The Whole Truth

Hm, hm, hm... Just woke up... what to say...?
Often I have an idea when I start blogging, but this morning I'm a bit fuzzy... Probably because I just got to the coffee shop and have not had my coffee yet.

The neighbors are back and have turned the wi-fi back on––yay!–– but I still like to come here.
And especially since the burned house next door is being restored.

That's good news!
I worried they'd knock it down and build condos on the entire lot, right up to my window. I'm glad they're not, but... it's bang, bang, bang, CRASH, starting at 8 a.m., as they tear out and replace the fire-damaged parts--which is most of the interior.

So, the coffee shop it is for me.

We're due for a hot weekend, but this morning is beautiful.
I'm sitting outside in the shady breeze with Mz, who is reading the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.

Whoops--no. Not anymore.
She just threw her book on the ground, saying:

"God it's all the same stuff, just people prescripting for the human condition.
It's all like, people are just trying to control their experience... There's all these ways to think, maybe I don't have to suffer...

There're all these different strategies. I suppose they might work, they're good and useful... sometimes.
They just create a different kind of suffering.The suffering of not being in touch with yourself.

'These things outside our control have no ability to harm us.'
What is this disease where we're trying to try to seal things off, make them airtight?

Eleanor Roosevelt said, 'No one can harm us without our consent'.
Fine! I consent! Now will you just let me be upset?" 

I respect when people work it out as an individual instead of adopting a system.
Make your own!
It's probably going to be similar.

But people feel a different sense of authority if they didn't make it up.
If you don't think you have the authority to do it, who do you think does? Marcus Aurelius didn't grow up as you!You have a different relationship to things you've worked out on own.

I'm just going to do my hobbies."

[end of speech]
_____________________________

I'm not a fan of comedy for its own sake either. It's manipulative and boring.
I'd been reluctant to watch stand-up comedian Hannah Gadsby's Nanette (on Netflix) because everyone was raving about it, and I distrust crowd pleasers.
(Enough Marvel movies already!)

But when the noise died down, I decided to give it a try, and I loved it too. (Have you seen it?)
I'd never liked Gadsby's former style of comedy, which relies on self-deprecation. It felt icky, and incomplete.
Turns out, it was, and that is the whole point of Nanette.

Recently Gadsby did a TED talk, which I also like, and which goes down sweeter. (Nanette rasps your skin, though it's also a balm.)

So, yeah...
Tell your story, and do your work.
That's advice I can sign up for.
The work is your own.

I should bike to work now, but it's so pleasant sitting here...
This is the view:

It's a noisy street--buses, traffic, people booming music out of their cars.
It's a noisy summer in the neighborhood.

I'm still thinking about moving... If the rent weren't so cheap, I'd have done it already. BUT... I do love the freedom of cheap rent!!!

Do I want to work more, to earn more money?

NOT REALLY.

There's always a trade-off. 
Which annoyances do I prefer?

Quiter neighborhoods are not as good for public transit, or for things being close by, for instance.
One day this past winter when it was –20 below zero, I wanted to make chicken soup. I had ingredients for American chicken noodle soup, but not Thai. I bundled up and walked two blocks to the Asian store (a couple blocks the other way from this coffee shop), and bought coconut milk, lime leaves, and lemon grass.

So, I don't know.
I don't have to know, right now.
But I had better get on my bike and go to work. The entrance to the bike/walk path is only 4 blocks from here---another advantage to my location...

Ciao! Have a lovely day, everyone!

Panda in the Mirror

I've missed blogging every morning.
My home-owner neighbors accidentally turned off the wi-fi before they went on an 8-day bike trip, so I couldn't write from home.

I blogged on my iPhone a couple times, but it was awkward, and once I lost a post in process. Blogger doesn't have a free app, and I didn't want to pay anything for it, not even $2.99.
(Has anyone here used it?)

So mostly I went without, and I discovered another reason to blog:
when I blog every morning, the self-reflection helps me center myself in my day, in my life. Without it, I feel just a bit fuzzy-edged.

It's not a moral reckoning, like the Ignatian daily examen, but it's related: 
"Here I am, this is what I've done, what I'm thinking about..."

Blogging mirrors me to myself, which I don't get a lot of otherwise.  As a longtime single person, I don't exchange reflections daily with a loving person, up close.

