Three Interesting Things

1. As someone who, since the pandemic, has worried about air quality in indoor concert spaces, I was interested to see this article about the Clean Air Club's work in Chicago.

2. I have been doing a little research for a project that led me to historical markers. So this deep dive into historical markers and their accuracies and viewpoints was of interest to me.

3. And also for research reasons, I have been listening to the "Hadestown" cast album.  (Okay, fine, maybe it's just because I like it.) So this piece about how Anais Mitchell took the West End staging of the musical as a chance to tweak a pivotal song, and then how social media meant that change spread, was fascinating.

The Butt Rule

I was once doing a group exercise where we all passed around papers, there was one for each person in the group, and everyone had to write on each one and then pass it on. So sometimes one would take a little longer, or the person you were passing to would clearly be busy and the person passing to you already had another ready for you. 

We discovered one had gotten stuck along the way and everyone looked, and nope. The person passing to me told me they had given it to me. And I was sure I had passed everything but shifted to look again, and discovered I had tucked the paper under me. So it was found and all was well. 

One person told me, they called it the Look Under Your Butt Rule. That it had started when they had kids in carseats who would call out that something was lost. And often once the car was stopped the search would find it underneath the kid.

These days, I often find in my squishy couch that I have lost track of, and often standing up and looking at where I was sitting helps. Though I can't swear I haven't been sitting on a park bench and suddenly realized I misplaced something I had just a second ago. 

We could get very profound about how things you need are often just right there.  But also we are keeping track of so so much these days.  Juggling all the things.  Sometimes, a thing or two slips underneath your butt.

New Release - Dream Catchers Anthology

Newsletter subscribers got the heads up first, but surprise! 

Something a little different from me. I had the chance to participate in an anthology. We all wrote flash stories around the theme of dreams. I have two stories  in this, one straight contemporary with a smooch (flash, so not much time) and the other is a little more folklore based, though there are relationship shenanigans.

Balloon Dreams is about a woman who, after a weird dream, hops into a hot air balloon to see if a change in perspective helps, and discovers that there's a cute balloon pilot.

Dream God's Assignment is about dream god Pahulu, who is asked to send a dream message to a friend's granddaughter.

The anthology is being made available on Amazon in e and paperback. 

It was such a fun prompt and I enjoyed the chance to go in two very different (and yet still very me) directions with the theme.

If Amazon is not your book purveyor of choice, I do have plans to make the stories, including an extended cut of one, available later this year, so stay tuned for that. 

Three Interesting Things

1. It has probably been a decade since I went to Salt Lake City for dayjob reasons.  But while we were there, I insisted I needed to see the lake.  And so I and the one co-worker who felt similarly drove out there, and circled past.  It was winter, there was snow, so we didn't get out of the car.  But it was gorgeous.  So, hearing about how climate change and drought have affected it, saddens me.  This article talks about some of the efforts to address that.  

2. In Wellington, one family has some native birds nesting underneath their house.

3. A DC born artist is part of two Broadways shows coming soon. 

Support the Things You Love

I missed talking about this last week, when it was National Library Week, but as anyone who has ever working in any sort of customer service job, which is a lot of them, people are so quick to tell you what they hate. 

And fair. I am currently trying to get information from a company that I have paid money too, I get it.

So it stands out when people take the time to tell you what they love. I wrote a love letter of sorts to my library this year. I made a point to reference specific things they were doing that I loved, books was obviously a feature. I mentioned branches that I frequented. Access to learning and to COVID tests that I made use of. And ways it had improved my life. 

First, it is so much more fun to write a letter about all the things you love about something. Try it. 

Second, I wanted to mention specific things that I loved, in the hopes that those would continue. 

And third, I wanted to mention how it had helped me. 

We are also in a tight budget season this year in DC, I am going to mention libraries as a thing I love, on the list of things I want more of. It's often easy to get stuck on the newsy bits of the city budget. But libraries, funding for shelters, for youth programs, also are parts of the city budget. And I plan to advocate for them. Your list may be different. 

And of course love letters can also go to grocery stores when a particularly helpful person got something taken care of, or to bus drivers who are fabulous. I think we all get customer surveyed to death these days and it's hard to remember that you can just reach out on your own to whomever or whatever you want to lift up. Like acces to books. 

