One side benefit of The 14-Year-Old being older than I think she can possibly be, is the fact that she is eligible to get the COVID-19 vaccine. We took her last week to one of our county’s mass vaccination sites. One shot down, one to go.
It’s too warm this week to knit blankets, so I’ve switched to amigurumi (the craft of crocheting little stuffed toys). It’s finicky work and I’m always deeply uncertain about the results, which is why as soon as there is a hint of coolness in the air, I plan to go right back to making blankets. Anyway, this week I made this unicorn.
All week I kept stumbling across useful articles and podcasts about this almost-there-but-not-quite-yet moment in the pandemic. Here are three of my favorites on muddling through this moment in the pandemic; helping middle schoolers establish and evolve critical coping skills to manage their stress, anger, and anxiety; and pandemic changes parents actually want to keep.
It’s springtime for the cacti too.
Palo Alto has installed eight new temporary murals designed to give residents struggling with the pandemic a bit of an emotional boost this spring. Last week, I visited the murals along California Avenue, and found myself spending a great deal of time with Carrie Lederer’s mural, Lost in My Abstract Garden.
With Santa Clara County slowly resuming economic and social activities, looking at some freshly installed public art is a great opportunity to get my entire family used to roaming freely around the world again.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and reading about how to detect and neutralize misinformation this week –and how to teach my daughter to do the same. Here are a few of the articles, blog posts, and books I’ve found most helpful.
Apparently, this is the week we get spring flowers in Northern California.
I grew up watching the Muppets. For years I wandered through life, filled with the happy conviction that I knew everything I needed to know about Sam the Eagle. This happy state continued until I saw a video of the African shoebill stork on Twitter. It bore a disconcerting resemblance to old Sam. To make matters worse, while researching shoebills, I discovered that some think that the harpy eagle is actually the model for Sam the Eagle. There’s only one thing to do when your world has been rocked by this sort of question: compare and contrast.
The last novel in verse I read was Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin. After finishing it, I decided that novels in verse are fine, but poems are a kind of contrived way to tell a story. Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam’s Punching the Air is forcing me to reconsider.
