done experiments here at DEF CONF in 2017, 2018 and 2020 regarding the usability of OpenSSL and the certificate ecosystem. It turned out that even though people think they succeed in using OpenSSL, they were tasked to just create a self-signed certificate and 87% of them thought that they managed to do it successfully. It turned out that only 45% of them did. And the general usability of OpenSSL was seen as rather poor. Next year in our experiment we have shown them errors of certificates of five different errors and we asked them how much they trust the certificate with the particular errors. And it turned out that the opinions were not what we would have hoped for as security engineers. That brought us to thinking what can we do about it. We have decided that there is a way for us to help in this equation. Click. As a first part of the process, we have created a website. We have made it x509 errors. And the whole idea of the website is that it's supposed to be a guide for developers working with TLS validation. I will now briefly cover the key features of the website. Click. The website lists errors from four different TLS libraries. Those are OpenSSL and the TLS button and new TLS. So whenever you work with certificate validation in any other way, and you encounter some errors, then you can find the error here. The errors are also grouped by categories depending on how the specific error can occur. So we have, for example, trust or chain-related errors that happen during the building of the path. We provide relevant links to various documents. For example, RFCs or manual pages or the official documentation, as we think that obviously we cannot show you everything, but we can point the developers to the right direction. Click. Each error on the website is clickable. When you click on it, it shows you some additional information. First, it shows you the original documentation that you can also find in the original library documentation, but it makes sense to list it here as well. Next, for many of the certificate validation errors, we have created an example certificate or rather an example certificate chain, which is a specially crafted mouse-form certificate chain that yields this specific error when the certificate validation code is run on it. And this can have various use cases. First, when you encounter such an error, and you might not know what it actually means. So looking, for example, on the way we generated that error could help you where the actual issue lies. Next, for us, this has an advantage that if we know that some of our mouse-form certificates yield, for example, in OpenSSL, the error unable to get issued locally, then we can try and run the other library's certificate validation code to see what error the other library yields and click. With having this, we can create kind of a mapping between the errors among the different libraries. Now, the mapping in many cases is really obvious. So, for example, if you have a revoked certificate, then arguably you will have some kind of an error message in each library telling you that the certificate is revoked. But it is not so in for many other errors. So because of the fact that some library has more errors than others, then it must mean that when we have some error in one library, it contains a set of errors in our library. And this can help, for example, when you transition from one library to another. Say you are working with OpenSSL and you know the error parameter violation, and then you switch to embed TLS and encounter an error called that search not trusted. You have no idea what it is. So, you can see that one such error corresponding to this error could be the parameter violation. So, I have yet not mentioned the maybe the most important feature of our website, and Martin will tell you more about that. Moving on from having a comprehensive resource about certificates and all the errors that can happen in four different libraries, we are thinking about the documentation. Now, a second poll comes. How long do you think the average documentation for a certificate validation error is? And I mean, in general, we took the commonly used libraries, OpenSSL, the TLS button, embed TLS, WALT, Polar, MS, crypto API and stuff like that. Try to estimate how long documentation is. Again, we will leave a couple of seconds. The poll is on the right in the Hopin interface. So, there seems to be some engagement. The majority of you think that it's between five and 10 words, even though there are people who think it's five words or less, and those who think it's 25 words or less. Well, the reality looks a bit like this. It differs in between the libraries again, but roughly we can say it's 10 words or less. The only positive exception is the Microsoft crypto API, whose average documentation is astounding 16 words, with the lighter blue being average and the darker blue being median. So, the median is roughly slightly lower, which means that there are certain errors for which the documentation is much longer because they are probably much more complicated. And coming from this idea, because we find 10 words to be insufficient to understand and to be able to explain what, for example, Unhandled Critical Extension means, we started to draft a new documentation. And at DEF CONF 2020, we did another experiment when we asked 180 participants that stopped at our booth to evaluate two documentation versions. One of them was the original version, as you've seen previously, for the Unhandled Critical Extension, the very, very, very short version saying just Unhandled Critical Extension. And our documentation that was maybe even overly long, but we wanted the second extreme so that we could discuss where in between these two, the ideal documentation in the mind of the developers would be. This is the actual Unhandled Critical Extension version that we proposed them next to the original one. As for the results, the new documentations, the versions that we created, we tested it on three different errors, was shown to decrease incompleteness, ambiguity, and inconsistency from the self-reported opinions of the developers, though slightly increased in bloat in Tango. This was kind of expectable because it's much longer than the original one, but I have to stress that they have seen incompleteness and ambiguity as very much decreased while only a couple of them thought that it slightly bloated. The new documentation increased the understanding and the subjective satisfaction and the perceived helpfulness of the documentation as well. Asking about the form, it turned out that the developers wanted just slightly shorter documentation as the ideal length compared to what we had. Ours was roughly 27 lines. They wanted about 22 to 24. But they put a focus on the structure of the documentation, that if it's well-structured, it can be quite long. Overall, they were generally satisfied with the structure that we provided. They looked like this. The error called a very short summary and then four sections of explanation, security perspective, what to do and consequences. Although in the end, analyzing the textual qualitative opinions of the developers, we decided to merge security perspective and consequences into a single section for a slightly easier and lighter structure. Then for an overall comparison, 89% of the participants in the Compt 2020 study preferred our design to the original one, to the short one. Which brought us to creating these new versions of the documentation and putting them into our comprehensive website that lists all the kind of knowledge that we have in the ecosystem of certificate validation errors. At the moment, we have the new documentation version just for six errors of OpenSSL, but we are gradually dividing more also as part of the academic attempts at the university students of security, teaching them how to write documentation that explains what is necessary to decide what is necessary to include what is necessary to exclude from the ideal so to speak documentation. Lastly, I will present what we are planning to do in the future. Click. As Marcin has already said, we plan to include the redesigned documentation for as many errors as possible because it is the key feature of the website. We also plan to add more libraries into the mix because we still don't cover many commonly used libraries, for example, Java libraries that are commonly used in number of devices or NSS as well. And we also need to work on the example certificates as well as we still don't cover all of the errors with them and it's a bit tricky replicating each of the errors. Click. Recently, we have also started research on analyzing huge datasets of certificate chains that are available on the internet and analyzing basically the prevalence of the individual errors on the internet and the expected outcome of this is that some of the errors are much more prevalent than others. On the other hand some are extremely rare or even non-existent in the wild. So there is a question arising whether it could make sense to merge the extremely rare error messages. Next. Lastly we are still talking about certificate validation errors but we can all agree that the most likely source of X509 errors is when implementing some kind of an application that connects using TLS to some server that detailed up-to-date source of information on this topic is kind of missing on the internet. There have been some attempts, for example by the Federal Security they have written very well written useful documentation precisely on this topic but that was like in seven years ago and it is now outdated and doesn't cover all the necessary features needed to provide a secure TLS collection for example revocation checking quick. So we aim to make this resource we aim to create such a resource for various libraries and we aim to make it as detailed as possible covering all the necessary aspects of secure TLS. We also plan to link the all the relevant documents here because if I'm sure the developers can find additional info there we also plan to link the all the relevant documents here because if I'm sure the developers can find additional info there quick. And in many problems in some problems in TLS there may be various alternative approaches so for example the mentioned revocation checking can be done multiple ways by the traditional certificate revocation lists or by OCSP or OCSP statement and each of these approaches has its own pros and cons and generally revocation checking is very tricky to implement correctly so we would like to also list the alternatives with the implementations list the pros and cons and explain when it is useful to try one approach and when to use the other approach and that's all from me. In the next section what did we have here we presented you an industry academic cooperation helping PhD students and bachelor students and master students to do their work and do something that's academically interesting but also which has outputs that the industry benefits from and we are aiming to improve the certificate validation ecosystem or the situation by consolidating all the errors libraries in one place we created a website for that website is already online actually for more than a year we are gradually adding stuff in it and now adding better and redesigned documentation for the particular errors with example certificates and mapping of the errors across multiple libraries in the future we would like to add more examples and more improved documentation pieces and include more libraries as well as client programming guides error occurrence statistics there are many more ideas that will hopefully come if the project continues as the academic-industrial relationship which brings us to the last poll question that we have and would be interested in what feature of the website that we describe do you find the most useful either the developer guides presented the last those still upcoming not yet present online the cross library mapping showing what errors are what in a different library the new rewritten documentation prolonged that are just on the website for the moment or the example certificate that is testing and can make deterministic well testing and QA on all of the errors that are possible there again a couple of seconds for voting in the polls panel on the right I see that so far the new extended documentation is leading with six votes with the others having a single person voting for them and with this question and basically this contributions of ours we'd like to end our talk thank you for your attention and welcome any feedback or Q&A if there is any will be available or at least I'll be available in the discord after the session I'm not sure about Pavel we are able to take Q&A now if you have any I have a question so you said there were 78 errors in OpenSSL right? have you taken a look at the new OpenSSL I think it's OpenSSL 3.0 that's coming out pretty much now I think we haven't checked the 3.0 there were changes from definitely pre 100 to 100 and some compatibility breaking changes very nice ones from 110 to 111 I think we've been in touch with the developers regarding the previous experiment as well and we've been happy to see some of the documentation and manual pages think upgrading nicely and actually improving the stuff that we've shown the developers have complained about but we haven't focused on the 3.0 yet I've been looking into it recently but it's not yet at the website


