Category Archives: thinking out loud

Comfort Zone? What Comfort Zone?

I joined Ali Manning’s Handmade Book Club this year and completed several challenges. Membership includes the possibility of connecting with other book members in your area. Introverted me would normally avoid a face to face group meeting, but I met a few women in the online community who suggested a meetup. I am proud to say that I agreed, not using my rural location as an excuse, and I spent a wonderful day with three other bookmakers sharing books and stories and creating together. We have a second date on the calendar, and I have homework.

I have seen lots of articles about how hard it is to make friends when you get to be my age. One good way is to connect with people who have similar hobbies, and online communities have made that much easier to do. I have lots of online friends who I will never meet in person. But it was nice to be in the same room with other people. I am looking forward to our next meeting, and there was a talk of a road trip. One aspect that made it successful was our shared interest in book making and other arts and crafts. The hostesses, long term members of the club, took time to create folders of materials for us as they knew we were new to book making and may not have had a stash of materials.

These women are visual artists ways that I am not, and I am looking forward to learning with them. Meanwhile, I am exploring ways to combine my crochet with books, and I created this accordion style book yesterday using two granny squares crocheted with thread.

Crochet Book

Quick Takes

I am ruminating on and drafting a few blog posts but am not ready to commit them to public text quite yet. Here are a couple first sentences and general ideas:

It must be exhausting to be Kim Kardashian. I like scrolling through morning after pictures of the red carpet. That meant almost 180 pictures from the Emmy Awards last night although blessedly my bad Internet stopped loading at 100. It looked very exhausting. I have now heard several celebrities describe themselves as being so completely worn out and depressed even at the height of their fame and fortune when it seemed like they had everything they and everyone else wanted. Rainn Wilson talks about it in Soul Boom; Dan Harris and Glennon Doyle talk about it as part of a recent podcast.

Seeds are tiny parcels of possibility. The next three months are the best time in a gardeners’ life as all is possibility. We inventory our stash and peruse the catalogs, choosing, planning, and, most importantly, imagining. Beatrix Potter and Edwin Way Teale both write about seeds, and NPR had an excellent story about a long running experiment that involves seeds.

I was born in 1962 just as the Vietnam War was ratcheting up. Browsing this list of wars involving the United States, I discovered that there were very few years in my life when the United States was not in some kind of conflict, with just a short break after the end of Vietnam when we were licking our wounds and there was little appetite for war. It didn’t last long: by 1982, we were fighting Lebanon and then invading Grenada the next year.

In the face of the current round of horrific death and destruction in the Middle East, I find myself back in my hippie days, thinking less about taking sides and more about how to get to lasting peace. My senior year in college I made peace collages, photocopied them, and then pasted them around campus. It was an odd gesture perhaps but a memory of imagining a better world if people would just practice peace. It seemed simple, a change in mindset. I may have been inspired by Another Mother For Peace‘s campaign against the Vietnam War and their famous logo. Sometime after my own campaign and college career ended, I connected with Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, the ice cream makers and activists, at an event in Vermont where I learned about their effort called 1% for Peace. The goal was to redirect 1% of the military budget to peace-oriented activities. Sadly, the bumper sticker didn’t really work well as it made people think you were *only* 1% for peace.


So, that is a sample of what has been rattling around in my brain. The last bit is probably the closest to a complete thought. I will leave you with John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

An Apology to Mr. Teale

As I mentioned, I am reading naturalist Edwin Way Teale‘s Circle of the Seasons: The Journal of a Naturalist’s Year. I took him to task just a bit for suggesting that winter is a pause in the turning of the wheel, arguing that the life of a gardener and her garden doesn’t stop, neither for that matter does the wheel of life. This time of year, especially, we are treated to birds taking advantage of our feeders and shrubbery. The cardinals are a favorite.

While I still might quibble over the word “pause,” Teale makes my argument for me in the entry for January 7. He writes eloquently about life being everywhere even on the coldest winter day:

Protected by sweaters and a leather jacket against the biting blasts of the north wind, I walk along the hillside this afternoon. Snow lies drifted among the wild cherries. Where the wind has swept bare the ground, the soil is frozen and rocklike. On this day of bleak cold, the earth seems dead. Yet every northern field and hillside, like a child, has the seeds and power of growth locked within. From cocoon to bur, on a winter’s day, there is everywhere life, dormant but waiting (p. 3).

