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.
Posts published in “Essays”
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.
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 that" type of comparison so common in today's conversation. This…
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.
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 Boonville on the last day of January. The weather was…
Bill Bennett, who had been Secretary of Education under Reagan and Drug Czar under George H.W. Bush, was on the talk shows last Sunday plugging his new book, “Going to Pot: Why the Rush to…
Do New Yorkers smoke weed? Yes, indeed, and apparently lots of it, though most of the New Yorkers on the new web series “High Maintenance” don’t seem to know where it comes from or how…