Broadcast 2000 fans celebrate the muse and Van

My new favorite CD arrived in the mail a couple days ago and I have been annoying friends and enemies a like with their contagious sound. They are Broadcast 2000 and if you have not heard them, then I recommend a little listen. But even better, on their myspace they briefly posted this odd-ball gem made by fans who obviously spend a lot of time in Vancouver BC and go to UBC.

Reluctantly liking my new laptop

I just received my new laptop today. Once I arrived home from work I started to play. Its a lot faster, of course, than my five year old custom built desktop. The new toy is commercially known as a Lenovo Ideapad Y530. I’m still working on a more personal name. I still have issues with the way that laptops mess with my posture. I seem to slowly sink into it, til I find myself about six inches from the screen wondering why my neck is killing me. Also, for now, there seems to be a disturbing smell coming from my Chinese-made computer. While my headache might be from a simple lack of water, I am not convinced that the off-gases are harmless.

I guess that my expectations of Vista have been considerably suppressed over the last year and a half since its release. Now, I am pleased to see that it works without any major meltdowns.

Yes, it is heavier than I would like and although I think that I won’t travel with it much, I am returning to university, where laptops are more common than pencils.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what I should name the little guy?

warning: narrow interest post

Yep, this is mostly just for a narrowly defined audience of one: me. This is my cork board for pinning up photo and whatnot. At this time, it contains in clockwise order starting in the upper left:

1. A Save the Date card from Jenn A & Michael for their wedding date (which just happens  to be on the last day I’m  in Eugene),
2. A photo of my housemates and me during college,
3. A poster for a Hot Club Sandwich show (Sam Bonds Sept 18th, 2002),
4. A shot of my grandmother and her family in La Habana, Cuba (1917),
5. A photo of a Honduran farmer (Santín) who I worked with in the Peace Corps, and
6. a photo of me and a group of other friends from Peace Corps Honduras.

Goats take over city, make changes

I’m home again after six flights in two days. I have finally got around to taking a picture of my new painting. Michael McDevitt painted ‘Into the Wildness’ in 2002.

Eating the seeds for next year

Vandana Shiva spoke at a recent organic farming conference I went to in Portland, Oregon. She spoke of the connections between seeds, sustainability and peace. She told stories of international corporations braking Indian national laws and her small victories to stop them in the courts. But what touched me the most was from a story she told illustrating the perseverance of the people who survived a long drought in the country. Although they were hungry, they did not eat the rice seeds for the following year.

While in Peace Corps in Honduras, my period of service coincided with a two-year drought in the country. I remember well the day I went to visit one of my best farmers. He reported to me that they had had to eat the beans that they had put aside as seed.

I remember feeling a mix of anger and sadness for their situation. Anger because I thought he of all people should know better. He must not have wanted to do it. Yet, how could he do such a stupid thing unless he believed that he and his family would somehow purchase more.

As an agricultural trainer, I knew that the beans that they ate were well adapted to the hot and dry conditions that plagued the region. The farmer knew this too, I did not need to tell him. Still, I did and he reassured me that they would be able to buy seed from a certain vendor he knew from the nearby township. They would be good seeds, breed and rised just over the hill to the east.

I hoped so. I could not have farmers dying on me while I volunteered to help them.

Vancouver or Toronto, that is the question

Some of you may know that I am applying to business schools for an MBA starting in the Fall 2009. After some research I narrowed the search down to just two programs: York University and University of British Columbia, both of which ranked high on the Aspen Institute’s Beyond Grey Pinstripes survey of environmental and social business schools. York University in Toronto placed third on this list, while UBC was in the middle of the pack. My selection was based on where I could stand to live (large northern city) combined with what I wanted to focus on (alternate energy). Costs were also a huge factor.

A lot of folks, say why Canada? I say why not. A nice coincidence is that the Canadian Dollar slipped 5% against the US Dollar since I first applied in December, making my finances just a little better. However, I’m trying to keep in mind that the currency markets can just as easily take that away.

I will miss Eugene and the friends I have made here over the last seven years in this town. Still, I am certain I am ready for a change in location. I’ve always expressed a preference for large cities instead of towns or smaller cities. I believe that a certain critical mass is necessary for a city to become something more than just a crowded area of human development.

So, I’m still waiting to hear back from York University, while University of British Columbia has admitted me. If they both admit me, then I am going to have to make a difficult decision. If not, then I can put all this nervous energy into something else.

At the moment, UBC is leading in my mind. And it is not just because they are the first and only program to admit me so far. It  is a 15-month program (instead of the usual 21 months) with an internship and all the usual MBA stuff. The Canadian public school is just finishing both a new residence hall and a new academic building for MBA students exclusively. They will be open in the Fall 2009. My own calculations appear to make UBC the cheapest program I considered, even a little cheaper than the University of Oregon (and I would pay in-state fees in Oregon).

