By: Revanche

Good Things Friday (340) and Link Love

September 5, 2025

1. Coming up with a good office storage set-up/layout is a weirdly slow process. Slow is better than never and sometimes fixing your longstanding storage issues is a multi-step process especially when you’re dealing with many crafting, office, life, and school supplies for yourself and the kids. We could really use more storage space here. I just wish I could settle on one good overarching system and stick with it but I’m always finding that I have time or energy to get 25-50% of the way through, stop, and come back to it months later wanting something “better”.

All that to say, it occurred to me to try rearranging my mask storage boxes so that I could reduce it to one medium bin and all it’s now left me with is a bag of well used old fabric masks, once paired with filters, to figure out what to do with. JB used them constantly over three years and they simply can’t do the job anymore. There should be no shame in repurposing them in the scrap bag but I feel terrible about taking apart the hard work that went into them. But it would be worse to waste the fabric, in the end, so I’ll get over it.

2. Every so often I dabble into beginner sheet music on a keyboard to try and remember what I learned as a kid. I wish I’d been able to muster the discipline to practice as much as I should have back then, the way I was willing to run for track or workout for martial arts, but I wasn’t so my muscle memory is a shabby shadow of what it could be. Another thing to do in retirement, teach myself how to play again. Try to get good enough to play Howl’s Moving Castle for fun.

White Earth Nation welcomes first bison calf

This is good, New Mexico, all states affected need to do this: State steps in to ensure access to COVID-19 vaccine

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration this week approved an updated version of the COVID-19 vaccine, but some pharmacies in New Mexico have said they won’t be able to give the vaccine to those for whom it is not recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.

The order says NMDOH will work with the state Board of Pharmacy to remove potential barriers access to COVID-19 vaccines at pharmacies in New Mexico.

RFK, Jr needs to go straight to hell for this mess but good, states, get yourselves in order: Northeastern states consider regional approach to vaccine guidance after CDC changes. Shifting national vaccine policy under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has Massachusetts and other states exploring a regional approach.

Australian-led trial shows nasal spray reduces COVID-19 risk in cancer patients

Ojibwe jingle dress brings education, healing to the State Fair

I knew nothing about Lee Child before this, I hadn’t even really known his name as the author of the Reacher books, but this passage is so spot on: Child thinks he overestimated America’s capacity to outgrow its past. “I had always resisted saying this is just about the relationship between white Americans and black Americans, based on the guilt white people carry, first for slavery and then for Jim Crow. I spent decades saying, ‘Come on, it’s got to be more complex than this.’ But I think it’s not. I think that almost everything can be explained by this deep hatred that the majority of white Americans have for black Americans. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”