Today we're in beautiful Caldwell Hill at Broad Maple Acres Farm visiting goats and there's 27 goats and we're celebrating 4-H today. This is Mr. Chew and he is a year old.  Drop it. I build little structures so that he can climb on them and I put it, always have his pack on him so he gets used to it having something on his back. This is Sweet Pea and she's my dairy goat project. We started 4-H when I was 11 and when I came it was like a year after I came to Canada. We've noticed that the 4-H program will bring them out of their shell. It also gives them a larger family circle. They meet lots of friends and they become very close. I like travelling to places and meeting other 4-H members and talking and then having shows and fairs. Public speaking has been a huge one. The communications aspect to 4-H. I have confident speakers now. They can talk to adults, they can talk to peers and they can talk in front of a big crowd. There's another boy. He has a pack goat and we were trying to start a business where we could have pack goats but we're not old enough. It's not old enough but you have to take all these courses and actually start a tourism business in BC. That would be an opportunity to 4-H if you wish to do some advocacy work to see if there are some opportunities there. Because you never want to come forward as one guy with one good idea if you can come forward as a group and say you know what maybe the province or the federal government could or should consider changing the regulations. With him I've learned to be patient and just keep persevering and teaching them because you won't learn if you don't just keep trying and trying. It helps them to become better citizens, leadership. It teaches them personal development in ways of being responsible for animals and projects within agriculture. I think it's a really good aspect for young teens to do because it helps them expand more than just sitting around it gets us out there and putting our talents to use and find something that we might like. We were very pleased to be able to give $85,000 to 4-H in British Columbia and you can see we have evidence that the goats are very appreciative. They've signed or at least eaten both corners of this letter of the announcement and I'm very pleased to say that I know 4-H is going to do a fantastic job with this dollars but also too with all the volunteers they have in their organization. We are so fortunate they are working with passion with the youth of today to make sure that 4-H is strong and vibrant and sharing agriculture and agricultural practice with all the British Columbians.


CHAPTER 7 The Realization of Perfect Peace In the external universe there is ceaseless turmoil, change, and unrest. At the heart of all things there is undisturbed repose. In this deep silence dwelleth the eternal. Man partakes of this duality, and both the surface change and disquietude, and the deep-seated eternal abode of peace, are contained within him, as there are silent depths in the ocean which the fiercest storm cannot reach. So there are silent, holy depths in the heart of man which the storms of sin and sorrow can never disturb. To reach this silence and to live consciously in it is peace. Discord is rife in the outward world, but unbroken harmony holds sway at the heart of the universe. The human soul, torn by discordant passion and grief, reaches blindly toward the harmony of the sinless state, and to reach this state and to live consciously in it is peace. It severs human lives, fosters persecution, and hurls nations into ruthless war. Yet men, though they do not understand why, retain some measure of faith in the overshadowing of a perfect love, and to reach this love and to live consciously in it is peace. And this inward peace, this silence, this harmony, this love, is the kingdom of heaven, which is so difficult to reach because few are willing to give up themselves and to become as little children. Heaven's gate is very narrow and minute, it cannot be perceived by foolish men, blinded by vain illusions of the world, Ian the clear-sighted who discern the way, and seek to enter find the portal barred, and hard to be unlocked. Its massive bolts are pride and passion, avarice and lust. Men cry peace, peace, where there is no peace, but on the contrary, discord, disquietude, and strife. Apart from that wisdom, which is inseparable from self renunciation, there can be no real and abiding peace. The peace which results from social comfort, passing gratification, or worldly victory, is transitory in its nature, and is burnt up in the heat of fury trial. Only the peace of heaven endures through all trial, and only the selfless heart can know the peace of heaven. Holiness alone is undying peace, self-control leads to it, and the ever-increasing light of wisdom guides the pilgrim on his way. It is partaken of in a measure as soon as the path of virtue is entered upon, but it is only realized in its fullness when self disappears in the consummation of a stainless life. This is peace, to conquer love of self and lust of life, to tear deep-rooted passion from the heart, to still the unward strife. If, O reader, you would realize the light that never fades, the joy that never ends, and the tranquility that cannot be disturbed, if you would leave behind forever your sins, your sorrows, your anxieties, and perplexities, if I say you would partake of this salvation, this supremely glorious life, then conquer yourself. Bring every thought, every impulse, every desire, into perfect obedience to the divine power resident within you. There is no other way to peace but this. And if you refuse to walk it, your much praying and your strict adherence to ritual will be fruitless and unavailing, and neither gods nor angels can help you. Bring to him that overcometh is given the white stone of the regenerate life, on which is written the new and ineffable name. Come away for a while from external things, from the pleasures of the senses, from the arguments of the intellect, from the noise and the excitements of the world, and withdraw yourself into the innmost chamber of your heart, and there, free from sacrilegious intrusion of all selfish desires, you will find a deep silence, a holy calm, a blissful repose, and if you will rest a while in that holy place, and will meditate there, the faultless eye of truth will open within you, and you will see things as they really are. This holy place within you is your real and eternal self, it is the divine within you, and only when you identify yourself with it can it be said to be clothed and in your right mind. It is the abode of peace, the temple of wisdom, the dwelling place of immortality. Apart from this inward resting place, this mount of vision, there can be no true peace, no knowledge of the divine, and if you can remain there for one minute, one hour, or one day, it is possible for you to remain there always.   No one else can give up sin for you, you must give it up yourself. The greatest teacher can do no more than walk the way of truth for himself and point it out to you. You yourself must walk it for yourself. You can obtain freedom and peace alone by your own efforts, by yielding up that which binds the soul and which is destructive of peace. The angels of divine peace and joy are always at hand, and if you do not see them and hear them and dwell with them it is because you shut yourself out from them and prefer the company of the spirits of evil within you. You are what you will be, what you wish to be, what you prefer to be. You can commence to purify yourself, and by so doing can arrive at peace, or you can refuse to purify yourself, and so remain with suffering. Step aside then, come out of the fret and the fever of life, away from the scorching heat of self, and enter the inward resting place, where the cooling airs of peace will calm, renew, and restore you. Come out of the storms of sin and anguish. Why be troubled and temptous tossed when the heaven of peace of God is yours? Give up all self-seeking. Give up self and lo, the peace of God is yours. Subdue the animal within you. Conquer every selfish uprising, every discordant voice. Transmute the base metals of your selfish nature into the unalloyed gold of love, and you shall realize the life of perfect peace. Thus subduing, thus conquering, thus transmuting, you will, O reader, while living in the flesh, cross the dark waters of mortality, and will reach that shore upon which the storms of sorrow never beat, and where sin and suffering and dark uncertainty cannot come. Standing upon that shore, holy, compassionate, awakened, and self-possessed and glad with unending gladness, you will realize that. Never the spirit was born, the spirit will cease to be never. Never was a time it was not, end in beginning our dreams. Birthless and deathless and changeless remaineth the spirit for ever. Death hath not touched it at all, dead though the house of it seems. You will then know the meaning of sin, of sorrow, of suffering, and that the end thereof is wisdom, will know the cause and the issue of existence. And with this realization you will enter into rest. For this is the bliss of immortality, this is the unchangeable gladness, this is the untrammeled knowledge, undefiled wisdom, and undying love. This and this only is the realization of perfect peace. O thou who wouldest teach men of truth, hast thou passed through the desert of doubt. Hast thou purged by the fires of sorrow, hath Ruth, the fields of opinion cast out. Of thy human heart is thy soul so fair, that no false thought can ever harbor there. O thou who wouldest teach men of love, hast thou passed through the place of despair, hast thou wept through the dark night of grief. Does it move, now freed from its sorrow and care? Thy human heart to pitying gentleness, looking on wrong and hate and ceaseless stress. O thou who wouldest teach men of peace, hast thou crossed the wide ocean of strife, hast thou found on the shores of the silence, release from all the wild unrest of life. From thy human heart hath all striving gone, leaving but truth and love and peace alone. End of THE WAY OF PEACE by James Allen.


