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Saying "Sayonara" to stress
November 14
I apologize for seeming trivial in these stress laden times, but, no matter how confused I am after watching "the experts"pontificate about "how to get out of the mess we're in" on television, I still experience a sense of calm and inner peace when I walk out into our yard. A beautiful deep green pepper plant is thriving near where our water hose sprang a small leak, new tomato plants are sprouting up in profusion, and trees are developing new branches that leave a new pattern of shade and light on the ground.
I usually go out in the yard looking for what I need to do next to make it more accessible for visitors who want to view our work here. I never go out into all its beauty looking for peace and calm. Yet I am always amazed at how quickly an awareness of the ability of nature to make things grow comes over me there.
I was reading an interesting letter published in Zimbio a few weeks ago about how easy it is nowadays to forget the "meaning of life" in our fast moving world. Written by a hedge fund manager who retired to get time to repair his health, which was "destroyed by the stress I layered onto myself', he gives an insiders view of why we now need "whole" people to come on board to design a " a forum for great minds to come together to create a new system of government that truly represents the common man’s interest, while at the same time creating rewards great enough to attract the best and brightest minds to serve in government roles without having to rely on corruption to further their interests or lifestyles. ...... I believe there is an answer, but for now the system is clearly broken." (read the entire letter here).
Our retiring hedge fund manager says that as "nearly everyone will be forgotten" we should "give up on leaving our mark, throw the Blackberry away and enjoy life". At Home-Grown Food Network we believe that life on a low income is going to become the most common experience for millions of families in the next few years. We are committed to demonstrating sustainable lifestyles for low income families by growing food at home in urban settings with access to broadband, so that while they might not have Blackberry's to throw away, they will retain a relationship with cyberspace balanced by a ready access to the calming influence of their own backyards!
Peter Naughton
Manager, Home-Grown Food Network
This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site
Blaming Bush for "The Troubles"
October 10
I was growing up in rural Ireland when the Russians first put their Sputnik spacecraft into space, and, my aunt started blaming everything bad that happened on the Russians. If we had bad weather, small potatoes in our yard, a cranky cow, or chickens who laid few eggs-she used to blame it all on the Sputnik. This was very amusing to me of course because I had endless fun imagining little Russian astronauts sending morse code radio signals to our chickens who dutifully decoded them in our barnyard and stopped laying eggs as instructed by the (Source) Russians!
Now that we are in the middle of "The Troubles/Unusual Times", it seems you would not be a human if you did not find someone to blame. So, as expected, we have millions of people looking around for a "blamee". Some say its "the Prez", others,"The Fedz", and the End Timers blame, "The Force".
Now I ask you, what effect are these blame thought waves having on the eco system? In 1968 researchers at Temple Buell College, Colorado, measured the effects of music on plants. They exposed them to different tones and frequencies. Their findings were amazing! Exposure to heavy metal music made the plants tilt in the opposite direction or die, whereas classical music lulled the plants to lean toward the speakers. Are we not thinking heavy metal right now? (more).
But how can we stop ourselves? On Black Monday, October 19, 1987. the Stock Market crashed. Nobody knows why it happened. My aunt, in a characteristically euphemistic way called it a Stock Market Bump, and as usual, blamed it on the Sputniks. Although I do not believe in challenging my elders about their theories of the universe, blaming it on the Russians 35 years after the Sputnik was launched into space was too much and I said so. She smiled at me and said "better to send the blame into space than keep it on the ground". Good point!
A couple of months ago we planted Passion Fruit vines. I love the way they grow-the flowers look like tiny replicas of radio telescopes and in full bloom the flowers on vines become array antennae like those at SETI in New Mexico. They are so adaptable to their environment and have such lovely leaves. And perhaps beam out the blame and receive back energy and optimism to rise to new challenges? Brenda created a beautiful sign using one of the flowers as a template. As you can see, the sign says 
"We Grow Passion Fruit, We Grow Passion, We Grow."
Home Grown Food Network is based on the belief that we can grow together, even while "under siege by Sputniks".
Peter Naughton, Manager, Home-Grown Food Network
This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site
SLAPPs and Bogus Claims: Legal Progress in Building the Under $20,000 House
August 6, 2008
Brenda Barnes, President, Home Grown Food Network, Inc.
