"We won't pass this way again..."

Speaking of gifts, how have I not yet shared Marz's most recent fanvid?
For its fluid, abstract editing, it's maybe her best work yet.

It feels like a response to the pandemic, but she had started it long before, and she posted it on March 19, right as our state's Stay-at-Home order went into effect...
What she calls the vid's "pointless angst" grew a point. 
 (Don't take that mask off, Starsky!)

Starsky/Hutch – Davidid
Song––"Dilaudid" by the Mountain Goats. "If we live to see the other side of this..." 

Governor Tim Walz announced Thursday that the order will remain in place for two more weeks until May 18th.
He says despite the extension, retail and non-critical businesses will be allowed to start reopening safely on Monday. Walz says to do that, businesses should offer curbside pick-up or delivery, continue following social distancing guidelines, and take online payment as often as possible.


Read More: Stay-At-Home Order Extended to May 18th | https://wjon.com/stay-at-home-order-extended-to-may-18th/?utm_source=tsmclip&utm_medium=referral

Governor Tim Walz announced Thursday that the order will remain in place for two more weeks until May 18th.
He says despite the extension, retail and non-critical businesses will be allowed to start reopening safely on Monday. Walz says to do that, businesses should offer curbside pick-up or delivery, continue following social distancing guidelines, and take online payment as often as possible.


Read More: Stay-At-Home Order Extended to May 18th | https://wjon.com/stay-at-home-order-extended-to-may-18th/?utm_source=tsmclip&utm_medium=referral

Governor Tim Walz announced Thursday that the order will remain in place for two more weeks until May 18th.
He says despite the extension, retail and non-critical businesses will be allowed to start reopening safely on Monday. Walz says to do that, businesses should offer curbside pick-up or delivery, continue following social distancing guidelines, and take online payment as often as possible.


Read More: Stay-At-Home Order Extended to May 18th | https://wjon.com/stay-at-home-order-extended-to-may-18th/?utm_source=tsmclip&utm_medium=referral

Governor Tim Walz announced Thursday that the order will remain in place for two more weeks until May 18th.
He says despite the extension, retail and non-critical businesses will be allowed to start reopening safely on Monday. Walz says to do that, businesses should offer curbside pick-up or delivery, continue following social distancing guidelines, and take online payment as often as possible.


Read More: Stay-At-Home Order Extended to May 18th | https://wjon.com/stay-at-home-order-extended-to-may-18th/?utm_source=tsmclip&utm_medium=referral

GIFTettes

The $1,200 stimulus from the feds was deposited in my bank account today.  Hooray!
Added to the Unemployment payments (per some federal ruling, unemployment is paying an extra $600/week), this puts me in the very weird position of receiving more money from the government than I would earn at my minimum-wage job.

That's great for me and everyone else screwed to the bottom of the wage scale. But I hate this unfairness:
that people who HAVE to keep working--and risk exposure--aren't getting extra--or not that much.

I'm finding some ways to share my extra.

I. Strong for the Long Haul

Besides making donations and giving tips ($20 to the mail carrier), I've had the fun of choosing gifts.

First, Maura is sick with "mild" Covid for her fourth (4th) week, plus, she got "furloughed" from her consulting job this week.
Ayayay... Not fun!

A store in my neighborhood that usually prints clothes for high-school sports teams started printing T-shirts reading:
MINNESOTA (or MINNEAPOLIS) STRONG COVID-19 2020
Perfect!
I biked one over to Maura's doorstep, along with a girlette, Hutchette. 
I hope Maura won't mind me sharing these photos--she looks... well, like someone who has been in bed for almost four weeks.
She's run a marathon in the past--she knows something about the long haul.

Btw, Maura recommends online Meditation apps, such as Headspace and Calm, for keeping panicky heartrates down.

Second, I ordered a dozen used books from the NYRB Classics series for Mz (who has to keep working in groceries and who is missing bookstores & libraries), including the four below.

(Someone's going to write a fabulous book about our Troubles.)

Third, HM used a spoon to try to change her bike tire---far from ideal. I ordered 3 sets of these fab tire levers to give away---they stay in place by hooking onto a spoke.

 
II. “Be true to yourself and to your profession. In other words, just be a normal librarian.”
--Scott Bonner, Ferguson Library Director

I've bought unnecessary (even unwanted) stuff from local businesses, to support them.

I've sent cash donations to a few places too--
yesterday to Ferguson Public Library--

--remember them? 

The library director Scott Bonner had made that library an oasis during the unrest following the police killing Michael Brown in 2014.