Hello traders. Just a quick follow-up video to a tweet we sent yesterday. We highlighted a simple market mechanic that can often signal a reversal. I want to quickly go over why the market was primed to reverse and show how you can use bookmap to spot potential trends changes. First some context. The blue box is the area that we're going to look at shortly. 4023.25 is a significant daily level. And as you can see, following the 930 open, price rallies then begins to consolidate. Now let's jump into bookmap. After the open, we have 15 minutes of choppy price action. Then, a clear uptrend is established for around 30 minutes. Observe how buying volume is becoming stronger as price increases. Taking a page out of Jesse Livermore's notebook, price up and volume up equals market up. But the key to this is what happens next. For the following 20 minutes, there's a complete lack of buying relative to what we've just seen. This is called buying exhaustion. And despite what many traders think, the first signs that a bull market is going to reverse is not sellers, but lack of buyers. Add the fact that we're at a significant daily level and high liquidity on the offer has just been filled. We now have a high probability setup. Relative volume change is what drives the market. If we look at this daily level in isolation, we have no idea if price will reject or break higher. But by observing the buying exhaustion, we apply confluence of what the current market participants are doing. Exactly the same principle applies to patterns. In fact, we actually see a bull flag here, but can safely ignore it. There are simply no more buyers left at this level. If you found this useful, please hit the like button. It helps us shape our future content here at Bookmap.


So clearly the mission is important. There's people that need to be brought to a safer location. I actually was formally in the area not too long ago, so it's good to be able to get back and continue to help out with the mission. So I'm just looking forward to doing what we're, you know, paid to do. To the younger airmen out there, you know, I'm just looking back to two years ago starting pilot training. I always heard the message that you never know when you're going to be called to do what you're being tasked to do. And it's just really good and rewarding to see how all the training hard work and the long hours of studying is finally coming into, you know, a real purpose. So it's fulfilling to be able to have this opportunity to serve. I mean, every time we fly, we always result to our training. But in this particular situation, it's time to put our training to the test. More than capable and confident in our crews that we have, we already have people down there that need our help. As far as the mission itself, it's unfortunate, but I'm glad that we actually have the capability to go out there and do it.


Hey everyone, I'm Rob Greenfield and welcome to my little homestead in Orlando, Florida. I've been in Orlando for just about two years now, so my time here is coming to an end just as I planned. But before I go, I want to give you one last tour of my little homestead and share my life and why I've designed things this way. So welcome in and I'm going to show you around. Before I get started, I just want to say, this isn't just about this tiny house or this homestead. It's really about a way of life. It's about a way of thinking. For me, it's all about how can I live in a way that's beneficial to the earth, my community and myself? How can I live more simply so that I can live in the service of others? So when it comes to food, to water, to energy, to waste, to transportation, to money, to my social interactions and my relationships, all of that is wrapped up in this. And when I talk about my possessions or my garden or the design of this house, all of that is about lessons that we can learn so that we can work with the earth rather than against it. So to start, I'm going to talk a little bit about minimalism, about possessions. I have been working to simplify my life for about eight years now. And I went from having a large number of possessions, a three bedroom apartment, slowly transitioned and I actually ended up getting my life down to just 111 possessions, all of which fit on my back in a backpack and then on a bicycle biking across the country. But now, living here in Orlando, I accumulated more possessions because you tend to do that when you have a space. But also because I have embarked on this year of growing and foraging all my food, it's required a lot of possessions. So not as minimal as before, but still very minimalistic. I'm going to show you a few things. Here's my clothing shelf. So as you can see, very few clothes. The idea of this is really, do I need a lot of clothes? Do I really need to impress people through the clothes in my body? No. They serve a purpose. They serve a very simplistic purpose and often, as you probably know, I'm wearing as few clothes as possible because I just believe in the natural usage of the body. So that's all of my clothes right there, except for maybe one or two shirts or underwear that are ready for the laundry. Here is another part of my possessions. This is kind of the natural hygiene. I woke up to all of the things that I was putting on my body and in my body and realizing that they were not things that I needed to have on my body or foods that I should be putting in there or not actual foods, food-like substances. So I started to think about the shampoo, the conditioner, the body wash, the face wash, the deodorant and all of that, and I just realized that I didn't need most of that. The body functions without them. So you'll see there's not a lot here. I have a toothbrush and toothpaste. I use a natural toothpaste that's biodegradable. It's in a plastic container. I do minimize my plastic and I do live a pretty zero-waste lifestyle, but this is actually one of my luxuries. I love my toothpaste. I use, as far as washing my clothes, I have what are called soap nuts here. So this is our natural soap. It's a nut or a spary that grows on a tree and creates a soapy substance to wash clothes with. And when you're done with them, they're biodegradable, and I can literally take this and throw it right into the yard. So a pretty zero-waste way of washing clothes. I have my dental floss. This is actually made out of silk. So again, biodegradable, goes into the compost bin, no garbage is made. And then I have my essential oils. Lavender is one of my absolute most essential oils. It really is relaxing and calming. I like to use it every night before bed and multiple times throughout the day. I have a natural sunscreen, and this sunscreen is actually so nice that I want to put it on. Mostly use it for my nose, and I don't like the toxic sunscreens, and was avoiding them for a long time, but a friend of mine made this, and it's so nice that I actually enjoyed putting it on. So a few other things. I live in a very noisy city with minimal insulation, open windows all the time in the Florida heat. So earplugs are key. I live right next to two airports. There's leaf blowers and lawn mowers, busy roads. It's been a challenge living here in the city, to be honest, and I'm ready to leave. But the earplugs have been something that's been really helpful. We have a lot of light pollution here, and it's so light that I can actually read my books. I can read the name of all of my books on the bookshelf with all of the lights off at night. It's that bright coming in here. So I also have an eye mask, and then there is fingernail clippers, and then this is a manual hair cutter. So no electricity. I try to minimize my electricity usage, so it actually works just like that.  Just as simple as that, I can do it on my arm. Just works just like that. And of course, this is also zero waste. I do not put myself in the landfill. I haven't really come up with the statistics, but if you think of all the hair that you put in the landfill, and all of the skin cells, and all of the times you blow your nose, and all of that, there's probably enough cells to make up multiple of you in the landfill. To me, that just doesn't make sense. My body goes back to the earth, where it came from. None of it goes to the landfill. So when I cut my hair, that hair is composted or just put into the yard. Pretty simple concept, but not one that is really practiced by mainstream society. I also burn sage and sweetgrass and cedar. So that's just a way to relax, to get myself centered. So very few material possessions. Under my bed here, I have some storage, and I have some possessions here as well. But overall, I have very few material possessions. And what I'm really excited about is I'm currently getting ready to leave Orlando. And I've seen that I haven't accumulated sentimental possessions or really material possessions over the last almost two years of being here. There's a lot of stuff in this house, but it's almost all jars, containers for food. It's mostly food. So there's not a whole lot here, and that's really great to see. So I've been getting rid of stuff already for the last week, and it's been really easy. I have not created an emotional attachment to things. And that's really the goal. It's just by not being attached to material possessions, it allows me to live a life that's just truly present wherever I am in the world. So this tiny house, it's just really simply a vessel that allows me to meet my basic needs. One of my basic needs is sleeping. So here's my bed. It's a futon that I bought used, and it works as a couch, and it works as a bed as well. This blanket I actually got off the side of the road. I've been using it for over the last year. The pillow from a garage sale. So really simple, really basic stuff. The house is built with 99% secondhand materials for under $1,500 all with friends. So pretty basic design and simplicity.  