Honest Weight Food Coop: a very interesting email from Ken Von Geldern

State and federal law are clear that the rules governing member-worker cooperatives are different than those that govern most businesses.

(This will be of limited interest to you folks outside of the Albany area, I’m afraid.)
Honest_weight
To all Honest Weight Food Co-op members,

I’m sending this email to inform you and every member of the co-op, especially all working members, about what’s going on at the co-op, and what will be coming up in the near future. I encourage you to read this and forward it to all your friends and acquaintances who work at the co-op. The reason for this is that we (a group of working members) are not able to get a list of working members, so we haven’t been able to send out this information directly to members. We are having to rely on personal word-of-mouth, flyering at the co-op, and a website, to disseminate this information.

Here is an update about what’s been happening in the recent period:

–At the membership meeting on June 29, the co-op’s voting (working) members were presented with a proposal by the Board of Directors to reduce the discounts received by working members. After some discussion about the co-op’s financial situation, and many suggestions from members on how to improve it, the members rejected the proposal by a vote of about 3 to 1. We also voted down the proposed yearly budget. There was some discussion at this meeting about the suggestion to grant voting rights to non-working members (people who have bought a share, but do not work, and get a 2% discount). (FYI: There are about 1200 working members at the co-op, and about 10,000 non-working share-holders.)

–At the Board of Directors meeting of July 7, the Board “resolved that its fiduciary responsibilities to the
Co-op would require modification, in consultation with the membership, of the current member labor program.” Continue reading “Honest Weight Food Coop: a very interesting email from Ken Von Geldern”

Stardancer and other science-fiction/fantasy books

Maybe I DO like “that kind of book.”

stardancerSome months ago, I read and enjoyed Stardancer (The Song of Forgotten Stars Book 1), the first book by Jaquandor, a/k/a Kelly Sedinger, quite a lot, actually. And it won’t be his last book, judging by his Forgotten Stars website. In fact, the second book in this series is coming out this week.

Read SamuraiFrog’s review and the Amazon customer reviews. One line of a five-star review: “What will hold most readers, young or not-so-young, will be the relationships among the characters, the fast-paced action, and the lovely unexpected unfolding of a story well told.”

What I really wanted to write about here, though, is the fact that, for whatever reason, Stardancer has not been the type of book that I traditionally read. I tend to be more of a history/biography type of guy.

I came across this Top 100 Science-Fiction, Fantasy Books, and there are some big-name books of the genre that, not only did I not read, but that I STARTED to peruse, but failed to complete.

In fact, the only reason I finished A Handmaid’s Tale (#22) is that I was in a book club at my previous church about twenty years ago, comprised almost entirely of women at least two decades older than I. Our monthly pick was fiction, and I read and enjoyed, the Attwood book. Maybe I need a group to be accountable to.

Now, many of the “classics” I did read, such as The Time Machine and 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, as well as the comic book-related material – Watchmen and Sandman.

As for some of the other books:

1. The Lord Of The Rings. For a good long while, I owned the trilogy, in colorful paperbacks; maybe I still do. I thought I’d read The Hobbit first. Got to about page 59 and lost interest. I did see the first LotR film, but none of the subsequent ones.

4. The Dune Chronicles, by Frank Herbert. Started the first book; did not finish.

45. The Left Hand Of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin. Did NOT give this 1969 book a fair shake. I was lent this, and quite possibly Stranger In A Strange Land (#17) when I was recovering from a car accident in 1972. I just wasn’t focused enough to read them.

68. The Conan The Barbarian Series, by R.E. Howard. I DID read a lot of Conan comic books. In fact, one of the few comics-related materials I still own is a short white box filled with Marvel’s Savage Sword of Conan. But never read the source material.

80. Wicked, by Gregory Maguire. This I DID finish.

I’m thinking that, in the next decade, I want to read – let’s be reasonable – 20 of the books I haven’t completed. Two per year, which will give me time to read other things traditionally more to my liking. Maybe some Stephen King, who I had not read AT ALL until I devoured 11/22/63. Almost certainly Asimov; I’ve enjoyed his essays.

Maybe I DO like “that kind of book.”

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