My Meeting, Layoffs and Farming

I forgot to mention my meeting with Ms. Sweeney went very well. She really liked my stuff! Too bad I didn't have a book to give her yet. Maybe next year!

Life is good. I'm still writing and just finished something for the New York Times, so hopefully I will get an edit and check soon! (It seems to take about 30 days for that, though.) No problem, though.

My company is having financial difficulties and layoffs may occur, so says the bosses. This, of course, leads to everyone walking around with little dark clouds hanging over their heads and pondering living on unemployment and empty aluminum cans. I plan on starting a sustainable existence by growing potatoes and other foodstuffs in my tiny front yard (it is an apartment, after all.)

I remember growing up in Fresno and that when the Hmong first started coming into the U.S. they came there. Mainly an agrarian society in Laos and Vietnam, they were put on planes and put in public housing in the 1980s, which consisted of little bungalows on open land. The women immediately started growing corn, beans, cabbage, the whole shebang, on the open land. I kind of liked seeing it. (The photo is a Hmong woman working a garden behind her Atlanta apartment.)