I’m at work right now. I do the graphic design for Nizzibet’s church bulletin. Usually I do this early Sunday morning. Being a heathen I have no trouble working on the Sabbath.

I listened to one of KEXP‘s public service show on the drive over. This one was concerned with the effects of Geneticall Modified Organisms on the environment. I’m not too worried about the effect of GMO’s on the environment – not in a “we’re killing the planet” kind of way. The planetary ecosystem will survive humanity. The problem with GMOs is that, as they currently exist, they are poison to the human diet. Our livestock won’t eat GMO grain. GMO salmon have greater birth defects than wild salmon. GMO plants have less disease and insect resistance than natural plants.

What’s scary from a cultural side is that Monsanto, the company that’s responsible for about 90% of GMO grains out there is using patent laws to destroy its competition. There’s currently a case going through Canadian courts in which Monsanto is suing Percy Schmeiser, a farmer, for patent infringement because he had unlicensed Monsanto GMO canola growing in his ditch.

So far the Canadian courts have been upholding Monsanto’s insanity. Think about it. Monsanto is claiming rights to Schmeiser’s crops and profits because grain Monsanto created was growing on his property. Not being cultivated. Growing in his ditch. If no one planted it that means that it got there as environmental disapora. Which means that Monsanto can’t control it. Which in my book would mean that their rights over it should be limited. In order to have tough rights protection I would expect that Monsanto would have the ability to be responsible for their product. No responsibilty, no rights.

I’ve been opening and rearranging the contents of the boxes that my Esteemed Brother sent up from Sebastopol. The easiest material to organize is my correspondence. I’ve probably got 98% of all the cards and letters I’ve ever received. That is, paper cards and letters. My electronic correspondence has only sporadically been archived. The postal service carried stuff has been stuffed into various drawers and boxes and filing cabinets. With EB sending up all my left-behinds I should have everything in one place.

I probably wouldn’t be attempting this organization right now if I hadn’t put a system in place before I left California. Sometime back I started separating letters from envelopes, dating them and then filing them under the names of their senders in a little two drawer filing cabinet. One of the first boxes I opened a few days ago contained the majority of those files and the next box I opened contained the rest. So I emptied out a couple of cardboard filing boxes, arranged the files alphabetically and set to work.

I pull the card or letter from its envelope. If undated I try to suss out the probable mailing date from the postmark on the envelope. Then I either put the letter in its appropriate file, or, if I haven’t got one for that writer yet, I create a new file. Once I’m done with the Sebastopol boxes I’ll be going through the boxes of correspondence I’ve got from the last decade here.

My mom and dad left me enough letters that I could probably write short biographies of them. No surprise there. They were both prolific writers. My mom wrote regularly. My dad less frequently but he always responded to any letters I sent him. What I never cease to be surprised and touched by are the number of letters I’ve gotten from other people, especially people that I don’t remember having communicated much with. It probably helped that I was a prolific letterwriter myself. I’d dash off letters on scrap paper during breaks at the various jobs I had.

These days I barely manage to croak out two lines in reply to an email I’ve gotten. Gah. That’s depressing.

Still not connect to the ‘net at home. We have a different ISP for the apartment than we had for the house and I haven’t figured out how to get our router to work with it. Once I get that taken care of posts here will become more frequent. Notice that I’m not saying that posts will actually become frequent.

This morning I unpacked my WACOM tablet and hooked it up to my computer. I’d found and inked a kaiju drawing yesterday morning so today I decided to color it. I made a little progress. Once it’s done I’ll post it to my Kaijuphile gallery.

Attacked another few boxes before I went to work on the illustration. One was filled with books. I found a shelf that had room for them. One was filled with files from my filing cabinet back in Sebastopol – letters from friends. Another was filled with stories and artwork that I did when I was a kid. I set both of those boxes aside for sorting later. I’d like to have gone through all the boxes by the end of this month. There’s probably quite a bit of stuff from 8046 Earl that should have been given or thrown away. There is also a lot of stuff from Sebastopol that needs to be organized so we can live with it here.