In an 2015 interview, Bonner said the library had had NO programming, and with the unexpected $400,000+  in donations , he hoped they could start running daily programs. And they did.

I ordered a fundraising T-shirt from the local micro-cinema, the Trylon. They chose Toshiro Mifune because it's the 100th anniversary of his birth.

It's Pandemic Drabble in the backyard with HM & her two sons tonight, so I ordered a whole key lime pie from a local coffee shop, and gave a 50% tip.

III.  The Stuff of Life

AND... I've received gifts too! Top of the list, Best Gift = Communication
THANK YOU, Everyone who has emailed, phoned, FaceTimed, blogged (and commented), text messaged, prayed, etc.
Keep it coming!

I'm moved by things like Michael of Orange Crate Art making "homemade music" videos with his musician wife Elaine.

...and friends sharing online things that match me. 
(I've shared some here--Baked Ham Recipe from Krista, Atlantic article from Kirsten, Meditation School from Denise...)
Some more:
Rupert Brooke poem, "The Little Dog's Day" from Eeva
"Book Spine Poem" from Jen
From John S: "Retired Doctor Walks Camino in His Driveway" 

And when communication is matched with a gift of bread, heaven!
This morning bink dropped off fresh (still warm!) sourdough rye from a German bakery:

__________________
No one knows how long this weird situation will continue, of course. 

This afternoon, Gov. Walz announced a two-week extension of the Stay at Home order that was to expire on May 4--to May 18, but allowing some businesses to reopen "safely".
Maybe the thrift store will reopen soon?

Or--who knows--maybe the world will end!?! Or I will. I mean, I will eventually, for sure.

So--that's another thing I did: I made a will!
It's pretty easy, you know, and you don't need a lawyer, at least if you don't have a complicated estate. (Mine is basic. Dolls and Bears!)
I copied the language of a state-specific template I found online, and got HM & Son to sign it. 

So, that's all good.

"How to Use Your Spare Time Effectively"

If only I'd brought this boxed set of self-improvement pamphlets home from work, I would be so much more effective at everything by now!
(I'd photographed this weeks ago--the set is still sitting at work.)

Dog Walk

It was too rainy & windy for me to bike yesterday, but when the rain let up in the afternoon, I took the dog for a walk.

He's always up for a long walk. He's young--just four years old; I've never managed to tire him out.

The orange sign announces that playgrounds are closed--as of yesterday:
During this past weekend's warm weather, people proved they were NOT going to maintain social distance while playing basketball.
The basketball hoop is covered over with a board:

Dogette is half Labrador Retriever--he doesn't care how cold the water is, he wants to go in. (The breed originally retrieved fish and fishing nets.) He won't retrieve though! Maybe that's his Beagle half--they're bred to chase game, not retrieve it.

I'm glad I'd gotten a retractable leash at the thrift store last fall. 
I'd been letting Dog off the leash in the winter, but now it's spring, squirrels and bunnies are out, and he chases them into the street.

Lake Hiawatha is a small lake---it's 3 miles to walk around it only because a fenced, city-owned golf course extends one side.
Unlike the basketball courts, it's not closed. 

I've never played golf. If the thrift store were open, I'd grab a golf club and give it a try.
Oh! No I wouldn't: I just looked it up, and it costs $29 to play. Yikes! 
Oh well. Dogs aren't allowed on the course anyway.

Grooves

These are grooved iron blades of an old hydro-electric turbine (1924–1994) standing on the bluffs above a Mississippi River dam.

__________________________________________

The turbine is around 10-foot-tall.
I came across it when I was biking along the Mississippi yesterday.

It's from the former Ford Motor Plant,
which harvested energy from the river dam below.

The iron blades were worn (by water?) where they curve--I circled the area in yellow. 

The grooves are surprisingly different from one another, 
like bones and bodies.
They are so beautiful, I walked around and photographed each blade.

Info plaque on the turbine:

Nothing but blue skies, II

Exploring by bike is being top-best thing:  this afternoon I went biking along the Mississippi River (I live only a mile away now). This is the sky reflected in the river through a bridge railing. The river itself is brown.  

Home now. 

I’d stopped at several Little Free Libraries along the way, 

and also the liquor store (wearing a mask, of course). 

Curiosity is an antidote to fear.

Curiosity is an antidote to fear––and it has all sorts of unintended excellent consequences:
overall the improvements to veterinary science due to curiosity far outweigh the risks to individual cats.

Along those lines, I approve of my country spending tax money on space exploration... AND on social well-being. 
It's not a zero-sum game--we could do both.
We could use some of the $6.4 trillion* we've spent on war on those things instead.

