Monthly Archives: February 2025

the last friday in february

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After an extraction and two years of orthodontics, my braces came off Wednesday. I still have 14 weeks of Invisalign and then lifelong retainers, but as of now, the metal is GONE. The Invisalign is no joke, but it’s an improvement over what was an uncomfortable and confidence-eroding couple of years. Entering my 50s and dealing with peri-menopause and its changes to my body and mind was bad enough without braces. But I didn’t do the orthodontics for aesthetics and now, at the end of the treatment, my bite is almost fully fixed and my front teeth won’t continue to chip, loosen and erode, so I guess I can say it was worth it in the end.

Today I am observing the economic boycott. (I probably can’t say the same about the kiddo who needed a Starbucks on her way to school.) This boycott seems like a small thing to protest such enormous fuckery from the regime of the Orange Manbaby and Apartheid Clyde, but I’m committed, and have also been burning up the phone lines with my 5 Calls app. I’m sure that my senators and House Rep are beyond sick of this constituent. I could talk a lot about this political timeline but that’s for another post.

So in a happier topic, this weekend begins a several-week foray into renovating our master bathroom. We live in a 1962 Colonial and while the bath may have been redone in the ’80’s, it’s still what you would expect, which is pretty bad. Brandon is doing a lot of the work himself and I’ve been of limited support (mostly just saying ‘yes that sounds fine’). He has all of our household’s skill with decor and aesthetics. I’m most excited about a trip to Pewabic in Detroit to pick out some cool accent tiles. For awhile, we will all be sharing the kiddo’s bathroom, which may result in her spending more time at her dad’s to avoid the enforced togetherness!

The kiddo has a full-day CPR class tomorrow for her EMT Cadet training and I am hoping to finish up a couple of knitting projects and get some reading done. My library haul this week included two Dune graphic novels and a historical fantasy from Francesca May ‘Wild and Wicked Things’. And lastly, on this Friday evening, I leave you with something that absolutely made my heart leap with joy. In these uncertain times, seeing all four original members of REM reunite this week at the 40 Watt Club in Athens, GA to sing ‘Pretty Persuasion’ with Michael Shannon is a light that we all deserve.

february 28 economic blackout.

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Read more here.

If you’re mad about what’s going on, I urge you to investigate grassroots efforts to show your disgust.

DEI is NOT the monster that MAGA makes it out to be. Personally, I have benefited from DEI and I would imagine many of you have, as well, even if it’s not transparent to you. DEI initiatives support pay equity and job protections for working women (so we have a job to return to after maternity leave, for example, and facilities for nursing mothers). They also ensure equal hiring opportunities for women and prevent discrimination and harassment in the workplace. These are things that I and most if not all of the women I know have relied upon, even if they’re not aware of them or don’t intellectually understand how critical they are to our ability to support ourselves and our children and pursue our careers with dignity and equality.

In addition, they provide accessible workplaces for employees with disabilities, and they prevent gender, race, and age discrimination in employment, among others. These protections exist to ensure that companies attract, consider, and support a broad range of candidates and that ANY qualified candidates – no matter their race, gender, ethnicity, age, and status – are not overlooked in hiring.

These are just a few of the most obvious ways that DEI has made our workplaces safer and more efficient.
I fail to see how these are bad practices.

So I will be planning ahead and participating in the February 28 economic blackout.

dispatch from a northern weekend

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Seeking the snow last weekend, our first stop was my mom’s house – almost 4 hours north, on the west side of the state. Snow was knee-high (conservative estimate). Brandon and I woke up Saturday morning to run the Betsie Bay Frozen 5k, which is one of my favorite events. It hasn’t been run since 2020, before the world shut down. In the olden days I would have posted a full separate race recap with my time but in today’s world, post-50 years old, having survived a pandemic, menopause, teenage kid years, the Orange Menace and his Nazi cohorts attempting to ruin democracy as we know it, and various other life events, just getting out there and running it is enough.

We then drove 2 hours further north, to the village of Walloon Lake, which is most famous for being young Hemingway’s Michigan playground. We found a historical marker, and there’s a statue of him somewhere around, but the wind was blowing fine snow into whiteout conditions everywhere so we gave up looking. Instead, we skied at Boyne Mountain (the kid snowboarded) and enjoyed our perfect little Vrbo. As we get older, my ability to stay in a hotel has decreased significantly. I hate being cheek to jowl with mass humanity, having to either pay for every meal and snack or rely on hotel coffee and crumpled snack bags. Give me an AirBnB or a Vrbo every time. I know they’re wreaking havoc on small communities but selfishly I want exactly what we had this weekend. Which was a cozy cottage on a private lot with a fireplace, hot tub, separate bedrooms for us and the kid, a beautiful living space and kitchen, fully appointed. We cooked, we had good coffee, we had a fire, we watched movies, read books, I knitted, and we had privacy. I threw caution to the wind and ate what I wanted to eat, drank Horny Monk from the Petoskey Brewing Company, and made a fool out of myself on the slopes. (I fell. A lot.) The snow was almost claustrophobic – piled higher than street signs and just continually sifting down. The drifts outside the Vrbo were up to the windows with paths cut into them to access doors and the driveway – if you don’t have a snowplow or a snowblower running constantly, you would have big trouble.

