I've been pretty quiet over here lately, so for today: ( snippets )

It's been pretty busy in general. Work is lots of work. I've gotten back to cooking and reading a bit more, and expanding my bicycle-range a little bit at a time. Life is good.

How are you?

I last posted a month ago before my great journey through Missouri and Arkansas. I've been back for almost two weeks. As usual after an exciting venture, I've had lots to share and not much desire to actually write it all out. I won't try to capture it all, but share a few highlights.

( ...and this is the condensed version! )

Hey all -- A bunch of you, especially the Feri peeps, are near the Mississippi, which has decided that now is the time to get uppity. Everybody okay?

I am safe and dry in Kansas City with starrthinks, kittenpants, and others. I hope all is well.

It's packing time at the llama-stead tonight. I'm about to leave on an exciting adventure to Missouri and Arkansas for the next 2+ weeks. I'm a bit sad to be missing PSG this year, and I'll be thinking of the many of you who will be there - many joys to you all!

( Where I'll be going: Feri-visiting and Witchcamp-helping )

I am excited to be off on this grand tour, and I hope that I'll see some of the as-yet-unmentioned-among-you along the way.

I am also excited and grateful for the accidents of fate, the well-laid plans, and the abundance of friends that will make this a trip that doesn't involve me bringing a car along!

For the record: I will have sporadic access to both email and my 21st-century-llamaphone along the way, but I will not be consistently reachable until I return on the evening of Monday, June 23.

Happy solstice, happy PSG, happy everything to you all.

It's never too soon to start thinking about DanceCamp...

For the last two years, Diana's Grove in Missouri has hosted a fantastic dance camp. celtic_elk and I have gone both years, and have been joined by a few of you there one or both times. Each year so far has been very different, and each has been wonderfully rewarding.

The early-early registration deadline for this year is coming right up, so now's a good time to start planning. I hope that many of you will join us in this fabulous pursuit. Yes, sahirazedare, I'm looking at you... and a whole mess of the rest of you too.

Like the first dance camp (and unlike the second) this year's camp will include instruction from folks brought in and hired for that purpose. (Last year's camp was all participant led, and thus cheaper. Both models have advantages -- it's possible that we'll alternate between them.)

Diana's Grove hosts Midwest Dance Collective Camp
September 11-14, 2008

( Details below the cut )
For more information check out: http://www.midwestdancecamp.com or contact JennTara at jenntara@yahoo.com or 314-497-8452

I'm off to the wilds of Kentucky with otterkin and Mary Katie. Have a fun weekend =)

Good news from our university administration:

"The board approved the addition of same-sex domestic partner benefits... Benefits include, but are not limited to the following: health and dental Insurance, continuation coverage, Tuition Waiver/Scholarship, and leave benefits. Domestic partners and children of domestic partners are included in the university’s definition of family for purposes of other policies that apply to families."

*rejoicing* This has been a long time coming, and is most welcome.

I passed a movie marquis today which read:

IRON MAN
PROM NIGHT

*that* sounds like an awful lot of fun, in some twisted sort of way...


In totally other news: I had a lovely, impromptu dinner out with branchandroot, which we've not done in a really long time. We went to Barley's in Columbus and had a glorious pile of pierogies, kielbasa, wild boar, and sauerkraut balls. Yum =)

We've been hearing a lot about gas prices lately, including John McCain and Hilary Clinton's advocacy of a temporary repeal of the gas tax. I want to propose an alternative to that measure, and I'm not sure how to inject the idea into the broader public discourse. (I did just write to my Rep and Senators, as well as Obama, McCain, and Clinton, but I doubt that'll get there attention...)

How about we actually do something to encourage energy conservation? In 2006 and 2007, the federal government offered energy tax credits to folks who made their homes more energy efficient with the purchase of insulation, better windows, and energy efficient appliances. Those credits don't apply to any improvements made in 2008, because the tax credits were for those previous years only. My family saved nearly $200 off our tax bill in 2007 as a reward/incentive for installing some much more energy-efficient windows. That sure beats the $30 or so I might save buying untaxed gas this summer, and will mean much more in long-term savings.