I mean, it's insane that my county healthcare system has to ask the public to send them nickles and dimes during this crisis. 
(I sent them $50.)

* * * I'm curious:
Are you donating to different causes than you usually do at this time, or otherwise supporting them (buying gift cards, etc.)? 
If so, which ones?

Anyway, I like NASA, and I like stories about space exploration, especially when they include Average Folks. 
  
I. "Missing pieces are part of the puzzle."

I don't like puzzles, but HM does. She's worked all of hers, so I offered her this "Astronauts of Apollo 11" puzzle from 1969. (I got it from the thrift store because I like the box.)

"It's probably missing pieces," I said. 
"I consider missing pieces part of the puzzle," she said.

As it turned out, the missing spots are nicely spread out, and nowhere too important. (Michael Collins didn't need that cheek.)

The girlettes cheered its completeion this morning: "We have landed!"

II. "Sputnik landed here...Why don't you?"

SPUTNIKFEST???
Manitowoc, Wisconsin, has a Sputnikfest?
How did I not know this? I'm from Madison, Wisc., and Manitowoc is near(ish) where my auntie still lives. 

This year's fest is Saturday, September 12.
That's near my auntie's 95th birthday--pandemic permitting, maybe bink and I can take a trip and celebrate both!

The fest celebrates the crash landing of a 20-lb. piece of Sputnik IV onto a Manitowoc street, on September 5, 1962:

"The impact of the piece embedded it three inches in the blacktop pavement.
Later, small charred fragments were found on a nearby church roof, but despite an intensive search, no other fragments of Sputnik IV were ever found."

I learned about this from comic Charlie Berens, host of the online "news" Manitowoc Minute, (in this episode)--who has been doing quarantine videos. I've mentioned his "How to Make a Bloody Mary" inspired me.


III. Bringing Columbia Home

Speaking of debris, I picked up this book from a Little Free Library:

It's a first-hand account of experts and locals searching for the debris of the Columbia space shuttle,  
which fell apart with its seven-person crew on February 1, 2003.

From the SpaceNews review:

"That work ultimately involved a diverse group that included ... volunteers who helped search for debris spread across a long path in east Texas.
"The small towns that became staging areas for the recovery efforts also offered tremendous support, taking care of the search and investigation teams."

_______________________________________

* "$6.4 trillion", via www.cnbc.com/2019/11/20/us-spent-6point4-trillion-on-middle-east-wars-since-2001-study.html Also:

"The United States has spent $6.4 trillion on wars that have killed 480,000 people since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, says a new report.The fighting... has created 21 million refugees and displaced persons, says the report by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. The U.S. government is conducting counterterror activities in 80 countries, it said."

Biffs & PODS

True: "I CANT WAIT2 HUGU!" It's hard not to hug friends, especially when someone (like, me) is feeling low.

Graffiti on the door of a portable "Biffs" toilet at the lake.

Saturday socializing at the lake with bink. (We look grayer than we felt (I hope.) People moving into a house across the street were unpacking the PODS [portable on demand storage].

Help Us Now, Lassie

Well, that looks pretty ineffectual...

Curbside Curiosity

I've requested two books for curbside pickup at the library:
the novel Lincoln in the Bardo (George Saunders, 2017),
and  
Why: What Makes Us Curious (2017) by astrophysicist Mario Livio. (It includes an interview with Brian May, the lead guitarist for Queen who has a Ph.D. in astrophysics--so then I had to get it.)

(The libraries offering curbside service is my personal favorite example of civilization during this pandemic. It only started a couple weeks ago--this is the first time I've used it.)  

What even is curiosity?  

Below: Slides from Mario Livo's TED talk, "The Case for Curiosity":
Scientists looking at an event on Jupiter in 1994, 
and Rembrand's "The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp", 1632

I've always been interested in curiosity, but I've never seriously looked into it.  Now, with all the brain science breakthroughs, would be a good time.
And I was nudged by Steve commenting yesterday that he thinks "lack of curiosity" is a reason why some people don't google for information or fact-check their own assertions.

We're a curious species, obviously––"nosy", at the very least––but what happens to encourage or discourage curiosity in individuals? 

I think a lot of our behavior is guided not by out inherent curiosity,  but by the social mechanisms that encourage or discourage it. 

I'd written that my mother encouraged and rewarded my natural curiosity.
Did that make me more curious?
It gave me tools to further it, that's for sure. Like a library card.
It's a tool--but you've got to use it. 
What helps or hinders?

