Acorn Day 1

Puck and i have an informal room sharing agreement.  In all of the sharing experiments we do at Twin Oaks, one of the ones which it is hardest for mainstream folks to wrap their heads around is sharing bed rooms.  When someone leaves Twin Oaks for more than 3 days, their room becomes community property and it can be assigned to guests who need space.  Room assigning is one of the jobs i have done for a long time and am currently covering it while Sapphyre is off meditating.

Different communards have different capacity for sharing rooms and Pucks capacity (after perhaps mine) is the best. He is generous with his room at Twin Oaks when he is not using it and it is often the place i end up sleeping when it gets to be 2 in the morning and i realize i have not worked this problem hard enough to know where i am going to sleep.

Puck gave me a ride and we chatted about the similarity of our situation.

“I am not an alternating member” he said “i am a dual member”  People often ask Puck (as they probably will me) “Which community are you part of now?” And while there is a technical specific single membership at any one time, what is really true is he (and hopefully i) are working on behalf of both of our home communities almost everyday.

When i arrived at Acorn i was pretty quickly given a seed picking orientation.  January is the beginning of the busy season and there is lots to do.  Rejoice explained how we take the orders customers have mostly placed thru our online ordering system and pull the various seeds for them.  We wander in circles around this smallish air conditioned space, in our little circular path pulling tiny packets of seeds from the thousands of varieties in the room.  Mac came in and helped and for a while we had 5 people picking seeds in this tiny room.  We cleared 3 days back log of orders, which was quite satisfying.

acorn three legged race

Acorn 3 legged race – with Rejoice and Mac and others

I did not get a chance to play Dominion or Magic with GPaul or Abe – but it was discussed and i am sure i will enjoy the company of these clever boys and these thoughtful complex games int he coming days.

Ira invited me to be the spokesperson for the Monsanto case, in which farmers and seed companies are suing this giant, because of there terrible behavior and their poisoning the ecosystem.  It is a long shot, because Monstanto outguns us with expensive lawyers and sympathetic judges.  What is fascinating to me is that Monsanto is illegally sending people onto farmers lands, stealing their crops, testing these crops finding traces of their genetically engineered materials in these crops and then successfully suing the farmers.  Most of these farmers would rather not have the Monsanto stuff in their fields and did not buy it in the first place.  Then these farmers settle out of court and part of the settlement is they can no go public with this injustice.  In 16 years they have sued 150 farmers and brought charges against 700.  Were Obama not appointing former Monsanto executives to the top spot in the Department of Agriculture, this would be something to seek justice over.

some of what our fine seeds grow into

some of acorns fine seeds, grown up

And i am blogging for Acorn, both for the community and for the business.  This will be good for me, to have a regular editor audience.  My job is to turn ideas into rough posts and then they can shape them, potentially radically.

The night wound up in the smoke shack, where there is card playing, and chess games and animated conversation.  There was this story game which i did not quite understand the rules of, but in which different players told true and fictitious stories about their lives and it moves thru all the people int he room.  i am excited as a story teller about this piece of the culture.

At the very end of the evening i went to the Rec Collective to go to sleep and went in only to find someone else (who i quite startled) had hopped into the bed i had made for myself (and understandable mistake, since there were no private blankets in the building other than the fluffy ones i brought).    I scurried out of the building as to not wake the perhaps 5 others sleeping in the crowded room.   This is why there are couches.