small cypress

weeknote 3

This week has been dominated by the $800 utilities bill that came in the mail, which follows up last month's $600 bill. Half of the bill is the cost to deliver natural gas to our house on our city's aging infrastructure. There's a lot I need to learn about as far as making sure I am insulating our home enough for the Maryland winter as a person new to seasonal living - and I need to figure out how the hell we do something long-term about affordable (maybe not even fossil fuel!) heating.

The current solution has involved space heaters and two very elaborate pillow forts. Here's the basement one with some of the side-walls removed, from when we wanted to watch TV and not freeze last night.

Pillowfort

We are Floridians living in a house set to 57*F and also trying to keep plants, fish, and reptiles all at the right temps for thriving. A colder house means more and more checking on the thermometers for my rescue gecko, and every time I look in his general direction he begs for food like my dogs. A plea for you to check your local rescues for geckos - they get dumped all the time because people don't realize they live for 20 years!

gecko

Inspired by a musician friend, I am becoming a notes app person. He has a three-year-long single page stream of consciousness that he adds to almost daily, then mines when he goes to songwrite. I think it might help me as I get back into studio habits for letterpress printing, but both entries are ones I want to expand into blog posts:

notes app

The first entry is about how personal comedy is, and how finding something that takes you out (ok it's Chris Fleming's bit on the snacks at Trader Joe's that only women can see, and it's very funny to me) and then you hesitate before sending it to someone. Then you re-watch it, through what you assume is their eyes, and suddenly the same bits aren't as funny, the pauses too long, the physical humor is childish. It's a form of self-censoring your own joy and humor! And I hate that! So I share it with you and if you don't like it it's okay!

And the other entry was made while I was eating lunch with my spouse, out of our cold house in a warm restaurant where I could take my coat off for a minute, midway through retooling my digital garden page on collapse. The same problems that lead to political and environmental collapse are the same ones causing companies to value quarterly profits and seemingly-progressive changes to promote equity in education that are screwing over all of my students: we do not have patience for long-term, complex solutions to our problems. We want a quick fix we that can show our investors, our voters, our parents, our funders. We don't want to build structures and pipelines for success five years from now because nobody will wait that long.

Sigh! But I continue to see glimmers and wins between the big headlines. I see glimmers and wins in my classroom. I am both collapse-aware but also, possibly foolishly, convinced we are going to make it through my country's current era, even if we will be rebuilding for the rest of my life. And spring will come again, and I will complain about being hot.