By: Revanche

Good Thing Friday (68)

June 5, 2020

If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?

Current total: Lakota, $1,570.70; Rural libraries, $321.62.

Challenges this week: The world is on fire, quite literally, and here I thought that COVID would be our biggest issue for the next several months. The racism in our country, and the systemic refusal to change, is breathtaking, devastating, heartbreaking.

Protests and riots were inevitable given how little this country has done to move away from murdering black people and then blaming them for their own deaths. I will never understand why our government prefers to arrest thousands and murder more people instead of arresting the police officers who murdered a man in cold blood. Never. My heart keeps getting heavier for our friends and family who are hurting and living through traumas we should not be putting them through.

It feels wrong to even be thinking of utterly mundane, petty, good things when this is happening to our fellow citizens, to our friends, to our neighbors. When my dearest friends and mentors know they can’t even be safe in their own beds, in their own homes.

But as I was thinking when Ursula Vernon said something similar – we also need good too. We can’t stay steeped in the anger continuously, indefinitely. We need to act and support people who are being hurt but we also need to recharge. I hate it, though.

More people need to listen to Jane Elliott and think on why they are so quick to find ways to excuse how we treat our Black citizens: “That says very plainly that you know what’s happening, you know you don’t want it for you, I want to know why you’re so willing to accept it or allow it to happen for others.” Another interview about her exercise with her brown eyed and blue eyed third grade students where she found that bigotry is a learned behavior.

The mundane challenges: PiC’s job changes started a couple weeks ago and as predicted, have been increasingly difficult to manage with no childcare. We will figure it out, we’re working on it, but time is tighter, tempers are a bit more fragile, and we’re all even more tired.

The mundane good things

1. I’ve been hoarding quite a few gift cards for pricey stores that we don’t frequent for years. I finally pulled them out to solve some of my problems around the house: I need a really heavy duty knife for cutting through bones (my catfish has to be cut into steaks) – time for a cleaver! We could also really some placemats but

2. AH HA. I don’t love buying from Houzz but PiC picked out a couple things he needed for a house project several weeks ago. By the time I got around to ordering them, the prices had gone up. But I noticed that there was a sale in another department entirely so my suspicion was that they had increased the prices elsewhere to make up for their sale in case they had people there for the sale and also picking up other things at more than full price. I backburnered the order until that sale was over and voila! The prices came back down the day after that sale ended.

3. I’ve been fighting with my phone that keeps making files available offline FOREVER. I would turn off “available offline” and then they would pop up with the dratted notification the “5 files are available offline” again! It was maddening! I finally found the solution. I only actively use the Sheets app, so forgot all about the other apps that I never use. I went through the Docs app and the Drive app to turn off all the files available offline there too, and I think … that has solved the problem. *Spoke too soon? Another file started coming up as available online even though I didn’t have it marked to be. Sigh. Restarting the phone helped. I might have to cave and update the phone system.

:: How are you doing?

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