I attended my second Arts Alive! here in Eureka last night. The art scene here is part of the reason that I think Eureka has way more going for it than your average small town of a similar size. (That, and the number of coffee places with free wireless.)  Arts Alive! happens the first Saturday of every month, and along with the art shops and galleries, all the other businesses in Old Town showcase pieces by local artists and serve free food and drink.  Many places also have live music, and then a lot of stuff happens in the street as well: random musicians, magicians, and other street performers hang out in some of the squares or just on the sidewalk.

The big to-do last night was, in my opinion, at the Accident Gallery, which was featuring an exhibit on hip-hop art. (Which was a drastic improvement over last month’s “erotic” art exhibit, whose main messages seemed to be the somewhat tired line of “we’re artists, so we can paint people nude or having sex and thus it’s art” and the unfortunate sentiment of “hey, bdsm is trendy now, so even though we’re mostly men and our paintings all depict and encourage violent sexual acts against women, it’s all OK.” It was pretty awful.) But this time, not only did they have some great paintings and prints on display, but the gallery was surrounded by live art, and was itself being transformed:

I’m hoping to go by there in the next day or so and see what the final creation looks like. In addition to the graffiti artists, they had a turntable set up, and some guy who teaches kids breakdancing had his students there and they were all performing. Some of the kids were pretty good, but perhaps even more entertaining were the toddlers in the audience who decided that they, too, deserved a turn and went and rolled around in the middle of the street in an attempt to ‘breakdance.’ No photos of them, but here’s a shot of the main guy:

I think I’m going to miss Eureka. There are only two weeks left to my internship; then Ben will arrive, and we’ll spend a few days here, then a few days hiking the Lost Coast, and then it’s back to Chicago for the rest of the summer.  I feel like everything’s gone by really quickly.

And chances are that returning to school, all my coffee shop encounters will become a little less exciting.  At the Div School, I’m a lot less likely to have conversations, for instance, like the ones that just occurred while I was writing the above.  I had an older gentleman walk over and ask for my help in copying down the name of the photograph above my table, along with the artist’s info, so that he could contact her about buying it.  It’s a really pretty photo of bright orange poppies.  The man, who was rather old and using a cane, and who couldn’t read the info himself because he couldn’t see it well enough, then proceeded to tell me about how much he liked poppies.  He liked them so much, he said, that when the gardener for his apartment building mowed over the nearby poppies and sprayed them with pesticide so they wouldn’t come back, he not only planted new poppies and put a protective fence around them, but then threatened the gardener that should they be mowed over again, he would beat him with a baseball bat and make sure he did it well enough to ensure that a hospital trip was necessary.  “Oh,” I said. “Couldn’t your building just hire a different gardener?”

And then, a little later: another man (also, strangely, old and with a cane), seeing my pile of books and notes, said, “Studying, eh? I left college forty years ago and never looked back… sometimes I still have nightmares about trying to make it to a final exam on time, and not being able to find it… I always hated studying.  Glad to get out. How long until you get to be done?”  “Oh, well… I’m thinking about getting a PhD. So I’ll probably be in school a bit longer yet.”

On both accounts, their friendly expressions became somewhat quickly less friendly, and they decided that the conversation was over, sort of like I was a person so obviously unreasonable that all future discussion should be avoided.

As chronicled in at least one of the entries below, I have on occasion found myself able to gain company at coffee shops, even when such intention was furthest from my mind.   And so it was yesterday, when after going to the farmers’ market in Henderson Center, I stopped for some coffee and a muffin at Vellutini’s:

While very pleasant, my companion remained rather silent (perhaps distressed that I, in joining his table, had decided it more appropriate he sit on a chair rather than the table-top). I did my best to inquire of others if they perchance were acquainted with him, however, no one seemed to be, or at least would not claim such acquaintance publicly.  Certainly those passing by seemed to take great shock at my free and open association with such a character. Yet as all the children who came by seemed delighted at his appearance, I chalk such apprehension up to the frequent narrow-mindedness of unfortunately unimaginative adults.

I had hoped to be able to leave my friend with the assurance that, despite his apparent lack of material possession, he would be provided for upon my absence, or at least that he had some suitable lodging to which he could return.  Alas, he would hear nothing of my entreaties, be they even after his own well being, to divulge his plans beyond his time at the bakery.  I was forced at last to take leave myself, with only the vague hope that perhaps some friend would come to retrieve him, or that some child, much less polite than I, would have nothing of his refusals and drag him promptly along home.

