There’s a lot I don’t understand about economic stimulus packages. I barely understand economics. Never mind, I don’t. But I have a couple of thoughts about debate in Congress about the current stimulus package: I honestly don’t get the logic behind the “tax cuts stimulate the economy” reasoning. I get that if people had more money, then maybe they’d spend more and that would benefit the economy. And that if businesses had less to pay in taxes then maybe they’d use the surplus money to create more jobs. But those seem like rather big maybes. And it could be argued …

In response to the 25 Things thing on Facebook: I have a very noisy cat. I don’t write as much as anyone who has claimed to want to be a writer should. Walking from a West End theater to a hotel one night in London was a life-changing event. I’m still not sure what I want to be when I grow up… there’s just so much I want to do! The best compliment anyone has recently paid me came last week when a neighbor said, “Whenever I walk by your yard, I think ‘little farm in the city’.” I horde …

Neil Gaiman – one of my most favorite authors ever and probably the most real celebrities I know of – has Twittered about a project Ian did. (Neil’s part is here.) I don’t know about Ian, but I’m perfectly giddy about the whole thing!

Caitlyn has decided to determine the distance between home and school. So she counts to herself, “One, two, three, four…” starting, of course, at some random point along the bus route. When the bus stops, she stops. When the bus gets going again, she picks up where she left off. “Eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one…” She gets to thirty-nine before needing help. “What comes after thirty-nine?” “Forty.” “Forty. Forty-one, forty-two, forty-three…” She made it to one hundred nine before getting snarled up in what should be next, asking me instead for what should come after ninety. Fortunately, it was our stop …

The folks at Food Democracy Now! have a little petition going with recommendations for various Under Secretary of Agriculture positions, twelve individuals who are “champions on issues of sustainability” and who have spent their lives “standing up for independent family farmers”. If you eat, care about what you eat, would like to see policies that support small family farmers before multinational agri-business conglomerates, or think that maybe an on-going habit of stripping the fertility out of our soil and then letting it blow away just so we can get one more bushel of corn is a stupid thing to do, …

So, in the middle of December, Seattle got sat on by an arctic air mass that kept our high temperatures just on either side of freezing. Then, naturally, a storm or series of storms moved in and dumped all kinds of moisture through that arctic air mass, resulting in snow. Quite a bit of it, which is unusual for Seattle, since we’re so close to sea level and all. And because of the arctic air mass, the snow didn’t go anywhere, which is what it would have normally done. Nope, it sat and got snowed on again. Apparently, this kind …