As I've written before, at least one of us had to stay here at all times this summer at the Home Grown Food Network demonstration house near Palm Springs, in a mobilehome park in Desert Hot Springs, California. All summer I've been in Arizona (which is even hotter and more humid, it seems to me—freaky weather everywhere), most weekdays and home weekends. This week what I was doing there on a real estate project stalled so much I couldn't stand staying there for no reason by myself, so I came home Tuesday night. I wanted to see the progress Peter told me on the phone he was making on our house, which we decided a few weeks ago is most accurately called “the under $20,000 house.”
I also expected to be served before now with an unlawful detainer action as to which a response is due quickly, so I figured I'd better be here. I've written before about how since we started the lawsuit for damages against the park owners in June 2006 for interfering with how we are remodeling our house, and for retaliating against us for going to the government about that interference and numerous violations of our rights like trespassing, they are getting more and more desperate trying to find some violation we are committing of park rules so they could first, get an injunction against our doing that. So far they have not been successful in doing that in two years of trying. The idea of getting an injunction against us clearly was that they were hoping a court would issue such a general injunction that we would then violate it and they could evict us easily for violation of the injunction. What actually happened, even though the law for evicting people states--as is plenty obvious to anyone, even these people who do not seem to be able to read a law to save their lives--eviction is more serious than getting an injunction, now they served a 60-day notice in May that they will try to evict us if we don't move ourselves and our home by the end of that time.
It was obvious from the beginning that they were not really trying to get either an injunction or evict us for violating park rules or the California state administrative regulations applying to mobilehomes that the Mobilehome Residency Law allows them to use. I had not been a tenant except in rent-controlled apartments in Santa Monica owned by law office clients—hardly a situation where a lawyer has to worry about being evicted—since I was a college student in the early 60s. I had represented landlords in rent control administrative cases for 15 years and been both a landlord and an investor in housing for millions in profits for over 30 years, so by that time my point of view was pretty much on the side of landlords. I thought tenants destroyed property values and there were far too many hindrances on landlords being able to control them.
Then I had two landlords in a row try to evict me for totally bogus reasons, and both of them lied about serving papers on me and such things, as tenants had always seemed to claim happened when I was helping landlords but I did not ever believe the tenants. A friend of mine always said, “All tenants are scum,” when I would be telling a story about what some tenant said in a case, and there are all kinds of legal presumptions such as presuming correctness of a sworn process server's statement, that make it difficult to prove such statements are lies. It seems to me now a very sad case of unfair karma that the same systemic disbelief of tenants and holding of stereotypical beliefs to hurt them have made life so difficult for us. I didn't know I was misjudging a whole class of people and making my living in a system that just bulldozed their rights, no matter what laws said. It doesn't seem fair to have to pay for my ignorance then, now.
However, when I think about it more, it hasn't been so bad. The two landlords did not succeed, since I am, unlike people we have seen landlords consistently hire, educated in the top 10% of a then-top 10 law school; experienced in legal practice for 20 years, even though I wasn't a litigator; and still competent to learn and apply law, though I stopped practicing law to get qualified to start Home Grown Food Network over 11 years ago. We've also had an incredible amount of luck along the way, which has made us think maybe the Universe knows it is unfair to punish good people like us and help people who lie and otherwise do act like true scum, so we deserve some amazing breaks to help us. One process server, for example, claimed to have posted a three-day notice on our door because no one could be found on the property to personally serve us, at the very same time when there were at least five workers AND THE LANDLORD on the property along with both of us. The landlord's case based on that alleged service eventually had to be dismissed, and that led to a long delay that was part of two years when we were not paying rent because we had given notice that the property was uninhabitable, which is why there were workers there working. Not getting rent for two years and paying attorney's fees for that kind of sloppy work eventually made the landlord want to pay us what it took to settle.
Many breaks just like that happened in the cases against the current landlord. For example, retaliating against us for exercising constitutional rights is an issue over and over. The landlords have to keep proving whatever they did in the particular context was really done because we were violating park rules or a law and that is what they were really concerned about. That becomes difficult when we have WRITTEN documents showing we got the very first letter from any of their lawyers 11 days after the date of our complaint to the government against them. It also is difficult to prove they really care about park rules when that letter tells us we must stop parking on the common area driveways as we had been doing every day and night we were here for 18 months by that time. Kinda seems like they were trying to get us for some other reason.
That was over two years ago, on May 12, 2006. Since then we have numerous other obvious moments of truth about our landlords. As time has gone on and we have gotten more and more of our building projects done, it is more and more obvious we never were and certainly aren't now violating any park rules or laws. I wrote them letters showing exactly how that was so every time they made some bogus claim. For instance, as we were accumulating the recycled building materials we have later used in our building and gardening here, there have been what they could with some surface legitimacy call instances where something that looked like “clutter” could be pointed out. They always went overboard and called it debris and trash instead, so it would have been difficult for them once there was opposition to a case based on those notices, which were never specific as the law requires anyway. However, as time went on they became so desperate to point some such something out that it has become not just easy to prove there is some other reason they are doing it, but it has become laughable. For instance, lately they actually called our $500 cement mixer “clutter” in one of their notices to us.
