Smart & Pleasant New Tech

I'm on the front porch of my cat-sitting house. I've been at this house almost four months, and I go home in one more week. I've barely been able to sit on the porch this spring, it's been so cold. This week we're due for a stretch of nice weather in the 70ºs.

Finally: I went and bought a new laptop.
A MacBook Air, much like the old one, but ten years newer and "space gray" instead of silver. So fast! So smooth! So not broken and insufficient!

Penny Cooper has new tech too. ^ She has taken to wearing a hair band around her neck, as an aid for carrying things. She started when my sister got Covid and Penny hid in her mailbox with a get-well message in the band.

I. Covid Report 

Sister's Covid case was mild, like most people's I know: a few days of general gunkiness and exhaustion.

So far as I know, I haven't had Covid (unless it was asymptomatic). Many (most?) people I know have had it now--almost all my coworkers. Mostly it's been mild, but one volunteer was hospitalized.

Almost no one here is wearing masks this spring, except a few people on the bus, where mask-wearing is no longer required by law.
The other day, a bus driver even announced over the speaker,
"The mask mandate is over, you don't need to wear a mask."

Weird that he made a point of it--politically motivated? Buses are incubators of disease at the best of times--shouldn't we all wear masks on buses all the time?

Huh--I just checked that, and a study showed that regular users of public transport acquire immunity against a range of respiratory viruses and are more likely to be asymptomatic.

I rode the bus all winter, so maybe I did get an asymptomatic case.

II. Turning Off the Chyron of Criticism

Fact-checking my own assumptions aside, I'm not fact-checking individuals anymore.
Or, I'm trying not to.

I get myself in such a twist, fretting about people saying inaccurate things, which they (we) do all the time. I made some people unhappy  by pointing out their errors, and I didn't improve anything anyway. *

Of course it's good to be discerning about factual information, like how Covid spreads.
I don't mean that.
I mean, I want to interrupt myself generating a constant stream of criticism that runs like a chyron across the screen of my mind.

I came across the Daily Decalogue of Angelo Roncalli--ten simple "little" things that are hard to do.
This one jumped out at me. I thought, I'll just try that:

Angelo: "Only for today, . .  I will not criticize anyone;
I will not claim to improve or to discipline ["correct or punish"] anyone except myself."

[Me: I will not fact-check things other people say.]

Ha, right. Just try it. I can pretty easily stop myself from physically fact-checking, but every day I fail multiple times not to criticize anyone--especially at work. I'm always saying stuff like, "That guy is such a jerk."

And if I count criticism IN MY MIND, I fail all the time even when I'm alone.

I don't like it; it's a habit that's makes the brain's gears all sticky. And it's useless! It doesn't help. It's not an effective policy.

 

I watched Harvey last night. ^
Jimmy Stewart plays a crazy/holy fool, Elwood P. Dowd, whose companion, Harvey, is an invisible giant rabbit. 
(Penny Cooper loved it: "It's just like me--even though I'm visible, people think I'm not real.")

From 1950, the story's got plenty of problems, but I liked Elwood's speech recommending being pleasant over being smart.
I'm wary of romanticizing this tricky, double-twisty position:
You have to be a a crazy (and smart?) saint to pull this off, maybe.
Elwood is smart--but he's made some kind of choice to forefront pleasant.

So, I'm wary, but I keep seeing that Being Right is not all that helpful, on its own.

Ass't Man (remember him? the assistant manager I clashed so badly with?) has learned a lot in his couple years at the thrift store, but it frustrates him that people won't go along with his plans (and as a mere assistant, he doesn't have to power to discipline them if they don't).

The other day, he asked me what I thought about his frustrating situation.

Because he asked, I suggested that this workplace presented him with an opportunity to Practice Letting Other People Be Wrong.

 He had a hard time with this. He explained to me again how people were being wrong--doing things the most inefficient way, etc.

"Yes," I said. "I know. They're doing it wrong. That's the point. Let them."

It's counter-intuitive, the idea of not trying to improve or discipline anyone but oneself;
and it's funny because Angelo Roncalli (who wrote the Daily Decalogue for himself) went on to become Pope John XXIII, the man who "opened the windows of the church" with Vatican II. It was his job to teach people, and he did.

