2007-01-22

After a leisurely Morning Offering, with our lingering in bed to celebrate Mick’s off-season, Jim headed up the frosty road to Avalon in a solid, sullen, lowering overcast. Avalon is upriver from Louisville three counties to the northeast, and by the time Mick arrived at the farm, there was snow on the ground, which we missed down south here. He hiked around, walking the land, and staked our personal home’s lot boundaries. Now we are ready to call the surveyors and have the piece surveyed off from the rest of Avalon.

Before he left Anchorage, however, he started cutting up a fallen tree of quite some size at St. Luke’s which they have asked him to remove and he hauled up a large load of branch-ends to start placing over the concrete work he did last week, where the half-mile access road to Avalon was washing.

This technique has worked at other problem places along this road, which crawls down the side of a ravine at the bottom of which, 250 feet down there, runs the feeder creek to Locust Creek. Its lins are simply lovely in the freshets of spring rain, making waterfalls down the rock face of the ravine wall like a wet weather spring makes its creeklet run. The branch-end debris creates a scree of organic material which, over time, becomes good earth, breeding bushes and young trees to hold the soil.

I decided that this was not a creative day for me, as I was feeling seriously under the weather and quite unable to think well. However I truly wished not simply to give up working for the day, so I worked on editing, eventually finishing three channeling transcripts, which I sent to Ian by end of day. I especially enjoyed working on the January 7th transcript – the one we tried, but failed, to broadcast due to unknown glitches.

My only other outwardly useful act was to find two recipes from which Jim and I can choose Gary’s birthday dessert. He loves peanut butter, so I found a peanut butter cake recipe, with chocolate-peanut butter icing, and a peanut-chocolate cream recipe for bar cookies. Both are easily made up, since the cake recipe starts with a mix, which I do NOT scorn; mixes are quite good these days - in terms of taste and texture, of course, not in terms of nutritive value and uses staple ingredients. My favorite recipe website is www.epicurious.com. It contains a quite large database and you can find recipes ranging in difficulty from the very simple to the gourmet. My only gripe is that the formatting is tricky to copy over to my own recipes database.

Gary’s birthday comes up on February 4th. That’s the last day of our workshop, during which we will have the closing channeling and watch the SuperBowl. About half of our attendees will stay for the bash. Gary’s got the material for the attendees’ packets all prepared now and we so look forward to the excellent conversations and also just the joy of seeing old friends and meeting new ones.

Jim was very weary after tramping about in the wintry weather on Avalon and we decided to have a low-energy evening, watching a block of Star Trek Enterprise after seeing Democracy Now. We had missed all of the episodes which they showed, so it was a great evening.

Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now is so valuable. I recommend tuning her in, whether on PBS, NPR or from satellite feeds. Nowhere else can one hear the voice of dissent so clearly. The program last night was upon the media’s role in not reporting the huge story of America’s loss of our middle class. Corporations are paying people less and giving fewer benefits while living costs rise, and these days it takes two people to earn less usable income than one provider did thirty years ago. The quality of our national life is in the toilet. Yet the mass media does not report this story.

I was unable to eat dinner at all, so nourished myself with a glass of “Boost”, a dietary supplement designed not for diets but for old ladies who aren’t eating well, like my young self. I swear by the concoction. My doctor told me one of her patients lived for ten years on nothing but Boost and Ensure – she switched off to get different flavors. Ah, technology! I knitted a bit before our Evening Offering, the Gaia Meditation, with Jim praying at the end, and we ended the day snuggling with the cats.