With the "Economic Stimulus" checks on the way, many people will have a little be more cash on hand this summer, and I would love to see many of us use that relief to invest in long-term savings of money and energy.

Eliminating the gas tax would save us each a little bit of money individually, and would cost us lots of money collectively. (Are we just going to stop fixing roads with less gas-tax revenue? How many folks in the road-repair business are going to suffer economically because the federal funds aren't there?) I suspect that artificially lowering gas prices will just create a bit more demand for something that we want to decrease demand for. (I am not an economist, but sahirazedare is. She has a econo-pro explanation of the gas prices on her other blog.)

What do you think of this plan? Could it work? Can we bring come national attention to this possibility? (From a playing-politics perspective, I suspect my idea is a little susceptible -- tax credits for capital improvements probably aren't much of a help for those who are struggling to make ends meet. This really is a bit of a middle-class proposal.)

Any ideas? If you like the idea, please consider writing to our representatives to suggest it again!

ETA: Turns out that Thomas Friedman wrote about much this same issue in a NYT column a few days ago. Difference: he's talking about tax credits for the renewable-energy industry rather than individual consumers.

Following up on my previous post:

Hey all you Ohioans! The fabulous, effervescent, hot piano mama Amy Steinberg will be in Columbus this Sunday evening!

Sunday, May 4, 2008 -- 8-10pm
Victorian's Midnight Cafe
251 West 5th Avenue (at Neil Ave)
Columbus, OH 43201
(614) 299-2295

Please come join us! Amy is delightful and amazing, hip, funky, quirky, playful, and fun.

If you're in the Springfield/Dayton area and don't want to drive, please let me know and we can arrange transportation. I'm hoping for a sizeable posse from this side of the state. malanai: I do especially think you'd enjoy her!

Hey all you folks in: Columbus, Cleveland, Dayton, Ann Arbor, Chicago, St. Louis, Denver, and the Pacific NW

There's all kinds of great music heading your way. I'm particularly thinking of Amy Steinberg, Rachael Sage, and S. J. Tucker. I highly recommend all of these stunning musicians. (And I especially recommend all of them to malanai.)

Ohio:
Amy Steinberg   Sun, May 4     8pm         Columbus      Victorian's Midnight Cafe
S. J. Tucker    Wed, May 7     7pm         Dayton        Co House (comment for more info)
Amy Steinberg   Thu, May 8     9pm         Cleveland     The Nickel     
Rachael Sage    Sun, June 8    TBA         Columbus      East Village (630 N. High St)
Rachael Sage    Sat, June 21   TBA         Cleveland     Cleveland Pride, Voinovich Park

Ann Arbor: 
Rachael Sage    Mon, June 9    8pm         The Ark

Chicago:
Amy Steinberg   May 9 2008     8pm         Heartland Cafe
S. J. Tucker    Fri, Jun 13    8pm         House Concert (RSVP George: tadghlughan-at-gmail

St. Louis:
Amy Steinberg   Sat, May 10    8pm         Mokabe's 
S. J. Tucker    Sun, Jun 15    TBA         House Concert, details TBA     

Denver:
Amy Steinberg   May 16 2008    9pm         There Coffee Bar & Lounge

Pacific NW:
Amy Steinberg   Sat, May 21    7pm         Mr. Spots Chai House 	Seattle
Amy Steinberg   Sat, May 21    9pm         Seattle Poetry SLAM!  	Seattle
Amy Steinberg   Sun, May 22    9pm 	   Mississippi Pizza Pub    	Portland, Oregon

What is the most quintessentially British name you can think of?

(If you'd like: one each for male and female names.)

Of such questions are Mondays made.

It's a traveling sort of season.

Tonight: going to a talk by activists for transgender rights/recognition
Then: meeting up with gothicsquish and celtic_elk to head out toward Diana's Grove for the next Feri weekend. I'm glad it's that time again.

