090103 Occidental
Occidental
There is no doubt what Occidental means to me, which is why this image is so direct and simple: sky, earth, redwood trees. As I write this I am staying in a small cottage west of Occidental on a ridge a couple of miles above Bodega Bay. On a fogless day one can see southward the mouth of Tomales Bay (last Sunday we spent a couple of hours with friends Karen and Dan and four year old Noah on the beach directly oposite this same baymouth) and northward towards Jenner. Just up the road is the Grove of Old Redwoods, where Ruby and I vigorously walked to and around this late afternoon, slowly absorbing the sun rays through the magnificent sequoia. The sky is blue, the ground gold and green, and I can look south over rolling California hills between forty and fifty miles to Mt. Tam. This is a powerful, natural area. Ann went home today, leaving Ruby and me to keep each other company. This drawing uses three colors and four shapes to evoke for me a very important place. (More about Occidental: Trees Are The Best Sculpture.) Out here one can see the Milky Way, Mars is the shiniest apple on the tree, and satellites are readily discernible from airplanes.
I saw two shooting stars last night
I wished on them but they were only satellites
Is it wrong to wish on space hardware
I wish, I wish, I wish you'd care
Billy Bragg: A New England
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Remember Labor Day, a day to commemorate the struggle of working people to organize and make their working conditions safe, fair, vital.
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I hope Karin blogs her entire graduate year at Harvard. That would be quite a cumulative record.
Yes Karin, we "have" a dog. Rather, she acquired us. We keep saying Ruby is a foster, but in my heart I know that she's already part of us and that with a little more time we'll drop the "fostering" label. She's a sweet-tempered seven month old puppy with a good amount of residual training not lost during a post-SPCA two month adoption with a very young and too-large family in our neighborhood that should really never have adopted a dog. She's a runaway from a whole block away, and a group of neighbors rallied to give her a safe home and find her owners. The owners, however, saw the fliers in the neighborhood but never bothered to call. In the meantime Ruby came to stay with us, and she is the dog I've been wanting for quit awhile. As I write this around 11:30 pm in the Little House near Occidental she is curled up on a blanket a coule of feet away deeply engage in doggie snoozing and canine dreams.
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Tom Friedman, NY Times: Policy Lobotomy Needed With one bomb at the U.N. office, they sent a warning to every country that is considering joining the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq: Even the U.N. is not safe here, so your troops surely won't be... I don't know what Mr. Bush has been doing on his vacation, but I know what the country has been doing: starting to worry. People are connecting the dots — the exploding deficit, the absence of allies in Iraq, the soaring costs of the war and the mounting casualties. People want to stop hearing about why winning in Iraq is so important and start seeing a strategy for making it happen at a cost the country can sustain.
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dan>weblog=erase>coder as artist
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