It's 10 by 10, so 100 square feet, and again, it's just really designed to meet my most basic needs. Over here I have some more possessions. A lot of food. Today is day 334 of growing and foraging, 100% of my food. That's been my immersive project. I'm not going to go too much into that in this video because there's other videos about that, but it's been a fantastic experience, and that was the centerpiece of me being in Orlando. And as I just have a month left, that's me transitioning out of here. I also have a bookshelf, and these are all books mostly about growing food, foraging, sustainable living, expanding the mind, and then basic cooking equipment. As I said, it's a lot of cooking stuff. So you might be wondering what's going to happen to this tiny house when I'm leaving. Well, I'm really excited that I'm actually going to be taking it apart with a few friends, a handful of friends, and we're moving it to a community called Sustainable Kashi, which is a little off-the-grid eco-village. And so this house will be used by dozens of volunteers for the years to come. So rather than it sitting in the backyard here where it might not get used a lot, it's going to be there, and it's going to be a part of a great purpose where people can immerse and learn about sustainable living and live in my old house. So actually, if that interests you, look up Sustainable Kashi, and maybe you can do their three-week volunteer program where you learn about organic farming, and maybe you'll get to actually live in this tiny house there. So I'm in Florida, and so I designed this house to be a Florida house. So people ask a lot about, what about doing this in cold climates? So if you're in a cold climate, there's a lot of ways to live sustainably. One could be a log cabin with a wood stove. There's straw bale houses. There is designing the house with passive solar for heating and cooling. So if you're in a colder climate, a temperate climate, you're going to do this in a different way. I can only be the example of where I am, and so that's what I've designed this for. I don't have insulation because it's not so necessary here. It would have been nice, but I designed this for Florida, and Florida has its challenges. Don't believe that it's just like paradise down here, the mosquitoes, the extreme heat. It is challenging, but just keep that in mind. Everything that I've designed here is to meet my basic needs here, and what we need to do as individuals is we need to adapt and adopt things to our climates. On that note, let's actually head outside, where I spend a lot of my time. So I've designed my life around living largely outside because you can do that here in Florida. You can do that for parts of the year in temperate climates. So you could certainly have an outdoor kitchen set up and an outdoor bathroom for those maybe six, seven months of the year. But this is my year-round kitchen and bathroom, which I'll be showing you. So the idea of this is that it's designed to really work with nature to utilize these resources and not let anything go to waste. So as far as water, my water is harvested from the rain.  You move water falling down onto the roof and into containers to be harvested. There's a little spigot right here to fill things up as needed. And then here is my rainwater filter. So this water can be used for filtering any water, whether it's tap water, water from a lake, or from the rain. And this is a Berkey system. I think it's one of the most sustainable systems out there, so it's why I use it. I've been using them for about five years. And my water doesn't have chlorine, fluoride, anything like that in it. It's just pure water from the sky. And for me, it's water that I love. I also love spring water, but rainwater is definitely one of my favorites. So the sink is also powered by rainwater, so it sits in this barrel back here, comes out this faucet, very simple system, no electricity or anything of that sort. And then I have my sink, and then this water drains. I usually have that filled up, and then it just simply comes down. And this does not go to the sewer. Instead, all of my water stays on site. And this water just goes to the back. And then right now it's flowing out, and then food is grown back here. So this is called gray water. So rather than making it someone else's problem and sending it off to a wastewater treatment plant, it's used to keep the fertility and the water on site and not to put pollution out. So I have taro, turmeric, and there's some papaya trees going back there as well. So water is kept on site to grow food. As far as cooking, my main source of cooking has actually been a propane stove. This gas is likely from fracking, something that I really do not support. I have not been successful at living a life that's fully off the grid or fully sustainable. It's extremely hard to do that in the world that we live in today. What I do is I do a much better job than I used to do, and that's always my goal. I don't try to do anything perfectly, I just try to do a really good job. So it's a message of moderation. It's not 100% of anything necessarily. It's not extreme. Sure, acorn's on the roof. That might be one of my recommendations is don't build a metal roof under an oak tree because it can be pretty disturbing, especially early in the morning. So I may do sort of extreme things, but my message is just moderation. It's what we can do to live in a way where we use our resources wisely and don't just destroy the very home that we have. So the propane stove is not something that I like to use, but it's one of those things that I do, and it's hard to do a perfect job, but I accept that. I have my hypocrisies, I accept those hypocrisies, I embrace them, and I just strive to do better. I also have a solar oven, I cook over fire, and I did have a methane bio-digester to turn food waste into cooking gas, but I got rid of that as I'm transitioning away, and that was donated to sustainable kashi as well. Actually, that's where a lot of things will be going. My books will be used there as well, so when I leave here soon, I will leave here with almost no possessions, and most of it will be donated or used. Or some of the stuff that I bought used, I will sell used again. So just a cycle of continuing the usage of stuff and not creating garbage. So speaking of not creating garbage, this is the compost right here. So I create very little garbage. That's a term that's called zero waste, so this is my trash for the last five days or so. I create very little garbage. I use the can that's here that is the landowners, you could say, garbage, since it's very little, because most of what I do is I compost. So food waste goes into this bucket, which is then brought over to the compost bin. Things like my dental floss, which is made of silk. There's the cardboard and paper, the yard debris. All is composted and not sent to the landfill. Simply composting is something that we can all do that would make a massive change in the world. One little tip, a lot of people worry about the smell and fruit flies. Here in Florida, we deal with fruit flies big time. So what I've done, you can see, I actually fill it most of the way with water. And that way, anything that's below the water line, the flies can't get to. So you'll see, this is four or five days of compost and there's very few fruit flies here. So from here, the compost goes over to my compost bin. It's all about taking responsibility for my actions and not making my waste other people's problems. In permaculture, they say waste is just a resource out of place. So this is not food waste. This is a resource. So it goes into the compost pile and then all that water soaks in here and bananas love water and they love a lot of nutrients. So this food waste directly, not waste, this food scraps directly grows bananas, which I've been eating today that came from right here. And then it also makes a great soil that can go back to my garden. So you know, one of the big things that I kept coming back to in life, I kept seeing that today in 2019 and the 21st century, things are so easy and they're so convenient. And I had to keep asking myself, why are things so easy and convenient? And basically what I found is that the burden is being placed elsewhere. Other people are paying the true costs. People, other species are natural environment. So this is all about taking responsibility for my own actions, not doing the easy thing and throwing it in a garbage can, but actually dealing with my own waste. But the great thing about that is it's sure it's a task, but it actually adds fertility to my land, to my life and makes delicious bananas. So continuing on talking about waste, something that I'm really not into is buying toilet paper. It's actually been over five years since I bought toilet paper. And this right here, if you haven't figured it out yet, is my toilet paper. This plant is the genus and species is Plecranthus barbatus and it's in the mint family. And the reason that I use it is because it is just incredibly soft. I mean, so soft that you just want to do this all the time. Well, not all the time, but you get the picture, it's extremely soft. And because it's in the mint family, it actually smells great as well. So I don't waste my money on toilet paper.  I simply decided a while back to stop wiping my butt with money, basically. So I pick my toilet paper fresh from my plants and then they come over to my compost toilet. So the toilet paper just goes right here next to my toilet. And what's really amazing about this plant is this toilet paper actually stays good for an extended period of time. I've had it sitting here for up to a week without it drying out and it stays soft and wonderful. Actually, there's really nothing at the store and minty. And what's amazing about it is if you pick it on a dewy morning, it holds that dew and actually serves as a wet wipe. So this is nature's toilet paper and nature's wet wipe if you're into that. I've never been into wet wipes, I just don't find it necessary. So this is my basically closed loop compost toilet system. So how it works is you sit down like you would on a flush toilet and then I have something here that is really important to me and this is, I have the mic in my pocket so that's why I'm sitting weird. I'm trying not to cry. So this raises up the feet and I'm all about trying to do things in a more natural manner in a way that works with the body. And we were not designed to poop at a 90 degree angle in pretty much common sense. Why would humans have pooped at a 90 degree angle? So we actually poop squatting naturally. So this helps create that squatting position and it flows out so much more easily. There's things you can buy, I think it's called a squatty potty, but you don't need to buy it. This is just some two by fours and a piece of wood on top of that. You know, it's about designing things really simply. So poop goes in here, toilet paper goes in as well and then instead of flushing because there's no water in this system I have a bucket of sawdust and you can use any carbon, it could be dried leafs, sawdust. In the past I used when they ground the stumps of trees in the neighborhood, I picked that up so the carbon source just goes onto the poop and I'm actually going to have you look in here, you'll see this is actually full.  