So DUHC had its third annual SkillShare this past Saturday. The basic idea: everyone gets together and swaps things they know how to do, from herbal first aid to tamale-making. Meaning, instead of reading Harry Potter, I was attending workshops on brewing beer at home, how to effectively facilitate meetings, and how to ride your bike in bad weather, among other things.

Larry, who is the DUHC volunteer who has graciously been my host this summer, also did a workshop called “Schlepping,” on moving heavy things easily/with less effort.  While moving heavy objects may not normally be on the top of my to-do list, Larry’s enthusiasm for such things was actually pretty infectious and I thought I’d take a stab at schlepping – the object at hand in fact being Larry’s truck:

Exciting as it looks, we didn’t actually get the truck off the ground like that – the springs outdid us.  Jared eventually moved it to the side just using a 2×4, though. And we did move a whole bunch of other things via levers, rollers, and even by lifting them onto blocks, sliding marbles underneath, and then moving them around on marbles.

I think I definitely earned the pint of coffee ice cream that kept me company for my all-night Harry Potter reading.

From the pond in Sequoia Park:

And his friends:

I know, I know, no posts. (Though my response to Zev’s comment is almost long enough to qualify as a post.) What have I been doing instead? Well, one, I have begun doing some writing for TransformationCentral, a website linked to the Solidarity Economy Track at the US Social Forum; feel free to check out my first post for them.

Two, I have been busy with DUHC helping plan this event and utilizing my book-geekiness and former library staff ways to help reorganize their lending library and put together an online catalog for it.

Three, I have been allowing myself to be carried along in the general Harry Potter frenzy. I reread the sixth book, and yes, went so far as to procure the illicit online copy of the seventh book (I even learned how to use torrents for the first time to do it). Is the copy a hoax? I would say definitely not. I will say, however, that the first page of the third chapter was blurry enough to prevent me from any further reading. (The pages are photographs of the actual book, many clear enough to read, but I wasn’t risking getting further along only to find some really important part truly illegible.) So, like everyone else, I will wait for my reserved copy. And in fact, I won’t be getting mine until Saturday afternoon; I have decided to forgo midnight release parties and all (even the Harry Potter roller derby party apparently happening here in Humboldt).

I also spent a long time with the rest of the DUHC staff at a dinner last night celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Seventh Generation Fund, which provides grants to indigenous groups working to preserve their land, culture, and sovereignty. Issues faced by indigenous communities are becoming a somewhat larger theme in my summer than I expected. They were certainly prevalent at the USSF, (there’s a good news article here detailing some of that), but especially on the final day at the People’s Assembly. I have meant for awhile to write about this, and I’m thinking now seem’s a good time for it, so here we are:

The Assembly was a space for people from the Forum to share resolutions together in an effort to share the large variety of movements and projects present at the Forum, and to encourage everyone to continue that work at home. However, there was a pretty limited amount of time for this, which caused some tension when an indigenous man from Ecuador had the microphone forcefully taken away from him. I remember being rather upset by this; it seemed too symbolic of the silencing of Native peoples that has gone on for so long now. However, people acted fast, and not too long later, dozens of representatives from different indigenous groups were up on stage. They spoke of how disrespectful they understood the action on stage to be, and then drummed and sang a song to heal and restore dignity both for the community at the assembly and the man who had been forced off stage. George Friday, the woman who had been moderating the assembly and had taken the Ecuadorian’s mic away, came back onstage and apologized, saying, “When I fuck up, you know we’re going to recognize it and do something about it.” I was amazed at the ability to create a spontaneous process for conflict resolution at a large assembly with thousands of people; to be a part of the crowd, and feel the injury, and then feel the emotional healing occur not long after, and know that the vast number of people around me were going through the same process; it was a totally new experience for me. There had been further tension created, at one point, when a member of the American Indian Movement suggested that the majority of the crowd had been silently complicit in the injustices experienced by Native peoples in recent decades, as Indians continue to be jailed for peaceful resistance to continued infractions by the US government. The crowd has started to suggest that maybe their time on the stage should be up. But this, too, was cleared up. Another person spoke, clarifying that they were not suggesting that the rest of us were the enemy, they knew that we were not; but at the same time, their anger and indignation needed to be spoken, that we might understand the nature of what had happened, and the depth of feeling; that such indignation has been silenced for too long, and if our movements are to work together, we must find a way for that silencing not to happen.