Lots of people have told me they had the opposite experience growing up--they were told not to bother, or warned off.
"Curiosity killed the cat."
"Doubt is from Satan."

Curiosity may try to assert itself like a plant through concrete, but a lot of those plants aren't going to be able to break through.

Social curiosity may be especially risky.
My auntie never asks people personal questions. She says people don't like it, but my experience is the opposite--that people often (though not always!) do like when you show interest in them by asking questions.
I think her way evolved as a safety mechanism, growing up in a large and volatile family--asking questions is risky.

But lots of people don't ask personal questions. HM's son has lived here a month and asked me not one. That's not unusual, in my experience.
What determines that?
Interest levels? (I'm not in this man's age cohort and we don't share obvious interests--he simply may not care.)  
Social skills? (Asking questions well [safely] is a learned behavior--where do we learn it?)
Personality types? (Some people get more pleasure from, say, astrophysics, than other people.)
Utility? (Not worth the work to investigate if practical returns are low.)

And surely many other ingredients in the activation and types of our curiosity... 

Energy. It takes energy to pursue curiosity--nerve work, social work, physical work (even getting to the library)...
Why bother? 
Being fed entertainment takes a lot less effort.
Even consuming nonfiction may be low-energy, if we don't process it deeply (think about it). Sometimes I browse idly through Wikipedia as if it were People magazine.

Receptivity, or the capacity for understanding. (Intelligence).
I can see how fascinating mathematics is, (infinity!), for instance, but my capacity for understanding it is limited (I think that's a hardwired thing).
I'm not smart in math, and so the rewards of being curious about it are diminishingly small. And so I'm not.

I'm most curious about the general experience of being human among humans.

Dig it, Wombat

Part of a mural on a wooden fence a few blocks from me.
Is that a wombat? I thought it looked like a Very Dangerous Animal with those claws, but I looked it up and wombats do have massive claws--for digging.

Speaking of digging and looking things up, here's a thing I wonder about, seriously:

Now that many of us carry the Internet in our pockets, why wouldn't people look (dig) online for an answer and/or fact-check their assertions?

Is there some cognitive bias going on?
Is there an evolutionary advantageous preference for not expending brain energy, but rather, for conserving energy with a shrug and a, "Who knows"?

Thoughts, anyone?


I. LMGTFY

Let's see... I'm going to google it! 

Hm.

Here's one option:
" you have to make an effort to create a reasonable question."

That used to be more true in the past than it is today.
You can type almost any junk in and google will make some sense of it.
However, it's true that when I typed in "why don't people look stuff up" I got a lot of returns about people physically "looking up", that is, raising their eyes to make eye contact.

So I changed it to "why don't people look up answers".

This is one of the best answers I found:

'Effective Searching' is a learned skill.

OK, yeah. That's true.
I learned when I was little that you can look things up, and I also learned it was fun, from my mother.
She was always saying, "Let's look it up!" and pulling out the dictionary.
In the early 1970s, she bought the Oxford English Dictionary from Blackwell's in Oxford and had it shipped home.
(Hm. Whatever happened to it? Gone now, anyway, not that I'd want it. It's online!)

Or she'd say, "Let's call the reference librarian at the library. They LIKE looking things up." 
[Kinda true.]

And then I grew up and worked in an art-college library for twelve years, and I researched geography books for another dozen-plus years.
So, OK.
What seems "easy and obvious" to me isn't--it's learned behavior.

Another answer, from a different angle:
it's not formulating the questions that is the problem, it's sorting out the answer(s):

"Google is a useful tool, but getting the most out of it requires the right mindset. You have to go into it with a willingness to learn, not just to apply a pattern filter to find your answer.
And a lot of people don't really think that way."

In spoken conversation, I do see the below answer in action--it's human connection we're after:

"People who ask easily-Googled questions are looking for interaction, not answers."

II. Don't be a Snark

Heh. This popped up too:

"Gratuitous meanness"---ergh. 
My question here is sincere, but I do sometimes feel snarky about people not-looking-things-up, yes.

I never say, "Google it," but I do say, "Hey, I have a magic box in my pocket we can ask," (and then I google the question). 

This is:

1. true
2. fun and openhearted (really!)

3. also a little like saying "Google it", or literally acting out LMGTFY [Let Me Google That For You]

From Stack Overflow:

The new Code of Conduct banned comments like "you could Google this in 5 seconds!" as excessively condescending. LMGTFY  has been banned for a while for being condescending and rude.

OK. I feel better, having looked that up--it helps me make better sense of something that's been bothering me. 

