Happy Easter for those who celebrate! Here I am writing about early March in early April. Spring came in and then went into hiding and then came back again - playing a game of peek-a-boo all month long.

Mar 9 – Day 67

I showed up very early at the office in Amsterdam and people were having their breakfast. A guest had made a very European breakfast and it was so beautiful and nutritious I had to take this photo. I spent the day working and getting to know a new colleague.

Mar 10 – Day 68

Tuesday, I went to Leiden University and spent the day learning about and celebrating the Public Domain. In Europe, for creators who died in 1955, their work is now legally in the Public Domain which means that copyright no longer holds over their works they published while they were alive.

The day’s events were almost all in Dutch and that was wonderful for my brain and confidence. I spent a fair amount of time with people who I normally interact with in English and they saw me making the effort and were very gracious and patient with my Dutch.

Mar 11 – Day 69

People are thinking about the impact of protests and what makes them effective. Protests don’t have to be big - simple signs in the windows also work as in this case.

Mar 12 – Day 70

With a creative and inspirational group of concerned citizens, we founded the chapter of Indivisible Netherlands. And after a lot of work behind the scenes by an incredible team of volunteers, the site is live! The website is only one arm of the work, but it’s an important world-wide visible part.

Mar 13 – Day 71

Peter B. Kaufman came to the Internet Archive Europe HQ in Amsterdam to talk about his new book, The Moving Image (MIT Press). He gave a great talk and received an enthusiastic crowd reception.

Two-thirds of the world’s internet traffic is video. Americans get their news and information from screens and speakers more than through any other means. And yet, for most writers, educators, publishers, and archivists, video remains something of a foreign country: present everywhere, understood unevenly, and preserved poorly.

His book is the first authoritative account of how we arrived here, and the first practical manual for those who want to navigate the medium with confidence. Drawing on decades as an educator, publisher, and producer, Kaufman covers the full lifecycle of video: how to produce it, distribute it, clear rights to it, cite it, and, crucially, archive and preserve it. And in a gesture entirely consistent with its argument, the book is now available as an open-access edition under a CC BY-SA license, released with support from MIT Libraries exactly one year after its original publication. You can read it here.

Mar 14 – Day 72

Saturday was spent being cozy at home as David got a cold and was feeling poorly. And midway through the day, it decided to hail!

That night, Santi and I had a date night. We had arranged a babysitter and David was already asleep when she arrived. We left and went to see Project Hail Mary and it was phenomenal. If you haven’t seen it yet and it’s still in your local theaters, go! It’s worth seeing on the big screen with a group of other people in the dark. Really.

Mar 15 – Day 73

Sunday morning it was beautiful and I went on a bike ride with a friend around MaximaPark. We decided to stop halfway round and enjoy a coffee. This guy sets up shop on Sunday mornings, near the church and in the park. He brings his cargo bike and a solar panel and gets to work providing cheap yummy coffee.

We took a detour on our ride to go to the Cherry Blossom Orchard and the blossoms were starting to pop. So very pretty.

Later that afternoon David made a fort in the living room - it was pretty cute - he took his books under there and read in safety.

This “interview” with Edward Norton and Stephen Colbert is brilliant. They had a great conversation and at the end he performed an distillation and amalgamation of two poems by Walt Whitman: "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" & “Song of myself” and he shows us once again the power of art in times of crisis. It isn’t frivolous acting, it’s giving voice to our emotions with power and energy.

And much like the website I built two years ago Action Dissolves Anxiety, he talks about how the antidote to anxiety is action. Do something. We can all do different things to make the world a better place, but just “do something” - take action, you will feel better for it and make your community stronger.