And the system works extremely well as long as you have enough of the carbon source which absorbs the smell and absorbs the moisture. There are systems that you can spend thousands of dollars on that work indoors. You can use these indoors as well but there's all sorts of systems, this is just the one that I use, I keep things quite simple. Now as far as pee, I have had a system set up here where there was a five gallon bucket and water where you'd pee in it and that would dilute it and then you would pour that on plants to water them but instead what I do is I planted a banana tree here and I simply pee not on the banana tree but around the banana tree. The banana tree is mulched all around it and that mulch, that carbon absorbs the nitrogen, no smell, bananas love a lot of nitrogen so this is me taking responsibility for my waste which is not waste in permaculture, waste is just a resource out of place so I'm putting it in a good place and my pee will be used to produce bananas. As far as where the poop goes, I put it into the 55 gallon blue drums and then that is brought to sustainable kashi where it's put on their fruit trees and it's used to grow food so again my poop is used to grow food and is not wasted. So continuing on with talking about hygiene, what about showering? I'll take you over to the rainwater shower. So this is the rainwater shower and as I do with most things I kept it very simple, harvesting water off the roof, I love this water because there's no chlorine, no fluoride, any of that stuff it's just water from the earth, collects into this barrel and then I fill up a five gallon bucket and then I have a bowl in there and I just use the water and then I just pour it over my head and that system works really great. I love being outdoors, I don't, I really don't like, I almost never take showers in people's houses I feel like I'm in a cave usually. Right here I'm out, I'm in the air and speaking of hygiene that's one of the biggest things you know talking about smell, first of all I think a little smell is fine, it's natural it's not a big deal but second of all one of the things that I think reduces smell greatly is exposing to the air, you know feet aren't naturally smelly it's because they're cramped up inside of shoes and armpits are a lot less smelly when they get plenty of time outside and they aren't all the time stuck up in clothes so just a natural mindset totally changes a lot of these things where we think we need products and such. So that's the simple shower and of course next to the shower is a banana plant and this absorbs the water, this is about four months, five months old and hopefully within the next year that will be producing bananas with my rain water, with my shower water and then as far as transportation I try, I bike mostly so I have what are called panniers which are bike bags that go onto a rack which allows me to run errands and do all of that stuff so I live without currently any bills, no debt, no credit card, no bank account, no driver's license, no car, extremely simply and there's a lot more that I want to tell you about those things because a lot of people wonder well how do you manage this financially how do you make money and what are you going to do when you get old and what about health insurance so I'm not going to go into all of that in this video but in the next video I'm going to go into those questions that I get asked all the time and some of those foundational frameworks of how do I manage to live this life outside the system because this life is very much outside of the system so how do I manage that and again all this is about living in a way that's beneficial to the earth, my community and myself everything that you saw here is simply designed to streamline my needs to make them as simple as possible and live in a way that I can dedicate my life to the service of others to the service of the earth to my community and the other species that are out there so I will cover more in the next video this is almost goodbye to Orlando it's been wonderful to be here you all will continue seeing me I don't know exactly where I'm going next I don't know where I'll be settling down next but you will be seeing me on here again if you've gotten inspiration from this video if you've gotten a lot of knowledge out of it that I encourage you to subscribe if you haven't already make sure you share this video with friends hit that like button to spread this out throughout YouTube and also leave some comments and I'll try to answer most of them so I love you all very much great to see you and see you again soon


All right, you lot what is going on and welcome back to another video today's video? I'm really I'm not sure what I'm gonna title it and I'm and I'm not sure what I'm gonna see A subscriber of mine a friend of mine has the game UFC 3 It's made by EA sports and it's on ps4. This fella Follows both myself and another fellow New Zealand youtuber called Sam. That's his first name His YouTube name is Kiwi kicker. Yeah, I know a lot of you guys who are watching this video right now We'll know who that is now Sam has created his following his Extremely decent following Through reacting to sports As a rugby fan.  It's all good But at the end of the day guys, you know, I've got absolutely no hard feelings. I love Sam Haven't met him, but I love him and at the end of the day There is only one way for us to settle this and if we're not gonna get in the ring in person Well, we're gonna get in the ring on UFC 3 the subscriber of mine that I was talking about has created To the tee I'm told a Fighter a UFC fighter UFC created character one representing myself and one representing Kiwi kicker So what we've got is a simulated five round title fight in the light heavyweight division between Jacob McDonald and Kiwi kicker and well, I've just been told actually I got told this yesterday That the videos just been uploaded. He was able to record it edit it upload it to his YouTube channel, and I'm about to react to it So right now Right now We're about to see I guess the closest thing you're ever gonna see to Jacob McDonald fighting in the UFC at my current weight current height in the light heavyweight division and with that being said I'm gonna go and rip some bongs and I'll be back because it Because there's only one there's only once we're gonna do this only one time and well just before we do I'm gonna go and have copious amounts of marijuana and Well, I'll be back in a second To watch the fight.  By Tim hefty we will be screen recording the match as per usual Oh, this is gonna be gold. This is gonna be absolutely fantastic battle. Okay. It's only 12 minutes actually is that the one It's only 12 minutes. Okay. It can't be can't be a title fight. Um, it can't even go the full distance But we do have a fighter on our hands. It's called the battle for our terror. Jacob McDonald versus Kiwi kicker We've got one like you've got two. I'll subscribe brah I'm hoping you've got some 1080. No, we're gonna leave it at 720 You have C3. What do we got? Who will claim the title of New Zealand's premier sports youtuber? Fuckin hell the there's a lot on the line then um in this battle of fisticuffs hosted by the incomparable snoop dog Do we have any comments? No comments two likes? I Wonder if Sam has seen this yet.  There I am. Is that me? Well, the body looks The body looks okay. Have a look at we've got Kiwi kicker over here.  No, he's Italian. I think he's of Italian descent. He's a bit wider than that. I'd say my shades I might say my shades pretty on point to be fair All right, guys Let's go. Let's watch the battle of the the battle the battle of the back the fisticuffs between the the New Zealand Sports youtubers Jacob McDonald and Kiwi kicker here we go Hmm Keep your hands up. Oh, you're kidding. Oh, no. Oh He is tall how tall is Sam? Nothing nothing from that range. Oh my gosh Yes, that's right control the opt to go and cut it off. That's right. Oh, yes get in there You don't want none of that. You don't want none of that. Let's go for a strike move Now I believe I'm told I am a striker. Well, that's what I told Tim. I said, uh, oh big knee to the belly um Make me six foot one and 91 kg and Able to take head kicks like that, please. Oh, this is gonna be a long fight. It's gonna be a long night boys.  Oh big overhand right don't want to do those two often straight straight punches In and out one two move. Oh Sam he must be he must be he must be weighing in at a well pretty much at the limit of The light heavyweight division I'd say He's looking he's looking rather large He's probably got a couple of inches of height over Jake and McDonald's as well Solid is this just a one-round fight take some damage throughout the round but finish it finish it with the a kidney a kick to the kidneys Fucking nice one too. Now. What's gonna happen here? Jump on them.  That's it That's it. He's got the size on you mate. Oh, you know, it's just whoo We it's got some power behind those punches. You better be careful. That's it Be careful counter counter.  Boom. You got that reach and comes in with the spinning back fist That's it control the ox.  He's he's One two one two No, that was probably a that was a one five No one six five six.  He's getting bloodied. They're both bloodied It's a fight. That's what happens.  I don't know what kind of style of fighter is I think he's a I'm gonna message Tim right now any details you want to provide Whilst I watch this fight Right, we've got two rounds to none Or two knockouts to none That's that good movement. That's it. He's he's he's predictable. You can telegraph them from a mile away Control the octagon way for him to come in and land Yeah, I'm getting behind a Made-up version of myself in third person. That's what I do.  I feel like this round if he gets it wins the fight What's he gonna do? Keep him at distance when he comes in when he comes in Well, I don't know what straight down the pipe one two Says Snoop, but you need some clean hats to be able to get this guy out of there. Come on three more bars clean punches Hit and not get hit. Oh, there's another one two more significant strikes Okay, and she's over.   They know it's on the line Got to attack Can't just leave it. Oh no, that was a solid Backwards heel kick. Oh get in there again. Come on Straight oh It's put down with a gut shot.   You need this round.  He's he's gonna be feeling as motivated as he has this entire fight Sam Or Kiwi kicker. Oh My god, come on man. Come on. Oh You can't telegraph those punches Keep your elbows low tucked in straight punches In and out. That's it Like a piston Couldn't start going to the legs.  You got to get away from those you can't No, it's not a it's not a hit-for-hit strategy anymore, mate. We need this round Four significant strikes. That's one. No, it's not really Really none of those is significant. Who's judging this?  I want to see what happens when you make it to three Red circles Get in there do it with the kick do it with the kick that's worked before it's worked before It's got to be a kick. You can stay with it. You can stay.  This is this is this is Falcon off ski versus a Holloway Three you could say but what's gonna happen? This is the championship round fifth round.  You can't be trying to make up these significant strikes late in the round It's just not working Keep with the kicks straight punches and Land and overhand right nice He's got nothing.  You shredded.   Oh my god. You could not have asked for a for a more entertaining simulated fight.  Do we have a tail of the tape? We didn't did we what a fight? What a fight So Snoop Dogg must Okay, so it's knockout mode Right knockout mode commentated by Snoop Dogg. We've got Jacob McDonald versus Kiwi kicker Three rounds to two three knockouts to two throwing hang on landing almost an Identical amount of significant strikes Although the amount thrown was way way higher for my player.  I Had no idea how that was gonna go. I just knew I needed to make this video I've given them their third view and second like and I want to say thanks. Thanks for watching guys I love the UFC We just watch you see 251 on the weekend. It was absolutely incredible. Wow incredible to see Volkanovsky defenders belt I'd have to watch the fight back the third round is the contentious round and you know before watching it back in Silence with no commentators no noise I'm not gonna make a judgment call on it because for me to make a judgment call on a round That is, you know controversial in any way I'd need to watch it, you know at least two or three times and then again With no sound and then I'll give you my opinion and I will start giving you my opinion on UFC Once I start feeling comfortable enough with it and once I start Well, I guess you've just got to start Once I start once I start.  So anyways guys, I hope you enjoyed that video as much as I did. I've got orange here. Is my hair that color?  Oh The beds pretty much the beds actually Pretty much on point. I'm I'm actually 8% body fat and I'd have to say he looks probably about 8% body fat, too So this the physique would be the physique is pretty much on point to be fair And with that being said I'll see in the next one great modeling Tim If you want to set up another fight possibly put Jacob McDonald against destroying. Okay, there we go To settle what are you gonna settle the Trans Pacific football youtuber? Title I guess you could say and we have a couple of fisticuffs and that sounds like a lot of fun cheers Kiwi kicker That was fun too bad.  See you later and good luck with the channel. Peace