III. Or a Narcissist

 The thing is, I know someone who does this rather a lot--asserts things they have not fact-checked.
(When I check later, in private, half the time they are not exactly correct.)

Mostly it's stuff that doesn't matter––(Is a daffodil a narcissus?* )––but I have a big reaction against the way the info is conveyed.


OK, so that's a many-faceted question, "Why don't people look stuff up?"
And a factor more important than the facts and the questions themselves is the social value of information, and how it's used to jockey for social power.

It irks me that this person says things that are wrong, partly because I feel like I'm being one-upped.
If the facts were correct, I still wouldn't like it ("mansplaining"), but I could grant that they knew what they were talking about, and possibly (depending on the person) enjoy that I learned something.

I am also trying to practice stepping out of my annoyance, like stepping out of pajama bottoms that have lost their elastic...
It's my 2020 Resolution, to be less reactive.
Boy is it hard, in this case.
Basically my nonreligious family saw the pursuit of knowledge as godlike. Lack of interest was pitiable, but asserting wrong things--and not caring--was a sin.

So, that was my early training, which I need to factor into this whole question.

Still, it's a real problem when you can't trust what a person says because, for whatever reason, they didn't fact check it. 
(See also, President of the United States of America)

Well.
And did I enjoy digging around in that question?

In fact, I did.

* And, is a daffodil a narcissus?
It is.

Link to "Why Some People Get Sicker Than Others"

Kirsten sent me this interesting article from The Atlantic  (they dropped their pay wall for articles about Covid.):
"Why Some People Get Sicker Than Others: COVID-19 is proving to be a disease of the immune system. This could, in theory, be controlled."

James Hamblin, April 21, 2020

www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/coronavirus-immune-response/610228

"There’s a big difference in how people handle this virus,” says Robert Murphy, a professor of medicine and the director of the Center for Global Communicable Diseases at Northwestern University.
...

This degree of uncertainty has less to do with the virus itself than how our bodies respond to it. As Murphy puts it, when doctors see this sort of variation in disease severity, “that’s not the virus; that’s the host.”
...The people who get the most severely sick from COVID-19 will sometimes be unpredictable, but in many cases, they will not. They will be the same people who get sick from most every other cause.
Cytokines like IL-6 can be elevated by a single night of bad sleep. Over the course of a lifetime, the effects of daily and hourly stressors accumulate.

Ultimately, people who are unable to take time off of work when sick—or who don’t have a comfortable and quiet home, or who lack access to good food and clean air—are likely to bear the burden of severe disease."

Balance

All the Orphan Red girlettes look more or less alike, I suppose, but they don't feel alike to me.

You may remember, in September my first girlette, Red Hair Girl, left  (I left her on the bus/she left for Alaska...). I've never "felt" another like her, until the other day her face looked out at me from eBay. 
It wasn't RHG herself (her nose has a distinctive mark she got at the Grand Canyon), but I ordered this girlette, and now she's here!

Sure enough, she's a scamp, just like RHG, and, like a goat, she always wants to be up high. Her name is Tack (as in thumb-tack).

(This is the first morning it's been warm enough to sit at my tile café table on the enclosed front porch. The porch faces east, so even on a 45ºF morning outside, it's fairly warm. It's a jumble out here, but as long as I have a clean surface for my laptop, I'm okay.) 

The other girlette is Noodle (a temporary name for a "New-Doll", but I think this one might keep it.)

I made Noodle a dress from fabric Julia gave me--she'd bought it in Korea years ago. I'd had enough to make a few masks, and leftover for a dress.
Can you see it's little children playing?

I am not a good sewer. It took me all afternoon to make this dress. I've been resistant to backing-up and LEARNING to sew, so I jump in and end up doing awkward work-arounds.

I saw that there's a BBC show called the Great British Sewing Bee. Maybe that would inspire me to make it easier on myself.

Become Like a Little Child

Speaking of learning things, I've signed up for a six-week online class, "Mindfulness Fundamentals", starting in a couple weeks.
It's through the nonprofit Mindful Schools, which a friend who is a high-school counselor says is great.

Their courses are for teachers, educators, and parents.
I'm not any one of those, technically, but I'm a little bit of all of them in different ways--including selfward.

It's a bit spendy (compared to free): $125. But in this drifty time, I long for the structure a class provides, even an online one. I've been doing so much on my own; I want to learn from other people.

They have a bunch of free videos and other info too.
www.mindfulschools.org/category/video

The ones for kids are short and inviting, reassuring. It's not rocket science. 

I've studied and read about mindfulness & meditation, and I used to pray. But the point is to practice not study these things, and I want to do that more (. . . than my usual amount of "mostly not at all").