This subject of the appropriate way to prevent silencing of Native peoples while also working with them also came up at the most recent of DUHC’s monthly pancake breakfasts, where I had an interesting conversation with a Native American Studies professor at Humboldt State University about the relationship between anthropologists and Native communities, and whether or not this is in fact improving. He seemed to think that anthropology is still acting as a fairly destructive force; he talked about UC Berkeley’s anthropology department, for instance, apparently being fairly antagonistic towards the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. I asked him what he thought about linguistic anthropologists involved in helping Native communities retrieve, restore, or preserve their original languages, since I had heard of this being an example of positive Native-anthropology interactions. Certainly such work is done with good intentions, he said, but added that it would be better if anthropologists were to teach their skills to the Native communities, empowering them and allowing them to do the work themselves. He talked about experiential learning being a key part of how many Native peoples learn, and suggested that if they are to preserve or relearn their languages, the process of that reclaiming will be as important as the actual result itself. He cited the decision of the state of Oregon to provide free college education to Native students as an example of empowerment, as opposed to simply providing services. (This seems complicated to me, however; isn’t it through Western-style education that many of the younger generations of Native peoples have been taught to disrespect their own culture and have lost much of the important indigenous knowledge they once had?)

So, the Seventh Generation Fund dinner last night continued to add to these ideas and experiences. I think what was perhaps the most notable occurrence, for me, was the announcement of the decision made by Seventh Generation to pay an honorary tax to the Wiyot people, recognizing that their current office in Arcata is in Wiyot territory, and thus paying the tax as a tribute to the Wiyot. DUHC later stepped up and said they would also recognize their presence on Wiyot land and pay the honorary tax. This sent a flurry of thoughts through my head – wouldn’t it be amazing if there was a movement of individuals and organizations around the country voluntarily offering such honorary taxes – a repatriation movement based not in legislation but in real public good will, and rather than being symbolic, providing tangible benefits to Native peoples? This is when it also occurred to me that I know absolutely nothing about what peoples previously resided in the Chicago area.  As far as I can tell, it seems like there have been many groups, including the Potawatomi, the Illinois, and the Miami.  It seems that most of the groups were eventually forced to relocate to Oklahoma.  (Any of you Chicagoans know more specifics about this?) So it looks like if I’m going to pay an honorary tax myself, it will take a little bit more research. But I suppose this a good place to be in, considering that before last night the idea would never have occurred to me.

And since I am fairly ignorant on the subject, does anyone know about any previous repatriation movements?  Have such movements aimed for honorary tributes in the past, but failed to gain popular support or momentum?  Or have most attempts for tribute or repatriation been through the legal system? I would be interested in finding out.

Sunday afternoon I went for a walk in Sequoia Park, which is really only a few blocks away from here; I had been sort of ashamed of not making it there before now.

The plan, of course, was to have a quiet walk through the woods to enjoy the sunny afternoon spent predominately in the company of trees. Oh, how silly of me! I would never go to a park in Chicago on the weekend and expect to find only trees. Why should I expect to here? I took only a few steps before my foolishness was revealed to me – though in ways I certainly wasn’t prepared to expect.  From somewhere… I couldn’t quite tell where… some sort of thumping sound was coming, loudly and regularly.   Thud, Thud, thud thud thud.  It sounded sort of like someone was hammering on a 5-gallon pickle bucket. After a few turns I discovered the culprits:

They looked like they were enjoying themselves, which maybe makes up a little for the fact that their sound certainly didn’t seem to be causing anyone else joy, so far as I could tell…

Not long after this, another strange form of music began floating through the air: tinny calliope music, eerie in quality, as though some sort of ethereal carnival from the past was about to materialize in front of me.  This, however, turned out to be caused only by an ice cream van winding its way down on the road through the park.  With such music, I expected some sort of Willy Wonka-like figure to step out and spirit children away into the van (we’re thinking in a good way here: spirited away to a land of chocolate where the good are rewarded and the bad become giant blueberries).  Instead: the driver, sallow and unshaven, stuck out his head and swore at two boys on bikes who rode away rather quickly.  (You know, you just shouldn’t drive an ice cream truck if you don’t like kids.)

My (semi-)magical adventure through the sequoias was not yet ended, however.  Up the top of a hill I climbed, when suddenly, bursting through the brush, there came a bare-chested warrior sporting a shield, a sword strapped to his back, long hair flowing over it.  He rushed by, ignoring me.  I tried to pretend that I regularly walked by guys with swords every day, while trying to figure out what he was up to… Maybe he was going to avenge those two boys and strike down the sullen ice cream vendor? (In which case, perhaps there will be ice cream for all, and maybe I should follow him…) Or maybe that drumming was just really pissing him off?