Panda Head

I don't get clear mirroring at work, either. But sometimes a coworker and I do connect. 
One hot afternoon this week, Maverick––one of the older men with poor health––was working all alone on the donations dock. (This is practically criminal.) He's one of my favorite coworkers––we roll our eyes at each other about how crazy the workplace is––so I said I would help him.

[Entirely NOT my job, but, upside of lax management: I can do what I want.]

Man, it was hard, handling incoming donations! I felt slightly nauseous after an hour. (Reminder: drink water!) And half of it was garbage.
Like a lightly used pot scrubby:

But it was fun, too, working with someone simpatico.  
A couple animals masks got donated, and I said, let's take our picture wearing these. Mr Furniture would never do this, but Maverick thought it was fun. I'm the panda with the camera.

Pandas Don't Drive Cars

People at work don't much get me, or, they get me wrong.
It's mutual--I often don't get them either. But I do try not to make assumptions, and that is not always mutual.
The other day a regular customer described me as rich. I must look like a rich, white lady to him, and to many of my coworkers too. 

That's not entirely wrong: 
it's a psychological/spiritual wealth to be able to choose to be financially poor––per the federal poverty level––as I have for most of my life (even counting money I inherited at midlife (thank you dead relatives!)). 
I've got it good!

But this customer's (and clearly some of my coworkers') assumptions about the way in which I'm rich are wrong. They think, for instance, that being as educated as I am must mean I own a car.

Really, it means I can choose whether to live in such a way to afford a car. So, yeah, that's a kind of richness. A huge kind!

It's not bad at work, socially--often it's good!--but I'm a little lonely.

Panda Restoration

I'm not particularly into pandas, btw.  They're not very interesting animals. But they're cute, so there are lots of representations of them around.
I am restoring a couple old stuffed pandas--probably from the 1960s.

Here's a panda I got at a garage sale. It weighed a ton...

 ...because it was stuffed tight with wadded up, shredded fabric:

This little panda had no eyes:

Still in process, but now can see:

And now I'm off to watch the Women's World Cup semifinal, USA v France!

"The Least of These"

What then should we do?

Mostly I post pictures of thrift on the thrift store's FB page. 
Every few weeks, I post something about the Society of SVDP's mission--to be guided by Gospel values-- specifically the verse where Jesus says, 

"Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me."
--Gospel of Matthew, 40

Sometimes this verse is translated, "Whatever you did TO the least of these...", which has a different spin than "for the least".

This morning I posted this illustration of the gospel verse, "The Corporal Works of Mercy", by Meinrad Craighead for The Catholic Worker newspaper, founded by Dorothy Day in the 1930s.

How to Help Unaccompanied Refugee Children at the US Border
One possible thing: learn more at the Women's Refugee Commission, and donate:
https://www.womensrefugeecommission.org/issues/55-detention/2119-how-to-help-unaccompanied-refugee-children-at-the-u-s-border
"For 30 years, the Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC) has been on the front lines of ensuring the rights and protections of displaced women and children. Our work transforms the lives of women, their families, and their communities—from the current crisis at the U.S. border to conflicts around the world."

In the New Jerusalem There Are No Keys

BELOW: Me, in an alley by work, photo by Julia.
Mz says I am often looking confused like this about something.

(I'm wearing my hamster eating a carrot T-shirt. It says, "I HAS A CARROT.") 

I. As It Is on Earth

Holding the key to the book-display case at work, I was fuming:  
it'd taken five minutes jiggling & joggling the worn-out key to open the worn-out lock. 

How can I stop my coworkers locking it again, I wondered.
Taping a sign across the lock hadn't worked––someone'd taken the key from its hiding place and pulled off the tape to lock the case.
And, why? 
You can't open the display-case doors unless you're in staff work area. (Nor are the books that valuable.)

A light switched on: 
No key, no problem.

I threw the key away.

I'm so used to thinking in terms of organization and systems, it's taken my brain a long time to adapt to a workplace that doesn't have them––or, that has ones I'm not used to.

I'm used to workplaces with established policies and procedures––(best case scenario: procedures that have been understood and mutually agreed upon)––and channels of communication that reinforce them.
Trainings, meetings, signs, etc.

The thrift store has almost none of that.
At a rare staff meeting this spring, Big Boss addressed the problem of over-spill––because of too much stuff and too little space, one department's stuff often encroaches on another's.

