"what do you do in your free time?" quilt-in-progress, from wool scaps, for keeping warm out at the Staple Foods Project land, Spring '08 For much of Gregorian Calendar Year 2007, my working hours roughly coincided with my waking hours. Starting over a dozen gardens up, mostly from scratch, in a period of two months, followed by their frequent upkeep for four months after -- all of which was preceded by close to three months of work at a different location entirely, of three acres shared -- took time. No event came as predicted, with the exception of the Aug. 4th CSA party(!). Nothing was truly a surprise either, after the Spring shake-up that reoriented the source of the CSA subscribers' food from the country to the city. And somewhere in there -- perhaps on some perfect summer afternoon, biking along the inner southeast bowl-rim, up in the 40's somewhere, on some picturesque tree and porch-lined street, a box of transplants or of tools or of produce on the back-rack, rattling on the bumps and seams, and, a particularly lovely cat that has just emerged from behind a bucket and is giving me an inviting cock of the head and an open mew from the sidewalk -- somewhere in there, it all just became the same thing. Or, it became obvious that it all already was. That is, I saw that all of my time is my "free time". I mean, wasn't I free to make whatever choice I wanted to make with my time? And hadn't I chosen to this? So then, what other kind of time is there? These are questions. The answers probably don't matter. Here I am, doing what I'm doing. What else can I do?

I readily admit to a certain attachment to time spent sitting at outdoor cafe tables, here in the city. Don't know why. I could say that coffee shops have perrennially been one of my favorite things about cities. In this photo, I am at a place in Seattle, on a recent visit there to see one of the two Charter Subscribers of the CSA. In 2006, I stage-rehearsed a CSA by taking on two subscribers, and the one of them ended up moving to Seattle during the 2007 season. She remains a generous supporter of my agricultural efforts, and I delivered a share of produce to her up there at the end of January. A friend was driving up there for a couple days for work anyway, so the ride was there, with his work paying the gas, so it was easy. I first, and last visited this cafe in February 2001, when I was moving to the City of Roses, and my itinerary took me through Seattle on my departure from the Midwest. Other than now being non-smoking inside, it didn't seem changed.