James Whiton plays double bass. He plays double bass as creatively and as well as anyone I’ve ever heard. He used to be in a band that should’ve been huge, Apricot Jam. They played around the southwest (mostly New Mexico) for a few years before moving to Portland and then splitting up. In the middle of his stint with that band, James had a motorcycle accident and shattered his bass-playing arm. Turned a good chunk of the bone to dust. He remained consious enough to make sure the ER docs didn’t cut it off and then proceeded to nurse it back to shape again, pulling off one miracle after another through sheer determination. Seeing him on his comeback tour with the Jam was one of the most inspriational things I’ve witnessed. James is still making beautiful music in Seattle, as a tour of his webpages reveals. He has music for sale (including the Jam CD I never managed to aquire until now). His new stuff, though different from the Jam, is still first class. He’s got several free MP3s available – give him a listen.

How’d you like to live in the country’s only Conservation Community with its own record label?

A short record of the creation of the Green Zebra tomato, one of the most popular we’ve grown this year.

I just noticed six days have gone by since I last wrote here. I don’t know why it’s been so long, and thinking back, I don’t know if anything’s really happened during the last week. I went to market on Saturday and sold out of everything. People even bought my samples. That’s never happened before. I started rehearsals for Larry Shue’s The Foreigner last week. I’m directing, and my pay will allow me to buy a greenhouse this fall. After a week of rehearsals, I promptly lost my lead actor, but I was able to find a more than capable replacement. Though it wasn’t due to your constant urges, I went and saw a professional for my back last week. A Kinesiologist who has done some wonderful work with others I know. He’s helped me isolate my pain to a single muscle, and I have stretching excercises to help me heal it. No drugs needed. But other than that, nothing’s really happened.

November 25th, 1997, marked the 134th anniversary of the battles for Chattanooga. On that day, Dave Buckhout and T.C. Moore retraced the route along which these battles flowed. They had cameras, a road map, and an ‘86 Buick. The resulting website is an example of what’s wonderful about the internet.

“A new generation of young people who have never heard of Ruby Ridge are now emerging from the public-school system and are heading off to college and will thereafter begin their careers in business, education, journalism, government, and other fields. This generation will find it hard to fathom that the federal government could have killed a boy and an unarmed woman and then tried to deceive everyone about what had actually occurred and, in some instances, rationalize what did occur. That is why it is important to remember Ruby Ridge.” I remember when this happened, and thought “there goes another bunch of racist separatists”. That’s what was being reported at the time. When the truth came out though, I knew that depite the fact I wouldn’t have been friends of the Weavers had I known them, I couldn’t in any way support what happened to them that day.

Lesson learned in Houston, Texas yesterday: shop at a 24-hour KMart in the middle of the night, go directly to jail. If you’re a 10-year-old girl having a late dinner with your father at the next door Sonic, well, it’s off to jail with you, too.

How about a car that goes 100mph, runs on hydrogen, has no conventional engine, steering wheel, or foot padals? That’s GM’s new Hy-Wire. Very pretty, inside and out. Seats five. I want one, but I’ll have to wait a few more years.

In late 1998 and early 1999, I began finding a new type of webpage here and there. These pages were not what I was used to seeing with online personal spaces, which was dry contact info, shrines to hobbies, recipes, and so forth. These new pages were updated regularly (sometimes several times a day!) and contained links to interesting or amusing sites and/or journally bits about the author’s day. One of my regular reads, Jorn Barger’s Robot Wisdom, called itself a weblog and that term made sense to me. I decided I wanted to keep a page like that. My ISP, though, had other ideas. A lack of basic FTP functionality stymied my efforts. Meanwhile, a fellow named Andrew (who maintained a whimsical weblog called “BeNiceToBears”) released a tool called Pitas that allowed you to updated a website from the browser for free. He even hosted the data on his own servers. I played around with it for a little bit, but having my words stored on someone else’s computers made me nervous, so I didn’t keep with it. Finally, three years ago this week, I decided to force the issue with my ISP. I created an ugly brown webpage, named it Kestrel’s Nest, and uploaded my first entry. My ISP still didn’t want to cooperate, but just a few days later a company named Pyra released a tool called Blogger that did the same thing Pitas did, but uploaded the data to my own webspace. I jumped at it and was one of their first ten general public users. Kestrel’s Nest was up and moving! The release of Blogger unleashed a flood of weblogs from people who had been waiting for an easy tool. Now, there are tens of thousands. Most aren’t worth reading by anyone but the author’s closest friends and family, but you know, despite what the scorners say (“99% of all online content is crrrrap!”) there’s nothing wrong with that. I’ve always thought that even if nobody reads your writings, even if you delete or throw away your words right after you’ve written them, that act of writing makes you a better person. It organizes your brain connections in such a way that helps you think critically and clearly. It turns the random impulses and emotions running around your head into something that is more organized and tangible, and that is always good. Quite a lot has changed for me since I’ve started this weblog. I’m right where I wanted to be three years ago, but then I never thought I’d get there so fast. Looking back at my entries here, when I look at my beautiful wife and my beautiful house, I don’t have to ask myself “How did you get here?” I know exactly how I got here, and I know exactly where I’m going. If you’re interested, you can know too. Here are thirty six entries from the last thirty six months that are representative of my journey from there to here:

• Blogger lets me post regularly
• I learn to make cheese
• Arthur C. Clarke predicts the future
• I went grocery shopping with Kim Basinger
• I join BikeAthens
• Despite living in an urban apartment, I declare myself an ecopoet.
• I break my lease and rent a farmhouse in rural Georgia.
• I have a homesteading kind of day
• A mountain vacation
• Breakfast with turkeys
• Don’t seem funny and it don’t seem right, Sittin’ on my bed on a Friday night
• I meet someone.
• A beach vacation
• I collect wild mushrooms
• Thinking about chicharones
• I admit it: I’m progressive
• More words about buildings and food
• I buy chickens
• A late winter soup
• Call me “trimtab”
• How does my garden grow?
• I mourn Douglas Adams
• I look at land
• Building an oven
• A sex-changing chicken
• I get my dander up
• We buy a farm
• We get married
• Thinking about Skanking
• The farm goes public
• Real milk
• An inspirational sustainiologist
• My former life, revisited
• First day at market
• Picking blackberries
• We join a farming cooperative
• I return my first car

GrabbingABite.com: for those who want to fully enjoy the time they invest in the recreation of eating out