But there's magic in it, and relief.
"Put down the encyclopedia, and back away slowly."
                          ______________________

*As [various people] said,
"Don't try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and it annoys the pig."

Tip o' the Hat to BOOK's

 (Still haven't got a laptop.)

I made some improvements in BOOK's recently, including setting up a New Arrivals cart. 

To start with, I just wanted to dump a bunch of unsorted books out front because I was swamped in back, but people have told me they like it--and I like the jumble too. 

A serendipitous side-by-side:

ABOVE LEFT: an issue on denim from the textile art magazine Selvedge; right, "A Soldier Priest Talks to Youth"

Everyone likes a fancy hat.

More "Salvation" below-- one of a series of embossed covers from...I think from the Jehovah's Witnesses.

I'm proud of the book-holders: a handy coworker made lips by bending up the ends of metal bookends for me.

More New Arrivals below.  Hm... Maybe my new Android phone camera doesn't catch book titles as well? I can't quite tell, posting on the phone-- I am inspired to go to the Apple store today and just cough up the big bucks for a new laptop.

Also, I am slowly making new signs. Art Sparker generously designed signs for me four years ago-- time for a new look. 

Below, one for the Minnesota books section-- I cut up a state tourism pamphlet from 1970.

Dolls of the World

(Laptop on the blink again.)

Donation from someone's large, vintage collection of dolls of the world.

Many have no markings-- some here have tags, Made in Italy, Portugal;

doll with painted wood face from Russia, USSR; next-to-last doll with her painted vest, from Romania; final two from Poland.

I don't know where the Black doll is from--his handwritten tag said, "Handformed clay, 1930s, $45".

 I spent most of my 5-hour shift yesterday pricing and photographing dolls. I priced them high for the thrift store, low for Etsy-- $3 to $15 (the Black clay doll). I love them all but don't want to take any of them home, or much of anything else either. I see two reactions to working in thrift-- buying tons of stuff and buying almost nothing. I do like having a camera again though, to catch details.

Sprightly Pink & Green

I. Beeswax Food-Wrap

Me at the Duluth Folk School last week, with a beeswax food-wrap I just made:

It's super easy:
1. Shave or slice bits of beeswax onto cotton cloth.
2. Place the cloth between parchment baking-paper,
3. and iron (medium-high heat) on top.
The heat melts the wax, which soaks into the cloth. And that's it!

To make the wraps more bendable and stick-to-themselvesable, so you can easily fold them around a sandwich, say, the instructor had melted the beeswax in a double-boiler and added a little jojoba oil (for suppleness) and pine resin (for stickiness).
She brought blocks of this blend to class for us to use.

It's nice, but I know from my crafty friend Julia that you can use the beeswax as-is. Easier to make, and it doesn't hurt anything if the waxy cloth cracks.

II. Weather Report

Whenever the weather changes, I miss my Auntie Vi.
After months of chilly gray weather, all of a sudden colors are popping out all over.
I want to email her this morning and give her a springtime update: I'd tell her that I'm sitting on the front porch with the cats, and the crab apple trees across the street are puffy pink and the new tree leaves are my favorite tender bright green.

I'd give her a tech update too:
the laptop battery I'd thought was dead magically recharged––(Marz discovered when she turned the laptop on)––so I turned it off again and gingerly carried it outside, here to the porch:
DO NOT LET IT UNPLUG WHILE IT'S ON, or it goes back to zero.
Tricky, because ever since I dropped it on its USB port corner, the power connector doesn't insert securely...
To hold it steady, I've clipped the cord to the computer with a chip-bag clip, like a big purple plastic clothespin.

Boring details! but the sort of thing that makes up a daily day.
Also clever-monkey funny though, too--like when someone has duct-taped their car's bumper to hold it on--these cheap fixes to expensive problems.

Anyway, the recharged battery means I can sit here on the house-sitting front porch surrounded by frothy spring colors and chat on my computer again.

