I’ve been writing postcards and letters to voters. It’s a little too late to jump on the postcard wagon but letters can be written until 10/29. It’s super easy, you’re provided templates, instructions and addresses, you just need paper, envelopes and stamps.

https://votefwd.org/

I wrote a ton of both and it did wonders to distract me and give me something of purpose to do at the same time.

I’m pretty sure text banking and phone banking is still going on too.

I had to have an abdominal ultrasound done once and the tech told me I have a great pancreas, “the most beautiful she’s ever seen”. I didn’t know what to say but it made me happy.

Shaka tea, either ice tea in cans or brew hot from packets.

Don’t sweat the small stuff. Just let it go.

Lindsay’s are good. But not as good as kalamata.

Hey you gotta share.

I dream every night and it is always some kind of a crazy bizarre acid trip that may morph into a nightmare on occasion if I had a bad day or something is weighing on my mind. I’ve had this all my life and sometimes when I don’t dream (which is extremely rare for me) it feels weird waking up.

But that’s the regular stuff, the insane stuff is that I have dreams that reoccur and evolve for decades, and it’s like getting a new season of a show that you watched two years ago, but with new characters and plot lines.

Yeah, way too expensive for us as well so we’re actually planning on moving to the other side of the bay. We are not renting, thankfully, but we’re pretty squeezed and moving elsewhere in Santa Cruz requires paying ridiculous amounts of money I cannot justify.

Santa Cruz, CA. Hi neighbor!

I think in more recent times it has to do with using folks as an easy gender neutral address instead of saying you guys etc, and then it spread out everywhere because it is, well, easier and people don’t want to think too much.

I was born in USSR and it collapsed when I was seven so my memories of it were at the very end when things were tough and scarce. I remember school books that were still about Lenin and Stalin, and we would write essays about Labor day parades and red hammer-and-sickle flags during our English classes, it sounded funny even for us first graders.

Yet, whatever little was available was cheap, we would have deficit problems but not financial ones unless you were trying to buy something that was smuggled into the country, like jeans.

We would take flights to Kazakhstan where my grandma lived, no borders no visas obviously. They lived on their own land there and were much better off in terms of food availability (Google USSR deficit to see what stores looked like).

Then we reached the point when food stamps had to be distributed and it was outright scary. I remember standing by our front door crying, because my mom gave me a bread stamp and sent me to get some bread, and I lost the stamp on the way and couldn’t bring myself to go back home. Eventually I was absent long enough for her to start worrying and she opened the door to go out and found me there sobbing.

Dear mods, can we please pin this one at the top?

I’m so glad you had such an amazing day!

Go team pistachio!

Well, we need to know about the avocado incident. You can’t leave us all hanging like that.