Hi friend.

It’s been a while since I wrote anything.

There’s been a lot going on out there. Here, I’ve been fine. I am as worried as anyone, and anything creative I’ve been trying to do has felt like trying to make a rusty machine work just a little faster? I almost said it’s like crawling uphill out of a cave, haha, I’m alright though. Anyway, gonna get back into it by telling you some things I’m trying to do to live a little differently, both to get my mind off things, and also because I think I need to for better future times.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to get off Instagram. I’ve gotten off Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter (still have an account mostly for voyeuristic reasons). Instagram sucks in so many ways, everyone knows. I don’t wanna see photos with music, make reels of everything, be sold products before I get to see updates from my friends, etc. My underlying reason for not leaving Instagram is the same as it was with Facebook. There’s some people who might be left behind in there, who won’t know any way to contact me in case they want to, but who are we kidding… Some I literally have not seen or heard from in years (no shade about that, just a true thing, I could’ve reached out if I wanted to, too).

I’m also trying to figure out how to be less online. I bought a flip phone last year. I thought it would be cool but it kind of sucks. It’s really clunky when it comes to txting, and no one wants me calling them with my voice, so fail on that one. I think I was imagining I was a character on the Wire who needed a burner phone, just in case. Another option I’m looking at is the Light Phone but its like $700. That’s a lot of clams in a time when all my jobs are short term and career shift is looking eminent.

In other news, some kind of animal tore up my water gardens that I’d been working on since the beginning of the year. It ate all my lotus plants, and upended all the baskets I had in the water. Ripped up some water lettuce. Really went to town.Luckily I saw a couple fish survived but not sure how many perished in the great garden disaster 2025. My guess is it was a raccoon, or really desperate possums, or a tiny bear. I had just taken the memory card out of a camera I had been using to see what wildlife walked in our backyard the day before the event. Didn’t know raccoons (or tiny bears) knew how to evade security cams, damn!  Trying to build some sort of better enclosure so that it doesn’t happen again.

Hope you are keeping safe out there.

Your Friend,

Elizabeth