In early January, Emma Goldman's Finishing School in Seattle hosted the FEC Winter Assembly. Delegates in attendance were myself (Amy from Skyhouse), Stan (from Sandhill), Radish (Acorn), Aubee (Twin Oaks), and Thea (Emma Goldman's Finishing School). Daniel (also from Twin Oaks) came along for the trip and sat in for all of our meetings. We managed to squeeze the agenda down to two and a half days, but still had plenty of time for socializing with each other and the nice folks at Emma's.

One of the first orders of business was to find a new Secretary. I hesitantly volunteered to fill in the gap that was left by Parke -- at least until the next Assembly. It seems like awfully big shoes to fill! Also taking on new responsibilities was Radish, who is going to be coordinating the print version of the FEC newsletter. We set our budget for 2007 and talked about the possibility of finding someone to fill the role of FEC Treasurer. If you live in an FEC community and are interested, please drop us a line!

We also spent half a day working around Emma's as a way of saying thank you for hosting us. The big job was taking down a big evergreen tree that grew up too close to the house and power lines. So while a few delegates braved the ladder to saw off branches, others mulched over the icy path next to their house and hung door sweeps. It was very satisfying to help Emma's.

It wasn't all work and no play, however. On Thursday, we had community check-ins where we shared stories of what our communities have been up to in the past six months. On Saturday morning, I brought in vegan donuts from the legendary Mighty-O bakery. Then, Saturday night, we went out for Ethiopian food for dinner and had a fun gathering at Emma's where we met neighbors and friends of the community. It was nice to meet Shawn from the now-defunct Jolly Ranchers community and see Brad who frequently comes to Sandhill for sorghum season.

The folks at Emma's were generous hosts who I enjoyed getting to know. Everyone was very nice and had an interesting story to tell. It's wonderful how individual each FEC community is and yet how we all hold similar values. It's easy to see how each community brings a valuable viewpoint to our organization. I look forward to the next FEC Assembly in August when it will be hosted by Acorn.

By living at Dancing Rabbit, I feel we've made a commitment to trying to live as environmentally sustainably as we can. This includes obvious things, such as recycling our waste and conserving resources directly. It also includes less obvious things, like making certain lifestyle choices.

One of the areas of life that I find easily overlooked when one is considering the environmental impact of our actions is food. Large amounts of energy are used every day in the production, care, and transport of food.

Bobolink, one of our food co-ops, puts a great deal of thought and energy into this one aspect of our lives. It's taken years, but the members have struck a balance between being environmentally friendly, socially conscious, nutritionally healthy, and happy with our food. These issues are hardly unique to Bobolink, and every food co- op at DR has had to wrestle with these same problems, and come up with different solutions.

First, we chose to make eating bioregionally a priority. This involves growing some of our food, and buying the rest from growers as close to us as we can get. For example, we buy produce from neighbors rather than at a supermarket. The logic behind this choice is simple: the less distance our food has to travel, the less energy and fossil fuels it takes to get it to us.

Eating bioregionally isn't particularly easy, however. We live in a temperate climate, which means that foods that are tropical generally stay off the menu. As such, we refrain from buying most citrus fruits, avocados, and other delicious treats, since they would have to be shipped from farther away than we'd like.

One large difficulty in trying to eat local foods is with grains and beans. Local farmers grow very few grains, so we find ourselves ordering the rest from a national bulk food company. Regrettably, we have no way of knowing from where the food we're ordering comes. We do the best we can, buying foods that could be grown nearby, and avoiding those that could not.

A part of bioregional eating that took a lot of getting used-to for me was the idea of food seasons. Most food crops aren't grown year-round, and some foods are only in season for a few weeks out of the year. As such, we do a lot of food preservation at Bobolink. We dry and can seasonal foods all throughout the warmer months so we can enjoy them in the winter.

Bobolink has made another big choice when it comes to food; we're a vegan food co-op. As a group, we buy no meat, no dairy, no eggs, no animal products at all (unless you consider honey an animal product, in which case that's our one exception). Of course, individual members are free to do as they wish when not cooking for the rest of the group, but meals cooked for everyone must be entirely vegan.

