📷 March Photoblogging Challenge Day 31: practice. A sample page from my calligraphy practice notebook. “Gravitas” is a fun word to write.
📷 March Photoblogging Challenge Day 30: mirror.
📷 March Photoblogging Challenge Day 29: slice. Tonight we went to one of our favorite restaurants, Jade Bistro & Patisserie, and my mom ordered a BBQ pork bao. It was almost too beautiful to slice open. Almost.
📷 March Photoblogging Challenge Day 28: prompt. My birthday thank-you notes have been anything but prompt this year, but they are almost ready to send out.
📷 March Photoblogging Challenge Day 27: support. I wouldn’t have attempted this expert-level gluten-free croissant recipe involving laminated dough without the moral (and physical) support my mom provided. Et voilà!
📷 March Photoblogging Challenge Day 26: instrument. My mom and I undertook two intricate baking projects today. I am grateful for all of the instruments in my kitchen that make exact measurements possible.
Finished reading: Babylon’s Ashes by James S. A. Corey 📚 Two-thirds of the way through the series now. It is wonderful and I will be sad to complete it.
📷 March Photoblogging Challenge Day 25: spice. My current favorite spice blends to cook with are Sweet Curry and Gateway to the North. Both are from The Spice House, a place my mom took me to years ago while I was visiting her in Chicago.
📷 March Photoblogging Challenge Day 24: court. A bit of a lazy entry today, since I used the text recognition feature in my photo library to find it, but I was grateful for the resurfaced memory.
📷 March Photoblogging Challenge Day 23: chance. By chance, my friend B and I happened upon Tyler FuQua’s “Mechan 42: Space Explorer” the day it had been installed at the dormant Salmon Street Springs.
📷 March Photoblogging Challenge Day 22: insect. From late summer of last year, spotted on the trail near my library.
📷 March Photoblogging Challenge Day 21: tiny. Does the Kaweco Liliput Fireblue count as tiny? It’s the tiniest pen in my collection. Here it is next to a 16mm d6 for scale.
📷 March Photoblogging Challenge Day 20: houseplant. Peeping over the shoulder of one of our houseplants as it waved good night to the trees outside.
📷 March Photoblogging Challenge Day 19: analog. While I remain a passionate advocate of analog tools, sometimes they frustrate me deeply. Tonight I tried and failed to disassemble my TWSBI Diamond Mini. I’ll try again soon.
📷 March Photoblogging Challenge Day 18: portico. I don’t often photograph porticos, so I really had to scrape the ol’ memory banks for this one. Park Güell, Barcelona, ten years ago.
Libraries are under attack. Stop scrolling past this.
Libraries are under attack and I am sounding the alarm as loudly as I can.
I get it. It’s boring to hear the same message, over and over, especially if you’ve ever hosted me at a party or been in a meeting with me or, let’s face it, been next to me for two minutes in a grocery check-out line.
But boredom is nothing compares to how it feels to wake up to headlines like “Michigan prosecutor mulls charging Lapeer library over LGBTQ book” or “As LGBTQ book challenges rise, some Louisiana librarians are scared to go to work” or “ND legislature seeks to ban ‘sexually explicit’ books” or “A graphic novel spurs Liberty Lake politicians to strip some authority from its library board”. And those headlines are just from the past few weeks.
My entire career has been founded on the principles of intellectual freedom, so I don’t have the luxury of scrolling past any of this. I don’t get to say, “Whoa, that sucks,” and then go about my day.
And that’s rather the point, isn’t it? A concerted movement to dishonor, discredit, and criminally prosecute library workers has been going on for years. And it will continue to chase library workers out and dissuade people from joining our field – especially people whose identities have been historically marginalized – until there are no more of us left, however long that takes.
So I need your help. I need you to stop scrolling past this. I need this to be more than a “Whoa, that sucks,” when someone mentions it to you at a party or a meeting or a check-out line. If you care at all about libraries, if you care about people who need libraries the most, I need you to help us fight back. Even if you don’t think you live in a place where this could happen, trust me: It’s already happening. You’re just not hearing about it yet.
EveryLibrary is a good place to start educating yourself. Then reach out to your local public library. Send an email, write a letter, call them, ping them on social media, whatever feels best to you. But do it right away. Tell them you’ve got their backs. Ask how you can help. If you have time to spare, volunteer. If you have money to spare, donate. If you have neither, you can show up to a library program, or you can repost their social media posts, or you can say one wonderful thing that libraries have given you the next time you’re at a party or in a meeting or in the grocery check-out line.
Photo by Freddy Kearney on Unsplash.
📷 March Photoblogging Challenge Day 17: early. When I get to work early, I have a moment to appreciate stunning sunrises.
📷 March Photoblogging Challenge Day 16: road. A herd of elk in the road, snapped from a cautious distance, near downtown Cannon Beach.
📷 March Photoblogging Challenge Day 15: patience. Patience reminds me of the Temperance card in the Spacious Tarot. Two seemingly opposing forces, fire and ice, combine to create something new.
📷 March Photoblogging Challenge Day 14: horizon. Cannon Beach last October, on the beach, near the ocean, with my person (not pictured, but so loved).
📷 March Photoblogging Challenge Day 13: connection. Cooking is connection. Our neighbor caught this steelhead trout and shared it with us, and I cooked it using a recipe I found online.
📷 March Photoblogging Challenge Day 12: shiny. My journal’s glittery cover plus magical red panda sticker from Marika Paz. So shiny!
Three years ago today, I cancelled the library’s all-staff meeting. Reading between the lines in my journal, I knew that closing the library building to the public would be next, but it was still an inconceivably drastic measure. I had no concept of the year ahead of us.
🔖 Read ‘J.K. Rowling and “Separating the Art from the Artist”’ by Charlie Jane Anders. Offline, I’ve been engaged in nuanced conversations about this; online, it seems as polarized (and polarizing) as ever. I appreciated Anders' thoughts on the topic.
📷 March Photoblogging Challenge Day 11: gimcrack. Although these wee items might not have much value in the traditional sense, they mean a great deal to me. Each one carries a memory; collectively, they are my treasure.
