I've become a work-a-holic of sorts. Jeff doesn't start school for two weeks, so I'm trying to pay bills, scrub the house, finish book business, and make a syllabus all while watching him out of the corner of my eye. Needless to say, movies are being heavily employed. I broke the gameboy by putting it in the backpack with his seashells. A shell got stuck in there. He keeps telling me -- you have to pay for it! Like I didn't the first time!

Don't tell my mother, but now California is starting to grow on me too. (Northern, not Southern). I really like the concept of food in Kali. I'm into the whole hippy thing that I hate for our food to waste energy by traveling to us. In Kali, the food is near, fresh, and cheap. I know NY has the green market, but it terms of the distance, variety, price, and freshness there in no comparison. My mother can buy strawberries at the end of her street. Wine practicaly comes out the faucet. I also love the humane cattle raising they do near my grandmother's house. There are horrible feed lots all of southern cal., but where Gma lives (appropriately called Vacaville) people raise their own cows-- or they go to a nearby small farm. There is a farmer who travels around the neighborhood with a Temple Gradin designed contraption slaughtering their cows for them. Unitl they die, they just hang out on the hill (WITH THEIR BABIES) eating alfalfa. Now, if you believe that it's wrong to eat animals at all, then this won't make sense, of course. But, I'm much more concerned with the cows having full, happy lives. It's funny, no one ever talks about this...you hear lots about factory farming and organic farming. But. people never write about people raising their own cows and the traveling slaughter truck, or going to your neighbor to buy a cow that's hung out on the hill. I didn't even know what these cows were for. I was baffled to see two calves of a good size walking up the hill behind mama. According to all I've read, calves are always sold for veal. This just isn't the case. I wish more people in the country would do this -- as I know they do with chickens. I suspect that they do, but since it really has no market value, they don't talk about it in the media.