The environmental impact of a vegan diet is straightforward: on average, raising meat requires significantly more resources than growing plants. For example, according to the USDA, farm animals eat 70% of the grain we grow as a country. Fresh water is another area where animal agriculture is a big resource drain, with farm animals drinking fully half of the US water supply.

We also try to eat organically-grown food as much as possible. Chemical pesticides are frequently petroleum-based, and contaminate the ground and strip nutrients from it. To compensate, traditional agriculture uses vast amounts of chemical fertilizer. Both those pesticides and the fertilizer are shipped to the farms from manufacturing plants - consuming energy in the form of transportation fuel. Organically-grown crops don't use these chemicals, and as such are less likely to need all that energy for transportation.

Each one of these choices helps a little. However, it's the combination of all of them that makes a big difference. Of course, our system isn't perfect, as we have to balance these environmental concerns with nutritional, financial, and quality-of-life issues. Other co-ops at DR have reached different solutions to the same problems, and I consider their choices to be as valid as ours. This is just what we do, and why we do it.

Bon appetit.

Labor. If there's one thing that ties Oakers together, its the work that we do to contribute to the continuation and upkeep of our community. This includes everything that we deem "labor creditable:" cooking, cleaning, group child care, tofu production, hammock production, gardening, dairy work, and the hundreds of other jobs that we do are valued equally. Moving to Twin Oaks, we each commit to working 44 hours/week (this number fluctuates).

We each have a great deal of autonomy over constructing a labor scene that fits our individual needs and desires.

It's a trust-based system: we track how much of which kinds of work we've done each week. Hours done over or under quota get added to, or deducted from a running vacation balance. Our labor system is a central to the community's functioning, and lately it has been discussed in the community. What follows is a small slice of the wider, ongoing community discussion: six communards give their personal take on our labor system. Share and Enjoy!

Pele- Our labor system is a mix of positive and negative, like virtually everything. I genuinely appreciate our system's dependency upon honesty, cooperation, and equality. One hour of work is worth one labor credit regardless of the type of job.

These same qualities can hurt our labor system, when communards behave disrespectfully and irresponsibly.

This is disheartening to me. I live here for the trust based way that we share our work in order to share the benefits. The labor system's effect on the community is also both positive and negative. We tend to be very work-focused, which can interfere with cultural pursuits.

However, we are highly productive. Our tofu business and garden are the first two examples that come to mind of hard work paying off. Even as a work-focused community, our system offers much more flexibility than the "outside". Each of us is an owner of several businesses, not an employee.

This gives each of us more power and autonomy over our jobs than someone with a boss. Personally, I greatly enjoy the freedom that our system offers. It provides me with the opportunity to hike in the woods for long periods of time. Although getting out of the labor hole (labor debt to the community -ed.) is challenging for me due to my physically demanding work scene, I still wouldn't change our labor system. I live with the consequences of my choices.

Gordon- During my first visit to Twin Oaks, in 1974, there was a well-attended hammock shop meeting on what to do about a member who was 200 hours in the labor hole. As I recall, the member was contrite, yet a slight bit defiant. He wanted to do better, but he didn't think The System was really fair. He could imagine working harder in the abstract, but he clearly had trouble staying motivated in the face of endless hammocks and other day-in, day-out jobs. Some people made supportive suggestions, others felt ripped off and helpless. Some people felt frustrated that the community couldn't prevent this problem from happening again and again.

Twin Oaks has made progress since then. The Labor Hole Policy is pretty good at catching people early who are falling behind. However, the tension continues between our trust-based labor system, built on members picking their own work and pace, versus the tendency of many people to slack off. We very seldom get to the point where we need a public meeting about an individual's work performance; unmotivated people often move themselves on before it gets too bad. So we don't have much practice with confrontational enforcement. Old policies are dragged out. Managers try to remember the way it happened last time. It is slow, and awkward, and the tensions keep building.

But it is important that we do ultimately confront members who are not doing their share. It is just too easy for people to lose energy, lose focus, maybe get depressed, and fall behind. Also, Twin Oaks' fairly open acceptance policy means some new members don't yet have much self-motivation. Usually when people fall behind, the small things (3x5s from the Labor Hole Mother, friends' support, gossip) get us back on track.

If those don't work, the community must face the unpleasantness of O&I papers, feedback meetings, and so on. Otherwise everyone's confidence in the community's institutions and culture is threatened.

