Monthly Archives: November 2022

I Begin Blogging Again To Resist The Melon Husk

Posted on by
Reply

With Twitter being ruined and hamstrung by well-known rich man-baby Melon Husk, I’ve been considering options and preparing several lifeboats.

This tweet – the whole beginning of the thread, really – encapsulates what I feel is my way forward.

https://twitter.com/Green_Footballs/status/1597058176817446913?s=20&t=P80599Tzn7owAvoSAhY0hA

The mention of Google Reader’s much-lamented loss was also the beginning of trying to find a quick, easy way to “microblog” via G+ (also gone) and Twitter (going) for me.

So I finished a draft post about last week’s trip to Salt Lake. Published.

I had Thursday and Friday off, thank God, so I spent it working on the T-shirt quilt which is turning out to be quite heavy, and I had a number of “learning experiences” during construction (okay, “mistakes were made.”) It will be a wall hanging so the ugly back won’t be visible. Next time I make one, will use a normal woven cotton backing! But it has been fun remembering the various trips (and figuring out how to turn the stains and bad seam intersections into fun appliqué bits). I did a lot of anxiety-reducing procrastinating, never fear. And ordered some fabric for my next few projects, too. 

Thanksgiving Day was spent baking a couple of loaves of sourdough/oat bread, cooking sweet potatoes, prepping carrots to steam, and packing them all into crocks and Dutch ovens into this insulated bag thing I bought from Amazon. The bag will eventually be a bread proofer, as I also got a seed warming mat and a thermostat controller, much cheaper than a Brod and Taylor proofer and multitaskers, too. Anyway, dinner was at my in-law’s new place, which is all of 5 minutes’ drive from us. So easy.

Other family members gathered for brunch that morning before dispersing to various other branches of their extended families; for us it was nice to just be the 4 of us plus one guest who is part of the family but didn’t have dinner plans other than going to the earlier brunch to see some of the young ones. 

One of my Illinois nieces seems to be needing to assert independence or something and did her own thing; not sure what’s up with that but drama has always been her M.O. – now  it appears that she’ll also skip an upcoming birthday for a very young lad, and holiday gatherings because “reasons.” We have something for her and her daughter but keep putting off presenting it to her, either because we didn’t want to pull focus in front of her ex-husband’s family, or because she teases her birth family with a possible appearance at a planned event, and then doesn’t show up (again, “reasons”).

One thing for sure, I won’t be making any more elaborate (or amateurish) attempts at sewing projects for her, because she’ll just throw them out.

https://twitter.com/ginnyred57/status/1597102138106466307?s=21&t=C_RtRzYyM-3J6plDuF52XA

Meanwhile, Twitter is in the news, and not for good reasons. Supposedly Husk is letting Herr Drumpf and some other horribles back in. Trolls running wild! Spam galore! Advertisers leaving in droves! Hackers shitposting! Oh, the inhumanity!

You may think that I’m grousing unnecessarily about Twitter’s decline under the overshitlordship of the Melon Husk, but events in Iran, China, Ukraine, and everywhere in the world where freedom of the press and of self-expression is not assured show that Twitter has been an invaluable resource. The Husker Duh has been gutting the security and human rights teams, not to mention the “banging on stuff” teams. It’s not good.

I’m exploring footholds on Counter.Social (run by an anonymous hacker dude, so hardly sketchy at all) and Post.social (all the cool newsies are waitlisted) and some instance of Mastodon (where a RL friend, Jette, plus some Resistance crewmates have landed). 
And I’ve been engaging more on Facebook with friends and family. It seems like blogging here, and having IFTTT handle crosspositing, may be my way forward. I like Twitter, but can try to retrain my brain to write long-form instead of short form again. 

You Can’t Go Home, Or To The Cabin, Again

Posted on by
Reply

flic.kr/p/4FgPK

Old Log Cabin, Lamb’s Canyon

The family cabin is slowly collapsing… this photo is from 2005, so things have probably gotten even more dilapidated. My cousins own it and though we used to have access, apparently that’s no longer as simple as asking for the key and checking the calendar. My oldest cousin tried to sell it a few years back, causing shock and dismay. Yet it’s a pretty big tax payment each year, so I can see why he’d want to sell.

Reportedly he sold off the piece of the property where I stood to take this… there’s a fancy new vacation home there now. There’s some sad memories associated with that spot, but some of us consider the property almost sacred ground. So it’s painful. I still have dreams where I’m in the mountains, trying to get to The Cabin.

My mom’s old house still looks much the same; on last weekend’s visit to Salt Lake, I didn’t need to drive by, but my niece did, and took this photo.

Both buildings have seen better days. Both contain memories of people long gone. I spent last weekend with family and had fun, but felt this pull to look for places I remembered (so much of Salt Lake is being rebuilt, it’s hard to find those old familiar places).

My room was the dormer window. They’ve put in window-mounted AC there and in the dining room window… the weaklings. And the only visible change is the fence on the side, and they took all the stinky “Trees of Heaven” down. Good riddance, they rot from the inside out and drop a mess of branches after the smallest storms.

What I wouldn’t give to smell the scent of those trees on a sticky, hot night again… or to lie awake in an old Coleman sleeping bag at The Cabin, listening to the faint hooting of owls and the stealthy fluttering of the resident bat.

It was good to see my side of the family last week – both sisters, all four nieces and most of their spouses. It wasn’t a super planned long weekend; we hung out at Holly’s house to reconnect Thursday and Friday, we managed to meet up with Raeanne and her husband Ron at Hogle Zoo (Ranny and I were raised together and we’re closer in age than I am to my sisters; same with all of my nieces).

We even had a chance to meet some of David’s co-workers face-to-face for dinner at a suburban Italian joint, a very enjoyable evening. Who knew that one couple would turn out to be avid parachutists??

Salt lake has changed and is changing so much. We stayed downtown near the City-County Building, now surrounded by a nice park and a lot of Trax light rail lines. I chuckled as we passed the corner where Mom got a ticket for pulling a “U-ey” in the middle of the road. “Ma’am, I’m afraid I have to ticket you, you can’t do that right in front of the main police station.” Heh.

Every time we went somewhere, I felt a need to spot familiar buildings and landmarks and reconnect to forgotten memories. However, though we drove down the neighborhood arterial street near Mom’s house, I didn’t need to drive by (although Raeanne did later to take her picture). It was somehow comforting to see some of my neighborhood remains as I remember it, and some shops and houses have been nicely updated.

Holly’s party was held at Trolley Square and it was fabulous – the local arts alliance have a theater and event space and the food was catered by a local Brazilian restaurant and butcher, so good. I even danced with my sister and nieces, though the band was a Grateful Dead tribute outfit and definitely not my favorite party music. It was interesting though in that the keyboard player was Mike Lookinland, yep, from The Brady Bunch.

David and I drove up the canyons – ALL of them. Emigration, Parley’s, Mill Creek, Little Cottonwood, Big Cottonwood. But we mostly had to go to Lamb’s Canyon to see how far up we could drive in our rented SUV. Turns out, not far at all, there’s a new gate at the mouth of the canyon, just off I-80.