Pandemic Drabble, II

HouseMate, her Other Son (not the one who lives here), and I met up for our second "write a short apocalyptic piece set in this pandemic" in the backyard this evening. 
We read aloud--it surprises me how enjoyable it is. Enjoyment is a movable feast, perhaps.

I don't write fiction and had NO idea where to go after my first piece, "The Last of Master, I", but this morning, an idea appeared.
Pressure helps, and the 100-words (more or less) drabble is a good (doable) form for this beginner.

This episode is 108 words.

"The Last of Master", Part II

The girl looked closer at the small body in the gutter.

Odd the dog still wore his collar. By now, most collars had strangled their owners or slipped off their shrunken necks.

Whatever this dog suffered from, it wasn’t hunger.

Dog stew tonight, the girl thought, pulling her baseball bat from its Velcro holster.

But . . .  this dog. Wasn't he the kind that killed rodents? Probably why he was plump.

A living hunter could provide more than an evening’s meal.

She scrunched her empty backpack half-under the dog and dragged him onto it. 
The blood left on the street didn’t seem much.

“You might make it,” she said, hoisting him up. “You look scrappy.”

❧  ❧  ❧

(Now I want to know what happens next. I have no idea!)

Nothing but blue skies

Better

Yay, I did it, I got up early: 6:30.
The sun rose at 6:17 this morning (sets at 8:06 p.m.) and is shining in my eyes right now as I type on the couch in the living room. I have the quiet house to myself for a couple hours. (HM sleeps in the finished half-story upstairs. It's got slanted walls so you can only stand up in the middle.)

The house isn't big enough for three separate adults to set up projects, and keep distance. HM's son is a nice guy, and I'm fine with him being here (not that I have a choice, but I am)--until June, I think.
He's an electrician--a necessary trade--so he's out at work on weekdays. But he's in the guest room across the hall from me, and I'd started to use that room as my sewing & sitting room. 
I feel squeezed. We all are.

BUT... I woke up this morning thinking, why don't I take up editing Wikipedia again?  
Happy! I'd loved doing that a few years ago, and had kind of forgotten...
Whew. I just needed to sink down into feeling useless, and then the current gently brought me up to the surface again: 
"Here's a good thing."

It's useful work---most Wikipedia editors are men, and since everyone chooses to edit whatever they want, the entries reflect a lack of women's input. I just looked up Tove Jansson, for instance, and no one has yet added info from the new April New Yorker profile of her.

It's challenging work because the wiki has its own rules, which take some learning. Learning something is one of the most cheering things.

The rules aren't hard but they're finicky, if you're doing more than a simple correction/addition.
When I edited in the past, people were kind and helpful. Though the site has a reputation for rudely pouncing on mistake-makers, I didn't experience that.
(Wikipedia provides good guides for editors, and one of them says that a higher-than-average proportion of editors are on the autism spectrum, something for everyone to be aware of in social interactions. (--en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:High-functioning_autism_and_Asperger%27s_editors)

And the work takes no more space than my laptop. I can even do it outside.

If I run out of ideas, there's a list of Requested Articles.

Fresh Bear, Glum Me

I finished restoring Mr Bear today--stuffed and sewed him up. 

I'll walk him home tomorrow--Mr Bear lives a couple miles away. That'll be my big outing of the day!
He's not a dramatic looking Before & After case. The dramatic change is to his feel--he was a solid lump, now he's squishy and mobile. I like him a lot.

In truth, I liked Mr Bear's old weight--he had heft. His new stuffing is fabulously mobile and soft, but it lacks gravitas.
Still, he's a much more pleasant bear to touch now.

I'm glad I did a kindness (Mr Bear's owner had offered to pay, but I said no)--otherwise I'm a bit aimless and glum today.
That's a sane response to a hard time. 
It's been five weeks since I worked my last shift at the thrift store on March 17, the same day the restaurants and other non-essentials closed.

I'm not bored---there's plenty of entertainment (reading, sewing, writing, etc.)--but I'm not being of immediate use, and that's hard. 
It's hard that some people have to take all the active risks, while the rest of us can only help by NOT doing things.
Free-floating nothingness---that's difficult for the humans.

(Of course some of us are suffering, sick and dying. I'm happy to suffer doing nothing (in order to help stop/reroute that). And it seems Minnesota's response is working to slow the spread.) 

I could use a project, but I'm fresh out of excellent ideas that I'm motivated to do. 
I'm out of cool fabric to make masks. I could use old pillow cases and the like, but it's feels kind of pointless to sew boring masks that won't bring joy to the wearer--and viewer. You can wear a scarf just as well.