Pam- I consider myself as (among other things), a pragmatic socialist. Our labor system offers a simple way of getting necessary tasks done without a lot of daily negotiation - that appeals to my pragmatism. I also appreciate that our system values all kinds of work equally, and shows this by 'paying the same rate' of one labor credit per hour.

I despise the huge range of pay scales in the corporate world. Here we run worker-owned and worker-controlled businesses. How wonderful! No need to compromise our egalitarian values to earn a living. We put domestic, agricultural and organizational work on the same level as money-earning.

Because of sharing income and expenses, we are able to reduce our cost of living to a low level while experiencing a comfortable lifestyle. It frees us from the need to each focus on earning money for 40 hours a week. It enables us to focus on the things we, as a group, have decided are important to us.

And yet sometimes we grumble....

What is there to dislike about such a fair and pleasant way of living? When we forget that we are the engineers of our systems and the participants in our decision-making, and instead cultivate resentments and cynicism about our community, we are choosing to live less fully than we can. Cynicism is a warped choice that allows a person to go along with something they can profess to disagree with strongly, and not do anything to change what they say they don't like. It allows the person to reap all the benefits without making the effort to work for continuous improvement. The price, of course, is a curdled soul - unhappiness that is blamed on what other people do, although it is caused by the mismatch between our ideals and what we ourselves are prepared to actually do.

Some of the foundations of happiness, as I see it, include having a set of ethics you really believe in and live by, and also a plan for your time that is realistic. Our labor system can fit such an approach. It doesn't have to be perfect.

Paxus- PSCs (personal service credits) are our own internal labor currency. If I have a vacation balance from working over quota on average, I can offer some credits to another member of the community in exchange for them doing some work for me. If my friend is good with tools, I can offer them PSCs to build me a piece of furniture. The long standing policy is that PSCs, like the rest of our labor, are granted on a one PSC for one hour of work basis.

However, like many things at Twin Oaks, there has been "norm drift." Can I give you 3 PSCs for a picture it took you an hour to draw, because you had to practice drawing other pictures to get this fast? Can we have auctions where PSCs are used as the currency, completely distinct from the time it actually took to create the object being bid on? Should PSCs be de-linked from the one-to-one policy, since the underlying work to the community has already been done?

Just as a member can choose to spend vacation anyway they want, perhaps they should be permitted to spend PSCs at what ever rate they would like. The debate rages on....

With the loss of Pier 1, our largest hammocks customer, the community has sought to increase other income areas to compensate. One of the fastest growing work areas in the community is Outside Work (OW). OW is labor that members do for someone other than one of our cottage industries. The wages go to Twin Oaks, and the member receives labor credits. The majority of Outside Work's growth has come from more members working off the farm in construction, agriculture, house cleaning and landscaping.

Despite the benefits, there is some internal controversy over OW. It puts a strain on our vehicle fleet, and it often takes people off the farm, degrading the quality of our collective life.

Despite the drawbacks, I still think that OW will continue to be an important part of our collective income.

Shal- A labor credit is earned per hour of work, no matter how much or little is accomplished in that hour. On the positive side, it is a very important part of an egalitarian system to recognize that some people are able to work faster than others, and slower people should not be punished for what they cannot help. This is especially important to me since I am a slow person, and love that I am not punished for that here. It is one of several major reasons why I live here. However, although a faster person's range is different than a slower person's, both have the ability to work quicker or slower. The upper part of that range requires pushing ourselves hard, and most of us would not want to be required to do that since we want to enjoy our work, and we own the place. But much of the range can be done without undo hardship, at least in repetitive jobs (like most of our work), by looking for ways to work more efficiently.

As I see it, it is a major weakness that our system has no built-in incentives for working more efficiently. I think this has the effect of making our community significantly more inefficient than it could be, thus costing us as a community quite a bit of time. I think we could chip away at this problem in a couple of ways. On a formal level, for our repetitive jobs we could teach efficient methods to new members, and hopefully even retrain established members in more efficient methods. And on a more informal level, we could try to create more of a culture of trying to work efficiently for the good of the community, while still working at a humanely comfortable pace. This would serve the community better in that we would get more done per hour. Then we could do more and/or work less.

