Dear family, friends, and fellow travelers,
Or as a young friend of mine likes to announce, "...people and gentlepeople!"
... so, the past six weeks have been a long fucking year, right? I don't know about you, but Hanna and I are still flat-out exhausted by about six o'clock each night (but also our sleep schedules are completely scrambled) and we have lost the ability to remember what day of the week it is (but also reach every weekend with a sort of numb relief?) and haven't we all be working remotely forever but wasn't it just yesterday we were commuting into the office? TIME HAS GONE HAYWIRE Y'ALL.
Image: Teazle being silly on her back with all four legs in the air. Cats don't care about time. Or haywires.
In the material sense, our household is weathering things pretty well. We're both still employed and working remotely at all of our usual jobs. The cats are still working at being cats uninterrupted by the fact we're also working from home. Everyone in our household has been home-based since March 17th which pretty much means daily socially-distanced walks at the Arnold Arboretum with a once-a-week walk up to the grocery store in one direction and the farmer's market in the other for a pre-packed bag of fresh produce. We feel very lucky to have plenty of local options for fresh food, access to park land that is safe for outdoor movement, and an apartment that suits us for both work and leisure. Also that we enjoy time spent together, have leisure activities suited to stay-at-home orders (knitting, sewing, reading, cooking, writing ...), and well-established modes of distance communication with friends and family who don't live nearby.
Neither of us have fallen ill with covid-19.
At the same time, of course, we are aware of managing the stress and exhaustion of nearly every piece of our lives that had become routine suddenly requiring active decision-making and, in many cases, decision after decision after decision. This week at work we decided that we needed a group of staff tasked to come up with a list of questions because we don't even have clarity on what questions need to be answered in order for us to return to our library building and resume some type of physical operations. Let alone how to answer them. It feels like so many areas of our lives, right now, boil down to lists of questions and temporary solutions patch-worked together with the knowledge that new decisions will have to be made in response to the next set of directives from the governor of the mayor or the next event.
That's just hard. It is.
I know y'all know what I'm talking about. And as we head into the late spring, and planned activities for the summer -- and even fall -- start to be cancelled and postponed, or otherwise altered, the weight of change is a heavy weight to bear. I know we're all feeling it in different ways, in different moments.
Try to be gentle, try to be kind. (Toward yourself as much as anyone.)
#QueerArchivesAtHome, Witness to History, and #AWEfund
Library life continues on even as our physical libraries are closed for the health and safety of staff and patrons alike. I'm working full days although the rhythm of those days has changed profoundly since early March (so! many! Zoom! meetings!). No longer staffing a physical reference desk, I'm busy coordinating distance reference services, collaborating on the internal staff projects that can continue on as we all work remotely, participating in endless discussions about what reopening the library may look like, and new projects that have come up as a result of the pandemic.
The History Project, the queer community archives where I occasionally volunteer, has had to close its physical location (as have we all) and launched #QueerArchivesAtHome, a collecting initiative that encourages people to share items from their own queer lives by uploading them digitially from home. This week I shared a photograph from the summer after I graduated from college (2005) and spent a month with a group of lesbian elders on a women's land trust in Missouri.
The Massachusetts Historical Society has launched a new collecting initiative focused on personal narratives of the covid-19 pandemic. You don't need to be Massacusetts resident to participate, and you can submit short contributions in response to weekly online prompts or embark upon a lengthier journaling endeavor to be submitted at some later date. I encourage you to check out the call and consider participating (or to seek out opportunities in your own area along similar lines ... many archives are launching similar projects to document the pandemic as it unfolds).
Image: The text "#AWEfund" in sketchy freehand in gradiated in blue to purple.
Thanks to a colleague who brought my attention to the effort on Twitter, I became involved at the early stages in the development of what has become the Archival Workers Emergency Fund (or "AWEfund" for short), currently under the auspices of the Society of American Archivists Foundation. This is a fund offering cash grants of up to $1,000 to archival workers in financial distress and it opened for applications on April 15th. We are on track to disburse our first round of funding at the end of this coming week of everything goes smoothly. It has been a lot of emotional labor, but really gratifying, to work with this passionate group of colleagues who came together spontaneously in early March and collectively made this happen from first thoughts to first donation in less than a month. I'm sure we have turbulent air ahead of us as we fly through the first rounds assessing applications and disbursing funding, but the organizers are thoughtful and committed to doing this well and I look forward to working with them as we refine and improve the work as we go.