Oh--another useful thing I did today:
I baked a ham using a recipe from Krista (thanks!) with a free Easter ham work gave us (dropped it off at worker's houses).
I wouldn't have bothered but HM and her son who's staying here (till June?) can eat it too.

The pineapple glaze has ginger and garlic in it: www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/pineapple-glazed-ham-106782
The ham was not bone-in, and the only mustard in the house is yellow––so, it's not the best ham ever.
I blame the pandemic--normally I'd have biked to the store for Dijon, but I don't want to shop for just one thing.
.
I also took the dog out, but instead of our usual long walk by the lake, I only had the oomph to go a couple blocks. We went past the closed library, and I felt sad.
Eight local libraries are offering curbside pick up now--how brilliant is that? I wish ours would, but it's a very small branch so I doubt it will.
I don't need books, but I'd like the exchange.

Two more weeks until this round of stay-at-home ends on May 4. I hear speculation it will be extended again, as it probably should be.

I don't know... 
I'm going to be a good Buddhist (I'm not a Buddhist) and just sit with these feelings and let them be. 
The weird feelings have a right to be here--in fact, they only make sense. Accepting the weirdness and the weird feelings that go with it is a good place to start.

I thought maybe the girlettes could do a pandemic play or something, but interestingly, they say they don't want to:
"We're busy." 
Ha. They are "busy" looking out the window!
I always feel better when I check in with them.

(They always say this sort of "no" to suggestions that they make a book too. However, I'm thinking I'll collect photos of them from throughout the seasons and make a calendar in late fall for 2021.)

So.
It's okay to feel uncomfortable.

Feeling glum?
Okay, then.
Feel glum well.

Ukulele improv

bink & Mz play ukulele in bink's backyard yesterday. Astro is not impressed.

I'd biked over. That's my foot (in red-toed sock) to the left. 
Next time Maura can join us: She's been well for three days now, so she can leave the bedroom. Yay!

I FaceTime with bink every day. 
Yesterday morning I was sitting by the creek (10 blocks from my house), and bink was in her kitchen.
Princess Leia! 

FT is great, but I've been surprised how much I get from seeing friends in the flesh (bink & Mz, mostly)--at a distance or through glass. It is one of the sanity-keeping things.

Also, the girlettes.

They are not concerned.

Are people where you are leaving messages in sidewalk chalk? 
It's common in this residential neighborhood--and sometimes they leave the chalk out for you to add to it.
SweePo wanted to take away these people's pink chalk. I told her no, we have some at home. (HouseMate does.) So that's coming up.

Serious Comics

What do we call the collective activity of watching stuff online?
"Watching stuff online"?
I lump it all together and say I'm "watching TV".

Mostly comic-serious stuff these days.
Some of it really is made-for-TV. I've already mentioned The Good Place, which folds philosophy-lite into the comedy. And The Windsors, which... nope. Not serious.


Also I've watched stand-up Maria Bamford's serious comedy. She impersonates her Midwestern mom, and she spins the brutal reality of her own mental illness into comedy.
I like when she puts the two come together--for instance, impersonating her mother calling her sister, saying she (the mom) can't find Maria and thinks maybe she's committed suicide. . .
". . . and I have a hair appointment downtown at two."

I was in the reverse position--I was the daughter of a suicidal mother. I can relate to the inconvenience of it. It's sort of like this pandemic---a mix of panic and boredom.
Someone said this time is like The Terminator + Groundhog's Day.

From the NYT article, "The Weird, Scary, Ingenious Brain of Maria Bamford". 

"[Bamford] addresses the loneliest of gulfs, acknowledging the confounding intimacies of living with and in proximity to mental illness — the whipsawing, humbling forbearance required from everyone involved.
....
Bamford’s imitations of the family and their various blunders are biting in ways that can be painful ... — but they can be illuminating, not just inside the family but also inside a world rife with struggling people.
Bamford’s comedy swims with paradox.
She skewers the culture of self-improvement but relies on it, too.
She pokes fun at the people who blithely misunderstand her, but also credits them for giving her love and shelter. (“You’re horrible,” she thinks about a friend who visits her in the psych ward and says all the wrong  things. ['You just need to get out into nature!'] “But can you come back tomorrow?”)"

Also I've watched some interviews with Stephen Colbert.

Here, he talks with his Jesuit friend James Martin, about being Catholic--not comic, but interesting to me.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgBg05f2M8A
Colbert says his favorite Bible passage is "Do not worry" (Matthew 6:25, part of Jesus' "lilies of the field" speech). It's not a suggestion, he points out.