Apple- Sometimes I hate our labor system. Sometimes I notice that I am comprehending life only through labor credits, deciding what to do with my time based NOT on what I would enjoy doing, or what I think NEEDS doing, but on what I could do that I could write on my labor sheet. Sometimes I find myself looking at what OTHER people are doing for labor credits, and judging myself against them. At times like these, I start to think that the labor system is a gigantic and ugly institution that's slowly crushing me into the ground.

And sometimes I LOVE our labor system. I see freedom within it to chose work that feels good to me, and that differs everyday. I see it as a representation of all the members deciding what is important to us, and agreeing to work on it together, equally, fairly. I see it as the basis of our egalitarian system. I see it as agreements that we individuals have made with each other, out of respect and shared interest.

I struggle with trying to uphold this second view of the system. I want to feel positive about it, and about us. What's important to me is that we get the work done, and we regard each other with respect. I don't think there is any SYSTEM that can make both of these things happen. It is the choices of individuals that make our society work. And on a good day, I DO think our society "works."

Skyhouse has been busy since the last FEC Assembly!

Something that was big on our calendar in September was the wedding of two Skyhousers - Amy and myself. Preparations took a long time, and included finishing the downstairs dining room floor and walls. We spent a month taking circuitous routes to our kitchen and eating outside, but the final result is fabulous.

Amy and I are now happily married. The ceremony was officiated by Cecil and the reception's MC was Tony; Skyhousers put a lot of effort into making our day a special one, and Amy and I are very grateful.

Skyhouse also participated in Dancing Rabbit's Land Day, celebrating 9 years since the land on which we live was purchased. Next year's 10th Land Day promises to be big, with old Rabbits and Skyhousers being invited for a reunion.

Amy and I then left on an almost-two-month international trip. Stop one was Argentina to visit my family. From there, we went to St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands for the wedding of Amy's brother Stuart. Finally, we topped it off with a trip to the east coast for Thanksgiving. We were gone for so long, Tony became a quite skillful hula-hooper in our absence.

Speaking of travel, Cecil took a trip to California while Amy and I were away. There he visited former-Skyhouser Jeffrey among other friends. Later, he held down the fort while Tony, Amy, and I all went to visit family for the December holidays. Yet despite this diaspora, we were all together again in time to ring in the New Year.

So what's ahead for us? The 2007 edition of the Communities Directory is large on Tony and Amy's radar; they've already put in many hours of work on it, and they're just getting warmed up. Skyhouse Consulting has also taken on more jobs for webpage design. There's even talk of updating our own business site to something a little cleaner. 2007 is going to be another great year.

find out more about Skyhouse at:
http://www.skyhousecommunity.org/

Ken and Amanda and big brother Drew added a new baby boy (Gideon) to their family this fall. He's a sweetie!

Our business is going very well, and we sometimes have more work than we are capable of doing! We have many happy repeat customers and many clients that come to us because of a recommendation from a co-worker, and so we've not had to do any advertising in the last year (other than keeping our google presence active).

We had extensive electrical work done outside our home, to update the system, and had the electricity taken out of our big old barn. The old system just wasn't safe anymore.

We had our garden here at the house for the first year since we moved here 3 years ago. The first summer came and went with us still working on making the house livable, the second summer we had a garden plot at the community garden in a nearby town. This spring Amanda grew lots of starters in the house, and a friend tilled up a small garden patch for us and delivered a truck load of organic compost. We had a very successful season and had lots of yummy produce to eat. The season was short, with a very rainy spring and early frosts. We are already looking forward to spring and our next garden.

We got help from a friend who came and completed the roof over our entryway so that we don't get wet or step into deep snow when we enter and exit our house. Thanks Karl!

Ken and Amanda's old Subaru finally bit the dust, and we purchased a new Subaru for their use, so now we know they'll be safe and won't be likely to get stranded on their travels!

Jenn has been sick for the last several months and unable to work, while the medical bills are mounting. This has been a serious hardship for our community. She was recently diagnosed with late stage, chronic lyme disease. The treatment has been difficult for her so far, but we are hopeful that she will recover fully over the course of the 2 - 3 year treatment. She is coping as well as she can, and keeping her spirits up thanks to the love and support she gets from the community. Her 3 children are looking forward to her recovery as well.

