blog stuff

Hi Folks - I've gotten (rightly) a number of emailed complaints about the number of comments that are disappearing, and more questions about whether I am censoring comments, or moderating them. Other than a few occasions for egregious attacks on other posters or sucking up my time until I had no other choice, I don't censor comments. The reason your comments are disappearing and being marked as held for approval is because of Science Blogs - there are a number of technical problems with my blog that SB has basically not been able to fix (and some of them affect other blogs) - the idea is…
So I've been offline a lot the last few weeks - as you know we had 10 kids in our house for a couple of days the week before Thanksgiving, and I was out of town until yesterday. While a few posts have gone up, I've spent absolutely no time on anything other than absolute necessities online. So it was something of a shock to me to find in my comments thread a bunch of accusations that I'd been removing comments.due to my disagreement with them. This frankly pissed me off, since I absolutely do not censor or remove comments routinely - or generally at all. Despite a general tendency of…
I have one more crazy week involving travel and lots of other responsibilities, culminating in our final home visit in our foster care certification (as some of you will recall, we had a tough visit our second time with a social worker who was totally appalled by the farm - our social worker's supervisor kindly agreed to come out so that we won't have to deal with shifting standards (our own social worker is totally cool with it) and can be clear what we need to do and what is ok), so there will be little content this week. So I'm asking y'all to provide content - tell me what you are doing…
Just a reminder, my last Adapting-In-Place class for the forseeable future begins on Tuesday - here's the syllabus if you are interested in joining us. Week 1 - How to evaluate what you have. We're going to concentrate on figuring out what the major concerns are for your place and your community. We'll talk about your region and its climate, culture and resources, your house itself, your community and neighborhood - the challenges you forsee and maybe ones you haven't thought about yet, and your personal circumstances - how much money, time and energy you have to deal with it. How does…
Hi Folks - It has been a week since I hit the wall and took off from the computer, and I'm back, at least sort of. The combination of a lingering illness, exhaustion from trying to finish the book, stress from a book not doing what I wanted to and just way too much time in front of the computer hit me all at once, and I really needed to step away for a while. My wonderful editor at New Society (and the kind marketing director who I also dumped my stress on) have been really nice about my melt-down, and we're talking now about a new deadline and release date for the book. I'm very grateful…