"Mark your space, defend it, and keep defending it", Big Boss told us. (Have I mentioned his former sales experience was on the street?)

Well, OK. It's not what I'm used to, but at least it's a stated policy.
I taped off my books-donation area and hung a sign, "Books Only". It has cut down on every other thing getting dumped there.

And really, throwing away the key to a malfunctioning lock only makes sense. 


II. Entertaining Angels

If there are no organized procedures at work, other ways of working will fill in.

I was fuming again last week because on the front sidewalk a pair of shitty jeans (literally, jeans someone had shat in) had remained there for three hours after the store opened.
The guys who were supposed to pick them up didn't. 
So I did.

I don't mind doing dirty work, sometimes. I've plunged the work toilets more than once. But I was disturbed that none of my coworkers thought removing human excrement from the front of the store was high-priority.

A couple days later, I was photographing in the alley (for social media), and a regular customer, a woman my age, came down the alley, picking up trash. 
Wearing a pretty summer dress over leggings, a floppy sunhat, and the broadly applied deep-red lipstick of someone with an independent fashion sense, she said to me,
"This is unacceptable! In the New Jerusalem, there will be no trash!"

"Won't that be nice!" I said. 
I assumed she meant the New Jerusalem from Revelations.

She did. She proceeded to tell me how that heavenly city would be laid out.

"The food court will be at the center," she said, "so all the trash will be contained. Fresh food will be delivered through underground passages. If even a light bulb is broken, it will be Pomp and Circumstance. . . "  
Here, she held up her hands as if carrying a sacred replacement light bulb.

". . . AND THERE WILL BE NO CARS!"

Well, I'm all for that, you know. 

"You should be wearing gloves," I said, "if you're going to pick up trash."

"I usually do," she said.

Turns out, she picks up trash around the building every time she comes to the store, which is frequently.

There ya go! If you don't establish procedures, God might just send angels to entertain you.

Inside and Outside

Kirsten said she liked Canteloupe inside-out better, and I’ve sometimes thought too that  these polyester bears do look nicer on the “wrong” side,
I decided to leave the head fluffy but the body with the cooler smooth side out.

Happy Hour yesterday— Julia sewing behind me.

Bear Repair, Part I

This is my first time writing a blog on my phone 

—trying it out because the wifi is out at the house

And my neighbors are away on a bike trip for a week!

So—here’s Part I of my next Bear Repair:

Opening the back seam with a seam ripper,

and dumping out the nasty old stuffing—

Some petroleum-based foam that wants to return to being oil—

It breaks down into sticky stuff.  

I usually have to turn the stuffed animal inside-out to get all of it out. 

Surprisingly to me, this is often cute. 

This bear is named Canteloupe (for now).

Up on the Roof

Another song for my Happy Playlist: "Up on the Roof" by The Drifters. Gosh, looking it up, I see Carole King co-wrote it and played piano on this original 1962 recording.

And here I am, truly "right smack dab in the middle of town"--on the rooftop deck of the downtown YM, where I'm writing on my laptop--photo right––the green strip on the horizon behind me marks the Mississippi River (north).
On the left, behind me is the IDS, the tallest building in town.

This rooftop is one of the reasons I signed up for a year membership back in January, but I haven't been back to the Y (a bit embarrassed to say) since that personal training session in April left my hands in pain for a week.

Today I swam a few laps and took a whirlpool--mostly I wanted to work out the dust and creaks in my joints that I get from work.
Oh--PLUS, I climbed five flights of stairs to get the this roof. There's an elevator, but why am I even here, right?

Off to work now.

This is not on paper.

I'm currently reading a thick paperback, Eye Witness to History--a compilation of first-person accounts of the sort you can see on this website:
www.eyewitnesstohistory.com

Reading it in bed last night, after thinking during the day about why I blog, I thought, I do not blog for the historical record--something that once might have motivated me.

When I was growing up, I knew that journal writing--even by an everyday person--might end up being of some historical importance. 
A note in the Manchester Guardian about birds on the battlefield during WWI, for instance:
"A flock of linnets 'insisted on sitting on a derelict bit of telegraph wire where shells fell continually. They were there day after day.' "

Now I can't imagine how future historians are going to sort through all the as-it-happened accounts of the Internet age.
How many hours are uploaded to youTube every second? I'm not even going to check. A lot.

