please look at the paintings

here's another photo miles shot. i have been too busy and tired to write much. sad but true. work has begun and it just adds that extra element of things to do and take care of. like right now, i should be uploading photos of my new students and some of the new toys in our classroom to ofoto so i can get prints and bring them in. i'm not. so i feel guilty. but, i've got to blog (first time i used that as a verb).

went to mendocino last weekend, miles says that where brian lives is like "a place that is floating in the sky" and this is pretty accurate, highway 1 seems to go up and up, cliffs above the pacific and our friends all live up on ridges covered with tall trees. rich's band played an almost all night show while the kids and i slept at lisa's. i was up at 4 am two days straight, woken by the dog-pack like vocal stylings of a huge gang of sea-lions. they were somewhere near lisa's house, but probably a half-mile or more, and just incredibly loud and energetic. rich described it sounding like a huge animal orgy, i guess that is pretty accurate too. we caught a beetle inside and put him on a tree leaf where he was so starved he ate a huge hole before getting away from us. we frolicked on the beach by the anchor bay campground, which is a little rv city kind of place that got organized and bought the land they had rented for years from some real-estate person. very cool, some of the rvs have woodstoves outside, all kinds of ccrazy hammocks and outside kitchens and their own little store and dogs running around, maybe 50 separate sites and everyone knows each other. at brian's the party people were looking pretty psychedelic and happy and just gaga over the kids. i started having the not so wonderful feeling that i was just there as the bringer and caretaker of miles and maya, but i guess that's ok sometimes. we saw a big bird gliding down in circles which miles assured us was a bald eagle because he saw some white on his head.

yesterday i took a 2-hour free class on urban composting at the garden for the environment. we learned about what, how, when, why to compost, felt some worms, sifted and turned compost. it was a mix of rainbow grocery kind of folks, some hip and handsome gay men, a teenager who had just moved to the city from her parents' organic farm, and a very cool uber chubby short uber gardener with a t shirt reading Compost Queen. it seems like it could get addictive, trying to get less and less into the garbage can each week. very green and inspiring. san francisco collects a 5 foot high football field of garbage daily, yikes.

here's the big news. my aunt has photographed and is finding museum homes for the incredible paintings of my late great-uncle phil weintraub.
if you want to see the paintings i can email you the link. it's really worth checking out, some crazy combination of innocence and childhood and war and biology and patterns and love and beauty and ugliness. well, maybe i am going off but when i looked at these this morning i felt chills and just couldn't believe that this man was in my family. i only met him once, he was a withdrawn and pretty reclusive person. if you see a painting titled josy, that's my mom.

so i will try and keep up this where should we live theme but really i think it's more about do i stick with what i have and make the best of it? focus on the positive and work for good change? or seek elsewhere for happiness and safety and contentment? ah ha, maybe this obsessive theme is about more than where to live. maybe it's about a lot of other things, including not really knowing much about making decisions, just kind of drifting in a fast-floating river, going along with the current, enjoying the ride but also full of questions--maybe i should swim to the shore here? those people in that blue canoe look interesting, should i paddle over? what's going on on that bank over there?
oh no, i'm getting pruny and there is so much else to do.

please check out the link.
excuse my pathetic river metaphor. i'm too broke to see a therapist, so my insights need some work.

bye