Saturday, April 12th was so rainy that I didn't take my camera to the demonstration in San Francisco. In fact, the only thing that changed in my life because of the trip was that I got the blue pin above on my jacket. When I think about the question "What's an element?", the fact that helium is chemically inert comes quickly to mind.

Saturday April 19th I took BART up to Berkeley, where they had an Earth Day event. I got the South African T shirt in the background at the Green Party booth, where I also got a bundle of Green Focus newspapers to hand out at Santa Clara County Earth Day events, which are coming over the next few days. The feather and candle I got from vendors in exchange for MEND YOUR FUELISH WAYS stickers. I vividly remember telling the guy in the www.green-e.org booth about the time I tried to explain they relationship between political power and electric power to a guy from Silicon Valley De-Bug by saying "the power company sells electricity for eleven cents a kilowatt hour." This was after I had shown him my favorite state quarter.

That T-shirt I'm wearing is dangerously PC. It's organic cotton, sewn by union labor, and printed by a mom and pop outfit in Sunnyvale, bicycling distance from my home. To get the Green Party of Santa Clara County behind the project, we used the consensus process at the countywide meeting to authorize the project. Then we held a design competition to get the art, and used IRV to pick the winner. We had 144 of them printed on T shirts that were made in California. It took more than a year to sell all the shirts, but the Green Party of Santa Clara County made money on the project in the end.