Editorial

Friend:

The dog-days of August are upon us, the temperatures here in the San Joaquin Valley average 95 to 105 degrees, while the snow that we can still see on the crests of the Sierra Nevada is pouring down into the ten-foot-wide canals that bisect the city. One canal lies right behind our backyard fence and in the night I can hear its water moving swiftly, deeper into the central valley.

Six years ago when we first arrived in Visalia I used one comer of the “family” room as office space. A couple years ago I moved everything out to the garage where I had more room. There’s no heat or air in the garage but for some inexplicable reason I half-enjoyed working in 30 degree and a few times even colder temperatures in the winter and 90 and 100+ in the summer (today it’s 99 degrees but the weather woman says by the weekend it’s going to heat up). When it was cold I’d warm my feet with an electric heater and I bought a kind of “personal” air conditioner to use to blow directly on us when it got hot. Magaly didn’t think it was as much fun as I did but she put up with it. Then one 30-degree morning this past February I realized I didn’t want to work in that cold. The bloom was off the rose. By the time June rolled around I didn’t want to work in the heat either.

So here I am, back in the family room again. This time I’m using more than a comer; I’ve eaten up half the room. I’ve set up a very efficient working space. All the equipment is hooked up again, the computer, the monitor, the printer, telephones, fax machine and the copier. A ceiling fan is directly over my head, our neurotic dog Katy is lying at my side, the refrigerator is close to hand, not that I need it everything considered, and it’s all systems go.

I should mention that while this issue of SR has ten pages, I don’t expect to make it a tradition. I’ll soon have a interesting place to publish the excess of materials I receive—explanation to follow.