Another time they said the $300 gazebo we had put up in our side yard—almost completely invisible to them from park driveways behind oleanders anyway—had to be removed because it was allegedly “combustible.” That's about all they could say, since “patio furniture” is allowed in yards under their rules, so whatever was objectionable about ours had to go beyond its being not something that in their opinion should be outside, which was at the time their catchall objection. (Canvas cushions on patio chairs, for instance, were one of their repeated favorite objections about our yards. No problem to them that every time I got a notice about canvas cushions outside—besides the obvious well-known fact that canvas cushions are common in yards throughout America—I would take pictures of about 20 canvas cushions in other yards here in the park that same day. One day there were planks open in the fence between our yard and the manager's behind us when we received such a notice, so I actually took pictures of canvas cushions on a chaise in THE MANAGER'S yard!)
Clearly gazebos are by definition made to go outside. So it seemed easy enough to these rocket scientists to just say ours was “combustible,” so it had to go. Any desperate attempt to make us seem in violation of some rule. (Of course we start with the small problem for them of there actually being no rule or law against combustible things in yards, which is why one of our neighbors has a wooden BUILDING in the back yard, taking up virtually all the yard, and the owner himself has a wooden workshop building built right up to the property line next to our parking spaces. Both of these had been there since we moved here in 2004, and one day flames started from an electrical transformer not 10 feet above that wooden workshop. These Einsteins got around the nonexistence of a rule against combustible items by saying we had “impermissible items” in our yard and citing no rule that made the gazebo even “impermissible.”) The day we got the notice about our gazebo we got proof from its manufacturer and provided that to the landlords' attorneys that it was made of fire-retardant metal, and it is proper and safe for use next to and even attached to combustible homes. The next notice about that just left out the claim that the gazebo was “combustible,” but it still said we had to remove it. By then, deleting the claim about combustibility left no reason we would have to remove it, but that did not bother these brilliant people in the slightest.
So it has been an incredible series of lucky breaks that we can now prove from their very own writing that it could not possibly have been some legitimate reason they were trying to get us to stop remodeling our house the way we were and stop suing them about their interference with our constitutional rights. That always beings us back to, then why would they do it? Why would they spend thousands of dollars on attorneys' fees and waste years litigating against tenants just remodeling their own house? First I say to myself, just think what Dr. Phil told Oprah when the beef growers in Texas were suing her for saying after she learned about mad cow disease she was never going to eat another burger again, and she kept saying it was unbelievable that she had to disrupt her life to defend against such a ridiculous suit. He said stop wondering why they are doing it and spend your time devising a winning strategy, or the line to sue Oprah will get very long. We don't have to worry so much about people suing us, as we are hardly the deep pockets Oprah is. As deep pockets go, we're more like a solid seam, totally judgment-proof. However, wondering why they are doing it and saying it is unbelievable are for the most part the same kind of waste of time for us from devising a winning strategy as they were for Oprah. In our case why they are doing it turns out later to be an important issue, but when we are beginning to devise a strategy and spending time working on it, we need to stick to that, instead of wondering why anyone would do this to us.
Then I tried, three or four times, to get the resident manager, then one of the landlords himself, then all of the landlords' attorneys I have dealt with, to see we are not dangerous people if they would just leave us alone. We are not violating any rules except trivial ones we haven't been notified about, like forgetting to get our car registration renewed 25 days before we got a notice about it, the same day I took pictures of cars parked here over TWO YEARS past the registration dates on their license plates. (By the way, I took pictures again a few weeks ago, three or so months after we got that notice about our car registration, and some of those with 2005 license plates are still parked here, where I have seen them the whole time, dusty, with flat tires, terrible looking actually whereas our car was drivable and clean. Also, in the meantime a wrecked car with the front windshield totally smashed and the top caved in has been parked in the corner of the park for a month. Nothing has been done that I can see to protect property owners of and in this park from destruction of their property values from that trash and debris being parked right in plain sight in the front of the park. It's still there today. I just looked.)
