Hundred Days of Happiness - Week Twelve
I'm transitioning my newsletter to Buttondown while juggling family illness and work chaos.
I’m tired and late with this last week’s missive. I’m tired and it feels like forever has passed for many reasons, but we just have to keep on putting one foot in front of the other. Sending hugs. I have moved my newsletter to buttondown from substack. Thank you to my friend Schuyler for the push. I’m tired of platforms becoming ‘Nazi bars’1 and having to find new homes to be online. But, this was overdue and now I’m here. Thank you for continuing to read.
I feel weird about this, but I made a paid option, as once you cross the threshold of 100 subscribers it costs money to use this service. This newsletter will always be free to read, but the option to help defray the costs is there. Plus, there’s always the old adage, if it’s free, you’re the product…. More and more these days, I’m paying for services I used to use freely to have more control and not be the product and trying to chose wisely to not support the “broligarchy”.
Monday Jan 27 – Day 79. The Peace Now flag and a lot of stickers and posters showed up today which was a lovey surprise as I didn’t know exactly when it would arrive. I put it up this afternoon and it will stay up. It’s a more positive message and hopefully I can internalize that peace. Spent all day working on various projects for work, and trying to take care of two sick people in the house. I because pretty overwhelmed today with too many spinning plates, and I can get snippy when I feel overwhelmed and stressed. I don’t know how to react differently. I think it’s a pretty normal reaction, but it doesn’t have to be that way, so I would like to “do better”. Have to figure out how to do that. This article is a start, and I feel like I do a lot of the suggested coping mechanisms already, but doesn’t address my emotional snippiness. I don’t feel overwhelming anger, just snippiness and reacting without compassion to others. I have tried meditation many times, but it might be time to try again. Small steps.
Tuesday Jan 28 – Day 80. My guys continue to be poorly. It might be the flu (which I was vaccinated for last fall), I’m not sure. So far so good – I’m not getting sick. But, today I helped DH build up his strength with some healthy food. I made homemade chicken noodle soup with last week’s chicken stock. It turned out really yummy and nourishing. Our son hasn’t really eaten in about three days, he’s fighting a low-grade fever and is living proof of the old adage “starve a fever, feed a cold”. There is definitely something going round; so many people are sick right now, 10 kids out of 29 in our son’s class were out sick today.
Wednesday Jan 29 – Day 81. Hot water bottle and a cup of tea on a chilly night to keep me warm inside and out. But now, bed. G’night y’all.
Thursday Jan 30 – Day 82. Today was a blur of work as my boss has arrived in Europe and I’m preparing for several conferences and meetings, so it was even difficult to make time for a walk. But, the fact that my plants in our bedroom are doing so well makes me incredibly happy.
Friday Jan 31 – Day 83. I went swimming early Friday morning with my friend and it was bitterly cold, but beautiful and this was the view after swimming. We finished early because my son was still sick and so I didn’t have to drop him off at school. You kind of have to zoom in on the picture, but the grass was covered in frost. I was glad to make the time to get my laps in and be done early in the day. The rest of the day was a blur.
Saturday Feb 1 – Day 84. I spent the weekend working a ginormous conference in Brussels called FOSDEM with the Stichting Internet Archive. It’s the Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting and there was easily 8,000 people in attendence. The day started with a beautiful sunrise from the top of the building we were staying at overlooking the city. I posted this photo as the first entry of the BlueSky account I have made for the foundation. If you’re so inclined, please give us a follow. The theme for this year, as difficult as it may be in these times, is gratitude. Gratitude for the people that enable us to do the work we do. Going to give it a try.
Sunday Feb 2 – Day 85. FOSDEM day two was a bit less intense with lectures, but we had some great meetings and met some awesome folks. F-Droid is an alternative App-Store platform to Google Store available on the Android and when I figured out what Hans had worked on, and that we had used it extensively in our household, I had to take this photo to show my husband. He sadly wasn’t able to come to FOSDEM and participate as he had to stay home and take care of our son who was still not over the flu. We were going to have a family road trip and then a divided weekend while I worked and they participated in FOSDEM Junior, but sadly that didn’t work out. I just worked, a lot.
It’s going to be an intense couple of months while my boss is in town, but I firmly believe in the work the Internet Archive does, especially as the US government is currently actively deleting websites wholesale. Not just changing the wording or reformatting or rebranding, which can be seen in the End of Term Archive but actively deleting websites and the data behind them - like the census…..
I end this missive with a bit of wonderful creative madness. Enjoy the sillyness!
Back in 2020, a writer named Michael B. Tager wrote a few tweets about his time at a dive bar in his native Baltimore.
While he was enjoying an after work beer he noticed the bartender booting out a seemingly quiet patron. This patron was wearing a jacket covered in Nazi symbolism.
When Tager asked about why he booted the guy, the bartender, a seasoned pro, said that if you let one Nazi in, slowly they replace the clientele.
“You have to nip it in the bud immediately,” he said, as Trager paraphrased. “These guys come in and it's always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don't want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after a while, they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.”
“And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh *****, this is a Nazi bar now,” he continued. ”And it's too late because they're entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.” ↩