Good Thing Friday (86)
October 9, 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, $1,816.35; Rural libraries, $346.69
1. I was in a tough spot on the weekend and made myself ask for help from a friend. Their kids, actually. I asked if they might be free for a Zoom playdate with JB and they happily obliged. They read books, colored, did art for each other, played tic tac toe and play-doh for HOURS. It was amazing and made it possible for me to pace myself for the rest of the day. I won’t call it a silver lining because that seems weird but I definitely appreciate that only under these circumstances would they have been available. When else would social ten and thirteen year olds have hours to spend with a five year old and actually enjoy it?
2. I sorted through my and an old friend’s gift of handed down comics this weekend. They were gifted them to me over ten years ago and I only JUST got the chance to go through them. 😬 But it’s perfect timing. The kids from #1 were interested in taking the whole shebang off my hands for themselves and to share with their friends. I won’t even have to sort them, that can be their project! I’ll look through my shelves one more time to see if there are good younger kid graphic novels to add to the already full box. I’ve picked up a handful of bargains at SDCC over the years that were good reads but not necessarily keepers so it’d be great to pass them along to someone who will enjoy them and reduce my sense of Stuff Claustrophobia.
3. JB has had permission to, under strict supervision, go through a few of my comics and they’re really enjoying the treat. I should go through them and organize it so the age appropriate ones are more accessible.
Yotsuba&! is a wonderful read and probably suitable for their reading level. I also found a small stack of Powerpuff Girls that are about the right level. Weirdly the Walt Disney comics seem to be a little too advanced for them right now (by my estimation, I haven’t had them try it yet).
Challenges this week: I’m not sure what words there are for the state of this federal government / presidential administration that lies so often you can’t tell if they’ve met a truth in their lives. I honestly can’t help but think that 45 is just lying about having the virus, still, because his behavior continues to baffle me.
We’ve pulled a bunch of previously inaccessible boxes out of storage and now we have to deal with them. It was always on the list of things to do but it’s rather daunting now that we’ve doubled down on the stash.
I need to consolidate old photos and also just plain get rid of a lot of old duplicate photos but darn if I can think of when I can make time for that to happen.
4. I did tackle and condense two boxes into one. I recycled a bunch of old paperwork and had a moment of reminiscing about my finances and filing system 10-15 years ago as I sorted a big pile of paperwork to be shredded. In 2010, I declared $43,000 of income, and $11,000 of that was unemployment. I’ve come such a long way.
The rest of the boxes are going to be tougher. I didn’t realize I had saved my yearbooks so now I have to figure out what to do with the darn things.
hot tip for the yearbook: just keep senior year, at most! unless you really think you’ll enjoy flipping through them, it sounds like you thought they were long gone, so now you can catch up reality to your mental state and throw them all away. I try to be pretty ruthlessly unsentimental – I didn’t like high school and really don’t need to drag the memories around at this stage. I think I kept my last year’s but I should throw it out.
I WAS sad when I thought they were gone. I didn’t mind high school and am still in touch with many of my junior high and high school friends so I might want to hold onto them. I don’t know … we have a whole lot of our own photos from that period so maybe they can go. STILL WAFFLING 😀
I roasted two pumpkins and made an unreasonable amount of pie.
I hope your weekend also had some fun in it!
PIE. YUM!!
The last two weekends were zero fun but I have some hope for next weekend, maybe?
Proud of you (#1) and bless those kids!
Found my kindergarten report card from Malaysia (everything is so structured and graded there) which was hilarious. We learned in 3 languages?! And got assessed on morality/spirituality including “responding to love and beauty…”
Thank you and YES indeed bless them, they were wonderful and give me hope for teen years.
Dang, three languages is awesome! I feel old thinking of how it’s hard for me to wrap my brain around sharing 2-3 right now.