III. Life at the Speed of Life

I miss BJ too.
Here's her photo from the thrift store's Instagram, where I announced her death (she was such a regular regular, other regulars knew her):
BJ, top left, holding Auntie Vi's stuffed Woodstock.
(In that funny way random posts line up, she's above an antique child holding a stuffed horse.)

That's the last time I posted for work, though I intend to post there more again, now I inherited a smartphone camera from BJ.
But I deleted my personal IG account after BJ died. (I'd already deleted Facebook.) Social media feels like constant low-level agitation--unwelcome to me now.

bink thwacked her head on a wood beam a few weeks ago and has suffered with a concussion ever since--light and motion make her sick. A concussion doc told her not to look at digital devices because their screens constantly refresh--too fast for us to notice, but it affects our brains.

Like so many things in the world, eh? flashing at us so rapidly and constantly we don't notice, but we're taking it all in.

Not having a reliable computer in the past couple months was frustrating, but it also meant I wasn't bombarded with nanoseconds.
I was taking in the world at the speed of blossoms blooming.
Or a friend dying.

Hanging out with BJ in her last months was ... Important in Slow Motion.
Body Time.
Even to write about it is too fast, too condensed, you know?
It happened at the speed of going-over-every-week-and-mopping-the-floor.

If I wrote about it, it would be what you already know--a list of platitudes.
Be present.
Do the little things that come to you to do.
Love one another.

A friend once surprised me by saying the Beatitudes are boring: "They're just a laundry list. Blessed are the X, Y, Z."

I agree. It's not the list that's interesting, it's the Doing of the List.

Low Reflected

 First to say, I tried to use my phone to comment on blogs but it didn't work. Is it Blogger or the phone?

I need to buy a laptop or iPad-- I'm just not agile on the phone--it doesn't allow (or I haven't learned how to do?) the kind of hopping and digging I like.

I feel like a long reflective catch-up chat-- awkward to do...

Here is Low again, reflected in rainwater sludge in Duluth.

On this visit, Sister and I went somewhere I'd wanted to go for years but was afraid to enter-- the Tappa Keg Inn. From the outside it looks like a dark, scary bar-- the kind in a horror movie.

But inside, it was just what I'd hoped for-- a small-town diner from another era, where the advertised "Authentic Italian Food" is spaghetti with canned mushrooms.

Sister had a Daily Special--a bowl of chili with a grilled cheese sandwich. Also, saltines. She ordered a side of sweet potato fries, which ruined the vintage vibe but added to the overall carb-bomb delight.

Typing on a phone is not aided by house-sitting cat George, who always wants up. (I'm here four more weeks.)

The book on the table, I've just started reading: "Version Control" (where's the italic formatting?), a time-travel novel by Dexter Palmer, from 2016. 

I picked it up at work and know nothing about it, but the first page was good, and the back blurb says it's "true to the science fictional world we live in". Don't we ever. Like, complaining about blogging on my smartphone--that would have been a science fictional sentence even only twenty years ago.

So it's comforting that Authentic Italian Food in a town up north is the same as it was in my childhood.

Tappa Keg even had bird art on the wall. (A loon, our state bird.) And a metal holder for salt and pepper shakers-- with the science fictional touch of a bottle of hand sanitizer for these pandemic days we live in. 

Penny Cooper approves.

Low Looking

 Photo below: Low (her name) in the wet Duluth woods along the St Louis River that flows into Lake Superior-- lots of mosses and other spore-bearing plants

My laptop died, and I lost a second phone--only a $25 flip phone this time, lost on the city bus. This has not been my year for tech. 

And my friend BJ died a couple weeks ago-- the friend of the thrift store who lived just across the alley from the store. I went over regularly and helped with laundry and vacuuming and the like-- I'm so glad I did. (Gee, life goes by fast, eh?)

Her sister gave me her Android phone and it's pretty good, but I'm slow on the keyboard (awkward for blogging).

Low Somersaulting

In Duluth for a class on making beeswax food-wraps at the Duluth Folk School. Using a new smartphone--cumbersome.

"We are not cumbersome", the girlettes say, and turn somersaults to prove it.

Left to right: Low, Penny Cooper, and Regent