Of course, probably a lot (most?) of what we're writing and otherwise recording online won't survive. 
We already can't access lots of old data from the 20th century--physical film is damaged, technologies to read computer files no longer exist.

I've thought about printing some of this blog out, but... why?

Still, paper is a good bet! There's still plenty of that for future historians.

I haven't written anything on paper in ages. Oh--wait. 
Geez-louise, Self! 
My nonfiction books for teens are on paper--and they're durably bound for school library use. They could survive a lot. 

The fandom one would be a decent starting place, in fact, to look at what we were up to, culturally, in the twenty-teens:
Storytelling! 

Whatever form they may take, humans tell stories, that's for sure.

Speaking of stories, I wish I had more of a comic touch, I could use my workplace as material. 

Work was bonkers (my latest favorite word) on Thursday. Mr Linens works next to my book-sorting area, and his pile of donated linens had grown so mountainous, he had to dig his work chair out from under before he could even start.

There wasn't room for us to work side-by-side (there usually is), so I took my book cart elsewhere, but elsewhere was overflowing too... I ended up leaving early.

On my way out, a volunteer said to me, "Someone above our pay grade needs to make changes."
I just laughed. Who would that be?
And then I thought, this is material for a comic novel, if only I could spin it that way.

Last week I reread Excellent Women by Barbara Pym for the nth time--one of my favorite novels. 
It's very a slight comic novel––or a very profound, even depressing one, depending on how you look at it––about a spinster, Mildred (she's thirty-two), living in London in 1950. 

The book shifts each time I read it--one of the things that makes it a favorite. On this reading, I appreciated how Pym catches what a lot of sheer work it is to keep things running.

Mildred is one of the "excellent women" who shoulder the miniature and (in her class and day) unpaid but many and endless burdens of keeping things going:
writing indexes and organizing church jumble sales, for instance.
They seems small, until no one does them.

And now I am off to work--it's Mr Linens's day off, so I should be able to function...

I just blogged to say I love you.

Michael at Orange Crate Art invited bloggers to blog today. 

I thought I'd write one thing about why I still blog--something I ponder every so often.

I. First, a hop, skip, and jump through What I've Said Along the Way, selected from posts I tagged Blogging (70 posts since 2007), subset Why I Blog (15 posts). I still feel all these things, more or less. And more...

One of the first things I said on this blog about blogging, in 2008, is that "it's fun". I stand by that. I wrote:

"Could it be blogging opens our minds to whole new dimensions in communications and connection?
Could blogging be one of those blanket-toss/down-the-rabbit-hole experiences, that show us everything we take for granted could, in fact, be otherwise?

"You know? You hang out in the blogosphere long enough and you start to think stuff like, why shouldn't books make noise?
And, when are computers going to add in textures?
Why can't I send soup over my phone?
Pretty soon you get to wondering other things, like--oh, I don't know--maybe, What did Jesus smell like?"

Also in 2008, I wrote that it's good to have a place to complain, which blogging offers. Ha! I'm going to remember that when I worry, for instance, that I'm complaining too much about my current workplace. "It's good for me." At least, some of it.

2008: "Frizzy Logic [now, ten years later, often on Instagram and infrequently blogging] posted a link to Scientific American's article "Blogging--It's Good for You". The article reports:
"According to Alice Flaherty, a neuroscientist at Harvard University... humans have a range of pain-related behaviors, such as complaining, which acts as a 'placebo for getting satisfied'..."

One more from 2008. Blogging about deciding to go to the Star Trek con in Las Vegas, I wrote:

"What's funny is the role blogging plays in this all for me:
It's like a permission slip to go where I normally would not go. When in doubt or fear, I think,
'I should do this so I can blog about it.'"

I made this Star Trek macro in 2010:

That year I wrote, re: Why I Blog:

[About starting to email in early 1990s]
"E-mail! What a dream.
I started to spend my evenings at the circ desk writing emails. I bombarded friends and wondered why most of them didn't write back in kind. Weren't they bug-eyed with delight too?
I really needed a blog, but they didn't exist yet. . ."

AND, also in 2010:

"Blogging, for me, is in the slow, low realm. I see a theme in this blog of me defending (to my own self) loneliness, grief, laziness... These are low, slow, dark states of being (virtues, even). They are like compost.

I'm always defending them because around me I mostly see lauded the bright, swift, and airy-- the happy blooms in the breeze (or worse, the 'you snooze, you lose' mentality)--and I thrash it out with myself every so often, feeling I'm wrong-headed."