After that didn't work, I did just what Dr. Phil convinced Oprah to do: no matter how silly or unfair it is that we have to lose $150,000 in income to fight these landlords, we are doing it, and we will ultimately win and get our money back, plus more, and make an example of these landlords to deter other landlords from doing the same kind of thing to other tenants just lawfully exercising their constitutional rights. Anyway, so far we have won. We are still here, almost two-and-a-half years later, after they first tried to get us to leave, and they have yet to win anything against us. We are on appeal about denial of our motion to dismiss their case for being a SLAPP, which is a retaliatory lawsuit someone files against someone else, knowing it can't win, but trying to keep the other side from exercising constitutional rights. Even the judge who denied our motion knows it should have been granted--and it should certainly have been--so I hope we will find an attorney who wants to go on the appeal with us and get $50,000 or so in attorney's fees for winning that appeal. The landlords did not even present any evidence to the judge of why they were suing us other than to retaliate against us for remodeling our house in a way they do not like and complaining to the government about their earlier violations of our rights. NO EVIDENCE! NONE! They just presented argument. I have never seen such an easy case.
The reason I know the judge knows he should have granted our motion is he made us write the statement of decision we requested when he announced we lost the motion, when the winner always has to write that; we wrote it saying there was no evidence to support what the landlords said but the judge just believed them and that was that; the landlords didn't even file any objections to that proposed statement of decision; and over two months later the judge issued a minute order that he was denying our request for a statement of decision. He had already decided we were going to get a statement of decision. That is why he ordered us to write, serve, and file the proposed one. But when you look at what happened in black and white--that he ruled in their favor with absolutely no evidence to support that ruling--he just couldn't sign the statement of decision saying that. Of course the rocket scientists didn't help him any by not filing any objections to that proposed statement, but on the other hand, what could they do? There wasn't any evidence submitted. You can't both manufacture the evidence afterwards and manufacture the fact that it was submitted in response to the motion, as well.
There simply is no evidence that they ever had any legitimate reason to try to get an injunction against us, and that is why they tried to obfuscate issues by arguing instead of submitting evidence of facts. I write them letters showing exactly why they have no legitimate reason, every time they try again to come up with some reason. Their notices never have what the law requires in the first place: dates, times, witnesses, and specific facts showing violation of a rule. That is, except for the trivial retaliatory things like car registration 25 days overdue when others are years overdue and nothing happens to them. Nonetheless, I give dates, times, witnesses, and specific facts showing there either is no violation of any rule or that there is could not be why we got a notice.
So for now, being here is the best revenge against unfair, illegitimate actions attacking us for exercising our constitutional rights. We are not wasting any more time asking why the attack happened. We are just trying not to violate even any trivial rules, to stick to issues of substance, and to keep on doing the necessary footwork to win. We also are continuing to exercise our constitutional right of freedom of expression. We are doing that by remodeling our house any legal way that seems appropriate to us and possibly helpful to 30 million people in America who never will own their own homes unless some inexpensive workable way to provide owned housing is demonstrated. The issues of 30 million and two people's freedom of expression are not subject to anyone's unlawful veto.
E mail: brenda@home-grown.org
This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site
Easy, Free, Perennial (and Cool) Desert Food Garden in August
August 2, 2008
Brenda Barnes, President, Home Grown Food Network, Inc.
At least one of us had to stay here at all times this summer at the Home Grown Food Network demonstration house near Palm Springs, in a mobilehome park in Desert Hot Springs, California.
I've written before about how since we started the lawsuit for damages against the park owners in June 2006 for interfering with how we are remodeling our house, and for retaliating against us for going to the government about that interference, every time both of us leave something awful happens to the house. As much as we've worked on it now, and as much as we both love it, we couldn't bear that again, so we've agreed one of us will always be here to take pictures and record what happens on an audio recorder and if possible video, too. I've had to work on a real estate project in Arizona, so mostly left on guard duty has been my husband and vice-president of Home Grown Food Network, Peter. It's amazing how much work he has gotten done both on remodeling the house and grounds and on improving the gardens. I think coming back on weekends and knowing I have only a few days makes me more efficient too, so we have really changed things this summer. Also, we are in the process of being evicted if we cannot show we are not violating any reasonable park rules by anything we are doing, and when things are in the middle it is difficult to show that, so we have been trying to finish many projects, and we have succeeded.
Peter has the wall marking the east edge of the front-yard courtyard, which is eventually going to be eight feet high and over 14 feet long, up to almost the top of our heads, on the first 10' section. He's using reusable forms and a 5% Portland cement and soil mixture, to see if that is enough. We learned that from the late great architect Nader Khalili at CalEarth in Hesperia, who showed how it works for dome houses made from mostly earth stuffed in continuous plastic tubes he calls SuperAdobe bags. So far it seems great even though we used no bags. Each layer, less than a foot in depth, dries rock-hard in about two or three days, hard enough to put the next layer on above it.
