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Posts published in “Essays”

Teaching In Mendocino County, 1934

The following are excerpts taken from letters I wrote home to my parents during the first year and a half that I taught in Sherwood Valley School in Mendocino County. This was my second year of teaching but the first year being on my own away from home. I boarded with Lou and Ethel James. Ethel James was the clerk of the school board. My salary was $100 a month. I paid $30 a month room and board. I had no car so I walked to and from school about 1.8 miles each way.

Mendocino Talking: Janie Sheppard

Janie is an attorney who spent many years working in the Federal Government in Washington D.C., drafted our anti-GMO initiative Measure H, and tried to impeach Dick Cheney.

The Mind Is a Terrible Thing

I thought this might be an opportune time for me to weigh in on some of today's pressing A/B controversies; you know, the "this versus…

Outage

The power was out in our neck of the Mendocino woods for nearly five days last week. Can we blame PG&E? I do. With the money they’ve stolen charging millions of people ten dollars a month not to have stupid, er, smart meters, combined with the billions of dollars they spend annually responding to multi-day power outages all over the state, they could easily have afforded by now to bury all their power lines and be done with outages forever. But that’s not how monopoly capitalism works.

Resiliency Starts Here

The 32nd Annual Winter Abundance Workshop, known by regulars as the Seed and Scion Exchange, was held this year at the Mendocino County fairgrounds in…

Remembering the Future: Dreams

Humans are exploring the moon, checking out Mars, digging deeper into the makeup of the atom, mapping incoming asteroids, yet dreaming, a common, ubiquitous experience,…

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