I am so grateful for the return of Spring. It's beautiful out, and everyone is smiling. I planted peas on my lunch break. pumaviking: wanna come visit in June or so... ? (Pumas, if you don't know, are big fans of things that start with P, and Peas top the list.)

*love to all*

From todays New York Times, an article about someone who's written an algorithm to compile publicly-available information and publish them as niche-market on-demand books:
He Wrote 200,000 Books (but Computers Did Some of the Work)

I feel like I ought to be somehow appalled, but somehow I'm not. Certainly, no one is pretending he's writing the books, per se; and there is an awful lot of ingenuity that must have gone into developing the process. I wonder how coherent and/or useful the books are, and how much stronger they'd be with the application of a bit of editorial control. And how much more useful they are than a Google search.

The world is a wacky place, and getting wackier by the nanosecond.

1. The phrase "more ways to save" (cf. email from Netflix this morning) actually means "more ways to spend".

2. Greenpeace has one of the more creative 404 Error Messages I've ever seen. (I miss some of the 404 messages that used to populate the net in its earlier days, such as the Internet Public Library's old "404 - The Reference Cat" cartoon by Jim Ottaviani and JSTOR's old "Danger Will Robinson" error that was almost certainly the work of Nigel Kerr; sadly, both of these pages seem to be now defunct. Seen any good error messages lately?)

We had a wonderful work-day at Co yesterday, the cooperative house shared by a few of my friends. It was the second annual Jared's Birthday Work Party. Jared's favorite thing in the world is to have bunches of people having fun and being productive together, so what better thing to do for his birthday.

We put in two garden beds (one for flowers, one for veggies), finished removing a tree stump (which had mostly met its demise in the preceding days), dug a pit and filled the bottom with pea gravel (in anticipation of some concrete-pouring that'll have to wait on clearer weather), fixed a some little stuff around the house, and put up some wallboards to cover the exposed insulation upstairs. The Rev. Sgt. Aaron Taylor replaced a glass panel that had been missing from the storm-door since sometime during the first Reagan administration (no kidding!) We were fantastically productive, and it all culminated in a surfeit of tasty food for dinner, and midnight snack, and breakfast this morning.

What a lovely way to spend a day with friends, and I'm excited about the prospect of fresh vegetables growing at Co.

And to that end, oh gardeners among us: what crops would you recommend for a garden that's likely to get very erratic attention. There are lots of folks around at Co, but "routine" is not a strong facet of life in that house. What will yield well under moderately neglectful conditions?

I had a fantastic trip to San Francisco. Worked for a few days, connected with both local and non-local folks and came up with some terrific ideas. In the last ten minutes of the workshop, discovered that the person I'd been sitting next to for two days was a Reclaiming witch. I knew she was my kind of people, and it was fun to make that connection, especially since it turned out that we were both headed for the East Bay after the workshop was over, so we had some time on the train together.

After the work part of the trip was finished, I had all kinds of wonderment. Dinner with yezida, staying with jgcr and eac and their absolutely adorable little one. James and I went to see New Model Army, which Eva was sadly not feeling up to. (And you who know her will know just how dreadful she must have felt for that to be true!) I enjoyed it way more than I imagined I might, and had my first moshpit experience. (For those following along at home, I have indeed managed not only to go out dancing every month so far this year, but also to make it a different kind of dance each month. We'll see how long I can manage that variety.)

( What I did on my days off )

In Chinatown and the Ferry Building I found two flavors of Extreme Consumption; they look different, but seemed to have a lot in common. In Chinatown I could have my pick of cheap, pretty stuff made by underpaid workers somewhere in the world. In the Ferry Building, it was all gourmet chocolates, expensive kitchen gadgets, $50 bottles of olive oil -- and, to be fair, some very tasty and inexpensive bread, and a fair amount of local produce. The stuff at the Ferry was more to my taste, but it still felt like extraordinary consumption to even consider most of it. Neither much appealed to me. I had built both of them up in my mind as being full of things I'd like to explore, and that really seemed not to be the case.

