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I loved this old essay about protecting your energy/best work space by thinking about your time like an ice cube. The analogy works for work itself or any creative endeavour, but it also works for any time when you feel like others are cutting into the time you need for yourself to either get what you want to get done or to recharge in general.

I like the opening, but I also LOVE the idea of protecting the ice cube from yourself:

Every tangent, action or decision melts the cube more quickly. Try having a pad next to you to write down all the intrusive thoughts and inquiries that demand your attention during the cube. Look it all up at the end as a little treat.

I melt my own cube more often than other people melt my cube.

Passing it along in case it resonates with you, too.

We went out to visit the kids last weekend. Winter always carries the fear that the weather will cancel the trip, but we ended up with sun and warm enough weather. You could go for a walk in the afternoon without freezing.

My cousin ended up in a town about an hour and a half away on the same weekend, and we decided to drive at each other. I picked a town I had never seen before but knew the name, and the kids informed me after everything was set that I might be a little nervous during the drive because at least five minutes of it was along a very twisty mountain road with a very steep drop.

I am not good on mountain roads.

I am very not good on mountain roads.

Waze took us on a very odd route going to the town, and I commented that I hoped it would send us back another way because I didn’t want to ride through the small towns and woodland when it was getting dark. But it took us the route the kids knew going home.

It was as awful as I feared. Back and forth. A sheer drop down a mountain with only a short, ice-covered barrier. Signs warning that steep roads were ahead. I spent a good ten minutes screaming obscenities while Josh guided us down the mountain.

And then… the sublime. We ended up driving for ten minutes through a valley, the road twisting alongside a stream. No buildings in sight, just miles of ice-covered trees and snowy ground and a grey road ribboning underneath enormous mountains.

I would have missed those ten minutes in the valley if I had never endured the first ten terrifying minutes of getting there.

I know Kindle Unlimited exists, but it often doesn’t have the books I want. I also know the library exists, but it has long wait times. So why doesn’t a Netflix, Hulu, and HBO for books exist?

As in, each publisher has a streaming service that allows you to access their entire catalog on demand, plus any other publisher that has allowed their books to stream on that service. (I could see a small press benefiting from being on multiple streaming services.) They charge $7.99 per month. Cancel at any time.

You could have a Simon & Schuster subscription, a Random House subscription, and a HarperCollins subscription, all at the same time, in the same way you may have Netflix and Hulu at the same time and still use your library for Kanopy and Hoopla. It’s not a replacement, but an enhancement.

Speaking of the newspaper, did your local newspaper syndicate The Mini Page? Ours was housed in the Style section, and it was an insert that came out for kids to read on the weekend while the parents read the main newspaper.

I loved finding the word “mini” in the Mini Spy, and I shuddered as I read most recipes for Rookie Cookie because I only ate peanut butter and jam.

In my head, it looked like a section in my parents’ newspaper. Though looking through the archive, perhaps not.

I know a lot of people in the world are sad about the massive firings at the Washington Post, which follows on the heels of the closing of the Kennedy Center for two years (to likely have everything memorable about the building destroyed), which follows on the heels of the destruction of the East Wing. I know these things are not related in the sense that two different entities are dismantling Washington institutions, but they are connected in my brain because they are my childhood.

The Washington Post is our local newspaper. Maybe people read it all over the world, but it was designed to cover our local news in addition to global news. When I was little, it told me the movies in my theaters, followed the sports teams in my city, reviewed theater in my area, and covered events on our streets.

Reading the newspaper (fine, most often the Style section) felt impossibly grown-up when I was in grade school. Now, reading the newspaper feels impossibly sad.