Also, his 20-min. conversation with Anderson Cooper about grief--both men lost their fathers suddenly when they were ten. 

I don't agree with everything Colbert says here. He's wrong that if you're grateful to be alive, you have to be grateful for every part of it. Huh? That's just bad logic. He's usually so smart, but his thoughts about God are obviously not in the same category. Fair enough.

What interested me was hearing that having learned that the worst can (and does) happen at any moment, the young Colbert did uncomfortable things, such as singing in a crowded elevator, to induce the familiar feeling of free-fall.

This is not a comic conversation, but it's partly about comedy, which aims to induce bearable discomfort. (The audience can laugh because they (we) feel we're on a bungee cord---they (we) will come back up.)

Edible Pandas

I've finished watching The Windsors TV series now, and loved it. I don't have a dog in this race and I can't sort out the truthiness from the truth, but the show is hilarious.

Those who can sort it out agree. The Guardian says:

" 'But these characters are nothing like us', they – the real royals – might say. True, they’re not (also some very peculiar vowel sounds, especially from Hugh Skinner as Wills).
But that really doesn’t matter. What does is that this is ballsy and rude [Fresca notes: only "rude" by Very Polite Standards]; very silly and very funny.

And actually, beyond the riotous hilarity, there are real issues in here – the point (or not) of the royals, their duties, the sovereign grant, Charles’s various agendas...."

I looked up the royals and found a fabulous article by Hilary Mantel: "Royal Bodies", London Review of Books, February 21, 2013.

What a writer. Her sentence "Marie Antoinette was a woman eaten alive by her frocks" has enough potential energy to launch a trilogy.
(I haven't read her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, but her early novel Fludd is one of my favorite books.)

Mantel compares the royals to, among other things, pandas:

"Our current royal family doesn't have the difficulties in breeding that pandas do, but pandas and royal persons alike are expensive to conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment.
But aren't they interesting? Aren't they nice to look at?"

 Let's put those two things together--being eaten and pandas...

Overheard

This block is almost entirely one-and-a-half story bungalows built in the 1920s with front steps and front yards. Weather permitting, I've been sitting out front so I can see other humans. This warm Saturday afternoon (warm for MN = 64º), lots of neighbors are sitting out front too.

Sound carries up and down the street. I just overheard a neighbor two doors down say,

"The only thing I've done to help is make hot dogs."

Back to Bears

 A bit of normalcy, nothing to do with you-know-what (though I had to go and mention it, didn't I?): today was spa day for 70-year-old Mr Bear. 

A couple girlettes stayed with him the whole time, so he wasn't scared at all. (This is New Girl (left) and SweePo.)

A volunteer at the thrift store had asked me if I'd restore theteddy bear who's been with her husband since babyhood.
I'm always happy to do such a thing, and she brought Mr Bear to me shortly before the store closed one month ago.

I would have gotten right to it, but with everything upside down, I honestly kind of forgot... 
I'd a hard week last week---staying up too late watching TV threw off my sleep and brought underlying anxieties to the surface. Also, even though I  was watching comedies, I had bad dreams.

[What am I watching?
I've been loving The Windsors, a comic send-up of the British royal family--an antidote to The Crown, which I thought was nauseatingly worshipful. (I only watched a few episodes before I becamse too enraged to continue.)
I also am loving The Good Place--it's a bit uneven, but  sweet and actually has some ideas.

Plus the temperatures have been freezing, and we've had snow, so I felt trapped indoors. HM and I had a couple quarrels--nothing serious, but no fun. (It's a bit hard living with someone who has very different communication styles, so that's a hurdle.)

We're fine now. And we both said we'd rather deal with the hassles of having a housemate than be living alone.
(Though I cannot imagine how horrible it is for people trapped in small quarters in difficult circumstances, as many people are.)

For the last couple nights, I didn't watch TV before bed, which helped. And today is a beautiful 64º F /18ºC warm, windy, and dry--perfect for bear day.
The stuffing is dusty and I like to unstuff bears outside. 

So, part I is done!

1. Open up a big back or bottom seam with a seam ripper:

2. Take out the wadded old stuffing.

3. Bathe in lukewarm water and mild soap (Ivory or the like). Mr Bear was fairly clean and needed only two baths before the water ran clear--sometimes it's more, or you need to let the stuffed animal soak.

 4. Pat with towel and lie flat to dry. Mr Bear is in the shade in the backyard--sun will damage old fabrics.