And we ended 2006 with our boiler blowing, and so we have been without heat and hot water for the last 5 days. We are currently looking into the cost of replacing our heating system.

So that's the news from here. We continue to be committed to sustaining and growing Meadowdance, and loving life in our little commune up here in the Green Mountains.

Ken, Amanda, Drew, Gideon, Jenn, Aidan, William, and Terran The Meadowdance Crew

Find out more about Meadowdance at:
http://www.meadowdance.org/

Membership has been steady: we still have the 5 adult members & Renay (now 10) who have been here "forever". This spring we accepted a new provisional member, Jesse, and her 1 year old daughter - but it did not work out and she left in the summer.

Betsy became a provisional member on Oct 1 after extended visits this summer. Her partner, Sue, has been spending much of her time here as well.

Both Betsy and Sue are massage therapists and Betsy now has a program offering massages to folx on the farm. Lucky us!

One of the big changes is that Renay began public school this fall - after having been homeschooled until now. She catches the bus outside our front door at 7:20 am and is gone all day - it's a big change for all of us and especially for her mom, Gigi. Renay wanted more social interaction with other kids and is LOVING IT and doing well in school.

A big project this summer was changing our sorghum operation. The last time we had a major change was in 1993. This time we upgraded our building to get rid of the steam by natural convection (rather than noisy fans), installing a wood fired steam boiler and an all new cooking pan setup with copper coils inside the pans. We now boil the juice with steam in the copper coils rather than an open fire under a pan. We are happy with the new system as it delivers more consistent hi quality syrup and stoking the fire is much safer now. A major player in the conversion to steam was Kris from EW who has spent months here doing the conversion. To honcho the construction upgrade we hired Ceilee - who was born & raised here. I noted the change in roles: all those years I told him what to do; now, I was asking: ok, so what do I do now?

We are anticipating Laird & Ma'ikwe's wedding in April in Albuquerque. We are still trying to figger out who is going to stay home to tend to the animals and the garden seedlings at home. Ma'ikwe and Jibran have visited here several times during the year.

Summer months we always have a lot more folx here; in fact, it is not unusual for nonmembers to outnumber members on the farm. This year was no exception: in addition to 8 interns, we had Jo here for the summer. Jo was born here and has spent much of her 19 years between here and Ganas. Jo had a good friend stay here for several months and help her prepare food and cater at Amy & Juan's wedding at Dancing Rabbit. Jo also put in a lot of time along with Ceilee at the sugar shack modification project.

Otto from EW has returned for his second annual winter lex trip here - keeping us supplied with firewood - even getting ahead on wood!

We had the vulgar bulgars from TO here for a week or so helping with sorghum and playing at A & J' wedding. We also had labor exchange crews from TO & EW here to help with the sorghum harvest. True to form, there were a few romantic liaisons as well... We continued to have a fairly steady stream of visitors - including several student groups and ex members and ex interns.

Interns have become an important part of our social scene and labor pool during the last decade. With fewer full members here (and all of us traveling some), the internship program has had some strains. It seems that interns - like the rest of us - experience various kinds of personal/growth issues and in the effort to maintain a healthy and supportive environment for all, some of us get more emotionally taxed than is healthy. We are in the process of evaluating the program and wondering how we can tweak it to be sustainable for all.

We have farmed and gardened organically since the commune was founded. The fields have been certified organic since 1988. This year we requested certification for the garden as well - putting the garden folx thru more hoops - mainly more detailed records and planting more organic seeds.

Find out more about Sandhill at:
http://www.sandhill.org/

You know you've lived on a commune when...

...you share a Netflix subscription with 4 or more people.

...you have no idea what Netflix is

...you or a member of your family has ever answered to the name Sage, Harmony or Rainbow

...you know the Briggs-Meyer, Enneagram or Aryuvedic dosha type of everyone you live with

...you've ever given or received feedback while naked, with someone other than your lover

...you share a checkbook with 5 to 75 other people

...dinner conversation turns to reminiscing about your favourite McDonalds food before you stopped eating there. The longest-term member thinks they ate there once in the 80's.

