My best friend, Chris, will help you make a SendOut(Jerry)Card for free. All you have to do is click your mouse. Plus, you can use any pic that strikes your fancy. (I happen to like this one.)

And oh yea, I forgot to tell you. Someone else (the Great Printer) prints it, stuffs it, stamps it and mails it to you or a lucky recipient of your choosing, not to mention remembers all the addresses of all your family so you can send cards anytime of the day or night. —Whew! That was a lot to say. Are you still with me?

Just imagine one of your brothers or sisters anywhere in the world opening his/her snail-mailbox and finding a Jerry-card from you with your message inside in your handwriting. I know, I know this is the twenty-first century, but a card in the hand is worth a ton of emails in the trash, folks. ‘Cause I don’t have to tell you where all emails end-up. Plus, real picture cards of Jerry Garcia send healing energy. Send Out to Give! We are not through changing the world yet, folks—let’s try it one card at a time.

Anyway, the company that does all this for you is way cool! It’s not easy to impress me, either. Chris and I just went to their convention—SendOutCards, and the closing ceremony was an African Drumming Circle of a couple thousand folks. What a healing blast! Can you feel it? Oops, now I’m off the subject.

Anyway, there’s real opportunity here—to have fun and make money while you’re at it. You know what that Confucius dude said: Choose a job you like and you’ll never work a day in your life.

Happy tales,

Laura signing off

I’ve been really harping on our smoky air lately. Now I think I’ll go back to water—for the simple reason that one out of five people on this planet don’t have one drop of clean drinking water. We of the Western World have taken our water for granted, until recently that is. But there’s nothing like watching a bunch of water-grabbing foreigners make deals with small town officials to wake us up a little.

Speaking of water, I got a very timely email from my friend Larry today: “Why Can’t We Manufacture Water?”. In this article, Joshua Clark poses some interesting questions: Water is mostly there for the taking, just hanging out in fluffy accumulations of water vapor (clouds) up in the skies. Why can’t we just harvest our clouds instead of waiting for it to rain? Or better yet, in this day of high tech particle smashing, why can’t we ram two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom together to make some water?

Three reasons: It’s dangerous to fool with Mother Nature; it requires expensive outputs of energy; and, oh yea, did I mention it’s dangerous? To drive these points home, all we have to remember is the Hindenburg Disaster of 1937. No one actually knows the actual cause of this explosion. Most theories are grounded in the extreme volatility of Hydrogen. Life wouldn’t be complete without another viewpoint on the subject, however.

That’s why I’m offering the opinion of hydrogen-lover Greg Vinson—a man who roasts his marshmallows with Hydrogen, a man who is dedicated to debunking the myth of this misplaced element, a man who says Hydrogen is Magic !!! The truth is, Vinson is but one of the many who believes that our most common element (Hydrogen) is the clean replacement answer to fossil fuels. More on this subject at a later date. Right now I’m pursuing the idea of water mining for the masses.

With this in mind, let’s get back to the Hindenburg and Hydrogen. No one argues the fact that one of the side-effects of this explosion was pure, sweet “warm rain” falling down on shocked bystanders. In other words, the ill-fated blimp carried over seven million cubic feet of hydrogen and wound up as half a million liters of water, give or take a couple hundred. This doesn’t sound like much water for my money, though; which brings me to an obvious conclusion: The creation of enough water to make a difference would require a complex, possibly dangerous, large-scale explosion of Hydrogen, much like the Big Bang.

Wait a minute, now. Did I say dangerous again? Isn’t that exactly what the internal combustion engine is all about, folks? Barely controlled, dangerous repeated explosions of gasoline to make your car, truck, motor boat, lawn mower, chain saw, etcetera have a little git up and go? Oh well, no one can deny that yesterday’s ridiculous sounding ideas are today’s widely accepted practices. Perhaps when water becomes scarcer, and multi-national corporations own most of the sources, exploding Hydrogen to make clean water will be just old-hat.

Until that day, what about good old fashioned cloud-seeding? China’s sure having a field day making it rain over their arid crop lands. The fact is, Beijing Weather Controllers plan to blast storm clouds with silver iodides–the idea being to milk them of all their moisture before Olympic Opening Day; that way there will be a perfect blue sky day on 8/8/08, eight being the auspicious number for prosperity in Chinese Numerology.

China had better be careful, though. A ‘hand of god” deluge would not make for an auspicious Olympic memory. The Chinese have more success at all forms of control, but I’m sure they are aware of the British Air Force’s horrendous attempt gone awry. During a secret cloud seeding experiment of 1952, RAF pilots dropped payloads of dry ice, salt and silver iodide into the clouds. The side-effect was a deluge of 90 million tons of water coursing through the village of Lynmouth in just one day. Uprooted trees formed dams; two rivers combined; boulders destroyed buildings and Brits were carried out to sea at the speed of 40 mph. This peculiar man-made disaster was dubbed ‘the hand of God” until 2001, when the BBC uncovered first person accounts from RAF pilots who implemented “Operation Cumulus”. Oh well. No use crying over spilt milk/ water/ hydrogen.. etc..