There's history here! And here. There's history there! History is everywhere! I am a quilter. And I started quilting young back in the late 70s when it was polyester and not very nice fabrics. And I didn't do well. So I put it on the table for a while. And then later, when the bicentennial came along, and they started holding quilt classes, I took a class, and then I was off to the races. I have made traditional quilts for many, many years. And in the last four years, I have started making art quilts. It's been my mission to get the art quilts into art galleries because many times art galleries do not accept quilts as an art artistic item. So that's been my mission. So I have things on display down at the Rogue Art Center, Rogue Gallery and Art Center in Medford. I've got things around on display. So I'm glad to say that people are getting a little bit more accepting about quilts. Yes. All right. So our title is Bertha's Red Work Summer Quilt. And this is Bertha. And the picture of one of the blocks on the quilt. So hello and welcome to our presentation centered around my second great aunt's Bertha's quilt. Her name was Bertha Ann Custer Solander. And we will be discussing the genealogical hints and clues that I discovered from the dates and the names written on the quilt behind me. And it is a summer quilt or a coverlet. And I'm going to tell you about other discoveries I made about my mother's research and my mother's family, Bertha's part of my mother's family. But first let me show you the summer quilt she embroidered. And just tell you a little bit about red work and how it's used in quilting. So this is the quilt. Quilt's also behind me. As I said, this is a summer quilt. And it has no batting. It is a finished bed cover that usually is lined. This one in this case is not lined. Sometimes they are tied. There's usually no quilting involved. These were used for summer covers when it got hot. And then they were put away for the winter and the winter quilts were brought out. Bertha made this cover from squares of bleached muslin. Sometimes unbleached muslin was used. I believe it's a sheet. It appears to be a sheet. It's been cut into 14-inch wide by 16-inch long rectangles. And she used embroidered it with turkey red cotton embroidery floss. And it is stitched together. The blocks are stitched together by a sewing machine. Now some of the blocks appear to be original drawings that Bertha may have drawn herself because some of the blocks up there, I've never seen those designs. And then the blocks that have the dates and the names are definitely ones that she created. And others are from commercial patterns that were published in magazines and newspapers. And Bertha's quilt does not, I mentioned that it doesn't have the lining. She may have intended it as a tablecloth. Basically, you notice it's square. But I have a feeling she used it on the bed. It has a lot of wear where the threads have worn off where somebody might have sat on it. But I don't know for sure. It shows quite a bit of use and was probably used as a coverlet. And the final task when you make a redwood quilt is after you sew the blocks together, which she did by machine, then down these seams, and you can see it on the quilt, you do a finishing stitch. In this case, I believe it's a feather stitch with that embroidery. So she got it finished and she used it. Now I want to talk a little bit about redwood before we get into genealogy clues that were in this quilt. It was very popular during the Victorian age. And it followed the trend of making crazy quilts. And crazy quilts were irregularly shaped pieces of fabric. So, you know. And they were stitched by hand or machine onto the back of usually muslin. It's called foundation piecing. And after your block was all stitched up, then you embellished it. And the Victorians used snippets and scraps from dressmaking or from some of the clothes that they had discarded. But most of them were clippings because they were new when they used them. And then they made these blocks. This is one block that was made by a lady from Shady Grove. And she dated it. That's her initials. Van Dyne, I think it's her name, Van Dance, Zance, Van Zance. And she made it in 1998. And so this is just one block.  And in this case, we see the block here. It's a diamond shape, meaning that this quilter set her quilt on point rather than what Bertha did, putting everything on square. This is the crazy quilt that was gifted to Ginger Rogers in the 1930s. It belongs to this group. And it's currently been loaned to the Aurora Colony Historical Society Museum because they're having their 45th annual quilt show in October, October 13 to 22nd. And they do have a website. And if you want to know more about them, there's a little flyer right there that gives you all the information you want. It's a wonderful show. It is in their museum. So the setting is just wonderful. There's four buildings. So you tour the whole museum as you go to the quilt show. And their theme this year is crazy about quilts. So that's why it was taken up there on loan. Usually these quilts, crazy quilts, were not this large. They usually were quite small, like a throw. So they would be like that size. This one is very well made. It's in very good condition and is unusual in the way that it has been preserved over the years. So Ginger took good care of it. So red work was popular after this. This is another close-up of the Ginger Rogers quilt where you could see the elaborate fabric and embroidery. So here we have red work. It lapped over crazy quilted and red work kind of slowly made their trend change over. And it started about 1880. And it featured, again, bleach or unbleached muslin for the backing. And you see over here I have some samples of red work. And this is a modern sample of red work. It's still very popular. So again, they were embroidered with turkey red, embroidery cotton, embroidery floss. It was color fast. And it did not fade when these quilts were washed. That was very important. And sometimes they used blue embroidery floss and sometimes black. Now, a folksy design, this case, some bonnetsu, was transferred to the muslin. And it was embroidered with a simple stitch. A back stitch, an outline stitch, or a stem stitch. And I think these are a stem stitch. Now, it was important when you embroidered red work that the back of the red work was supposed to be very neat. This one isn't the neatest. But you would want to hide your knots. And you wouldn't want to carry your threads over like they've done here, because it would show through on the front. So generally, the back of red work was really neat, neatly done. The embroidery stitch was simple enough that it could be taught to a child. It wasn't as elaborate or as difficult as it was doing the crazy quilts. And the designs were usually of animals, flowers, toys, landscapes, sometimes famous people, famous landmarks. But quite often, they were of children, like we're seeing on these samples. And here's another one. This is one that you would see quite often. They were often called pinning squares.  And they took their task really seriously. So when women get involved in a task seriously, they drive the industry, the manufacturing industry and the publication industry and the commercial enterprises. So that's what happened with red work. Cottage industry even got involved. And they did it by stamping these blocks. And so the newspapers would publish articles of how, you know, with a pattern on it that you could mark. And the ones over here. We forgot to tell us how she knows the birth year was wrong. That's good. We'll leave it to you. I know the first year was wrong because the birth certificate was filled out by her brother and after the family had moved. But it often happened there were pre-stamped. And then on this quilt is the actual birth date. And I figured that she was by them at Woolworth's or some of the stores which is on this quilt in your town. And they would be like a quilt. She wouldn't have put the wrong date on her own quilt. Red all came together. And maybe even a pattern to show you that. So it was a big deal. And it's still popular today, but not like it was back then. So women began designing and stamping their own blocks to sell to their friends at fairs or in booths, that sort of thing. Newspapers and magazines would publish how to make a finished product. Merchants, like if you could go to your country store and ask for a penny square. The merchant would have the squares in the back pre-cut. And you could either, while you wait, you would pick a design. And he would go back and stamp the design probably with chalk. I really don't know how they stamp the design.  