In 2011, I wrote:

"When I first noticed that lots of people were looking at my Freddie Mercury post, I went back and beefed it up a bit. Which made more people look at it, though there's nothing you can't find a hundred other places.
Anyway, I like the idea that strangers pop in and hopefully get a little kick from a shared love."

In 2013:

"For me, blogging grew out of writing [sometimes self-indulgently] long letters and e-mails, and that's what I still want and like. Blogging is a way to indulge myself in writing out loud and not impose it on anyone.

Facebook feels more like sending the same postcard message to 153 acquaintances, which had its charms. I liked choosing fun pictures and crafting little messages. But reading other people's postcards--well, I felt crankier and crankier, wanting something more."

In the years since, blogging has dwindled, and so has the pleasure of meeting strangers on the blogosphere--something I miss.

In 2015 I wrote:

"Honestly, much as I love blogging, it's lonely over here. I used to engage with more than a dozen active bloggers, now it's two or three...

I don't see myself not blogging though---where else can I post the FULL results of five hours of searching a fuzzy image in the apartment of Starsky or Hutch?"

II. Today, June 14, 2019, I will add this answer to Why I Blog:

"Nostalgia makes the present sweeter."

Every so often, I leapfrog back through my blog, looking at what I was doing on or around the same day since I started blogging in 2007.

Today when I reached June 2011, I got all choked up. 
That June, I was walking the Camino de Santiago across Spain with Mz and bink. On June 14, 2011, (eight years ago, today), I emailed this song, below, to my sister for her birthday, from an albergue computer along the way. 

I'd written to her:

"I saw this Spanish music video --Stevie Wonder's song  'I Just Called to Say I Love You' covered by a Spanish flamenco singer & guitarist named Pitingo-- in a bar where we bought ice cream (bars also serve as restaurants and coffee shops). It seemed a perfect birthday message--by a very Spanish cast in very Spanish colors---"

 

Walking the Camino (twice) taught me the power of nostalgia: 
Both times, I was in pain MOST OF THE TIME, not to mention bored for long stretches. The second time I walked it, knowing how memory spins gold out of dirt, I even wrote a note to myself at the end:
"Do not do this again."

Here's the thing: memory is untrustworthy, collapsing days of pain into zings of sweetness––but the sweetness is real.

Have you followed recent thinking about placebos?
In the episode "All the World's a Stage—Including the Doctor's Office", the podcast Hidden Brain looks at how research into placebos shows that they work--no surprise--the surprise being, they work even when the person taking them knows they're taking sugar pills.

Since placebos are harmless substances, some ask, why not harness their power? Their power lies in the theater of medicine.
Not the surgical theater, but the staged interaction between sufferer and healer.
(Ditto religion. I hear people dismiss it as theater, but for better or worse, theater works! Even though we know it's make-believe.
See also, politics.) 

So, I think--the same for nostalgia.
Nostalgia does not accurately reflect the past, but could we harness the sense that the past was better than it was and somehow apply it to now??? 
Preemptive nostalgia? 

Blogging, I can stand outside myself and think, "One day, this time will appear to be sweet."

Or, on the flip-side, "One day I will be glad this time has passed."

Meanwhile, while so many bloggers have gone (to Instagram or elsewhere––a couple, to death), I just blogged today to say I love you, fellow bloggers who remain!

June 14, 1964

I've posted this still from a home movie a couple times before––from my sister's birthday when she turned five and I was three. 
It's a favorite photo of mine.

I always say the same thing about this photo, that it shows all you need to know about my sister and me: 
she has picked her peony carefully; I'm holding the peony I've pulled up by its roots.

Our sisterhood has progressed as you might guess it would have... (For instance, she did not invite me to her birthday festivities for this momentous birthday today (60), and I wouldn't want to go.)

Oh, and looking back through my blog, I found a photo of us (sister in blue) with our twenty-nine-year-old mother that same summer, from a post about our mother & valium. 

"Garden Art & Decoration" (1973)

Another book donated to my BOOK's at the thrift store.

A Sunset Book: Garden Art & Decoration, 1973

"A hatful of succulents";  copper birds. . . "by metal arts hobbyist"

 Sculpture is easy ...with asbestos!

Cat reminds me of Art Sparker's mosaic cat, sadly still missing from her porch, having been stolen.

