On Saturday, Jennifer and I went on a "garden tour" in Sacramento, in the area near where our new house is located.  Some of the houses in the area are in part of Sacramento called "The Fabulous Forties", and it’s where the politicians and lawyers and other assorted scum live, but it’s a nice area anyway.  Some of the gardens were really nice (others were quite bland).  We looked at them and tried to come up with some ideas for the garden in the surprisingly spacious back yard of our new home.

ME:  I’ve got an idea for our back yard.

SHE: Oh?  What?

ME:  Pirates!  Pirates of the Caribbean!

SHE (after a momentary blank stare): Um.  No.

ME: Why not? Pirates are cool!  We could design the carriage house like the front of a ship, with a figure head and a mast and everything, and put up skeletons and treasure chests.  And have a Jolly Roger!

SHE (predictably): No.

ME: Come on, Jennifer!  Zombie pirates!

SHE: I said no.  No pirates in our garden!

ME: Not even just a little?

SHE: No, no pirates!

ME: Just a Jolly Roger, then?

SHE (after a few moments of thought): Fine.  A small one.  Hidden away.  In a corner.  Maybe.

ME: Fine.  Hmph.

So we trudged on for another half block or so, looked at another couple of gardens.  Then I had another idea:

ME: How about ninjas?

SHE: No.

ME: Robots? Aliens?

SHE (lovingly): What the hell is wrong with you?

Should have seen that one coming.

We also went to the new house, just to scope out the neighborhood (walking distance from Trader Joes: check) and happened to meet a couple of our neighbors to be.  One of them breeds show pigeons; I had no idea there was such a hobby.  His wife is a gardener and says she knows everything there is to know about shade plants.  This is good, because I know nothing about them, even if they’re growing in pots of dubloons.

I think the new house is going to work out well, even if the pirates are banned from our garden.

In other news, I went to the Whole Earth Festival at UC Davis yesterday.  I’ve gone to just about every WEF for the past twenty years (missed last year’s because we were in Ireland), and after awhile you get used to sights like the skinny man in the unflattering fur loincloth toting the recycling bin (the guy dressed as a Borg and riding a penny-farthing bicycle that I saw a few years ago still stands out as unusual, though, even by WEF standards).  I was taken aback by the older woman with the nice gray hair and surprisingly youthful figure who also sported an immaculately groomed goatee.  I was kind of disappointed in the dearth of politics-related booths though.  The anarchists were there with their well organized booth, as were the Green Party and two (count ’em, two) Barack Obama booths.  But that was it.  In the past, there were so many more.  And there were no booths from religious groups at all, which surprised me: no Baha’i’s, no Jews for Jesus, no Christian Apologeticists, nothing.  I did see a group of Hare Krishnas (reformed, I guess, since they were not wearing robes and they had hair) chanting.  And while I saw dozens of environmentalist booths, I saw few political action booths: nothing about Darfur or Somalia or Armenia or the Basque.  Not even a single booth dedicated to the plight of Iraqi civilians.  I was actually really looking forward to seeing some of these booths and learning about the issues.

Perhaps the organizers of the Whole Earth Festival are engaged in a process of removing everything that might possibly be offensive to someone?  I don’t know.  It was disappointing.

Good music, though.  As always.