This brought us to think about a moment of truth about our landlords. They actually called our $500 cement mixer (left over from our consumption-driven limousine liberal days) “clutter” in one of their notices to us. That “clutter” has been the real time-saver on that project. Khalili says a family can mix up the mostly soil mixture with just coffee cans, and that works. I've seen it done several times, in 29 Palms and in Hesperia. However, a little help from good tools saves so much time. In doing most of these projects, there is always a choice between investing time and labor and investing money. We feel like serfs sometimes, since now we don't have any money because we've lost $150,000 in income fighting our landlords. So to see a project move quickly because we happened to have the right expensive tool invigorated both of us.
The greenhouse in the gazebo frame on the East side of the house is coming along, too. Peter decided to dig soil for the courtyard wall from the middle of that space because it was slowing him down so much to bring soil from the desert, so I decided to wait to put in growing tables and to start them at the lower level of grade where that interior will be when he finishes. Actually, that will give us another foot or so of height to grow in. I decided to shade the greenhouse with vines the way we have the back yard, rather than the greenhouse-grade plastic and shade cloth to put over the frame I was going to use. This week we bought two $19 passion fruit vines at Home Depot, and a soaker hose to water them. We planted them in the moonlight before I went back to Arizona Sunday night, and they seem to have settled in perfectly. This weekend I will have time to put in string for them to grow up and a welded fence panel on the roof for them to grow onto.
The planting directions had all kinds of stuff about non-organic brand-name fertilizers, which of course we ignored, but they did say put a 2” layer of mulch on the plant after it is planted, and we did that, since we mulch everything. That reminded me of another moment of truth about our landlords. They actually sent me a letter once about a year ago saying we had a fire hazard here from all the mulch. That time they focused on three limbs one or more of them saw by bending down and peeking through our west garden trellis at three feet from the ground and lower, or maybe leaning over the four-feet high 10' long strip of low fence at the west very back boundary. (Maybe we will get that up to 6' this weekend, or almost certainly next weekend, and Peter put up art against the trellis this week to stop their bending peering.) I had pruned the limbs from a jacaranda and stacked them on the ground to shred later in our electric shredder. Amazingly, the landlords pay for the water we use, so it is incredible they would object to mulching, one of the three main purposes of which is to save water. But there you have it, the kind of thing that causes people to attack others, most often based on ignorance combined with unlimited arrogance that keeps them from educating themselves out of that ignorance. I answered that letter. They never objected to mulch again.
About a month ago, I bought the misting system I planned to use in the gazebo greenhouse to keep it cool for our working and spending time in, and a faucet divider to send water to the mister from the east side faucet, but this morning I decided not to put that in. I've been getting a set of newsletters in my e-mail from Mike McGroarty for years, and I decided to use his intermittent misting system to help seeds germinate and cuttings root instead. Once I saw how high the passion fruit vines were growing in a week straight from the store, and I realized how much coolness will be in that greenhouse from their going all over the roof within a year, I realized we won't need a mister to cool it. In fact, this morning I took some pictures in the back yard where Peter has perfected a method of keeping the sweet potato vines over the area from breaking the arbor. It was so dark the camera flash went off, while there was full sun of the desert five feet away, and it was so cool it approached needing a sweater, when it was over 100 degrees outside. So I'll use misting only as it is needed for plants, not people, after all.
I also took pictures of new tomato flowers and a small green tomato that grew this week while I was gone—how amazing in a 115-degree afternoon sun area; a new pineapple plant that has started from a top I planted when we ate the fruit; two doves I decided are the same ones I saw on the fence a few weeks ago, this time on the back of the patio loveseat next to the bicycle behind the storage building, and they didn't fly away when I was less than two feet from them; and the sweet potato vines growing at the edge of the back yard arbor almost back to the ground, so thick you can hardly see the car in the parking space beyond.
Peter is extending the arbor so it will shade the window in our back door. That is not an easy project to work out since supports have to be out of the way of both the back door and the gate to the back yard opening, all of which we put in and adapted for various purposes as we went along, so haven't planned really well. What a difference the sweet potato vine arbor has made in how comfortable the house is, but getting that window shaded will be a major plus.
What a great life! Semi-tropical and Mediterranean in the desert. I'll write more soon. Keep cool.
This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site
More HGFN blogs (July 08)
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