Chevrolet truck

Lovely to hear songs from the Rubber Soul era of The Beatles playing in a Healdsburg garden centre this afternoon. We buy a hammock as a small contribution to the IdeaGarden.

A book I have been dipping into since Will gave it to me in Mill Valley on Friday, en route to Healdburg, is Bring Me the Rhinoceros, an appreciation of Zen koans by John Tarrant. At the GreenStart event earlier in the week, I had mentioned that, to me at least, the Zeronaut idea was akin to a koan, a device that forces (at least some) people into a higher order of consciousness.

One of the quotes in the book is from Lewis Carroll's The Red Queen: "Why sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." I also feature the quote in The Zeronauts. The challenge these people set themselves, however, is not think impossible things, but to do them.

One of the things I regret in San Francisco is the loss of bookshops, including my long-standing favourite, Stacey's. But Healdsburg still has two bookstores: at one, I bought three books today, Edward Glaeser's Triumph of the City, Doug Patt's How to Architect and Richard White's Railroaded. Plan to read the second of these, together with Steven Sieden's A Fuller View, profiling Buckminster Fuller (a book I bought at San Francisco's MoMA), on the flight home.