After about four years in Ballard the office I pretend to manage moved. There’s still organizing to do here and still clean up to do there. I’m hard pressed to be enthusiastic about either task. Moving my residence was enough of a chore.

Still, the new space has a good ambience for tech support and design. And we’ve got good views of Seattle on three sides. I personally get to overlook Aurora Ave and listen to the neverending roar of commute traffic.

Shining.

Apologies to those of you reading Misspent Youths. I entered the dates wrong on a couple of the recent entries and they failed to post as expected. I’ve fixed that. The pages should post on Tuesdays as scheduled from now on. (Thanks to Nick for pointing the problem out.)

I’ve also cut the prices for Misspent Youths 2 – 5. I’m more interested in having people read them than in trying to make a profit on them. Clearing out a little space in my overstuffed apartment would be nice too. I’m going to be adding a listing selling all four issues for $10 once I’ve got my home computer web-enabled again.

I finished In The Days of the Comet last night. The earth passes through the tail of comet and a green gas puts all living things to sleep. When they awake, what happens? Is the world overrun with zombies? Do all the animals start talking and hunting down humans? Does humanity gain awesome psychic powers?

Nah.

I don’t know what happens to the rest of the animal population but humanity wakes up and … is Enlightened. Everybody gets together and starts building a socialist utopia. The hero rejects his lover and then, as he becomes more enlightened, his limited picture of love expands enough to include her as she is. Happy ending.

– I seem to be losing weight. Or at least getting thinner. I’m tucking in my shirts and tightening my belt because my pants have been looser lately. I haven’t had a plan for this. I suppose I’ve gotten a bit more exercise what with all the lifting and shifting involved in moving. And I think I’m eating less now than I was at this time last year. But it’s just something that’s happened rather than something I set out to do.

– I’m recovering from a cold. Happens the same way every time. First I get a scratchy throat. That lasts a day or two. Then my nose gets very productive in the snot department. That’s another two or four days. Then I feel mostly okay but I keep coughing for the next week or two. I’m in the coughing phase now.

– I’ve been reading H.G. Wells lately. I’ve got a collection of his science fiction novels and I’m going through the ones I haven’t read before. So far that’s The Invisible Man, First Men in the Moon and Food of the Gods. I’m surprised by Wells’ sense of humor, especially in the latter two books. The Invisible Man is a little dull – perhaps because I knew how the story would turn out and perhaps because not much happens. Griffin, the inventor of the invisibility process, is a pathetic sort of maniac. Being invisible requires being naked and being naked in the English weather is really uncomfortable. He spends a good amount of his time trying not catch cold. Moon and Food are more fun, partly because I was less familiar with them and partly because a lot more happens. Food especially was a surprise since there haven’t been any (anywhere near faithful) movie adaptations of it. In The Days of the Comet is next.

– My work is moving. Bleah. Moving myself is annoying enough. Moving the place I work … very low on my list of enjoyable activities. The good thing is that once we’ve moved we probably won’t do it again before I’ve moved on to another job.

Nizzibet loves the new place. I’m sure she’ll love it more when everything is unpacked and organized but even in its current state of chaos she finds the apartment cozy and restful.

Paliki, almost surprisingly, also seems to enjoy herself. She’s spent the last 12 years as an indoor/outdoor cat. The last few months at the old house she was much more outdoor than indoor. She’d show up in the morning, eat, go out and then find a place to sleep until dinnertime, come in, eat and then she’d go out until morning. We didn’t put her out, she went, she ran. We’d usually have to call her to come in. She’d often stalk back and forth in front of the open front door, meowing, not going away and not coming in. She didn’t seem to want to interact with us much. We were worried that she’d freak out being trapped in this relatively small space with us.

Maybe it’s a matter of finally finding a space that fit the cat. There’s no competition with other cats here. She’s past her hunting and climbing days. She mostly slept when she was outside. There are lots of nooks and crannies to hide in here. And she gets petted. She loves to be petted. She’s always loved to be petted. I guess she’d forgotten how much she loved it in the last few months.