Or maybe he belongs to the two guys who are practicing with battle axes on that fallen log over there?

I decided to leave the park.  Though it became obvious that the weaponry was perhaps somewhat more explainable as I continued on, and saw several pieces propped up against a tree: they looked like they were wood and plastic, well-covered with duct tape.   All was revealed later in the evening, when I learned that there is a fairly active branch of the Society for Creative Anachronism around here.

Which is a little sad.  I was finally thinking that maybe at last I had been transported into a land from a fantasy novel, where I would be assured success in all my fights against evil, as they would no longer involve dismantling the military-corporate complex and instead depend only on my (of course innate) archery and dueling skills.

I’ve been spending the past couple of days processing things at the Social Forum, and trying to make sure to remember things I found important. I thought I might talk about what turned out to be the highlights of my time there.

First, on the first big day of workshops, I attended trainings on nonviolent direct action with the Ruckus Society. This was really good, just in having a space to reflect a little bit on direct action, its usefulness and purposes. I think the idea of implementing direct action was really complicated for me (which is a good thing). Also, there was some training on how to respond the police intimidation, which was helpful. And I met and had some good conversations with people who have been involved in more action than I have myself, including folks working to prevent deforestation and strip mining in Appalachia.

Part of what Ruckus does in one of its trainings is a human spectrograph. They read off possible direct actions, and everyone finds a spot in the room based on how violent/nonviolent they see the action being, as well as how effective/ineffective. Disagreement on whether or not an action is violent seemed to really crop up around two issues: 1) actions that are nonviolent themselves but are known to provoke others, like the police, to violence; and 2) destruction of property. I knew about this exercise ahead of time, and had been doing some thinking on the question, so the spectrograph activity became the place for me to really publicly question for the first time whether harm to corporate property should count as violence. I do think it’s a really complicated question, and depends a lot on how a specific action effects individuals. Is there any risk that people will be hurt? Even if there is not risk of direct harm, is there risk that individuals not responsible for the problems you’re interested in stopping will be harmed because of your tactics? I really think, that just logically, it should not count as violence to challenge the property of corporations, which are only legal fictions, especially if it’s in the interest of real rights for actual human beings. But unless you make sure that there are safety nets in place for real individuals who might suffer (say, raising support to help workers who may be put out of a job if you prevent a logging operation from going through) then you should consider other tactics. Of course, this is all just in theory now, seeing as the only direct action I’ve really ever been involved in is considerably more limited in scope, and nowhere near as involved in directly challenging corporate power.

Friday the best workshop I attended was “Promoting Black Environmental Thought and Action,” sponsored by a group called AfroEco. I’ve always felt slightly uneasy about participating in environmental groups that are largely white, especially when trying to talk about issues on environmental justice, and especially being located on Chicago’s South Side. When the Religion and the Environment Initiative was trying to regularly hold an eco-justice reading group during the winter, I had tried to do some outreach through the minority students’ office, but didn’t really feel like I had any common ground on which to meet people to talk about their perspectives on the environment. So I attended this workshop largely to listen, and I feel like I learned a lot. I experienced a really big shock when the presenter asked two really striking questions: “How many of you, when you think of a tree, still associate it with lynching?” and “How many of you, thinking about ‘the land,’ and farming, think ‘our people aren’t ever going back there’?” Hands were raised around the room for both questions. Such thoughts had just never occurred to me, even when viewing things like the Without Sanctuary photo exhibit. This is a really big shift, to understand that trees, which to me symbolize life, might instead be associated with death for a significant number of people in our society.  Something that I also heard in this workshop, which I have rarely seen addressed in predominately white environmental groups, is an emphasis on strengthening one’s family connections and community through participation in the environmental movement, rather than being forced to sort of throw one’s entire life into environmental action without thinking of how it is improving social bonds and community.  I think this is a really important point that many social movements need to incorporate into their work.  How do we create change without adding to the general trend of isolated individuals in the U.S.?  And can we even work effectively if we aren’t strengthening one another’s social bonds at the same time we are attempting to change our own communities?

