I live in the Hills above Hollywood. It’s a great place to be.

Though I can’t see Alaska from my house, I can see a castle that would make Cinderella proud, turrets and all! There is Moorish architecture. An English manor house too. Even a mid-century masterpiece Case Study House by Pierre Koenig looming over the whole canyon. Who built these houses and why? They certainly had big imaginations…and what a tapestry they have woven through these hills over the years.

Most Sundays we walk down from these hills to the Hollywood Farmers Market. It’s probably a mile or a bit more and it’s a wonderful walk in (almost) any weather.

I love the market on Sundays. There is such a sense of community, and because it’s on Hollywood Boulevard, there is a real sense of place too.

Welcome to the Presidential Election of 2008! It’s been going on nearly two years and here we are two weeks from Election Day and all the questions that should have been addressed during this process have gone ignored. And what a mess it’s left us in. Now we must make a monumental decision…without the facts!

The political parties distract us with canned rhetoric. They try to quantify and categorize us into units and voting blocks they can manipulate. When that fails they try to divide us into manageable coalitions of 50 percent plus one. The media entertains us with invented feuds, predictable villains, and yes more rhetoric.

As we sit in our kitchens, our living rooms and our multi-media cocoons we can’t help but wonder what is going on! Here we are bombarded with information 24 hours a day, but very few of us understand what went wrong, how we got here or what we should be doing.