WOOD AND OTHER THINGS

My wood pile is done and drying out. I take great pride in also collecting all the little wood chips for kindling. Inside of our shed I have about four trash cans full of the pure gold. I think we've got enough wood for this winter. Last winter we ran out of cured wood toward the end but this time we should be all set as they say here in Maine.

Looks like today will be a walk and picnic on the beach. We have a place called Morse Mountain nearby that requires a brisk walk through the woods before you get to the ocean. Along the way you climb a hill and are able to see for miles in every direction. Great exercise and great beauty - all in one.

I am looking forward to a statewide meeting that will be held in Augusta on Saturday, June 13 to develop a coordinated Afghanistan-Pakistan campaign across Maine. The war supplemental is back before the House of Representatives next week and across the nation the opposition is still not where it should be. The public is showing in poll data that they are growing increasingly skeptical about that quagmire but still not at the 70% rate of opposition we've seen against the Iraq occupation. Despite the fact the US has been bombing the hell out of Afghanistan for many years the American people really know very little about that part of the world.

Our Keep Space for Peace Week (October 3-10) posters are now printed and I've just mailed them out to our key folks in the US and across the world. The poster was created to give folks a visual idea how space technology is used these days to fight wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV's), or drones as some call them, are essentially flown via satellite with pilots sitting safely in front of video screens at bases in the US (Creech AFB outside of Las Vegas for one). The poster idea came from a remarkable discussion we had in Seoul, South Korea during our annual membership meeting last April. We had several of our members saying how difficult it has been to get the public to understand how space systems are being used to coordinate war on Earth. So we came up with the idea of a collage of images that hopefully will do the trick. The group process really worked that time.