Category — Microblog Mondays

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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Immediately after writing that last post about the staycation, I was moping on the sofa, playing solitaire, when I decided that I would officially lose it if I had to spend one more day staring at the stacks of paper on top of the file cabinet.

I dumped everything in the center of the floor and spent four hours sorting and shredding old papers dating back to when the twins were in elementary school. It felt so damn good. I mean, it didn’t feel good while I was doing it, but it felt good after the space was empty. I cleaned off the top of my desk for good measure.

And I still had time to sit outside and read in the afternoon. And pull together lunch and breakfast for the first three days of the week. Feeling productive turned the whole day around. I accomplished one big thing on the staycation, AND I read a bunch of books, too. So all is well that ends well.

I think I need to tackle a tiny space in the house every two weeks or so. I don’t have the emotional bandwidth to deal with the whole basement at once, but I can do a single corner of a room every few weeks and have the whole thing finished by winter. It’s hard to live with clutter when you can’t get breaks from your home.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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I love local news. I forgot how much I like local news until I read an ode to why local journalism is important in a newsletter. I’m not talking about the town listserv or a Facebook group—I’m talking about the weekly newspaper that you can pick up in the front lobby of the library or have mailed to your home.

It is rarely depressing in the way that the national news is depressing. And it’s exciting when someone I know is featured in the paper; they become a mini local celebrity. When we go to Chincoteague, I always pick up their local newspaper and read it to catch up on things because we know so many of the names and places in those pages, too.

Do you have a local newspaper? And do you read it?

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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CNN had a piece on a couple who built their own island over the last 29 years. The pandemic hasn’t really changed much for them because they’ve set up their lives to be completely sustainable on their floating compound.

It’s not that it’s easy—they have an exhausting number of tasks per day in order to be self-sufficient. But they also don’t have to worry about losing their home because they couldn’t pay the mortgage.

The pandemic has made me take a hard look at what it means to live a sustainable life. What do we actually need vs. what do we want? And then taking a hard look at those wants: how many of them should stay on the list?

I’m always fascinated by people who figure out how to be self-sufficient; in big or small ways.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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I love Fathom Events, and we see a bunch of National Theater Live shows every year. It makes London theater accessible for people outside London—it’s a brilliant idea. During the lockdown, National Theater Live streamed a show every week on YouTube. 16 weeks. 16 shows. I didn’t watch even one.

The Atlantic recently had an article about how to build that feeling of community from afar. Reading it, I realized what was missing for me with the NT Lives. When I see a Fathom Event in the theater, I’m seeing it with people. If they had set it up as a limited viewing similar to real theater—going live at a set time, not recorded, behind a paywall—so you knew other people were watching at the same time, you would have felt like you were seeing it with people. But being able to tune in at any point during the week and watch it without knowing if anyone else was on at the same time felt lonely. What made things easier also made things less enticing.

I think it’s still possible to build that same feeling of community from afar, but it has to happen in real time with everyone on together. It’s the difference between tweeting during the debates (knowing you’re seeing them with everyone else and talking about it in real time) vs. reading about the debates the next morning in the newspaper. One is a community experience. One is just imparting information.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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We’re going to do a channel island trip in the future (my plan is to ultimately hit every weather station named in the Shipping Forecast, but that’s a post for another day), so I read the tourism posts from Guernsey and Sark.

Guernsey wrote recently about the tradition of hedge veg stalls, which are small, unmanned boxes that people set up near the road where they can sell extra vegetables from their garden or crafts or books. It’s done on an honour system; you drop the coins in a box and take what you need.

We have them around our town, too, though we don’t call them hedge veg. And they almost always sell either eggs or vegetables. Every once in a while, you’ll see one selling plants, and, of course, there are Little Free Libraries, but this sounds like a fun way to get creative and make a small amount of money at the same time.

If I lived on Guernsey, I would fill my hedge veg stall with cookies and copies of a serial story.

How about you?

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.