The opposite was also true: I find great delight in places I considered not going. Odd as it may be, I often find myself at a loss in bookstores, not really interested in exploring them so much. I visited the Fields bookstore up yezida's recommendation, and City Lights upon the urging of everyone under the sun. I had a wonderful time in each, and was particularly delighted by Fields, where I got lots of excellent book recommendations. I suspect that I have become too accustomed to mediocre bookstores, and have forgotten the magnificence of the sort of places I visited on Friday. Hurray for enlightenment.

I had a wonderful time in SF, and will be glad to go back!

Wow -- The last few weeks have flown right by! There's so much I've wanted to write about, and it just hasn't happened. Now I've even started to forget what I wanted to write about.

Some of it was all about economics:
* what is money good for
* local economies / Bill McKibben / Deep Economy
* some other stuff inspired by both the food co-op and Feri work -- it all flows together

Also:
* a terrific meal, including a genius idea (if i do say so myself): Jamaican jerk-seasoned pot-stickers. Sooooo very tasty.
* this past weekend's events, including a zombie/free-hugs pub crawl, laser tag, biking in the rain with a dozen friends, an epiphany, and a word-fast
* pictures of a recent project

Hopefully, I'll get to write about some of that when I get back from my next adventure: I'm off to San Francisco in the wee hours of Wednesday morning. I'll be working on Wednesday and Thursday, and then have a few days to explore the city. In the process, I will hopefully get to see eac, yezida, and brassratgirl.

For now: I must get home, pack, and get to Columbus.

Love to you all!

Is it spring yet? My calendar says so, and today it looks like the world believes it too. I woke up to a clear sky for the first time this week; it's chilly out, but felt remarkably mild for the 30°F that the thermometer reported. It's spring, folks -- equinox is today! The groundhog is out of time and off probation.

Our lawn is a rain-soaked mire, and I saw our first onions coming up in the garden this morning. The world is getting busy.

Happy Spring, Happy Equinox! (And, even though she probably won't see this: Happy Birthday to Promethea Tupelo-Schneck!)

I am back from a long, fabulous weekend in Massachusetts, during which I:

* helped the Puma and Turtle get ready for their wedding
* met a whole mess of cool people, including caitrin, fauxmiddlechild, anotheryarn (who has one of the coolest LJ names ever), knitprincess, tashadandelion and shellsapoot (whom I've met before but should really see more often.)
* stayed up way too late with my brother, laughing and telling stories long after we'd turned the lights out, which I don't think I've ever done with him before. most worthwhile.
* banged around Northampton for a bit, and saw all sorts of quirky, cool, and attractive stuff (including, surprise of surprises, my friend Mary/Gaia, sometimes of Twin Oaks, who happened to be at the same breakfast joint where the rest of us were)
* attended the wedding, which was one of the loveliest I've ever been to. I love how many weddings I can say that about.
* ate a lot of really tasty food
* visited my friends Susan and July in Boston
* met up with a pair of Blue Moose for lunch and had a lovely time meeting them for the first time
* spent a few delightful hours in the Harvard Coop bookstore, which had a really high density of books I want to read. I only bought one of them, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future by Bill McKibben, which July had recommended the night before. I read about the first half of it while I was in transit last night and am really getting into it. This will not be the last you hear of this book. In fact, you might as well go get a copy now, as I'll undoubtedly be pimping it extensively in the coming weeks.
* had some tasty pho
* arrived back home, veryvery glad to be back with my beloved branchandroot, who came to pick me up at the airport rather late at night.

A most excellent weekend! I've come home to find an enormous pile of LJ-backlog, and I'll never get through it all. As per usual: if anything really exciting happened, let me know...

Oh! And happy (belated) birthday to otterkin, pisceskitty, my brother, and the IPL.

We wish you a happy birthday,
A joyous and celebrated birthday
To a whole mess of lovely people --
We wish you a long, long life!