Three Interesting Things

1. I am really enjoying NPR's sibling series, and this one about grief with siblings was interesting. 

2. American University's student paper wrote about the shrinking local news coverage in DC.

3. I enjoyed this story of two friends who first met in DC, and have stayed touch throughout the years.

The Things You Get Used To

I've had glasses for a while now. It was distance where it showed up first. The first glasses I bought fit tightly on my nose. I mostly wore them when driving, at sports, plays, things like that. 

I remembered when I realized that there were a group of people who knee me through my sports attendance who only saw me in glasses. And how weird it was that those people thought of me as a glasses person.

This happens in other ways too. I was in one group, where someone once asked me, after I did some new member interviews, if that was the most I had ever talked in a single day. (A friend of mine died laughing when I recounted this.) 

We all contain multitudes, and nit everyone gets to see every facet of us. So it can be weird when things collide or shift. 

Last year, I got progressives. I had started to find my eyes at the end of the day were having issues. And realized that I was working harder to see some smaller print, and maybe I needed to give my eyes some additional support. 

It took months to get used to them. I was in the very lucky position that a lot of my middle distance vision is still very good, so the contrast between the things that are blurry when wearing progressives versus not, was an adjustment. 

But now I'm used to them. (Okay, I may have typed some of this without them, but still, I reach for the glasses every day. Plan how many pairs to bring on trips.)

And recently I looked at my face and felt it looked different, and realized, it was because I wasn't wearing glasses. I have grown used to my face with glasses now. 

Three Interesting Things

Baltimore is fundraising for the families of the workers who died in the bridge collision.

1. Sibling relationships are fascinating to me, and I find the fact that this story mentions that birth order is less important than some think, while covering a story with very stereotypical birth order, fascinating.

2. The founder of Trans Day of Visibility is thrilled at the success.

3. Jemele Hill wrote about how this baseball gambling story is part of a long line of gambling and sports stories.

Pushing Back Against Cynicism

One of the things that happens, if you have researched bad sports environments, or lived through enough bad managers, or even done too deep a dive into certain advice columns is that you forget how hard the mundane terrible stuff can be. 

Sure, the stories about coworkers who show up at your house to proselytize are clearly very bad. But coworkers who just smirk and say, "I know you have a lot going on at home," can be soul draining. Even though when you try to describe it people will say, oh, she's just trying to be empathetic. 

I thought this as I read the WaPo article about Kim Mulkey, who was so upset that someone wanted to write about her she held a press conference about it. And the article says she's exacting, and unforgiving, and that she was probably meaner to some players, providing punishment unequally. And yet, the article does not seem that bad. Well, you know, unless you had to play for someone who was a my way or the highway perfectionist. Unless you, at a critical point in your physical and emotional growth, were playing for someone who would make fun of your hair, or your love life, in front of all your teammates. 

See, when I say it doesn't seem that bad, I mean, when you include coaches who have strangled their players, sexually abused them, drugged them, and starved them. Coaches who encouraged a gravely injured athlete to keep going, even though it was clear that further movement would likely cause lasting injury. So, when I say not that bad, to be clear, I do not mean this is good. 

It becomes easy to be like well, coaches are often like that. When the correct thing to say, is why do we let coaches be like that? Why are we constantly letting supposed geniuses harm others because sometimes they do great things - be it science, tech, or sports. And it isn't progress that we sometimes let white women be terrible. It's bad. 

I have the sense that this story is probably going to peel off another layer or two in the coming weeks. But even if it does not. People can win sports without making fun of you. People can win sports without being jerks. And if they can't, then they were never really good at sports anyway. 

Three Interesting Things

1. Leprosy is on the rise in the US.

2. This piece took a look at some of the mundane uncertainties related to the damage done to a, ahem, Key, Bridge in Baltimore, from longer commutes to changes in where customers stop after work. 

3. This story about a baby hedgehog that was taken to a rescue, where they discovered it was actually a hat bobble, is hilarious to me.  But I also want to note how wonderful that someone saw something fluffy in the wild, and assumed it needed to be treated with care and attention. May you treat every accessory with such care, and also potential tiny animals. 

Three Interesting Things

1. This is lovely retrospective of DCist, what it was, and what it became.  (Note: WAMU and I share an employer.  I am not responsible for any of their content.)