Julia Child Book, Signed

I flipped through a donated copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and found an envelope from Random House.
Inside were two presentation notes signed by Julia Child.
(I found copies of Child's signature at Harvard, and they seem to be hers all right: a distinctive "Bon" in "Bon Appetit", and her "J's" do vary.)

The owner had tucked newspaper clippings of Julia Child's column in the 1970 Minneapolis Star newspaper in their matching sections. Fun, but they acid-stained the pages.
I'm not sure how to price this... Signed copies sell for couple hundred and up. How should the accompanying clippings affect the price? Must look further...

Me, I suppose

I met with a friend from my twenties whom I haven't seen for seventeen years. She asked the waitperson to take our photos.
I suppose this is how I appear in public.
(I'm on the right.)

Gorgeous, Not Ruined

I never used to shop for clothes (unless I had to), but at the thrift store I sometimes glance at the racks of clothes going out, and I've discovered I like stupid-and-cheerful T-shirts.
Like the toaster one. Oh, also the honey badger one. There's a hamster one somewhere on here too––oh, here––so, maybe I did know this already.

I pulled this "snapcat" one from the recycling bin the other day, and took it home to wash. It was covered in cat hair, and we have no way to wash clothes at work. 
(Nor do other thrift stores, but that doesn't stop people donating dirty clothes. Cat hair is bad, but not the worst. That would be body fluids.)
I feel like myself in this silly top. (I've layered it because it's a chilly morning. Weird, but good weather.)

I also almost never read book reviews, especially before a book comes out. But skimming the Guardian last night, I stumbled on this interview with poet Ocean Vuong, whose first novel On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous just came out. It caught me because I am always interested in things about the Vietnam War. Vuong is Vietnamese American: his grandmother was a Vietnamese rice farmer, and his grandfather was a US soldier.

Possibly his novel will be a bit poetic for me, but I want to read it, partly on the basis of this line he wrote:

“Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you’ve been ruined.”

I'm not ruined, but I know what he means.
That probably explains the gorgeous, silly T-shirts, eh? I don't even like cats.

Maybe even more than that line, I like his take on dramatic suffering = not required to make art.

"The idea of Vuong’s childhood as a generator of great material for fiction is one that makes him laugh like a drain.
These days, if any of his upper-middle-class students grouse that they don’t have a good backstory, he mildly points out that Virginia Woolf got one of the best novels ever written out of someone basically crossing a lawn."

Rainy Sunday at Campaign Headquarters

A rainy Sunday afternoon at the Penny Cooper 2020 campaign headquarters, at The Back of the Couch.

The Orphan Reds had wanted to have a parade today, but they don't want to expose the fab poster made for them by Art Sparker to the inclement weather.

It's chilly too, a weird-for-June 62ºF.
I turned on the oven and am baking turmeric tofu. (Easiest thing ever---cut tofu into chunks, toss with oil & spices, bake 30 min.)

New Roost for Rhino

I didn't want to keep the ceramic rhino, so I put it out in the alley for someone to take. 
That turned out to be my landlord/house-neighbor Scott, who mounted it on a pole (rhino is a coin bank, with a hole underneath) at the edge of his garden, looking over the fence.
I couldn't be happier!

Here is Rhino as I biked off down the alley this morning, going to meet bink for coffee:

New Decorations for Yellowstone Bear

At the coffee shop, I sewed a beaded decoration onto one of the Yellowstone bears:

I have a dozen of these bears, in various stages of re-decoration. This is the first one I repaired, last year. When some flat, beaded ornaments (like, for skating costumes?) came into the store, I immediately thought of these bears. First one up:

New School for Me?

I'm not, not, not committed to this, but I'm thinking of taking some computery designy classes... 
The community college downtown here is very good (and it's only a couple miles from me). They offer continuing ed. Microsoft application classes, and a series of classes in Adobe (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign). 
If you take all the Adobe classes, you get a Graphic Design Certificate. Looks like that'd take a year? Not sure...
I need to look into it more.

I've never taken formal computer (or design) classes--my (now outdated) computer knowledge, such as it is, came piecemeal.
Often, I was motivated by love:
I stayed up all night wrestling with iMovie to make my first Star Trek fanvid (made with stills), and posted it in the early morning of  
 [looks it up]
. . . OMG, on the morning of June 26, 2008. That's eleven years ago!

