More lessons in Solitaire & Manifest Destiny!

Another lesson I’ve learned through playing Solitaire is that Pride Commeth Before a Fall. It seems as just as I get the thought in my mind that there is no way I could lose this game, I run out of moves. I think the reason for this may be that pride leads to narrow-mindedness and laziness, so opportunities are missed or passed-by.

They say every girl goes through a photography phase. I think my last couple years would qualify. Here is a midnight shot of my hammock/volleyball court/palm trees in Bakersfield. It has a dreamlike quality that reflects my backyard design–my own little paradise in California.

Hammock

I also liked this self-portrait (me staring at the starry night sky-look hard!):

Me 2

I’m busy this week preparing for the opening of my massage business in downtown San Francisco. It will be my part-time, evenings & weekends job, at least for now. I made a website for it last night that I’m quite happy with (http://www.uncoilmassage.com). It is still under construction but at least I’ve got something started. I’m hoping the city will finish the paperwork for the permitting in the next 2 or 3 weeks, so I can jump into my marketing and start getting some clients. I’m feeling optimistic and ready to go.

I caught a good article today in the SF Post, that will be used in my “What I Believe” page under “Do you eat animal flesh & wear their skins?” It sums up my beliefs on meat-eating pretty well (plus, has a nice description of the drive down I-5):

“You live here, you know the drive well: It’s a veritable candy store wasteland of prisons and landfills and toxic waste sites and massive, politically corrupt aqueducts, huge industrial farms and enormous ranches and depressing tule fog and vast swaths of bland nothingness all around, and it’s dotted all the way down with weird little forgotten farming/industrial towns you will never ever visit except perhaps to refuel and empty your bladder as you wonder how the hell they get all that garbage food out to those endless Jack in the Box and Carl’s Jr. and creepy overlit Del Taco outlets in the middle of nowhere.
Oh yes, the meat. It is right there, writ large and reeking and utterly undeniable as you cruise down I-5 and I don’t mean just in the staggering, gluttonous array of greasy junk-food joints. I mean right there, the actual source itself, that famous and semi-gourmet bastion of manure and methane and meat known as the Harris Ranch, just off the freeway by a town called Coalinga. What a thing.
You know the place. Or rather, you know the stench. It is 800 acres and a whopping 100,000 head of truly miserable-looking cattle, all bunched together in one very dejected herd, right alongside a half-mile stretch of freeway, and every other cow has its head bowed to the ground munching on what appears to be, in contrast to the sweet grassy fields spread out for miles around, grayish dirt. “