2. The inventor of the karaoke machine passed away recently. Imagine, karaoke with 8 tracks. 

3.The WaPo spent some time with a local Scrabble club. 

Annoying Phrase

Can we talk about the phrase "wasted on a man" in reference to any body part? Like why would lips/eyelashes/cheekbones be wasted on anyone? 

Because let's really unpack that. All those body parts serve a purpose. Eyelashes are there to protect your eyes. Cheekbones and lips are both structural and decorative. 

And yet, somehow this phrasing has become incredibly common in books. Implying that men don't deserve or need functional faces. Which seems like a weird take.

And yes, I am taking this super literally, but also, what else is that phrasing meant to say? 

And if it's solely meant to convey jealousy, aren't there way healthier ways to say that? Like if I looked at someone and thought, wow, that is an incredible set of cheekbones, I wish mine were that chiseled, or round, or prominent. That is one thing. But saying the person who has them doesn't deserve them, is honestly a little rude.

So how about we try to avoid that. 

Three Interesting Things

1. The prison population is aging, and this article looks at what that means for prison infrastructure.

2. Apparentlysomeoneopened some mail in the archives and found a gorgeous sweater.

3. The Iditarod is on (though,yes, several people have finished), and this story of the pizza place on the route that takes orders is just adorable. 

Altered Plans

So March is about where it gets feasible to eat outside around here. I obviously eat all year long, but eating outside is fun. Eating with other people is fun. And so I start making more plans to gather for food in March. But March is volatile too. It can snow. The temperature can drop wild amounts. It can rain for days. It gets a little iffy.

So I had plans to do a taco tour of sorts with a friend. But then a wind advisory came. The things was, one (okay several) of the taco places were very near me. And one often has a line. (It's a small space, no indoor seating.) And I kind of really wanted a taco. And wondered if the wind would make the line shorter. 

So I went. My hat blew off, but not too far. The taco line was shorter. And I discovered another place nearby that had been scheduled to open had opened. So I carried my tacos into the other place, and made a second to go order. And then I went home and ate all the food where it was not windy. 

Other than the wind it was a very pretty day. 

And my friend and I will convene for more food on another day. 

Three Interesting Things

1. DC is known for cherry blossoms (which are gorgeous) but we also have a goodly number of daffodils, so this story about the daffodil line in the UK was interesting. Getting out to see the flowers is the best part of spring.  

2. The Iditarod is on, which means there are dogs of the day, like this snuggly one. 

3. "This American Life" replayed their Math or Magic episode from last year, which as a romance author and reader I found fascinating. 

My Questions for NaNoWriMo

I became aware of the issues that had been raised to the NaNoWriMo board last year, during NaNo and wanted to give them time to respond, though it was quite clear there had been an egregious lack of oversight. 

Well, NaNo has now provided a roadmap of sorts for going forward, though no clear way to respond. So here are the questions I have. 

NaNo states they will reopen the forums, but going forward limit them to folks age 13 and up, rather than allowing all ages. How will they verify ages?

NaNo states all volunteers will receive criminal background checks.

First, I want to note that this is likely to dissuade great volunteers. Because it requires sharing info like national ID's and real names, which not everyone is willing to do. I'd also love to know if these checks will be run in the country the moderator lives in, or just the US. Or somehow in every country the moderator has lived in. But let's be real, criminal background checks show you who has been caught, which means it is more likely to demonstrate which of your volunteers are overpoliced where they live. 

In general, the best policies when you have kids and adults together, is basically a buddy system. Adults should not be alone with kids, kids should not be alone with adults. That means things like more mods, not allowing DMs. Does this eliminate all bad behavior? No. 

I worked with teens in the nascent days of Facebook, we had a policy that the adults wouldn't send friend requests to be teens, only the teens could initiate that. If they DM'd us, we shared that message with another adult. 

And yes, the place I volunteered also background checked us. 

NaNo has said regional forums will be moderated by people in those zones. That way moderators will be in the same time zone and familiar with the language. Cool. Does this mean NaNo is going to have no oversight? With NaNo reducing staff, is the remaining staff going to be fluent enough to check in on those, or is it going to be a free for all situation? 

And what processes will they have in place, if any, to monitor the safety of teens operating in those spaces? 

It's also worth noting that one of the issues raised involved a volunteer moderator making racist comments about someone. What, if any of these processes, will help NaNo catch or address that in the future?