All in all, it was a perfect swift getaway with my two favorite people. The world is hard right now and being away for a bit is a luxury. We don’t have a lot of travel planned for the year, so the times we do have together will be all the more important.

pins of the week – the one before Valentine’s day that has nothing to do with Valentine’s day

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We are headed off for a long weekend in northern Michigan – we have a Frozen 5k to run on Saturday morning (it is going to be COLD), a rental cottage further north, and a couple of planned days skiing and snowboarding (and maybe knitting in the lodge for one member of the travel party who shall remain nameless). But I’ve had some really pretty images swirling on my PInterest feed and wanted to quickly share them before we leave!

I’ve been saving my Harney & Son’s tea tins to reuse as knitting needle holders in my home office but I also love this idea and this one as well. I’ve made candles in my old tins before, as well. (I may or may not have actually ordered tea from them because I loved the tin it came in.)

I’m going to have to knit these fellows for the same reason as I loved the fish tattoo a few weeks ago.

I’ve never had much luck with seed starting indoors. I don’t have the space for it, and Emmett is a voracious plant-chewer. But I wonder if this idea would work for just a few tomato plants…

The leather pants are nonstarter for me but I love the haircut, the glasses, and the scarf.

And lastly, don’t forget this truth.

the friday files, harlequin edition: several intrepid heroines, a dummy, and a gurney

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This week has been a total blur – but I look back and feel like I traveled miles. There were work complexities, three days in the office, depression and rage over
the current political situation (always, now), a comparatively and thankfully minor ice
storm, and an evening spent at EMT Cadet training for the kiddo. (As usual, this was the
high point for me. This week our intrepid heroines strapped the lifelike dummy to the gurney and fluttered around him performing industrious lifesaving maneuvers. Then, they took turns hurtling the gurney up and down the halls, banging him around the corners, and loading him into and out of the ambulance. I’m glad that the dummy made this appearance; a couple of weeks ago it may have been volunteer moms strapped to that gurney. I speak from personal experience.)

I finished the latest Haruki Murakami book. “The City and its Uncertain Walls” was not
as swiftly immersive as “1Q84”. The book felt a bit disjointed, which makes sense as I
learned it was written in two different time periods of Murakami’s life. The cast of people and places include a teenage couple in love who become separated; there is a walled city with a library of dreams, perishing unicorns, and characters who become separated from their shadows. There is another library in another world, a ghostly librarian with a quirky fashion sense, and a boy with a Yellow Submarine parka. The plot and poetry lies amid those details. If you love Murakami and would read his writing even if it was on a bathroom wall in a Tokyo train station, you’ll enjoy the delicate unfurling of this book. If you don’t, or if you’re not familiar with him at all, this may not be the book for you.

In other reading news, perusing the NYTimes, I saw this starter pack of romance novels and I’m intrigued. I think the last romance novels I read were back in early high school. One summer vacation, our rental cottage had a rickety bookshelf full of old Harlequins and I worked my way through all of them with single minded determination, staying up late, gritty eyed with fatigue but determined to find out if the romance between the plucky yet wilting amnesiac with a secret twin and the arrogant aristocrat with the eyepatch and the tortured history could ever bear fruit. That led to spending allowance money on a few Regency romances at our local bookstore ‘The Printed Word’ (where I also bought my Tiger Beat magazines, horoscope rolls, and later, the biography of Ed Gein which made the clerk ask suspiciously if my mother knew what I was reading). I really only remember ‘Lady Lochinvar’, a Barbara Hazard banger (no pun intended) with the requisite strong-willed heroine and a worldly and fairly smutty viscount, but I know for a fact there were more than that on my shelves for awhile, until they became embarrassingly unsophisticated for my high school literary ambitions. One of my mom friends has a Goodreads account full of ‘new’ romance – she says she likes her reading to be “spicy”. She’s Canadian (and btw Canadians – I am SO VERY SORRY about our embarrassment of a “president” – over 75 million Americans did not choose this for you or for us) so many of these are centered in the hockey world, and have seemingly endless riffs on the word ‘puck’ in the titles. So there’s definitely a market for it and if romance is written up in the NY Times, it HAS to have an aura of respectability, right?

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Several of the classic titles I may have read as a teenager, and one that I most definitely did not…

I feel like I might be coming down with a head cold so perhaps some time spent under
the duvet with a couple of recommended steamy romance novels may be the best plan
for the weekend ahead. I will report back.


In the meantime, be well and safe – xo.