...you cringe at the phrase "high impact", because you want to get as far away from those people as possible, or because you *are* one of those people

...you've ever organized an orgy by consensus

...you've decided when to hold a retreat based on the most auspicious astrological reading

...your household income breaks down to either $75 a month, or $250,000 annually, depending on how you look at it

Eight of the above are true for Valerie LivingWater, who has lived at Twin Oaks for 15 years.

Shortly after he moved out Jessi, Marc, Abie, Kibby, Adam, and Theo all moved in. We are learning how to live communally and egalitarianly with each other. Jessi and Abie moved here from Pittsburgh. Jessi is a star bike mechanic and chess player, and has quickly gotten plugged into being a riseup.net volunteer. Elijah is thrilled. Abie is a mathematician, fermentor extraordinaire, and has perhaps the wryest sense of humor on the planet.

Marc is a local yokel who moved here from Sherwood Co-op, the local student-housing cooperative. He makes beautiful crafty things, works with kids, and speaks fluent French. Nous t'aimons, Marc!

Kibby, Adam, and Theo all moved here from West Seattle co-housing. Kibby is a woman of theater, a so-good-it-makes-you-cry baker, and is studying the Waldorf style of education. Adam brings some much needed sophistication to the house with his gorgeous Scottish accent that makes everything sound much more exciting. He has a new job at Yes! magazine that is great but has an overly long commute. Kibby and Adam are the parents of the delightful and amazing Theo. Theo is three, his favorite color is blackish-grayish-green, and he loves to hide and play instruments.

Having a child in the house has been really fun for all of us, and it helps that Theo's parents are geniuses at meeting Theo's needs, so he is generally a very happy kid. He has been growing rapidly since living here, which all kids do, I guess, and has mastered the use of pronouns and how to ask probing questions. He calls our house the Deer House, due to the large deer in our living room.

For the rest of us, Monica and Addy are in school. Monica is studying education and Addy is doing pre-reqs for nursing school. They continue to be best friends and confidantes. Sheldon and Johanna have moved into the "sweet suite" - rooms across the hallway from each other. They have ski passes and try to go find the snow every Friday. Elijah has applied to graduate school and may leave, with Katie in tow, in the fall. Katie continues to write up a science fictional storm, and even has some story sales this past year. Thea has painted two rooms bright orange, and one can only assume her master plan is to paint the whole house electric orange. She kindly and bravely has stepped into our delegate role. You all are lucky to have her.

The house has had a really social, friendly, and homey feeling. We had a huge ten-year land day party in late summer. We had twenty-plus communards of yore here and had a marching band throughout the house. The whole house felt like a funky Muppet commune.

Sheldon, Marc, and Monica recently purchased and installed a gas stove on our first floor, which is so nice for our cold and dark winters. We have a new shoe rack made by Marc. We are full enough that we have people cooking dinners every night. Yay!

Along with other communities, we have formed a 'Collective of Collectives' linking other housing communities in town. The group is very fledgling, but talks about things like collectivizing food and ending rent. We are also helping restart a north end 'Community Pantry' which provides dumpstered and bulk foods to cooperatives. When that gets running we have plans to form one on the south side of Seattle, possibly in our house.

Find out more about Emma Goldman's Finishing School at:
http://www.egfs.org/

The Tofu biz continues to expand as we explore further upgrades, including getting advise from an Ottawa, ON soy equipment consultant; the upgrade team has begun preliminary discussions on potential building locations for the expansion.

This October, a contingent of teens from The Farm in Tenessee came up for a weekend of work and cross-commune cultural exchange. They helped out boxing tofu, doing food processing, and in the dairy and kitchen, as well as participating in various discussions with Oakers, including how Twin Oaks can better integrate our teens. They even got to experience a Twin Oaks dance party! A group of Oakers will be visiting the Farm this Spring to complete the exchange.

In other LEX news, a group of Oakers traveled out to East Wind this spring , and three people didn't return! We evened the score soon after when some East Winders came to LEX for the Communities Conference and one of them decided to stay on as a Twin Oaks member.

After lots of community process, a new family with a child joined us in the late spring, our fi rst in four years! Luuk (age 2) has charmed the pants off of everyone and quickly amassed his own bevy of adoring primaries. Elsa and Ben are both an important part of our (somewhat waning) Ultimate Frisbee scene.

