Be it further resolved...

...that I'm not gonna bitch about work on the blog anymore.

This has nothing to do with any improvements at The Children's Correctional Gulag #108. It has everything to do with getting Annageek to stop with the excruciating mocking of me.

You win, OK?

No seriously, you win!

Stop!

So now that that's out of the way, I've been enjoying my Xmas books immensely the last couple of weeks. I started out (literally on Xmas morning before I'd even finished opening the other goodies) reading Emma Goldman's autobiography, Living My Life.

Incredible! Inspiring! Fascinating! I love this book, love it love it love it!

Which, considering just how much I usually despise biography as a genre,especially the pretentious and utterly egocentric Icelandic autobiographies that every single Icelander is required by law to publish before or shortly after they die, is pretty surprising.

(Let me repeat it one more time: THE THREE VOLUME COLLECTED MEMOIRS OF AN INBRED SHEEP FARMER IN DALVÍK SHOULD NEVER EVER EVER BE A BEST SELLER!)

Oddly enough, the only other autobiography I've ever really like was also by an Anarchist and contemporary of Goldman's, Peter Kropotkin. His Memoirs of a Revolutionist was nearly (thought not quite) as good as Living My Life.

After Goldman, I indulged in a little brain-free fantasy, devouring For a Few Demons More, the fifth in a wonderfully fun series of post-(quasi) apocalyptic fantasy stories featuring bi-sexual vampires, bad-ass pixies and a the hottest (although unluckiest) red-head spell caster since Willow.

ahhh....Willow....

After that I tore through China Mieville's brilliant Perdido Street Station and his orgasmically good The Iron Council.

Yesterday I started Plenty, a book by two Vancouverites who decided to try a diet consisting of only foods produced within a 100 mile radius of their home. So far, its a fascinating read. I was hooked from the first chapter-heading quote, a bit of graffiti the author found in the city: "Man is born free and everywhere in chain stores".

Lucky for them though that they live in the hot-bed of C.S.A. that is the Cascadia. They may have a hard time getting wheat, but my ol' neck of the woods grows damn near everything else. I'm excited to finish the book.

All this reading, especially when combined with two other books I received Xmas and look forward to re-reading, E.F. Schumacher's enlightening Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if people mattered, and Kirkpatrick Sales' rowdy Rebels Against The Future have left me with a peculiar longing to go back to the States...or more accurately, to go back to Cascadia, and take an active part in the slow local revolution that's sprouting up from the home soil.

Not that I will. I just want to.

My ma, The Honorable Peggy, has been working with the Cascade Land Conservancy to protect and develop sustainable farming in the upper-reaches of the Carbon River Valley area before the last of its incredibly fertile soil gets paved over with ugly track-housing. The red-neck (not the cool I.W.W. kind, the Jeff Foxworthy kind) town I went to High School in has its own local brewery now, and the "eat local, act global" meme has even caught on amongst the folks who used to rail against "tree-huggin' faggots" and thinks that anyone who didn't like Bud was "a city-slicker snob".

I'd love to help her out.

Plus it would give me an excuse to visit my newest nephew (two in three months!!!) Nathan. Congrats Jen and Daryl!!!!

But the way things are at the mo', I'll be another year or two before I can manage anything other than the typical 2 week trip home.

Oh well...the women are better looking here....

That's all for now dear blogadytes...more on the flip.