How about safer methods of making water from thin air?

Happy to say, people are on it, folks! Max Whisson uses the power of the wind to collect water—as much as 2600 gallons per day, the only problem being enough capital to back his project and the need for refrigerant coolant. Jonathan Wright and David Richards have similar ideas, but their windmill uses wind power exclusively.

As kooky as all these methods sound, we still have to do something. There’s not enough clean water to go around and water, like oil, will not last forever. There’s no water hailing from outer space, at least not that I’ve heard of.

Speaking of space. I’m supposed to be using this space to tell you more about SendOutCards: how easy it is, how fun it is, how inexpensive etc. But I’ll just say this––people sure are happy when they get one of my personal sendoutcards, but they are even happier making their own.

Laura, signing off.

p.s. want to see our sunset?

The fact is, poor meticulous George was so bummed out by the whole thing that he considered resigning his kingship. He didn’t, but became permanently deranged in 1810 and died ten years later, blind and senile. Some medical historians say ‘Farmer George’ was a victim of porphyria, an inherited metabolic condition that feeds on stress and causes psychiatric disorders. I don’t know if I believe that, because Porphyria is hard to diagnose when the patient is still alive, much less dead: To begin with, Doctors need a urine sample.

Speaking of urine samples, I bet our Founding Fathers would not have approved of such obvious invasions of their private parts/privacy. The truth is, though, they should have voided in their own little individual buckets and had the urine guarded and preserved for posterity—just so we could make sure that they were not deranged or under the influence of locally grown crops. So much defiance with so little firepower to back it up seems insane when you think about it.

All kidding aside, folks, the Founding Fathers and Mothers had to be extraordinary people with guts and vision. The recent television miniseries on John Adams really drives that point home.

Back to the Declaration of Independence, though: Certain powers are summed up in the conclusion of this document that I find interesting “…Free and Independent States have full power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce…”

Did you notice that ‘Include Peace’ is listed as a separate power? Judging from our history, we’ve never had much— Peace, that is. Not including the American Indian Wars, the Range Wars, Bloody local feuds, state and national secession attempts, armed insurrections and slave revolts, I counted over 280 deployments of U.S. military forces abroad and domestically.

For example, The Whiskey Rebellion (1791-1794), was the first time our federal government sent troops in to squash its own citizens. Led by President George Washington, himself, the whole thing started because the Secretary of the Treasury (Alexander Hamilton) convinced Congress to approve taxes on distilled spirits. Unfortunately, this tax penalized small distillers who paid by the gallon, while big-time distillers took advantage of a flat fee.

You have to understand that farmers had been converting their excess grain to liquor for years. Some growers converted all their grain to liquor because it was easier to transport to market. In other words, home-made booze was their only source of hard cash. I don’t think the first Secretary of the Treasury stopped to consider that poor folk don’t have a treasury.

In any case, by sending in the President of the United States to get those ‘Whiskey Boys’ back in line, Hamilton was trying to do two very important things: Pay down the national debt from the Revolutionary War and secure the authority of the brand new federal government over its citizens—citizens who had some silly notion that they should not be taxed without a vote.

All of which brings me to the here and now…

As we approach the most celebrated date in our history, July 4^th, you can’t deny that our Federal Government has come along way in establishing its power; and, regardless of political leanings, you can’t help but be worried about the National Debt, the War in Iraq along with its possible escalation into Iran, not to mention the upcoming election of our new World Leader. Speaking of which, what will he do about Iraq?

About a month ago, right before Memorial Day, Chris and I came across a waving sea of small white and red flags in Ashland, Oregon called The Iraq Body Count Exhibit. Although there were too many flags to get into one shot, Chris took a bunch of pictures, and we made a Send-Out Card of a really provocative one which we had the Great Printer in Salt Lake City mail to some friends and relatives. It really makes you think. Read the sign and decide what you think. As always, let me know if you would like a card and I’ll send you one.

But, generally speaking, foxes are shy creatures that go out of their way not to draw attention to themselves. Masters at the art of camouflage, they come and go unnoticed, changing colors with their surroundings. Even their paws are extra furry for quiet passing in the night.

Occasionally, though, foxes go all out to be noticed. They charm their prey into an unguarded state with high leaps, artful jumps and playful rolls, even chasing themselves to look silly. How wily is this? Everything about a fox is aimed at cunning or invisibility, so how would we even see one if it dropped by?

Three nights later, though, we found out. Lying in bed sound asleep, we were both awakened around midnight by a feeling more than a noise. I even had goose-bumps. When brave Chris got up to take a look there was nothing, so we dismissed the vibration as uneventful. Then it happened again, and I told Chris he ought to check his truck bed. And sure enough, there it was—a little silver and grey fox with red markings, digging its long snout into a small yogurt cup.

Before the magic creature could get away, Chris put his camera together in the dark and got a few good pictures—perfect, perfect, perfect for Send-Out Cards. You have to be amazed at the way that shy fellow looked right up at us while he blended into our river-stone driveway. About the only thing he couldn’t disguise was the light in his eyes.