And look, I do absolutely understand that running a global forum is a huge undertaking. My hope of for NaNo to succeed, rather than end up right back in a place where we have issues again. No set of systems will be perfect. 

And if you are a kid who wants to do NaNo, maybe the answer is that the NaNo site is not the place for you to make friends. With hashtags and whatever else, you don't even really need the forums. Not to say that literally every social media isn't also problematic, but find people where you are. Treat the internet like the shark infested waters that it is. And definitely don't trust adults who tell you to join another site where you can talk more freely. Sites where you can block people are probably your best bet. 

Also, in past years, particularly with the pandemic, regions were encouraged to set up discords, zooms, basically lots of ways to communicate outside of the forums. Will NaNo discourage that going forward? And if not, will NaNo state anything that happens off the NaNo site is not their business?

I have questions. 

But please, whatever your age, keep writing. We need your stories. 

 

Sale - Aloha to You

Newsletters subscribers already got this news, but my novella Aloha to You is on sale. It's part of Kobo's Leap Year Sale in Canada and the US today. For non-Kobo readers, it will be on sale next week March 3rd - 8th in honor of Read an Ebook week.

Aloha to You is the start of the City Complications series, so a great place to jump in. It features Seth and Adriana who meet when he interviews her for a lifestyle magazine about her lei business. He is a museum admin who secretly yearns to be a journalist. There are nosy parents, opinionated friends, and brownies.

Content notes listed here.

Available at multiple etailers:

Amazon: https://amzn.to/2KJ1DR7

Kobo: http://bit.ly/2KM3RiR

Universal Link: https://books2read.com/u/4XZnd6

Note, print is not on sale, but if print is your jam, print link: https://bookshop.org/books/aloha-to-you/9781393545323

Three Interesting Things

1. RO Kwon wrote about the complicated feelings involved in writing to add to the stories about people like you, when you also kind of hope your family won't read it. Note: contains references to panic attacks and statistics about suicidal ideation. 

2. This story about a tech billionaire buying up property in Hawai'i was interesting.

3. Nepalese folks have been repurposing some of the trash mountain climbers leave behind.

7 Things: An Evening with Stephanie Hsu

I had the opportunity to attend an event with Stephanie Hsu. Here are seven things she talked about.

1. Hsu talked about how picking up a job in college working on a permaculture farm taught her a lot about understanding the environment and the context you are working in, rather than just coming in and plopping down the seeds you want.

2. She talked about how an industry person had told her "Everything Everywhere All at Once" was a silly title, that was too long, and it was a niche movie that very few people would see. 

3. She talked about how she really enjoyed working with people who were wonderful, and that being on a set that made things like sustainability part of their ethos has been something she is carrying forward as she produces her own show. 

4. She talked about visiting Copenhagen and being impressed with how the city was designed, and the cultural ethos, and also the practice of regularly jumping into the water. (She was advised that our local waterways were perhaps not the best choice for that.)

5. Hsu talked about working on a movie that was so specific and felt so much like the story she had been dying to tell was wonderful. But that she had not expected how wonderful it was to hear from others about how much it meant to them, and to feel like that was a wonderful feedback loop to be in. 

6. She talked about how she had realized a lot of the things society had told her about Asian Americans was not factual, or based on erroneous assumptions. And so she was working on unlearning and challenging those.

7. She was asked about role models in media she had growing up as a Chinese, American and she said there weren't really many, though she did mention Lucy Liu and Sandra Oh. But she noted there has been change, that she got to be on "Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" and get a role in a historical that didn't feel embarrassing. She also mentioned an Asian American extra on the show, thanked her, because she was pretty sure Hsu's role led to them considering an Asian American extra for a historical show. And she told some aspiring actors in the audience, and they haven't met you yet, so imagine what can happen. 

Quick Note

Hi, all,

WAMU announced today that they are shutting DCist down effective immediately. 

This is sad for me personally, and for the region, as the sign of a trend of local news being trimmed.

But, it also means there are a ton of links, including one I posted yesterday, that are now dead. 

So, tread carefully. If you are a local journalist, I love you, and please save copies of all your work. 

Three Interesting Things

1. Not to take away from Caitlin Clark's incredible achievement in scoring, but it turns out there are other high scorers, who, due to changes in the divisions and such, who's achievements should also be noted. 

