Mitt liv som Tobin

Ant Hill Co-op at Springwater, NY. January 2006. Photo by Girts Folkmanis.

"An affordable and sustainable housing organization with aims to serve its members and community through community involvement/service/outreach, serving as incubator and launching point for creative projects, activism, and grand exhibitions. This entails potlucks, volunteering, hosting wayward travelers, freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, robots, print and online publication, intrigue, drama, suspense, assasination, banjos, midnight breakfasts, political abduction, leading urban camping trips to sleep in abandoned buildings, volunteer mobs, knowledge sharing, freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, music of the variety that Robert P. appreciates, public lectuers, optimism, train hopping, cheap and responsible living, a steady stream of new friends and new faces, guerilla art, and freshly baked chocolate chip cookies." — Rob

I exchanged fireworks for fireflies.

They were a different sort than the ones in Rochester. In Rochester the fireflies are active only at dusk, for about an hour. And they have drawn out, waning sort of pulses. These ones blinked steadily all night long, in a big grassy field with waste-high grasses.

It was good to get out of Rochester, and at night it was so silent that I could hardly sleep. Just a couple miles out of town, the old burnt-out city gives way to farms and barns. Foot-high corn stalks, fields of soybeans. Towns with one stoplight, flashing red in the center of the sole intersection.

Our landlords have a cabin out there, on an open space preserve one of them started along with a dozen other people. They bought ninety-six acres of land twenty years ago. I told you they were co-op maniacs.

As we arrived we joined, as if in one continuous motion, a trek out to the pond. With a lashed-up zipline, diving board, and rope swing, and everyone frolicking in the pond it was like hippy pioneer camp. There was a huge potluck and much delicious food. I think everyone from Ant Hill came (except ultraman) and we had some guests too. Our contributions: a rhubarb pie (Ben), a huge bowl of hummous (me, under Ben's direction), a chicken curry (Amol), and 1.5 gallons of premium beer.

At the cabin, the bat house, which had fallen down, was reinstalled. Under the porch are the parts to a make-shift hot tub, under construction.

Previously.