I do this, I do that...

Michael (of Orange Crate Art) reminded me yesterday that not everyone's "I do this, I do that" is as interesting as Frank O'Hara's.
Ha, no kidding.

From O'Hara's "Getting Up Ahead of Someone (Sun)"

it is dawn
...
I make
myself a bourbon and commence
to write one of my “I do this I do that”
poems in a sketch pad
it is tomorrow
though only six hours have gone by
each day’s light has more significance these days

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"Each day's light has more significance these days."

Yesterday was Winter Solstice and today, the daylight ticks for a tiny bit longer. Or does it? Does it pause for a while?

The timing was incidental, I suppose, but yesterday, Solstice, I announced (with a flounce) that I was ending my blog, l'astronave.
Some bloggers yesterday were complaining about their house cleaners:
well-off, well-meaning people complaining about the help. 
They don't say "the help".

A forty-year-old memory came to me of staying with a friend's parents (the Martyns--the dad was in insurance) in a wealthy suburb in New Jersey. Every morning at eight o'clock, a stream of black women in pastel maid's uniforms came up the hill to the wealthy houses. They had come on a bus from the big inner city. At five o'clock, they streamed back down the hill to the bus stop.
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Solstice is a good time to make a change.
Pause, change partners, and dance.
I wasn't thinking about that, I'd just had enough of people writiting about other people doing their housework (not up to their standards).

My god. What do you say? "You missed some of my dead skin flakes here, and a little of my dog's body fluids there"?

In theory I could have —should have!—ignored those bloggers all along. But I didn't.
And they'd show up in my stats, which, again, in theory I could have not looked at. But I did.

Will this work for me, starting a separate blog?
Why not? FRESH START! Singing a new tune, a noodle toon:

ABOVE: a shelf in my workspace where I've been setting donated books about or by Jimmy Carter, to display when he dies.
He turned ninety-nine in October, and Rosalynn died recently, so I think he may leave any minute now.
Fly away, Mr. President!

[A fun thing I learned from the New Yorker article "The World of Frank O'Hara":
Frank O'Hara and Edward Gorey were college roommates. WHO CLEANED THEIR ROOM?]
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I woke up feeling fine this morning, after being wiped out yesterday by the latest Covid vaccine--the fourth, is it, since 2021? 
I'd planned on doing errands yesterday to prepare for Christmas Eve's pot roast dinner (Sunday), but I was too achy all over. I'm glad I got the shot though, since bink had been so sick with Covid for two weeks, not having had the vaccine.

Next up--shingles vaccine. Gold star! to me for attending to medical matters, which I put off (and off).

When it comes to medical and financial things, I don't do this and I don't do that. I've taken a few paid days off over Christmas, and I intend to sit at my desk and clear some papers.
Intentions aren't very effective though...
Penny Cooper is advocating for making an ACTION PLAN!
This is such a good idea.
Here. Step one: I will mail my rent-rebate form.

"Hope is not an action plan", Jeremy Norton writes in his book Trauma Sponges. Norton is chief of the fire station I bike past on my way to work, in between my apartment and George Floyd Square. His truck was called to the scene of the 2020 murder, but Floyd was already dead.

Yesterday I wrote Norton a thank-you card and told him that his line about hope was a favorite. (Looking it up now, I see it's a common saying, but I heard it from him first.)
Also I said that his book helped because I saw myself reflected in it:
yes, this happened; yes, it was this bad.

That's the thing that bothered me about the bloggers I kept reading--perhaps their focus on housework comforts them--I can imagine it does!–– but for me, their "this and that" was not a reflection of or a helpful response to what I see happening in our times.

Fine, then walk away!
I have. And god bless and good luck to them.

Of course, doing little this-and-thats does help in these times. All times are unknown, and this-and-thats mark time like geographic coordinates.
And so does making an effort to celebrate the seasons help...
Below: bink helps Penny Cooper decorate the dolls and bears' Xmas tree.