As per our age cap policy, we removed the age cap this spring when the average age fell below 40. We are now open to members of all ages!

Rollie's son Chris(ex-child member)had an emergency appendectomy and recently spent some time recovering at Twin Oaks.

Various Oakers have been working on Brad Blanton's (local Independant candidate) campaign for Congress, as well as participating in discussion groups based on his book and personal philosophy, "Radical Honesty." Paxus did a stint as his fund-raiser and campaign manager, and Promethea faciliated several "World Cafe" discussion forums on the farm as well as in Richmond and Culpepper. Marione and Brenda have started a Radical Honesty discussion group on the farm. Several Shannon Farm-Twin Oaks "News" continued from page 1 romances sprung up from Shannon Farm's "alternative singles" dance this summer, resulting in increased traffic between the two communities.

Twin Oaks' homegrown klezmer band, The Vulgar Bulgars, finally took the plunge and took PALs to go on tour this Summer and Fall. They played their way up to Montreal, and made it as far Toronto before their van broke down. Overall, the tour was both a success and a blast, and they were well recieved everywhere they went; an imporant step in the Bulgar's mission to spread klezmer throughout the world!

Our social scene continues to blossom and fluctuate. We've had some community dialogues around racism, culture, and class, including sharing circles and O&I papers. Some folks have been playing bridge in ZK on Saturday nights, Alyssa organized a number of coffee houses during the spring and summer, and we performed "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Abridged" to great acclaim over Anniverary weekend. Rehearsals for Tom Stoppard's play "Acadia" are already underway, in preparation for performances the first week in December.

Sky and Marielle organized Twin Oaks' second annual rave for the fall equinox, a lovely evening featuring bumpin' music, a bonfire, special treats including fruit, chocolate, and coffee, and lots of groovy late night vibes.

We just approved Scott's proposal to start a Twin Oaks Software collective; for the first time we seem to have amassed enough computer geeks to make this business feesable. If successful, it has the potential to earn $40/ hour, our highest dollar per hour yet!

A group of Oakers went to Sandhill this September to help out with their Sorghum harvest. As always, they fell in love with this homey community and returned singing its praises.

Gwen (Age 4) had a Fancy Nancy birthday party this October, with many off-the-farm kids and many princessthemed presents.

Find out more about Twin Oaks at:
http://www.twinoaks.org/

In membership news, we are now 6 full members (Ira, Stacie, Erik, Abraham, Radish, and Ken) and one provisional member (Sean). We just made Ken Bezilla (ex-EW) a full member, and hope we can convince him to stay forever! We sadly said goodbye to Brittiney and Ajna (her two year old and our other toddler's only playmate) in October, though we've heard that they're considering a return. So with kids we're down to just True (2) and Kelsey (13) again, so keep on sending any families our way! On New Year's Day, we added new member Sean and his giant dog Beamish. Sean is a hard worker with a great sense of humor, True's new best friend, and a great musician. We office workers are all enjoying the sound of banjo and guitar coming down the hall since his arrival, and we're all so glad that Erik has finally found a kindred (maybe TOO kindred?) spirit in his buddy Sean. Sean's fiance Julie has made many visits to the community, and we're all hoping she'll think about being a resident of some sort in the future.

We've been blessed with multiple great interns this winter. Nicole, Edmund, David, and Jolene are all wonderful workers and great folks. Nicole and Edmund have added some additional amusement to our living room lately with their tendency to break into foot wrestling and/or stick fights. Yet, we remain committed to nonviolence.

Stacie and Erik (mom and dad to True and Kelsey) announced that they're expecting a new addition to the family in mid-August. Kelsey started private school this year, and is doing great, happy to finally be with some kids her own age and away from a house full of "grownups!"

In additional news, we started a big bathroom-remodeling project at the farmhouse in the fall, which was in dire need of a bathroom that wasn't rotting or full of millipedes. Thankfully, David (TO, ex-EW), our associate Joe, and several Twin Oakers gave generously of their time to rebuild the room. Unluckily, however, we lost Joe, who was going to finish the work, to travel in December - so the bathroom sits unfinished. Our former member Paul, however, is expected to ride in for a February visit and make our entire whirlpool bath and tile dreams come true. If only!

To find out more about Acorn Community, visit www.AcornCommunity.org.

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