2. I agree with this column on trigger or content warnings and how good ones let you make informed decisions, and how good media will suck you in regardless.

3. Mychal Threet's library videos have popped into my timeline few times, and are they always lovely.  This interview with him was equally so. 

Better at Mistakes

I've been sharing some of my knitting oops moments on Bluesky, and was tempted to be like, really, I do know how to complete a knitted object without an error. And then a small internal voice said, but do you? And my initial response was of course I do. I have lots of finished items. 

And then I started being like, well okay, that one, I crossed the cable the wrong way, and that one, I had to reknit the panel twice, and that one I had to tink back two rows. 

Many moons ago, Yarn Harlot said experienced knitters don't make less mistakes, they just make different ones. Except, I joined a cowl as a moebius when I did not mean for it to be a moebius, which felt like a newbie mistake in many ways. What's different is, I knew immediately what I had done wrong and what it would take to correct it. I still let it sit for a day, pondering, just letting it be a moebius. If it was gonna get double wrapped around my neck, who would even know? 

But in the end I fixed it. Because it is silly to have spent this time and money on something, that I could fix easily with minimal effort. 

I think this is often true of other things, like writing. Now that I've written multiple books, my drafts are both better and worse. But if I forget what character C's name is halfway through, I know how to fix that. If no one has hair or clothes, I know how to fix that. So, as much as I whine that I hate editing, I know what things are no big deal to fix later. So that helps. Even if sometimes I write myself an edit note and go, yeah, that's a future me problem. Now I'm going to eat a treat. 

Three Interesting Things

1. This conference happened in September, and I am very biased, because one of my knitting friends is in it, to say nothing of all the wonderful authors. But the videos are posted to the Yale website, so you can hang out with these wonderful people, without travel. 

2. This article is originally from a few years ago, but this discussion of how Bob's Red Mill became a leading gluten free provider was reposted, as Bob himself passed away recently. 

3. I loved this story about the gentleman known for rapping on the X2 bus.  Note:  DCist and I currently share an employer.  I am not responsible for any of their content. 

Adjustments and Enjoyment

I've had a week where my body has reminded me how connected everything is. How doing a thing here, affects a thing there, and so on. It feels like one of those lessons you learn over and over. 

Lunar New Year was over the weekend, and we switched from one animal to another, and I thought about how switching from a rabbit (or cat) to a dragon signaled a change in movement. In the ways that animal approaches the world, and all of us. 

It can be easy to focus on the cleaning, the desire to have the perfect or best first day. But many of the traditions are about eating favorite foods, gathering with loved ones, and resting. The prep is in service of that. 

I realize there are new year switches that happen - for us on the Northern Hemisphere - late spring, or early fall, or with a wider rotation. 

So whether this past week was a new year, or just mid-February, making time for enjoyment is always a good plan. 

Three Interesting Things

1. Sometimes somewhere on social media, someone will say this thing is cool, and I will open a tab and go back to social media, so by the time I get to the tab, I have totally forgotten who or where this person told me this thing.  Short story "End of Play" by Chelsea Sutton is one such thing.  It's wild, appeals to me as a theater lover, and also a person who enjoys short stories that go deep into a thing. 

2. My time on social media Spoutible was short, but I did still have an account there, when I heard about this data leak, and was concerned that the org itself did nothing to communicate this well to users who were not active on the site.  I have not deleted my account.

3. I hadn't really thought there was that much variation in tennis balls these days, though I certainly had noticed that injured seemed to be taking out a lot of players.  So this article discussing the differences,and how players are hoping for better standardization was interesting. 

A SCUBA tale

A while ago, so like the early aughts, a friend asked me to be her buddy and take SCUBA lessons. It sounded fun. I had been on a trip where I snorkeled a few times, and sometimes us snorkelers were on one side of the thing, an and the SCUBA boat was on the other side, and the SCUBA folks moved faster and got closer to stuff, and did not have to clear their snorkels (or so it seemed). So I was in the right place to be interested even though I had no travel plans to anywhere I wished to SCUBA.

So I did, and I learned there is SCUBA math. I mention this because so many things turn out to have math, and my math teachers had a poster about how math was useful, but I do not recall SCUBA (or knitting) being on there. Maybe it was and I just didn't know yet I would ever care about those things.

