Every time I step outside I find new experiences to enjoy and learn from. Every adventure, whether traveling far away to just exploring the city I live in has introduced me to different people, perspectives and cultures. Often they challenge my assumptions and expands my understanding of life. This site is meant to be a personal reflection on these moments and how they shape my journey. If you find meaning in what you read and want to contribute a little
, it helps keeps the lights on here (but no pressure - that's not why I write).
It's been a much more joyful week. On Friday my wife and I celebrated our 16th wedding anniversary. Because of the Buy Nothing boycott we decided to change up our initial plan and opted to do something small each day of the week:
Lunch Monday at a local restaurant. The food was 10 out of 10 but we aren't going back as we have since found out that the owner repeatedly hosted far, far right events (including promoting self-proclaimed nazis). Wish I'd known before, glad I know now but we still had a really lovely break in the day.
Tuesday I got us smoothies.
Wednesday we spent the morning working at a coffee shop.
Thursday we went to a local coffee shop and bakery as well.
Friday on our anniversary we we got some meat at an independent local butcher.
It made for a really nice week with my wife.
Yesterday I spent the morning finishing a yard project I'd started earlier in the week (we now have garden beds around some of the trees on the side of our house). Then in the afternoon we took the kids to the grand opening of a new lego store in a town near us. It was a nice store but there was an hour and a half line to get into it. That made it all kind of underwhelming. The kids still had lots of fun and my son was able to get a couple of minifigs he wanted with his allowance.
I just updated wand3r to use 11ty! It's becoming my POSSE source for microblogging - quick thoughts, links that don't fit in my postroll on KRRD and "smaller" bits of content. I'm excited to get it going!
But - expect things to be a bit messy on the site itself. Sorry about that.
I've been shocked at the attacks on DEI and the nefarious ways they are undermining all the hard work done in the civil rights movement. But then I remember abortion became a thing to the Christian right because segregation was too taboo and I get a little less surprised. It all comes full circle though - white supremacists co-opted a voting block and are doing their white supremacy things.
It's been a week, as every week seems right now. There's just so much going on right now: personally, globally, etc.
Leaving the big picture stuff aside for the moment:
The kids had two "remote learning days" this week because of snow. We didn't actually get much (less than an inch) but that's enough to shut things down.
We also had heat issues, on one of the colder days of the year. To make a long story short, we have an old oil-based gas boiler system and it's showing it's age. We got it going again on Friday thankfully (after it had gotten down to the low 50s in our house).
Our daughter had a youth retreat and that was really great - she was gone Friday evening until this afternoon and seems to have had a blast. One of the biggest joins in life at the moment is seeing the ways she is really coming into her own at the moment.
Our son had a scouts banquet that happened. That's about all I can say (none of his close friends came so he was pretty bored).
Anyways....I also changed this site up. It's focused more on microblogging and snapshots of life (like this). I'm moving links into their own short posts to send out to Mastodon and Bluesky and am rethinking what I want to do with these weeknotes. For now I'm going to keep the Last.FM collages because I like those quite a bit.
Scary but important look at the reality of apartheid and how that predominantly economic system is being re-shaped for modern American life. Having spent significant time living in South Africa and working with people deeply affected by apartheid, too much of this rings true and is scary to think about.
For the SNL50 concert, the members of Nirvana got Post Malone to fill in on vocals and they performed "Smells Like Teen Spirit". I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it and wanted to share because it's got lots of feels for someone my age that grew up with grunge.
Check it out here: https://youtu.be/pB7Cmayu56g?si=Te9ivgJ8vKVdpCuz
I still can't believe the current executive office is attempting to make a case for excluding Native Americans from citizenship. Over and over and over again they prove that cruelty is the point.
