BITS AND PIECES

I'd hate to be that tree, or the ants who live under it.

• We've got the weatherization folks at our house doing a total top to bottom intense energy conservation make-over. They've been here since Monday. It ain't cheap but we should get our money back in saved energy costs over time.

• Thanks to my friend Tom who recently sent me a homeopathic remedy while I was suffering from severe back pain. It helped, along with the chiropractor treatment that I swear by.

• We are now into our 4th year of living at the Addams-Melman House. There are currently seven folks here (including two kids). We are having a potluck supper to celebrate on Sunday, January 30 from 5-7 pm. All are welcome to join us. We'll play political bingo after eating.

• A small group of us in our area have come up with an idea called "Vital Connections" where we are going to try to organize a quarterly pot luck supper for all kinds of organizations and small business in the Midcoast community to meet and share our work and struggles with one another. The idea is to build a grand coalition event where we occasionally set aside our separate single-focused agendas and come together recognizing that each of our groups are losing and that maybe by expanding our view of our world just a bit, and meeting new people with good hearts, we can all benefit over time by listening and learning from each other. We are going to begin with a smaller supper in February for some key leaders of some groups to see how they like the idea and then if they go for it we will then undertake organizing the larger events and invite every organization we can identify in the area. The general thought is that at each quarterly potluck three of the groups would get about seven minutes to talk about what they do and what difficulties they face. The hope is that each participating organization would invite their membership to these events and over the course of time we'd all expand our consciousness and our vision. The hope is that we'd have folks sit and talk with people they don't already know and cross-fertilize each other's brains and hearts. Sort of like the dogs in the photo above, they are all different but still are dogs and they share a similar goal - getting at the tree. It's a radical notion - getting to the root of our problems.