So, SCUBA also involves pool lessons. Our first pool lesson was at Holton, and yes, as an alum, I am biased. But I was like cool. I know where it is. I did my lifeguard training in that pool. I'm ready.

But it turned out we were at a semester switch or something.

Worth noting that in SCUBA pool lessons, part of what you practice is sinking to the bottom. So you have all your gear on, and you swim along to the bottom of the pool, looking through your SCUBA mask. And then after the lesson, you kind of want to take a shower and rinse some chlorine off before you trek home.

Anyhoodle, the rest of the lessons were at Georgetown Prep. If that sounds familiar to you, you are either or local or remember the Kavanaugh hearings. Does this have anything to do with my story other than to remind you of my biases? Nope.

Now I also knew where Georgetown Prep was. And again, this was a while ago, I am sure someone has cleaned this all since.

But let's just say, there was not nothing to see on the bottom of that pool. And the lockers were -again, at the time, you are free to tell me they rebuilt it all three years ago.

But, there was a towel in one of the lockers. The lockers were all open face, no doors. The towel was gray. Except a teeny corner on one edge that revealed it had not originally been gray.

I did not put things in the lockers.

But, one of the other students did tell me she liked the Prep pool way better, that the Holton pool had just smelled like chlorine. So see, I'm biased

Three Interesting Things

1. This recap of some of the responses "Sesame Street"s Elmo got when asking on social media how folks were doing was a fascinating glimpse into the ways social media and characters for kids, speak to a lot of us, even adults. 

2. I first saw Chita Rivera in the filmed version of "Pippin".  I listened to her memoir last year and enjoyed it. This remembrance for her captured some of her spirit. 

3. I have read enough British historicals to have heard of posset, but never actually looked into what it was.  Per the wikipedia, it was done a little differently in olden days, but this recipe for a modern lemon version looks wonderful.

Sunrise and Sunset

I am not a morning person, even though I naturally (now, umpteen years later) wake up by a certain time in the morning. I am more of a late afternoon/early evening kind of person. 

So, I tend to associate seeing the sunrise with some sort of event that forced me to be up at some tortuous hour. And conversely I associate seeing the sunset with great evenings eating outside with friends or family. 

But this time of year, in this part of the world, as the days slowly lengthen, my normal schedule means I see both the sunrise and the sunset. 

Which, yes, is very cool. And I realized maybe, possibly, it's not the sunrise's fault it happens to occur early for much of the year. 

And while I do not plan to rearrange my schedule as the days lengthen, I can pause to appreciate these things while they are occurring at such convenient times. 

Three Interesting Things

1. I'm so sorry that George Carlin's family has to spend a moment on this, but someone decided they could use AI to make a "new" George Carlin special and now the estate is suing. 

2. I appreciated this article about the strategies one scientist in Australia is using to keep COVID safe.  

3. I swear I don't only care about the new winningest coach in college basketball history because she has a delightful name, but she does have a delightful name.

2023 Reading Tally

So, a few caveats. I've been doing the reading tally for enough over a decade that I no longer wish to be specific.  But here's a link to last year, and it links to the prior year, and so on. 

Last year I had a really good reading year.  And it turns out, that the slow destruction of Twitter, well, that freed up quite a bit of reading time too.  I also had a period where I was between contracts, and had a lot lot of reading time.  And I had two trips to visit family, and that helped too. 

Read 377.  Yes, I'm sure.  Some were graphic novels that were short, and many were not.  It's also worth noting that I DNF'd 24.  (So they are not included in that number, I just like to track DNF's.) Per Storygraph, about 56% were in the 300-499 page range, the rest were shorter, except for a small percentage that were 500 or more. 

There were 310 different authors read (not including anthologies and shorts). 

The oldest title was from 2006. 158 were from 2023. 

193 were new to me authors. 

Most read author was Holley Trent. 

Highest reading month was June, followed by July. 

37 were audiobooks, which was actually lower than last year, though not by much.  266 were library books, in case you are wondering how my book budget sustains this.   And 54 of them were from Kobo Plus.

I hesitate to predict, but it seems like I might not hit this peak again.  I may watch TV or something this year.  But I am glad reading provided so much fun last year.  And have high, if not quite this high hopes for this year also. 

