My Desert Blog Cabin: How I Designed and Constructed My Desert Home

A book of how the author came to build his home in Morongo Valley, a small rural settlement twenty miles north of Palm Springs. It is a description of his transformation from ethnic city slicker to down-home cabin dweller in California's high desert. As he lets go of his urban preferences and prejudices, he picks up a new set of tools for independent living. As he designed and constructed his "little house on the desert prairie", he developed necessary depths of self-reliance to cope with the elements in a more extreme climate and environment. During this process Cat was schooled in finding and purchasing real estate, residential design, dealing with government bureaucracy, undergoing and surviving home construction, wading through the inconsistent world of home improvement centers, and distinguishing important differences between manufactured and stick-built homes. He offers amusing, sometimes frustrating, and often inspiring stories and tips on what to do and what to avoid in attempting such an ambitious undertaking.

Author: Cat Cohen
Publisher: Cat Cohen Unltd
Published: 04/30/2018
Pages: 134
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.54lbs
Size: 10.00h x 7.01w x 0.29d
ISBN: 9780989939072

About the Author
Cat Cohen is an active member of the Palm Springs Writers Guild with nine self-published books on travel, food, music, and recovery. He is also a longtime ASCAP songwriter with pop, R&B, jazz and blues songs cut by recording artists Cheryl Lynn, Syreeta, Freddie Hubbard, and Bo Diddley, and has had his work featured in the HBO movie The Rat Pack and the Universal feature film Undercover Brother. Cat was born in the 1940s near downtown LA and called the City Of Angels home for six decades before resettling in the high desert above Palm Springs. As a child he played along the walk of stars on Hollywood Boulevard and rubbed shoulders with the entertainment world early on, making two guest appearances on Art Linkletter's House Party TV show. At the age of ten his family moved to the Jewish neighborhood near Canter's Deli on Fairfax Avenue where he learned to fish pickles out of a barrel and haggle prices at local bakeries. His adolescence was spent in the San Fernando Valley before attending UCLA where he majored in music. While enrolling in graduate school in classical composition, Cat also played in a rock band six nights a week in Redondo Beach. After a stint in the Peace Corps in Micronesia, he lived in Santa Monica a block from the ocean. Here he taught piano and wrote songs and musicals, several of which were recorded, produced, and performed. For many years he taught songwriting at UCLA Extension. During the 1980s he was involved in the political and social movements of LA's gay, HIV, and recovery communities, work he continues in the Coachella Valley today. Currently, Cat performs as a pop music therapist and leads sing-alongs in hospitals, senior homes, and rehab centers.

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