Category — Uncategorized

I’m in a travel-related Facebook group, and someone posted that their child noted the location of webcams trained on a street or inside a building before they left, told their parent when they would be at that location, and then went and “checked in” by waving at the webcam. So, if their parent went on the webcam at the same time, they got to see them and know they were okay. It’s how they’re traveling with limited data and still able to communicate that they’ve reached their next location. In the post I saw, the boy stood, waving at the camera in front of Abbey Road in London.

I thought it was a fun idea for anyone to do with people back home. You can use Earth Cam to find webcams in your location. Aren’t humans clever?

I entered a new decade. The last time it happened, I was yanked, kicking and screaming over the threshold. This time, the panic didn’t really begin until a few weeks beforehand, and it was more of a quiet panic. Like my body thought it was supposed to panic, so it stepped up and did its job, but it performed halfheartedly because it didn’t feel it deeply.

It is weird having a milestone birthday. There is nothing you can do with the day that is big enough, but you feel like you have to try.

We took the pressure off the day by planning something small for today and then scheduling a big trip later in the year. With two weeks of days on the trip, I figured I could choose one that seemed to be already going well and declare it my birthday day celebration.

So, I am eating cake and celebrating making it through another year and into a new decade. There’s a lot to celebrate.

I read something recently that I feel so deeply to be true:

The secret to enjoying life online boils down to one simple piece of advice: Protect your peace. Mute words, block bad posters, unfollow the person you only met briefly years ago on a work trip. It’s an algorithmic world, and anything you let into your orbit is what Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter will use to inform what they funnel into your feeds.

I don’t think you need always to cut ties, but I’ve temporarily hidden people this year, and it has brought me a great deal of peace. On the other side, I have added things (people, words, images, videos) that spark joy, bringing greater enjoyment to my time online vs. just removing the drains.

But I think the larger thought in that quote is that you inadvertently tell the algorithm you want more of the thing bringing you stress when you leave the thing causing you stress in your feed. If you watch dozens of videos about X, you can’t blame the algorithm for thinking you want more of X, not realizing that X actually upsets you.

So watch carefully. Read thoughtfully. Unfollow when it needs to happen for your own peace of mind.

In the early 1980s, Cabbage Patch Kids occupied a substantial portion of my waking thoughts. My grandparents stood multiple times in line at a toy store to get me my baby-powder-scented doll, and I loved that toy with all of my heart.

And then I mostly forgot about them, even though the twins liked playing with our old dolls when they were young.

Fast-forward to this week and I was speechless when I learned about the existence of BabyLand in Georgia. I didn’t believe the first story I read about it, and I had to keep Googling because I couldn’t wrap my brain around its existence. Or the fact that the dolls were still around.

I don’t know when I will ever be in Cleveland, Georgia, but I think I may need to go and see it with my own eyes if I’m ever in the state.

One night after dinner last week, I picked up my iPad and said, “I’m going to go read the news.”

“Spoiler: It’s all bad,” Josh warned me.

It feels like the news has been bad for a long time, and I’m hitting my bad news saturation point earlier and earlier in my feed. I don’t think this is about just getting through X or that after Y happens, things will calm down. Maybe the world has always been like this, but the reporting has changed. Maybe these are the end times.

I liked this article on nine things you can do to stop catastrophizing when you do enter a panic spiral while reading the news. I’m placing this here in case it helps anyone else.