This workshop, along with recommendations from folks at DUHC, steered me towards the Catalyst Project’s Saturday session called “‘Battle for the Hearts and Minds’: White Anti-Racist Organizing Vision and Strategies.”  The presenters from Catalyst were absolutely amazing, particularly in their ability to address complex issues with not only intellectual but emotional depth.  The message of the workshop is captured well by the name of Catalyst’s website: “collective liberation.”  We cannot win our other struggles (to save the earth, to have real human rights for both women and men) without addressing the divisive structures of race that have been entrenched in our society.  I’ve been learning a lot about the creation of the ideas of race in the U.S. – a tool developed by the wealthy elite to help quell rebellions where indentured European servants and African slaves were teaming up together to fight for their rights – and hopefully will post more on this later; I feel like I need to do a little bit more reading and reflection first.  But at the moment I am convinced of the need for whites to take a lead in actively organizing against racism in their own communities.  A speaker from Oregon’s Rural Organizing Project, who presented with Catalyst, spoke of the need for ‘inoculation,’ by which she meant that we can’t just cry out when racist slurs show up around us, or when racist anti-immigrant groups like the Minutemen start taking action.  We have to organize before this, so that when others in our communities are subjected to arguments from racist groups, the arguments don’t make sense; people have already learned to consider immigrants as members of society, and thus can’t so easily dehumanize them.  “Everyone is either a potential Freedom Rider or a potential Minuteman,” she said.  So the question is, how do we work to turn people into Freedom Riders, and prevent them from becoming Minutemen?  A member of the Heads Up Collective from San Francisco also spoke, and touched on some themes which were repeated throughout the conference, namely, the links between racism here at home (particularly as exemplified in the response to Hurricane Katrina) and U.S. imperialism abroad.  Again, this is something I want to do a little more reading and thinking about, but will hopefully post about later.

The same goes for what I learned about at the one big plenary session I attended, “Liberating Gender and Sexuality: Integrating Gender and Sexual Justice Across Our Movements,” which was also definitely a highlight.  I don’t think I’ve ever been somewhere before where justice for the LGBT community, and for women, was not just a matter of political correctness but of true concern to the majority of people present, or where the recognition of hetero-sexism and patriarchy were fully recognized as existing and as needing to be overturned.  But I definitely felt like this was the case at the USSF.

Other highlights: the stressful, but meaningful, People’s Movement Assembly on Sunday morning, and all sorts of activities which I participated in surrounding the “Solidarity Economy.”  But the fog has finally burned off here in Humboldt this morning, so I’m afraid it’s time to be outside rather then here at my blog.

The U.S. Social Forum has begun!

For the last two days there have been nearly 13,000 people gathered here in Atlanta under the slogan “Another World is Possible; Another U.S. is Necessary.”  And I have been one of those many folks, who are still trickling in on buses and planes and caravans of cars.

Monday, I drove down from Humboldt county with the majority of the DUHC crew. That evening after we arrived in San Francisco we went to Axum Cafe, which serves Ethiopian food. I had never eaten Ethiopian food before, and I liked it quite a lot. Everyone has these spongy, soft pieces of flatbread (which taste a little like sourdough) and then there’s a large platter and you just scoop out the food with your pieces of bread. We had a vegetarian platter, so there was a spicy chickpea dish, and yellow lentils, a sort of cabbage/potato mix, a mushroom-based dish, and a nice sort of spicy spinach dish that we all shared.

Then, Tuesday, I spent a decent time in the San Francisco airport before my flight, and then quite awhile afterwards in the Atlanta airport discovering that the flight just about everyone else from DUHC was on had been extremely delayed because of bad weather in Texas. At this point, we still don’t have a large amount of the supplies everyone was expecting to use in presenting in their workshops, or a lot of the material we were hoping to hand out while tabling. But thankfully, all the people are here, which is good (they came in some time around 6am this morning).

The first day of the Forum was interesting, but mostly dedicated, for me, to helping out with the Democracy Track Tent (read: handing out a lot of copies of the Democracy Track workshops and tabling for DUHC). The big feature of the afternoon was the Opening March, which went from the Georgia state capitol building to the Atlantic Civic Center. It was a really fun march, with lots of drumming groups dancing their way through, as well as amazing art displays like this puppet made by a coalition of groups here at the Forum:

Today, the second full day of the Forum, has been really fun and I’ve learned a lot.  But at the moment I’m a bit too tired to write about it… all of this was supposed to go up yesterday, but there were some wireless problems at the hotel.  But hopefully I’ll get more details up about everything tomorrow.

