My freelance business is booming. I have more work than I can do. I think a lot of the clients I work for are more eager to hire a freelancer than consider another employee. I have the benefit that my husband has a job with health insurance, which allows me to do this. I don't know if this will last, but at the moment it's great.

aka the land of hydropower and endangered salmon, hydropower isn't exactly green. There's a currently a fairly large kerfluffle over sea lions that swim up the Columbia, and plonk themselves at the lunch counter at Bonneville Dam. That is, the end of the fish ladder where the salmon come out. And who can blame the sea lions? It's a man-made situation, concentrating the few surviving migratory fish in one place. So there's a huge argument. Can we shoot the sea lions? Should we? They're not endangered, but the fish are.

The old stories from the turn of the century and before about the salmon runs, about walking across streams on the backs of the salmon, it makes me sad. Whole ecosystems, whole ways of life are no more, because the fish are almost gone. Because of "clean, green, renewable" hydropower.

Fish hatcheries don't work. The hatchery fish are not like the wild stocks, and in fact they just eat what food there is so the wild fish have a harder time surviving.

Just ask the native Americans who used to live and fish at Celilo Falls, now drowned by The Dalles dam on the Columbia. Their longhouses are still there by the freeway, next to a the memory of a waterfall. They got a bunch of money at the time, but that doesn't bring back a waterfall and the fish that swam up it every year.

The entire Oregon salmon season is canceled this year, for sport and commercial fishing. There just aren't enough of them. They may be gone soon.

... in a park, in a house owned by the local park district, the wonderful woman who did my flowers showed up nearly in shock. She'd just been to deliver the flowers to a different wedding, where the bride SLAPPED her because the flowers didn't look like she expected them to.

Wow. Just wow. I felt so sorry for her, she was really nice, and just trying to run a small business.

If I had the whole wedding thing to do over, I'd do it very differently. Even a smallish wedding like we had had too much fuss and bother, and not enough fun for me. Everyone else had a great time. I didn't stop stressing out for about a week after.

And no, we didn't make the attendants buy anything.

I recently saw ads saying "Everyone Deserves the Chance to Fight Their Cancer."

Wow.

I understand, but wow. It's amazing that an organization with as much clout as the American Cancer Society has taken up the cause of the uninsured and underinsured. Finding a cure doesn't do any good if no one can pay for it.

Add the chronically unemployable in to this mix--my husband works in adult psychiatric care. The chronically mentally ill are not capable of holding a job with benefits--hell, most can't manage their own medications in the community. What do we do with the mentally disabled, or with people who are otherwise incapable of working?

Take this whole idea and ask the question "but what happens when the goats get out?"

What happens when genetically modified animals and plants get out into nature? What happens when we can't control them any more? Piggoons, anyone? They were Atwood's super-intelligent pigs bred to grow human transplant organs.

And a whole lot of other weird animals.

Read the book. Atwood is brilliant (the same incredible author who wrote "The Handmaid's Tale"). You will never feel the same about genetically modified animals.

Of course Oryx and Crake is fictitious.

However, it's science fiction in one of its best modes, used as a way to explore those "what happens if" questions. In a story. Especially a story by a brilliant writer like Atwood.