Bethany

First of many fires to come in our wood stove - a dream years in the making finally come true for @andrewz

10 yr old to his best bud: If only one of us was a weird kid and the other one was a normal kid, I think we would still be friends, we just wouldn’t be best friends.

If I ever want to start a blog to post my grumpiest opinions about nursing, I will call it “The Cranky Krankenschwester”

If there’s one thing I know about FB marketplace sellers, it’s that they will call absolutely anything “MCM.”

I appreciated this anecdote from Lauren Rioux, on undertaking a new hobby/skill as an adult: At the time of this story, I was around twenty-five ish years old, had graduated college with degrees in music, and been focusing four hours a day for two years on

My Kindle has been increasingly sluggish, so in a desire to untether myself where I can from the Amazon ecosystem, I bought a Kobo to replace it.

Finished watching: Gone Girl 🎥 Better than the book (not all that high of a bar).

Case Study House #8, aka the Eames House 📚 Case Study Houses by Elizabeth A.T.

Slowly outfitting the new house with furniture, mostly sourced secondhand.

Exploring our new neighborhood by bike tonight - I love that in the space of a couple miles we can bike through forest, prairie, and around lakes.

A good mail day today

Best room in the house (Fern agrees).

My daughter is at an intensive “pre-college art lab” for high schoolers right now, and I am loving seeing all the work she texts me photos of.

Past me (an idiot), blithely: “We can definitely paint every wall/ceiling/baseboard in our house ourselves (plus the prerequisite plaster repair) before listing it for sale!”

Sure, your refrigerator may be from this millennium, but does it have a POWER MISER??

Exciting things happening over at our new house . . .

My (9 and 12 yr old) sons were just in the backyard playing a game they call “lawyer karate,” the rules of which are somewhat opaque to me, but involve hand-to-hand combat while wearing suit jackets and ties, and yelling at each other about taxes.

Finished reading: The Memory of Old Jack by Wendell Berry 📚 “Don’t you want to go in there and watch the TV?”

Our family stayed at a hotel last week, and as usual, the children were delighted by the novelty of live television.

Just now: Andrew and I are discussing A Pattern Language, and our 9 year old sighs to himself, “Not this again.”

Finished reading: The Correspondent by Virginia Evans 📚 - I very much enjoyed this, but I couldn’t help feeling like it was the equivalent of taking the character of Joyce from Thursday Murder Club and running her through a literary fiction filter.

A number of people working at hunger relief organizations and in education, who asked not to be identified for the record for fear of retribution, said the food instability and lack of access to social services are not simply a byproduct of the ICE crackd…

“While groceries and household supplies are an ongoing need for the families being terrorized by ICE in Minnesota, what is becoming an ever-more urgent and pressing need as the 1st of the month approaches is rent money.

Living in the Twin Cities, and feeling the need to monitor The Situation daily––not to mention keep abreast of our 16-block-radius hyper-local neighborhood chat–which puts all personal rules about online news and smartphone usage in shambles, I’m having to

I don’t know what to write here.

7p - 7:30 am - Go to work at the hospital, caring for a lovely, sweet, critically ill little one.

From the Star Tribune: “Fraud investigation and immigration enforcement in Minnesota have become a pretext for a sweeping federal show of force that bears little relationship to the problem it claims to address.

I’ve been trying to think of what to say about how it feels living in St.

Random Twin Cities sociological thought: You can take a decent guess at someone’s politics by what terminology they use about the events in the summer of 2020 after the murder of George Floyd – e.g., “riot,” “protest,” “unrest,” “uprising,” etc.