If you are able, I invite you to donate to the fund so that we can get cash into the hands of people who are struggling at this time. Every dollar counts. I'm also offering up this scarf via Persistent Stitches in exchange for a donation of $25 or more to the fund.
Image: Magical Water Lily Scarf in varigated pastel rainbow colors.
T'sp and T'mp'st ... Lydia Lyrica and Purl
If you had asked me in February what 2020 had in store for me, I probably wouldn't have said either role-playing games or video games, but here we are! Within the first days of Governor Baker's declaration of emergency here in Massachusetts we had purchased the Stardew Valley app on the robust encouragement of friends and have since been using the soothing video game -- where you leave your soulless office job in order to back-to-the-land-it in the idyllic Stardew Valley -- as a way to rest our brains in the evenings. My first homesteader (on my laptop) is named Lydia Lyrica and she lives at Knitty Knoll farm with her cat Purl. She is green with purple hair and enjoys growing whet and planting fruit trees. I also now have a second homesteader (on my phone), named Teaspoon, who lives at Lichen Ledge farm with her dog Teacup and four chickens named Cardamom, Cinnamon, Tumeric, and Nutmeg. She enjoys foraging for mushrooms and tapping maple trees for syrup.
Image: Lydia Lyrica enjoys her fire pit on an autumn evening at Knitty Knoll farm in Stardew Valley.
I had a friend on Twitter ask me how I could possibly find Stardew Valley restful what with the whole "quest" aspect of the game (periodically the character you create encounters villagers who offer tasks or recieves pieces of post in the mail that provide quests you can complete for rewards). *laughter emoji* I told her I just ignored the quests and continued growing my wheat. I guess in some games this would have meant Death or similar but in Stardew Valley the worst that ever happens is that you pass out from exhaustion while staying out too late and the community doctor puts you to bed (maybe charging you a fee for care but only if you can pay). I told a friend last night that I think in a real-world context where forward-looking planning is really difficult because of all of the unknowns, a virtual farm where you tend an orchard and work toward building a barn to house sheep for wool in order to produce textiles is soothing.
Image: An ink pen illustration of the character of T'sp and her familiar T'mp'st aboard their boat the Scallop.
The other game I'm now playing regularly is Little Wizards, a cooperative role-playing game that my friends in Minnapolis play as a family and that I have been invited to participate in. My character is a young lighthouse keeper named T'sp who has a starfish familiar named T'mp'st and lives with her parent Sq'll in the archipelago of Storms (a canonical location in the game world). T'sp is currently on an adventure in a mine maze with her new friends Stout, Pod, Vultro, and Merryweather.
Cooking at Home
One of the really wonderful things about being home-based again is cooking at home. Hanna and I typically enjoy two meals a day when not on a commuting schedule (mid-morning and mid-afternoon) a I've been doing a lot of hot breakfasts. This week I improvised baked French toast with slightly stale homemade bread, the recipe for which is as follows:
Preheat oven to 375.
Grease a bread pan.
4 thinly sliced pieces of bread (any kind) trimmed to fit in the pan
1/2 cup chopped dates
1/2 cup chopped nuts (I used almonds)
1 medium apple, cored and thinly sliced
3 eggs
1 1/2 cups milk (any kind; I used dairy)
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla
1/4 cup maple syrup
1. Layer first four ingredients into the pan as follows: bread, half the dates, half the nuts, bread, apples, bread, half the dates, half the almonds bread.
2. Combine remaining ingredients and pour over top.
3. Cover with foil and bake for ~45 minutes until a knife in the center comes out clean.
Serves 3-4 (or two very hungry people!). Also reheats well for a day or two after.
Image: A serving of baked French toast in a flowered china bowl.
#romance giveaway is still going strong!
And I'm on week six of my romance e-book giveaway. I have titles from weeks three, four, and five as well as the title from this week left to give ... so check out the thread on Twitter and don't hesitate to email me if you're interested. I'm a librarian -- it makes me happy to give people books.
Especially kissing books.
Image: The promotional slide for week six, A Lady's Desire by Lily Maxton.
Stay safe, be kind.
