The rains have come this week, and there are mushrooms poking up out of the ground in our backyard. I think the ones over between the strawberries and the rosemary bush may be a form of collybia, and haven't even brought in the big white one over in the far corner near the marigolds to key out at MykoWeb.com
California gardening patterns are so wierd, (though marvellous) having grown up in Minnesota. There's no rain here from April till November or so; summers are cold with the fog that the "stinkin' heat" over in the Central Valley pulls in over our heads on the coast (midwinter is warmer than midsummer!) and the rains that pass for "winter" here keep making me think it's April-in-Minnesota - time to plant greens! I could spend a few decades getting used to this. 'shrooms in the garden are an amazement anyhow...
love, Ruth

Jury duty this week - call in Friday evening, to hear "call back Monday evening" - which left me open to working some hours for BEAM - very good and happy keyboarding.

Monday evening, "call back in Tuesday evening" - so I have today to figure out who else to vote for in today's elections in SF... we could wind up with a municipal power Co instead of the ripoff PG&E profitmongers. That'd do fine. I do want to see a forst of solar panels on city roofs, and more wind generators than just that line of them out along towards Livermore.

3895 words down in my 'novel' file in the NaNoWriMo write a novel in a month 'contest' -- there's something just viscerally appealing about how simple it is to set out a 'contest' where everyone who makes the 50,000 word line by November 30 is a winner... and who knows, perhaps it's possible to create something coherent?
At the moment, I seem to be scribbling vignettes from my life and those around me over the past year and a half; and plan to deal with those scary emotions about how to deal wtih a slow debilitating disease or two (diabetes and having one's retina detach slooowwwwly and painlessly...and coming down with nasty asthma during the rainy season while working in an Old office in a fusty mildewy pier building) and what it's all going to mean about work and ability issues and how painful it is to run into the walls of what you can't do any more, the way y'once could...
Id the safe walls of fiction and write the nasty true stories of Girlfriend's former workplace and the stoopid managment decisions that have run the place into the Ground, a bad situation for any service profession that was started with an intent to be run as a charity health caregiving deal...
And then there's our dear neighbor, a Viet Nam era vet who lives in his van and rolls with the big hardships of his life, and goes to pieces over the small but personal injustices, like being ripped off by other homeless folks with even less than he has. *sigh.*
Of course, because it's me, it'll poke through all these tragic and sacred everyday living happenings and wind up with happy ending of hope claimed and nurtured and passed along from heart to heart.
Love is the most powerful thing there can possibly be, after all.
-Ruth

The yahoo group artistsjournals has been such a delight in my life this last half a year, I can't begin to express it.
The techniques different folks report and share and the show-and-tell of
the files area, the swaps of art projects, on top of the great
conversational threads that go by - nurture something deep in my soul.
Yum.