I had a fun and unexpected encounter Sunday afternoon, when I went out for coffee to Old Town Coffee and Chocolates. While sitting at one of their outside tables, an older man (in his 50s, maybe early 60s) sat down at the table closest to me. After a little bit, he began asking about the book I was reading, Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice by Cormac Cullinan. “Wild law?” he said. “Isn’t that kind of an oxymoron?” So I started explaining Cullinan’s idea that human law needs to take into account the patterns of order that appear in the natural world, and that we need to understand human law as part of a greater system of laws or order (physical and ecological laws, as well as patterns of moral and social values) if it is ever actually to be effective in ordering human relationships with the Earth. This launched us into a conversation on the growing ecological awareness of the U.S. at present, and whether or not we will reach some sort of ‘cusp’ in which we really do begin to reorganize social relations, not only to benefit other animals and the land, but also to provide greater social and spiritual possibilities for people: to create deeper individuals, stronger communities of people.

After awhile, he says “Hold on. I want to get you something,” and hops up from the table (he had moved over to my table by this point) and goes down the street to an old, faded blue VW van. He opens up the back and pulls out a book and brings it with him, and asks for my pen. A moment later, he hands it to me, and it turns out that he is the author of said book, and he has signed it and added “For Megan: To read in your contemplative moments. – Lew Paz.”

We didn’t talk too much more after that (it was nearing dinner time) and eventually he took off. But now I own a copy of Pushing Ultimates: Fundamentals of Authentic Self-Knowledge, written and self-published by Mr. Lew Paz (you can check it out at www.plumbell.org). It didn’t necessarily jump up the ranks of my reading list (Paulo Freire, Shulamith Firestone, and C. Lummis easily made their way into my bag for this trip instead) but none of these authors bear the distinction of having kissed my hand at the end of a conversation with them. (I offered mine to shake his, and was pretty downright surprised to have it kissed instead!)

Saturday I had the opportunity to check out both the Arcata’s Farmers’ Market as well as Arcata’s annual Oyster Festival. While oysters aren’t necessarily my thing, I do like outdoor festivals, so I thought I’d check it out. I did try both “oyster rockefeller pierogi” as well as a grilled oyster with lemon juice and butter (cooked as shown below). Oysters have officially been relegated to “eh, not bad, but don’t really care about them” status in the Megan culinary scheme.

The farmers’ market, incidentally, was pretty cool. Instead of just one or two booths with organic produce, nearly everything was organic and grown on small farms. I had some fresh cherries, which were delicious.

The festival itself was also fun. Good live music, and lots of folks crammed, but not too crammed, into the one-square-block of the Arcata plaza. People really chilling, kicking back, some folks freely dancing. The whole thing made me remember how different just the whole cultural atmosphere of the Pacific northwest can be. Take this, for instance: six hours in the middle of hundreds of people, and I don’t remember seeing anyone on a cell phone the entire time. (What think you of that, all you Chicagoans?) That, and I still find the mixture of (left-over? neo?) hippies (old guys with long hair, women in flowy skirts in lots of colors), lumberjack-type guys in flannel and boots, and kids with dreads kind of appealing.

I also kind of like the mixture of palm trees and coniferous trees that you get around here. The palms keep kind of surprising me; it’s not too hot here, and you get used to seeing all the evergreens and then suddenly bam, there’s a giant palm in sight. Also, I was pretty amused by the number of people at the festival drinking out of paper bags (see the bottom right corner of the second picture above). There was beer for sale, but folks were obviously interested in bringing their own. (Furthermore, check out this guy’s kid brother, toasting with his water bottle: Cheers to the paper bag!)

Oyster Fest was just one day, which I’m cool with because this morning DUHC held a pancake breakfast, and I have to say I probably prefer pancakes. And the vegan pancakes we made this morning were particularly good (helping to break down just a little bit more my general skepticism of vegan baked goods). The pancake breakfast is part of the Humboldt County Exchange community currency project. You can pay to attend the breakfast with either regular cash or community currency, and there’s also a space set up for folks to bring things to barter or sell for community currency. Lots of DUHC members and volunteers and friends are invited and everyone sort of hangs out together eating pancakes and fruit and drinking coffee. It was nice. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any pictures.

So the weekend was a fun cap to my first week here in Eureka. I’m feeling fairly settled in and like I’m gaining a good sense of the town as well as what goes on at DUHC and what I might work on there. I think it’s looking like it will be an enjoyable couple of months here.