We spent last weekend at the ranch. Mona made a great potroast dinner one night, and enchiladas with red chili sauce and chili stew the next. We wandered around the Northwest corner of the property to try and visualize what a small cabin would be like there someday.


Clark and Mdog Monday morning.

On Monday evening after we returned home, we went to screening of a film called "10 Questions for the Dalai Lama". It had some great interview segments with HHTDL, and lots of rare historical footage of Tibet before and after the Chinese came to desecrate and terrorize as they forcibly annexed the country. The Dalai Lama, as the head of state as well as spiritual leader, tried to enlist the U.S. to fend off the invasion and horrific atrocities of the Chinese communists, but as Tibet was not in posession of any valuable resources the Americans coveted (like oil), and their pervasive religion was decidedly non-Christian, there was little interest and no assistance made available. Apparently our outrage over attrocities is only translated into action when there is loot for corporate interests involved.



After watching the footage of how the Chinese tortured and persecuted those Tibetans who did not flee in time, and how the gemlike capital of Lhasa was reduced to a dreary concrete urbanscape populated with criminals, prostitutes, secret police and video monitoring, and it is amazing to see the Dalai Lama so devoid of hate for the vermin that infested his country. It is sad that the majority of what we buy here now originates in China, that our country is deepy in debt to them, and that our corporations appear to fall all over each other to conform to Chinese oppression in their business pratices there. Various Internet companies work with the Chinese government to create limits on web access that distorts any effort to learn the truth about Tibet and the shame of Chinese aggression there.

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Pat was off to Seattle again for the week, so I have been on my own, and not having an especially good week I'm afraid. Rather than resolving any questions about the future, ever more forks seem to keep appearing in the path ahead, with no clear indication of which direction to pursue. This morning I awoke around 4am, and lay sleepless for the next four hours pondering the way time is passing with such little progress toward the gracious life I imagined when we left California two long years ago.

Yesterday I did check out a good certification school for Cisco network technology, that could give me sufficient credibility after a year off to seek and land a job....somewhere. I sat in on a class and enjoyed the stimulating lecture that rekindled my interest in the technology I used to wrangle. The next class is in late January.


Silkie the ranch cat has few concerns for life's complexities.

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