Adding to the decision is the complexity of where I want to be afterward: east coast or west coast. UBC is known within the northwest region, but not very well outside of that area. While I have never heard of York University, it is probably known in eastern Canada and the northeast of the US.

I am trying to not let climate affect my decision, but of course, it does. Everyone, and especially my family, who I ask about my decision seems to think that climate is important and suggests that Toronto is very cold. The fact of the matter is that I’ve been in the northwest of the country for 10 out of the last 13 years. I’m probably here to stay.

So, Vancouver or Toronto? Anyone have any thoughts or suggestions?

Something’s cooking in the South

Sustainable (organic) agriculture tends to be an all-white, upper middle class movement, but that’s not what I found when I went to the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group Conference in Chattanooga, Tenn. The South(east) might be a little slower than the rest of the country, but they are way ahead in terms of the racial integration of the natural/organic/local food movements. The conference was about half black.

Also, sustainable agriculture in the south means social justice and poor helping poor. Most of the attendees of this 1000+ conference were ‘dirt’ poor, but in the best sense. They do not have much money, but they eat (and live) well.

I did a farm tour to visit a fully integrated biodynamic operation in rural eastern Tennessee. 300 acres, 3 in veggies, 100+ in woods, 150 in pasture. They had chickens, cattle, and pigs. They tried turkeys. There was a lot of talk about how unfair the state rules are for on-farm meat processing. Basically, if you want to process your own animals in Tennessee, its illegal to sell the meat to anyone, anywhere. Other states have exemptions for small numbers of animals.

But the real highlight of the conference was the keynote speaker who ended the conference. John E Ikerd fired up the crowd with his talk about the ideal of the family farm and the ways that conventional economics has it wrong. Ikerd had a long and successful career as an ag economist, but has concluded with great intellectual force that the practice of economics overvalues the short term to the detriment of future generations. Ikerd is author of several books that I have not read, but Sustainable Capitalism appears to be getting positive reviews.

al Sur para la Navidad

My family is a bit odd in that we don’t celebrate a traditional Christmas. We agreed years ago to forgo the gifts and all spend our money on travel instead. For the past eight years, we have rented a house in the tropics for the week between Christmas and New Years. We don’t do the holiday rituals at all. Mom was a little hard to convince at first, but now we are on the same page about it.

Our familial tradition continued this year with a gringo palace in San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua. San Juan del Sur is a beach town that has become a stop on the tourist trail through Central America. Popular with the Euro-backpacker and surfer crowds for years, now the place is a magnet for foreign real estate developers.

In the last 10 years, the town has gone from sleepy Central American beach community to a home to hundreds of Americans and others who have built large concrete houses on the water or in the hills just outside of town. The spike in land values has probably forced more than a few families away from the bay and the ones that have stayed appear just as poor as before.

Nicaraguans are generous and gracious hosts, though. They are an outgoing people and they love to talk about politics and history. They are proud of their minor socialist feats. And they appear to not want to dwell on the darker points of their past, perhaps out of fear of embarrassing or shaming their guests. Certainly, they are not unaware of the role our government played in their prolonged civil war throughout the 80s.

5:22 am, notes from a dream

The scene starts in a hospital room with the OMRI staff around Cindy in a bed. She will have to spend the night. Megan K and I stay to clean up the room and hang out. Magen tells me that she read my blog entry about the “Tribute” story. I cannot…

I turn on the TV and play with the channels. Cindy goes to sleep. Scene shifts and I feel as though I might have entered one of the shows or movies on the TV. I’m with a group of three men who I don’t know. I think that they might be actors from the movie or show. We are at a dock next to a broken sail boat. It was dark. There’s a large hole in the hull. Two of the men explain that the boat’s condition. There’s discussion about what to do with it. The group makes a quick decision to ride it out to the middle of the body of water and sink it. One of the men is older than the rest and he follows behind in the shallow water with a walking stick. We made it to the middle of the body of water. We enter the cabin on board and crush the plastic milk jugs that seem to keep it a float. Suddenly I am the last person on board and I can feel the boat sinking underneath me. The water’s deep and I feel a stray line wrapped around my waist. I struggle to quickly free my arm from the line, but not before I feel the pull of the sinking boat. I loosen the line and eventually free myself. I am only below the water line for a moment, but when I wake, my heart is racing and I feel hot, scared.

Thanksgiving in the Redwoods

Just across the street from Pelican Bay State Prison is a ordinary RV park. Mom and I decided to meet there for our Thanksgiving dinner and long weekend. We got a rented cabin because we don’t do RVs and the weather was too unpredictable at the end of November. The Northern California Redwoods are about half way from each of our places. Given that and the fact that neither of us had been there before, we decide this year was the time. We were blessed (and thankful) for the amazingly clear weather. We toured both Jebediah Smith and Prairie Creek State Parks. Here’s a couple of my favorite images from the trip. The rest are posted to my google photo page.