Katchoo

After several years of getting excited about the lineup of this or that film festival in Atlanta, I finally went to one. Spent most of the day today at the Jewish Film Festival and saw one full length documentary, 9 shorts, and two features. All well worth it. Loved it, glad I did it, wish I could do it more often.

Now I want to get to Toronto or Sundance…

I tried 100 books last year but fell way short thanks to sudoku, magazines and podcasts taking up a lot of my reading time. But one book a week? I can do it!

First book for the year:

1. The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

You’d think a book about what happens to human artifacts, from art to architecture to ubiquitous plastic detritus, if humanity disappears through extinction, rapture or implosion, would be depressing but this book is oftentimes oddly hopeful. Although the radioactive remnants of our nuclear power plants and the unyielding plastic chemicals we’ve strewn everywhere would be problematic, it seems that the rest of life on earth would adjust pretty well to us vacating our overgrown niche.

The best part of the book, though, are the suggestions of things that we can do to lower our impact before the earth shakes us off like a dog getting rid of an annoying tick. I loved the author’s edenic vision of an earth in which women limit their childbearing to one child each—by the end of the century earth’s population would subside by several billion people, and the rest of the biosphere would exhale a deep sigh of relief as our pressure eased up accordingly. Would that it could be made to happen some way…

Got a bunch of stuff out on ebay and out the door. I’ve been trying to get into a daily routine of updating old listings and listing a few books each day. I slacked off this week because I’ve been working on our Etsy project, but I plan to move between them.

I’m really excited right now because our Etsy shop, Life at the Rancho, is finally up and running. We decided to do it as a collective shop (me, my partner and our two best friends who live next door). I’ve been hard at work on Valentine cards and Deb is getting ready to post some of her pottery. Eventually we hope to have a variety of stuff since we all dabble in lots of different crafts. For right now, I’m just happy to have the doors open!

If you are interested, you can check it out at lifeattherancho.etsy.com.