Page 22 RAIN Janu<J.ry 1978 12aindr-ops I'm sure by now all .of you must be wondering what is happening here in the Rainhouse-are we quitting? moving? bringing in ne\Y people? Rumors have been flying (especially among ourselves). Well, as of today (Sunday, December 11), we have good news to share with you. RAIN is alive and well-just going through more of its usual changes and transitions. Joan Meitl has now been a Rainmaker for about two months, taking on more and more of the day-to-day work of subscriptions, checkbook and mail orders. She's the person you should address yourselves to on questions about getting RAIN in your mailbox as safely as possible once a month. She's a champ and has taken over so much of my load that hopefully I will soon fulfill my longstanding promise to do some more substantive writing. The reason today is a special day is that We just hired another person to join our group. Steve Ames is another Ohioan who has been working in Ann Arbor an,d Toledo on social change • issues for quite a while. It's been a)ong search, but we look forward to his moving out here in January. We do have an odd karmic association with Northwestern Ohio, though: Tom grew up there and former staffers Steve Johnson and Rhoda Epstein both went to school there ... January will be a time of changes. Tom and I are planning to move into the house on the Oregon coast that we've been building since July with my brother, Kip. For awhile it looked like we might move the whole magazine out there, but now it feels more appropriate for Tom and I to create a space for ourselves away from the .crazy days here. We'll continue to write for RAIN and ' for awhile at least will spend,a couple of days a week in Portland. Lee also will put a little distance between himself and the daily goings-on of the magazine. He plans to do some consultii:ig work again-perhaps a jobs and energy study and some experimenting with his windmills. All three of us feel a strong need to get back to some real-life hands-on stuff for awhile. Tom and I intend to monitor carefully, for instance, our drum composting privy antl yet-to-be-designed grey water system. We'll all feed the results of all this · back into the magazi~e as it comes into focus. We still need one more person for the daily work on the magazine_::probably a technical person to balance Steve and Joan. Arn you someone with experience with alternative energy systems, recycling, toilets or something new who would like to do s-ome writing, answer ques'tions and maybe even run a workshop or two? Send us a resume and a statement of how you'd like to contribute. We'll be looking around for the next two or three months. -LdeM 1:aking Off the GlovesYou may have noticed we've been taking the velvet gloves off a bit more around here and are trying not to be such "nice guys." We always knew people' expected experienced evaluations of projects and pub_lications as such critiques are the necessary mid-course corrections that will keep us all on the sensible pathways and out of the flashy cul-de-sacs. Due to our subscriber-based financial independence, we need not worry about offending advertisers or losing grants. And for that trust, we owe you honesty. Also, we've grown tired of buttoning our lips on bureaucratic stupidity and corporate greed, some of which we've experienced firsthand, including that time four years ago when a Portland utility tried to get Steve Johnson, RA/N's founder, a,nd I fired when we ran Randy Skoog's anti-• nuclear reading fist after printing their pro-nuclear one. Seems they didn't like equal time. But that's a piece of ,documentable local history for another day. Thanks for your suggestions for future articles and for your favorable comments on Bill Day's critical review of John Vivian's Wood Heat book and to criticism of the DOE-Honeywell Corporation-run Transportable Solar Lab. And, so far, comments on the article about think-tanks and the diffiCtJ.lties of getting independent research have been pos.itive. Certainly if the changes we want to occur are to be accepted by the majority of our fellow citizens, we must be as even-handed in our treatment of our friends in the a.t. network as we are of government agencies, multi-national corpoi;ations, and their hired guns. Otherwise we're simply faking it. Like everyone, we make mistakes, so kt us know when we miss the marlt or we overdo it with a mailed fist. Meanwhile, if you'.ve any suppressed document stories you can back up, let us know. The gloves are off! It (eels just right. Some final ideas for personal action: Other'groups with money in the bank might want to check whether their financial resources are being used appropriately, or whether their neighborhood is being redlined and their bank is also negative on energy-conservation and solar loans ... solar redlining. We heard our bank's loan VP talk disparagingly of solar home heating at the regional solar conference we helped organize, so we've moved o'ur <i:hecking and savings actounts to a pro-solar bank. Since We also publicized our move widely, it's still getting local newspaper coverage, and we'll be helping a local magazine do an in-depth story on the problem. So don't forget the PR! It really helps to reach out to others, hopefully jogging them into action as I'm trying to do to you. -LJ Librarians and mailbox watchers, take note: There ~ill be a longer than usual delay between _issues next time. We'll do a combined February/March issue (Vol. IV, No. 5) that will come out in late February-. Nothing to worry about -just our mid-winter breather which, as usual, we have amply filled up already!
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