So that's how it got going in small towns. So hence they got the name penny squares. And then when you got enough of them, you usually stitched them together without sashing. And what I mean by that is this quilt right here has sashing between the blocks. This one does not. The blocks were butted up against each other. And almost all the very few of them have sashing, the ones that were made then. They were very simple. So Aunt Bertha, also my great, great Aunt Bertha, also made. She made a crazy quilt with my grandmother. But it got burned in my aunt's fire in Gold Beach. So it doesn't exist anymore. And this is a pieced quilt that she put together just the top. And it's about a twin size. And I knew Bertha and she would run. It wasn't really an inn, but she and her husband never had any children. So they always kept their guest room full. And she had a one room that had twin beds. And I can picture this one was probably going to be intended for that. So it's unfinished. This one is hand pieced. And you're welcome to touch it afterwards. You want to come up and look at the back to see how that's pieced together. It wasn't pieced on machine. But I believe the sashing, just the blocks were hand pieced. And the sashing was added by machine. So our story begins. Our story about Bertha begins in Eagle Rock, Virginia, where she was born. She was born in Badatort County, Virginia. Some of you may know that, pronounced a different way. How many of you have heard Badatort pronounced Batatot? That's the way my grandmother pronounced it. But I'm going to do Badatort because it's kind of the way it sounds. And this was a small town located along the James River. And that county was up in the northwestern part of Virginia. And she was born here on March 25, 1880. I know that from my family records, which included an oral history. And the family pages filled in with important dates from the Custer family Bible, which unfortunately also burned in the fire. But we have photographs, and that's helpful. And that Bible belonged to Bertha's mother. Her name was Nancy Kessler, Custer. And she carefully recorded in the registration pages of the Bible the names of the birth of her children, deaths, weddings, that sort of thing. So that's one record that many genealogists used to do the research. I also know when she was born, because Bertha wrote a memoir about her family of 13. She called it the original 13. So I have that. And I also discovered that she put it on the quilt behind me, her birthdate. Another form, another picture of Eagle Rock. It was named, you see the James River running there. It was named Eagle Rock because of that huge mountain behind it is limestone. And so they would dig limestone out of, quarry it out of this mountain or surrounding an area. And they set up little kilns all over the town of Eagle Rock. And smelted, is that the word, they got the limestone out. And so when I visited there in the 1990s, a lot of these backyard kilns were still there. And each one would have a little plaque up by it, saying which family ran it, and that sort of thing. And I think they called that Mountain Eagle. There you go. So she was born there. And I think I've got another picture. Yes, that's when my mother visited Eagle Rock in the 1970s. And the railroad track runs right down beside the river. The town is strung out right beside the river following the railroad track. And then the rest of the town goes uphill because this part of the country is very hilly. And I think when I was there in early 2000s, I just felt like as I walked down those streets that my grandmother and my Aunt Bertha, if they had been with me, they would have pointed to the little white clapboard houses and said, so and so lived here and so and so lived there. It hadn't really changed much. It was very quite and unique. And I got to visit the cemetery when I was there. So back behind me on Bertha's quilt, you see that she put dates. And I was able to look up many of the dates. There's names back there. And at first, I thought these blocks were made by the people who are named on the quilt in Eagle Rock that they were part of the granges. And maybe they made a block and gave it to Bertha when she moved away from Eagle Rock to Spokane, Washington in 1902. But then I noticed that the dates were older. So I began to realize that, no, this quilt was put together after she made her move in 1902. And it was probably assembled between 1905 and 1915. But it was her red work quilt that caught my attention. And I started comparing the dates on it with what I knew about my Aunt. And some of the dates didn't make any sense. So I did some more research on that. There are names and dates on this quilt that I looked up this one, this block. Thinking they were from Virginia, they were not. They were from her new home in Spokane. And they were neighbors. They were a Swedish family. And they became very, very close. And for some reason, she wanted them on that quilt. And those may be signatures. The people may have written their own names on there. Or she might have done it herself. But what we know about building a quilt is that you take pieces. And you prepare them and sew them together. Building a family history is just like making a quilt. You have bits and pieces, all kinds of records, books, maps, photographs, diaries, letters. And you fit them together and compile them into what you call family sheets or profile sheets. Is that the correct name, Ann? One of these things here? Family group sheets. Yeah, that's just hers, her page. So this page gives, and it's hard to see. I'm sorry about that. Gives all the information. Whoops, we went too far there. Let's go back. That's Bezel's. It gives all the information about Bertha, where she was born, the date, Eagle Rock, death. And then down this row here is all the things that happened to her along the way. When her dad died, when her brother died, whatever. And then over here, you have the sources that you found to back those facts up. So we've got one for Bertha. And notice she was born in 1880, but I did notice that on the quilt, she puts her birth date down as 1881. So, I'll get back to that, but just remember I said that. But all the records have her in 1880. And then she married a man named Bezel. And he is right here, which you can't see, but you'll see later. His last name was Sollander, and he's on the quilt. Sollander, the name Sollander's on the quilt. And so they got embroidered into the quilt. Also, that was an important time for her. So we also have a sheet for her husband, Bezel, who was a few years younger than she was. And kind of a handsome young man. And then you could make these sheets for each member of Bertha's family. She was the baby of the family. There were 11 siblings. Most of her, interestingly enough, most of her brothers and sisters were born during the Civil War. And here is one of the birth records of Bertha. I think it was probably put together later, because I see there's a date on here down at the bottom that it was filed between 1880 and 1898. And the other thing that's interesting about this is that the information came from John W. Custer, who was Bertha's oldest brother. And he was the one that stayed back in Virginia and he probably provided birth information on many of his siblings. But there's so many things you can learn from a birth certificate or a death certificate. And here we learn, we know she was born in that county. This is Commonwealth of Virginia. They gave her birth as 1880, which is wrong according to her information up here. And her firm name, the A student for Anne, Bertha Anne Custer, female, she was born alive. We have her father's name, John Custer. We have her father's occupation, pretty cool. He was a miller. I thought he did like flower milling where he grind wheat. He was a sawmill man. And I learned that by reading her memoir. He lived on the Allen's branch of the James River, so they lived a little bit out of town. And her mother's name was Nancy Custer. They didn't give her maiden name here, but it is Kessler. And her brother gave the information. So these types of documents provide a lot of clues where you can go and research it out and find other documents that support what's on there. And sometimes they have mistakes. Cause they're only as good as the person filling them out. Now, the next thing that happens when you're researching a person is you can fill out, again, this is kind of blurry, but you get the idea, a family ancestor chart. So this one works this way. This is Bertha and her information. That's her parents, John Custer, and her mother, Nancy Kessler. And this whole line here are her grandparents. Yeah, you got four grandparents.  She's got eight great grandparents. And then that's all I have of her great, great grandparents. But what I found remarkable about printing this out was so many of Bertha's ancestors were born and raised and died right in Boddatorick County or nearby in the state of Virginia. We get back here, we find some other names, Maryland and some other names, but they pretty much were there for a long, long time. So we got that filled in. And then I'm lucky enough to have Bertha's wedding photo. And where they were married, notice that they were not married in Virginia. They were married in Burlington, Des Moines, Iowa. And it's on the quilt. She inverted it on the quilt. And this was a big puzzle to me because all I knew was the family moved from Virginia to Spokane around 1900, between 1900 and 1905. So I did not understand why they were in Burlington. I did look up the marriage record and you can go into courthouses and find these books or places like the genealogical library here where information on marriages and deaths are recorded. The old county courthouses used to record them. When my mother was doing research, she could go to the courthouse and find these books. And we learned that Bertha's extended family were attending the wedding and that Basel, her husband's extended family, were also attending the wedding. And after the wedding, Basel's parents went back to Virginia and I found them in the census records there, but all of Bertha's families were in Spokane, Washington by 1905. And they may not have come out all the same.  