I just rewatched it for the first time in a long while. It made me laugh, so here it is.
(The music is "Jazzy Bach", by Ben Charest--I know it from The Triplets of Belleville).

 

Learning more about computer design appeals to me--personally, and possibly professionally.

Design and communications are parts of my job I like--parts I've taken on for myself. If I add some computer knowledge to what I already know and do, I can imagine doing more of that for pay
. . . though not in this job!

When I think about trying to improve this workplace, I picture pouring too much of something into a funnel with a narrow neck---it backs up and overflows. (Like our old plumbing.)

Well, how bout that? I googled "pouring too much stuff into a funnel images", and it's a concept teachers talk about.

(I'm not worried about "losing control", we just don't have the capacity to handle more nor, at the moment, the know-how to widen the neck.)

Computer/design classes... just an idea. But it's appealing, thinking about learning new things. If not this, something. It's wonderful even to be thinking in these terms.
Yay, possibilities!

Inscriptions and Ephemera in Composition Book and Set of Waverly Novels

Photos I took yesterday, at the thrift store, of a few of my favorite things:
Inscriptions and other handwritten notes, and ephemera in books--glimpses of people living their lives....

TWO BOOKS

1. Advanced Course of Composition and Rhetoric, G. P. Quackenbos, New York, 1879.
The entire book is archived online.

Receipt (6/23, 1924) tucked in book from Silas Walston Second-Hand Furniture:

"I Repair All Kinds of

Talking Machines" 

What? Gramophones, I think...

I can't make out what it's for, can you? Balance on a ... lawn mower???

Inscription on flyleaf: "Miss Vic. Jackson's 

Book

July 26, 1880"

(Is "Vic." for Victoria? )

 ____________________
BELOW: Ego te amo. "I love you", in Latin.

_______________________________

2. Set of The Waverly Novels, by Sir Walter Scott, given as a retirement present in 1883.

Close up of inscription, below. It reads:

"On the occasion of his leaving the

Department, the Employees of the
Manitoba Local Freight *

❧ with best wishes ❧

present to

Mr. W. F. Myron **

the works of his countrymen

Scott and Burns.

St. Paul [Minnesota]

31st Jan. 1883."

* RE: Manitoba Freight
"In May 1879, the St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Manitoba Railway Co. (StPM&M) formed—with James J. Hill as general manager." The company later became part of the Great Northern Railway.

**A clipping online from the St. Paul Globe in 1879, notes a Mr. W. F. Myron attended a meeting of "Scotch citizens" to form a Saint Andrew's Society.

The covers all have the same design:

Dog rescuing child, from a book in the set, The Abbot

 "Wolf", I guess is the dog's name--an Irish wolfhound, or Scottish deerhound?

Book Photos

Above: Book on concrete floor at work

I like looking at pictures of books.
Do you? 

I don't know why I haven't been photographing the books more, all along. I guess it's because I have been so busy simply sorting donated book and organizing them on the shelves. 
Occasionally I snap photos, as you've seen, but I'd like to photograph them more, books as books.

When I posted recently about how much space BOOK's has in the thrift store, I realized how much work it is to keep it up.
Oddly, I've barely thought about that...
Twenty hours a week is  barely enough to stay on top of the basics--I don't often get around to optional things. 
(Wash the shelves? Never once!)

And it's a lot of physical work too––I've gotten better at pacing myself, but sometimes I work too hard and go home quite sore.
Sore is OK, but I'm mad at myself when I stupidly risk injury. 

A lot of books come through the store. About 1,400 magazines and books sold last month (most priced only 25 cents to $1.99). I don't know how many I handle. Besides shelving them, I boxed up for recycling/resale or threw out (moldy) at least that many, or more.
I must be selecting well though--I don't need to weed the shelves all that often. I do eventually move some old-timers to the 33-cents bargain shelf. One way or another, most of what I put out sells eventually.

I want to take the time to photograph a little more.
Not to make it an art project, like this book artist: www.instagram.com/elizabeth_sagan

I can just take a minute to photograph a book. The thrift store's concrete floor, so hard on my feet and back, makes a beautiful background.

Some book types I love...

Heavily used books that have been lovingly and inexpertly repaired--here, with masking tape

Vintage paperback covers

Vintage typefaces (This is the same book that's in the fuzzy photo up top.)

Pulp (and Frank Frazetta's warrior princesses (left).)