Three Interesting Things

1. Bluestockings is in New York, but I think the issues of blaming the place that is trying to provide some help - be it a public bathroom or Narcan to neighbors, is something a lot of cities are reckoning with.  Worth noting for DC folks, DC Health does do Narcan training. 

2. This gorgeous embroidery floated across my timeline recently.  I found this post where the artist explained her technique. 

3. A photographer found a mouse was tidying up his shed. 

Snow!

I love snow unabashedly, as longtime readers will know. We broke a snow drought this long weekend. I spent so much time staring out the window watching it fall. 

Watching little birds tuck them selves in warm vents. Trying to get a good picture of the tiny flakes falling, before just taking a video. 

Woke up this morning to the message my office was closed. Does this mean I telecommute? Yes. Was I gonna telecommute anyway? Yes. So how is this different? It feels different.

I wrote this 7 Things post about snow closures in 2014 after we broke another snow drought and the only thing that's really changed is closed means telecommute for more of the adults these days: http://www.talkapedia.com/2014/01/7-things-about-frozen-precipitation-in.html

Three Interesting Things

1. I served on a jury last year, and one of the things we chatted about after the decision was the amount of street surveillance.  A fellow juror, who lives near me, had not been aware of some of the things like street cameras and license plate readers.  EFF has a primer on the kinds of things that are being used. 

2. I really appreciated this story about the Alaska Airlines incident with the door plug, because within it were a number of steps that people took to keep everyone safe, including checking on all the unaccompanied minors.  It's likely all part of their training, but it looks like the NTSB found the flight crew and attendants did all they could to manage what had to be a really terrifying day at work. 

3. Steve Ammidown noted that there are several anniversaries in Black romance coming up this year, and he's put together a list with info on which books are easy to find these days. 

News Avoidance

The "On the Media" show did an interview recently about a recent news avoiders study. And it reminded me of a thing I have heard from others, about how the news about (insert ongoing issue) just made them too sad, so they stopped listening. 

And it is easy to yell at those folks. And say, hey, it's harder for the folks living through issue. Or, well, not living through it. 

And yes, of course it is. But part of the issue, whether it's climate change or drones, is that I can listen. I can read. I can empathize, I can process the horror. But I also, cannot fix it. 

And humans really hate not being able to fix things. So sometimes we look away. We block it out. Because I still have bills to pay and things to do. 

But while I cannot personally fix things on a number of fronts right now, I also am not powerless. 

They - that nebulous they - would really like it if I felt powerless. (Also, it's worth noting, that some people legit are doing all they can right now. And that's cool too.) 

It's easier if I don't call my electeds. Don't reach out to community members working towards fixing any or all of these things. Don't look for ways to help make differences. Don't join any protests.

A lot of people would be perfectly happy with me paying my taxes and worrying about my recyclables and asking, advocating, or assisting no other change.  

But just like that time the President's spokesperson said, well, what are we supposed to do, mail everyone COVID tests? And then lots of people said, um, yes please. And then they did. Change can happen when people work for it. 

It's a long process, and there are ways to join existing efforts. Sometimes showing up with stamps may be the thing they need. 

It can be frustrating to feel powerless. But there are things you can do to help. 

Three Interesting Things

1. There may be some promising news about drug resistant bacteria. 

2. Ni'ihau fascinates me, so this new book that evaluates a wider range of resources looks really interesting. 

3. This story about a local tattoo artist who creates classic art based tattoos is gorgeous.  As are the tattoos.

Best Laid Plans

New Year's is an arbitrary day. Okay, Tara, you might say. Didn't you used to post random holidays to social media every day? Aren't they all mostly arbitrary?

Yes. Okay fine. 

I've talked before about how the big expectations assigned to one day are just fraught. About how it's in many ways much more exciting to believe that any day could be the start of a new trend. 

But also, yes, we do, societally, like quarters. We've divided the calendar into them, assigned each quarter a name, and then we expect things to shift each time we progress into a new one.

And of course, I am going to do a giant reading analytics post, so obviously I believe in years. 

But I spent New Years sick, and I refuse to accept that as a sign of anything other than human bodies are fragile and we live in a time of climate change and increased germ production. 

I hope your holiday(s) were not spent sick. 

And here's hoping we all get time this year to read, write, craft, and relax.