So I Googled Burlington Northern Railroad and learned that it was a hub and another hub was Spokane, Washington. So that's what took them to Burlington. They must have had a big celebration, I'm guessing. I'm still looking into that. And then they parted ways, got on the train and they got as far as Spokane, a town called Hilliard, which was a railroad town. And that's where they stayed and they lived in that part. So let's see what we have next here. Photographs are another wonderful way to learn about your family, another piece of information that you can make and stitch into your family history. And this one is of their home taken, oops, I always push the wrong button there, 1894. So that's quite a bit before Bertha got married in 1902. There's Bertha. She is about 15 years old. She looks older. She was a very tall lady. These are her siblings and she was a youngest. So these are older. Her older sister here, her husband, oldest sister's three children, my great grandmother, her name is Lizzie Elizabeth, Bertha's older sister, my grandmother. So I was able to kind of date this picture by the age of my grandmother. I knew when she was born. My grandmother's brother, I know knew these people very well. And my great grandfather, Lafayette Harlow. So Lizzie Custer married Harlow. And this man was visiting. He was a cousin from another state. He didn't want to be in the photograph and he looks kind of sheepish. The lady in the middle is Bertha's mother, Nancy. They called her nanny. And she's holding one of her grandchildren. This is her home after her husband died. And it was located again, really close to Eagle Rock. I visited the land where it was. And so I wondered what happened to this family between the time this photograph was taken and that they made their move. Because in the 1900 senses, they're all, most of them are in Virginia. And in the 1910, they're in Spokane. And we see Basil Solander and Bertha Solander living on, that says Gladys Avenue. And next door to them are Nancy Bertha's mother and two of her unmarried siblings, Jacob and Nanabelle. And they are living next door. And not too far away were my grandparents and they stayed together in Hilliard in Spokane. So census records are also another way of finding family information. By 1906, I have found almost everyone in her family had moved to Washington except for her oldest brother. And he stayed back in Eagle Rock. And this is a postcard from Eagle Rock that was in my mother's collection. Again, you see exactly how I'm telling you the railroad track ran straight down by the river, the river's over on the left and the town just strung right along there. So he stayed there and that picture was taken probably around the time that the family moved from Eagle Rock. Now the brother that stayed back was named Jim. This is the brother that gave the birth information from that birth certificate. And this is their beautiful home. And it was on the Allen's branch a little bit outside of Eagle Rock. And when I visited it in 2000, it was for sale and then it was empty. And I wish I would have had time to contact a realtor and go inside the home. But my mother visited it several times with her mother and her sisters and brothers. And it never left the family. This family always lived there. This is Mrs. Hamilton Custer. She's his wife. These are their children. One of these boys got married. The other three children did not get married. And they are the ones that stayed in that home until the day they died. And when the home finally got put up for sale. And my mother always loved visiting these people. And in the land records, we found, my mother and I found a sale that was dated July 5th, 1888. And it was recorded in Fincastle, which is the county seat of Batatort. And it was a sale between John and Nancy Custer. Those are Bertha's parents. They sold a track of land located on the Allen's branch, which is a tributary of the James River to John E. Custer for $150. I don't know how much land it was, but it was part of the land. And he is the one that built this beautiful house. I would guess sometime around 1900 after the family moved, he built a big house. And he also ran the family business, which was a sawmill business. There's another child in this picture that died in 1917. So the first picture, this was taken later or earlier, and he was gone. He wasn't in the family by then. But this is a mourning, a funeral picture of the family.    The death of Charlie Custer. His name was Charles Adam Custer. He was 11 years old. You read through the obituary. He died working in the sawmill. Got caught in a belt. It was instant. But terribly unfortunate. And it upset, even though it happened in Virginia, of course the family in Spokane was very, very upset about it. So we have a newspaper clipping, another piece of our family history that you can research and get information out of these. And then we've got a cemetery record that shows where, this one I think came from Find a Grave, and where he's buried and what cemetery he's in. So that was really sad. But again, it caused them to save this information, which I could put together later in research. This is his death certificate. Remember I told you that these certificates tell a lot of information. He was in Fincastle. That was the closest town or this was the county seat. And he lived in Eagle Rock. That's his name, Charles Adam Custer. His male, white, single. This is the date of his birth, 1906. He was 11 years old when he died. And his death date is here. And then it gives the parents' names, James Edward Custer of Wich County. And I think her name was Mary Ellen Hamilton. That was her maiden name. So you get a maiden name there off that certificate and where she lived. And very sad down here is James Edward Custer, the father of this child that had to fill out to inform the information. And then this is about the death, how they died.  So these are very valuable. Now let's see what's next here. Oh, these are the family Bible records that I told you the Bible got burned. So before the fire, I had written to my aunt Joe who lived in Gold Beach and said, she had the Bible. And I said, I wanted her to take photos but she ended up writing me a letter that had the information about the family and what was written in the Bible. So I was really glad that that happened because we do now have that letter that has that information. But family Bibles are very important and interviews, personal interviews, like I talked to my aunt about the Bible and asked her what she remembered about the family. This is the memoir that Bertha wrote. It's called The Original Thirteen. She wrote it in the 1940s, she died in 1964. And her great niece, Virginia Brown, was the person that typed these handwritten records up and put them in these folders. And this folder belongs to Boyd, who was her nephew and one of my favorite great uncles, and distributed them to the family. She had a lot of information in this memoir. She even had a picture of the natural bridge because her sister Lizzie, her favorite sister Lizzie, my great-grandmother was married there. And here we know that the names of the children, she's down here. These people died about the same time in a diphtheria epidemic. She even put the names of people that did not marry. Now this was not unusual, I understand that children that were born during the Civil War, now Bertha was born in 1881, but these guys in here were all born during the Civil War. It is not unusual for those children that were born during those years not to marry, to stay together in the family. And also I learned from the memoir that her father, although he lived in Virginia, was a union sympathizer and he had to move away and leave his family because Virginia declared that they were a Confederate soldiers. So the family did go through some trauma during that time too, but Bertha never really knew it because she was born later. This is a postcard that was in my family's possession. Letters and postcards are another way of finding family history. She told a sad story in the memoir about her sister who was forbidden from marrying her first cousin, Jonathan. And Jonathan kept, would write to her and she would write back and sometimes the letters would get stolen or hidden or not given to her. And Jonathan's writing there say, you ask why I haven't answered any of your letters. It says I answered every single one of them. So she didn't get them, but she got this one. And so that's in the memoir, a little sad story that goes along. This is Bertha and her husband, Basil, and her mother, Nancy, in their home about 1915 in Spokane. This is one of the ladies that's on this quilt back here. It was one of her neighbors. And I did find that her maiden name's on here, but the married name is on the back of the picture. And this is a nephew. She had a lot of people. And of course the family dog is in the picture. This is my grandmother, Lizzie and Lafayette and their home in Hilliard, not too far from where Bertha lived. This is a four generation photograph. Bertha's mom here, Bertha's sister here, my grandmother and my aunt, the oldest child of my grandmother. Those are awfully nice to have and they tell a lot of information. This is Bertha, again, the youngest child with her mother, Nancy, taken shortly before she died. This is Bertha, when I knew Bertha. She was like to dress up and go shopping. My mother told a tale about going shopping with her grandmother, with her mother and Bertha in downtown Spokane and sliding off of the wicker seats on the streetcar where every time the streetcar would stop. And she had her own version of the shopping trips and the elevator was so scary and not being able to see above the countertop when the transaction was made. But this is how I remember Bertha. I did get to go to her funeral, but when this is my grandmother, Mary, my brother took this photograph and she was, she named me and that's how I got my name. My name is Charlotte Lee and my grandmother gave me as a Southern tradition, I was called Char Lee, not Charlie, Char Lee. She was a lovely lady. This is Bertha's brother. He was, as you can read down there, he lived with Bertha, he's in most of the censuses. Mysterious death, another brother, older brother was murdered in 1905. Washington, the state of Washington during these years was having labor union disputes and it got kind of violent. And although there's no, I haven't yet discovered any records, I suspect that this particular death and maybe this one, they worked as railroad people. They were called blacksmiths or carpenters that they may have been associated with that. That's for me to discover. Notice that Bertha's stone does not have her date on it, but she was, Basil died first. So that's my next project is to, my cousin and I are gonna get together and get that date on there. And it's possible that somebody already did that and this is an old photograph. But I have to find her death certificate and then we'll take a trip up there and take care of that for Bertha. In Washington? Yes, at home. I think the Washington death certificate is from a lot of mothers. Yes, and I just haven't done it. I didn't realize that I didn't have her death certificate. I wanna tell you a little bit about this photograph. This is a Harlow Cabin on Elliott Creek, California, Northern California. It is a double story log cabin built by Lizzie, my great-grandfather Lafayette. And we had a family reunion up there not long ago. And I just thought it was kind of cool that you can connect modern times with old times. And why is it in Northern California? You might ask, because they were in Spokane. For a brief time in the 1920s, my mother's family lived in Ashland. And the grandparents moved with them to Ashland. And my grandfather was, he had built log cabins before.  And his son, who was probably 20 or 30, built this cabin up in the Siskius and ran a placer gold mine up there. And in the summer, my mom and her siblings got to spend their summers up there. And then about the time my mom graduated from high school, for whatever reason, the whole family moved back to Spokane. But that's just a little side story. So this concludes my presentation on Bertha, my great-great aunt, and how the pieces of her life and the pieces of her quilts can be twined together and useful in family research. This is around her home. They must have had significant, I think this is when she met Bethel, her husband. See, maybe she met Bethel right here. I know her, but she's got his last name here. I must have heard of her, too, so. Well, some of these dates, I'm not able to tell.


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