Well I couldn't help getting into the really good stuff: weather.  And for
all you poor souls out there in really horribly hot places, these last
couple of days here in God's Country (the Pacific Northwest) have been the
sort folks do move here for: after several days of cleansing rain, it is now
a cloudless 72 degrees.  How very delightful!

But I tell you, the business of folks moving here: it does give a person
pause to think that we measure our national well-being (well, *I* don't) by
the number of new "homes" constructed.

And here I mean two things, related: first, contractors do not build
"homes."  They build houses and people make homes out of them.  Or, as my
mother used to say, "It takes a heap of livin' to make a house a home."
   You do not buy my home; you buy my house.   I do not sell my home; I sell
my house.  It is the real-estate people with their insistence that
development is good who have co-opted the word "home" and bent it to their
marketing uses (as if people who live in apartments don't have "homes"!)
because the word "home" is much warmer, more humane and friendly.

The second thing I mean when I fulminate against "new housing starts" to
give it its proper name, is the destruction of what made it so nice to move
here and live here 25 years ago.  It is not mere railery against "new
fangled moderism": no, I tell you the place is not nearly as nice as it used
to be.  It's not just me.  Ask anybody: "Didn't this place [Bellingham,
Whatcom County, right across the line from  Canada, 50 miles from Vancouver,
BC] used to be nicer?"  And always the answer is yes.

So why do we continue along with the same economic imperative that, first,
destroys the whole connotation of the word "home" and second considers
"progress" to be the destruction of forestlands, the dislocation if not
ruination of all animals other than humans, the pollution of rivers and
streams and the near-extinction of salmon runs, the tainting of shell-fish
beds, the poisoning of ground water with fertilizers, the paving of
thousands of acres of farmland along I-5 for used car lots, equipment sales
and log-"home" sales companies?   Several  of the arterial roads here have
been torn up and re-paved, five lanes wide, to accomodate all the new
traffic, and scores of rural "homes" have been abandoned or the houses
literally moved away.  Forest lands are cut, stripped, gardens and farmland
bulldozed and paved to make room for the new Wal Mart and the Home Depot
monster stores.   And already even the new roads are congested at busy
times.  All hail the capitalistic system!

Is this what we have to look forward to, for another 300 years?   And I say,
it cannot go on like this!  Fulminate!

Dan Warner