Circle of the seasons, p. 3

He goes on to describe how some seeds and bulbs actually require a period of cold in order to thrive. For instance, tulips and lilacs signalled spring in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where I grew up. So, when I moved to Virginia and started my own garden, that is what I planted. I quickly discovered, however, that we lived on the very edge of their range and growing them was challenging. It just didn’t get cold enough.

Now, as the climate warms and the plant hardiness zones shift northward, those spring favorites may become less common in Pennsylvania as well. Developed in the early to mid 20th century, the plant hardiness zones attempt to identify the average minimum temperature a zone. Changes to the existing zones were announced in November 2023 making changes to the 2012 maps. While I continue to garden in Zone 7b, my parents’ zone changed from 6b to 7a, making them warmer by 5 degrees, which may be just enough to discourage the tulips and lilacs from blooming. You can check out your zone on the interactive map. It provides your 2012 and 2023 zones for reference.

Part of the reason my lilacs struggled in Virginia was also the heat and humidity we experience in the summer. They survived but certainly did not thrive, already weakened by a too-warm winter. The American Horticultural Society developed a heat zone map that looks at the other end of the thermometer and what the high temperatures for each zone are.

Gardeners were not surprised when the new maps were released last fall. We have been seeing the changes in our own backyards for some time now. Collards, a staple of southern cooking, may be the canaries in the coal mine. The tradition is that you only pick collards after the first frost. It sweetens them up. But, lately, the frost has come later and later, and one recent year, we weren’t sure it would happen by Thanksgiving. There would be a hole on many holiday tables.

I am grateful to be able to live here on the farm, my own bit of nature to observe, my own bit of wilderness to tend. It affords me a golden opportunity to look closely and connect to the turning wheel of the seasons.

The Best $26 I Have Ever Spent

I enjoy playing computer games. I recently reinstalled Township on my iPad. And it wasn’t long before I was reminded why I had deleted it the last time. At some point, in order to really advance in the game, the player is encouraged to spend some money. Maybe just a dollar or two or three or maybe more. It can happen quickly and sometimes too easily. I have found that, eventually, the game gets a little repetitive as, despite perks as you move through the levels, you are mostly asked to complete similar kinds of tasks required by the game.

This time, as I went to press the pay button a little too quickly, I was reminded that I could be building and harvesting and exploring almost for free in Minecraft. Since I don’t play on my iPad, Minecraft seems like more of a commitment, requiring a laptop and even a mouse. But even that is good as it makes game playing more intentional, not just something else to do because it’s easy and available.

I paid for Minecraft many years ago at a time when most education-focused websites and software was free. So, twenty six dollars seemed like a lot of money, particularly if you weren’t sure you would stick with it. I play about four times a year and have easily played for ten years: that’s less than a dollar a game. And, I can start and restart to my heart’s content so when I get tired of a particular simulation, I can start a new one, or move from game to game, maybe building something grand in creative mode or battling creepers in survival mode. And, ultimately, it remains interesting as I am the decision maker. There are rules to follow but they don’t dictate what I have to do as much as what I should or could do within the context of the game.

As I type this, I am downloading the iPad version and plan to try it out this evening. If I am going to “waste time” playing a game, at least I can do it mostly for free.

Local News

One of my graduate students was a sport writer focusing specifically on high school sports in a small town. So, I had to share the news about Gannett Newspapers pulling back from their use of AI to write their news stories. Gannett, of course, is not loved by small newspapers and local journalists as they take over and big layoff usually follow. What suffers when that happens is the local news, and it is local news that led to the pull back.

The Columbus Dispatch‘s story about a local soccer match opened with this grabber of a lede:

The Worthington Christian [[WINNING_TEAM_MASCOT]] defeated the Westerville North [[LOSING_TEAM_MASCOT]] 2-1 in an Ohio boys soccer game on Saturday.

Opinion: High schoolers can do what ai can’t, Scott simon, npr

It was, not surprisingly, written by AI.

Scott Simon, who penned the NPR editorial, suggests that the news organization could hire high school students to cover what is, and my grad student backed him up on this, a crucial part of small town life. As I wrote recently, local communities are an essential part in many people’s lives and AI has not yet, at least, found it niche.

On a side note, I introduced my students to the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine last week. The offending news story from The Columbus Dispatch had been taken down but CNN was able to link to the archived version. At least, Gannett had given credit to LedeAI, the bot that wrote what is on its way to being a classic of sports writing.