Ever onward,
Anna
Or as a young friend of mine likes to announce, "...people and gentlepeople!"
... so, the past six weeks have been a long fucking year, right? I don't know about you, but Hanna and I are still flat-out exhausted by about six o'clock each night (but also our sleep schedules are completely scrambled) and we have lost the ability to remember what day of the week it is (but also reach every weekend with a sort of numb relief?) and haven't we all be working remotely forever but wasn't it just yesterday we were commuting into the office? TIME HAS GONE HAYWIRE Y'ALL.
Image: Teazle being silly on her back with all four legs in the air. Cats don't care about time. Or haywires.In the material sense, our household is weathering things pretty well. We're both still employed and working remotely at all of our usual jobs. The cats are still working at being cats uninterrupted by the fact we're also working from home. Everyone in our household has been home-based since March 17th which pretty much means daily socially-distanced walks at the Arnold Arboretum with a once-a-week walk up to the grocery store in one direction and the farmer's market in the other for a pre-packed bag of fresh produce. We feel very lucky to have plenty of local options for fresh food, access to park land that is safe for outdoor movement, and an apartment that suits us for both work and leisure. Also that we enjoy time spent together, have leisure activities suited to stay-at-home orders (knitting, sewing, reading, cooking, writing ...), and well-established modes of distance communication with friends and family who don't live nearby.
Neither of us have fallen ill with covid-19.
At the same time, of course, we are aware of managing the stress and exhaustion of nearly every piece of our lives that had become routine suddenly requiring active decision-making and, in many cases, decision after decision after decision. This week at work we decided that we needed a group of staff tasked to come up with a list of questions because we don't even have clarity on what questions need to be answered in order for us to return to our library building and resume some type of physical operations. Let alone how to answer them. It feels like so many areas of our lives, right now, boil down to lists of questions and temporary solutions patch-worked together with the knowledge that new decisions will have to be made in response to the next set of directives from the governor of the mayor or the next event.
That's just hard. It is.
I know y'all know what I'm talking about. And as we head into the late spring, and planned activities for the summer -- and even fall -- start to be cancelled and postponed, or otherwise altered, the weight of change is a heavy weight to bear. I know we're all feeling it in different ways, in different moments.
Try to be gentle, try to be kind. (Toward yourself as much as anyone.)
#QueerArchivesAtHome, Witness to History, and #AWEfund
Library life continues on even as our physical libraries are closed for the health and safety of staff and patrons alike. I'm working full days although the rhythm of those days has changed profoundly since early March (so! many! Zoom! meetings!). No longer staffing a physical reference desk, I'm busy coordinating distance reference services, collaborating on the internal staff projects that can continue on as we all work remotely, participating in endless discussions about what reopening the library may look like, and new projects that have come up as a result of the pandemic.
The History Project, the queer community archives where I occasionally volunteer, has had to close its physical location (as have we all) and launched #QueerArchivesAtHome, a collecting initiative that encourages people to share items from their own queer lives by uploading them digitially from home. This week I shared a photograph from the summer after I graduated from college (2005) and spent a month with a group of lesbian elders on a women's land trust in Missouri.
The Massachusetts Historical Society has launched a new collecting initiative focused on personal narratives of the covid-19 pandemic. You don't need to be Massacusetts resident to participate, and you can submit short contributions in response to weekly online prompts or embark upon a lengthier journaling endeavor to be submitted at some later date. I encourage you to check out the call and consider participating (or to seek out opportunities in your own area along similar lines ... many archives are launching similar projects to document the pandemic as it unfolds).
Image: The text "#AWEfund" in sketchy freehand in gradiated in blue to purple.Thanks to a colleague who brought my attention to the effort on Twitter, I became involved at the early stages in the development of what has become the Archival Workers Emergency Fund (or "AWEfund" for short), currently under the auspices of the Society of American Archivists Foundation. This is a fund offering cash grants of up to $1,000 to archival workers in financial distress and it opened for applications on April 15th. We are on track to disburse our first round of funding at the end of this coming week of everything goes smoothly. It has been a lot of emotional labor, but really gratifying, to work with this passionate group of colleagues who came together spontaneously in early March and collectively made this happen from first thoughts to first donation in less than a month. I'm sure we have turbulent air ahead of us as we fly through the first rounds assessing applications and disbursing funding, but the organizers are thoughtful and committed to doing this well and I look forward to working with them as we refine and improve the work as we go.
If you are able, I invite you to donate to the fund so that we can get cash into the hands of people who are struggling at this time. Every dollar counts. I'm also offering up this scarf via Persistent Stitches in exchange for a donation of $25 or more to the fund.
Image: Magical Water Lily Scarf in varigated pastel rainbow colors.T'sp and T'mp'st ... Lydia Lyrica and Purl
If you had asked me in February what 2020 had in store for me, I probably wouldn't have said either role-playing games or video games, but here we are! Within the first days of Governor Baker's declaration of emergency here in Massachusetts we had purchased the Stardew Valley app on the robust encouragement of friends and have since been using the soothing video game -- where you leave your soulless office job in order to back-to-the-land-it in the idyllic Stardew Valley -- as a way to rest our brains in the evenings. My first homesteader (on my laptop) is named Lydia Lyrica and she lives at Knitty Knoll farm with her cat Purl. She is green with purple hair and enjoys growing whet and planting fruit trees. I also now have a second homesteader (on my phone), named Teaspoon, who lives at Lichen Ledge farm with her dog Teacup and four chickens named Cardamom, Cinnamon, Tumeric, and Nutmeg. She enjoys foraging for mushrooms and tapping maple trees for syrup.
Image: Lydia Lyrica enjoys her fire pit on an autumn evening at Knitty Knoll farm in Stardew Valley. I had a friend on Twitter ask me how I could possibly find Stardew Valley restful what with the whole "quest" aspect of the game (periodically the character you create encounters villagers who offer tasks or recieves pieces of post in the mail that provide quests you can complete for rewards). *laughter emoji* I told her I just ignored the quests and continued growing my wheat. I guess in some games this would have meant Death or similar but in Stardew Valley the worst that ever happens is that you pass out from exhaustion while staying out too late and the community doctor puts you to bed (maybe charging you a fee for care but only if you can pay). I told a friend last night that I think in a real-world context where forward-looking planning is really difficult because of all of the unknowns, a virtual farm where you tend an orchard and work toward building a barn to house sheep for wool in order to produce textiles is soothing.
Image: An ink pen illustration of the character of T'sp and her familiar T'mp'st aboard their boat the Scallop.The other game I'm now playing regularly is Little Wizards, a cooperative role-playing game that my friends in Minnapolis play as a family and that I have been invited to participate in. My character is a young lighthouse keeper named T'sp who has a starfish familiar named T'mp'st and lives with her parent Sq'll in the archipelago of Storms (a canonical location in the game world). T'sp is currently on an adventure in a mine maze with her new friends Stout, Pod, Vultro, and Merryweather.
Cooking at Home
One of the really wonderful things about being home-based again is cooking at home. Hanna and I typically enjoy two meals a day when not on a commuting schedule (mid-morning and mid-afternoon) a I've been doing a lot of hot breakfasts. This week I improvised baked French toast with slightly stale homemade bread, the recipe for which is as follows:
Preheat oven to 375.
Grease a bread pan.
4 thinly sliced pieces of bread (any kind) trimmed to fit in the pan
1/2 cup chopped dates
1/2 cup chopped nuts (I used almonds)
1 medium apple, cored and thinly sliced
3 eggs
1 1/2 cups milk (any kind; I used dairy)
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla
1/4 cup maple syrup
1. Layer first four ingredients into the pan as follows: bread, half the dates, half the nuts, bread, apples, bread, half the dates, half the almonds bread.
2. Combine remaining ingredients and pour over top.
3. Cover with foil and bake for ~45 minutes until a knife in the center comes out clean.
Serves 3-4 (or two very hungry people!). Also reheats well for a day or two after.
Image: A serving of baked French toast in a flowered china bowl. #romance giveaway is still going strong!
And I'm on week six of my romance e-book giveaway. I have titles from weeks three, four, and five as well as the title from this week left to give ... so check out the thread on Twitter and don't hesitate to email me if you're interested. I'm a librarian -- it makes me happy to give people books.
Especially kissing books.
Image: The promotional slide for week six, A Lady's Desire by Lily Maxton. Stay safe, be kind.
Ever onward,
Anna