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Wedding Mittens


I’ve been working for several weeks on these matching selbu mittens for my platonic life partner and his fiancée. I’m incredibly pleased with how they turned out.


Contrapoints new video on envy is *long* and **good** and so very worth the long wait.
Oh that's good to hear. I've been waning on long video essays lately, but your recommendation may push me to check it out.


Third interview with an IT company tomorrow that has amazing benefits and work/life balance. Wish me luck!


As a bonus question for their last exam, I asked students what trick/song they used to time their hand washing over the past year. Some notable answers:
The alphabet backwards
Humming the theme to Disenchantment
Whistle while you work
If I had a Heart (by Fever Ray)
Steven Universe Theme
The opening to The Black Parade
The opening to Ocean Eyes

and my personal favorite answer:
La Vie en Rose
I take it back, the best answer is actually the chorus from 'I want it that way'
Steven Universe theme was my go-to while I was still going outside of the house and paying intense attention to my hand-washing. I don't know if I'll be able to watch those opening credits without feeling the urge to scrub my hands. 😂


Epidemics and Pandemics


We're less than a month past the inauguration of Biden and just over a month away from the anniversary of Michigan's first lockdown when I started working from home. I've found myself reflecting on the factors that could have caused and/or mitigated the disaster.

At the beginning of 2018, the CDC made 80% cuts to it's efforts to prevent global disease outbreaks and by the beginning of 2020 we were experiencing a 'once in a century' pandemic.

Before 2018, the world had addressed multiple epidemics of ebola, SARS, MERS, swine and avian flu without them going global and with a fraction of the death tolls of covid-19.

I don't have answers, but I've been wondering how things would have changed had the CDC remained at full funding after 2018. Would we have been able to contain the virus to Wuhan? If so, what does that say about American power/influence that it is by our effort that pandemics are prevented or accelerated.




With three months, 36,000 stitches, and nearly a kilometer of yarn, my partner's enby socks are finally complete.
Accepting any and all sock related puns to name this holiday gift. If only they had wanted the pansoxual flag colors...
That is... a lot of yarn. I've never really stopped to think about the length of yarn in a project like this.

What a cool gift, though! I'm wracking my brain trying to find an appropriate pun.
This entry was edited (3 years ago)

Bro, we literally call it the ‘sock monkey sweater’ 🤣


This has been a big weekend for me. I scheduled a November trip for Emily and I to go visit our metamour, my new laptop finally arrived, I finished the yoke portion of my sweater, and picked up 3000 lbs of firewood.
More and more, this house is beginning to look like a homestead with a woodpile and two large-ish garden plots.

What have y'all been up to this past week?
I guess I'm also getting on this.

The other week I and a couple of friends all quarantined before having an in person hangout at one of the friend's beach cabins. I had a lot of anticipation going into it to finally see people again, but still hadn't appreciated just how much I needed to see and hug everyone. Also as someone who doesn't own a car, it has been a ride just figuring out how to safely transport myself to anything beyond what I can bike and walk to.

Beside that and this weekend becoming a member at one of our gardens so that I can visit whenever, it's been wonderful to feel a little bit... I suppose intentionality to these trips when everything else keeps feeling like it's not in my control, being able to go on these trips, to plan them, execute them, and then have things work has been really really nice.

Being out 1 week and everyone still not having symptoms doesn't hurt either : )
That sounds so nice! I've definitely been feeling touch-starved during the pandemic. I can see one of my partners regularly, but for safety we've been keeping my house's social bubble small. Especially now that UM students are back and playing beer pong in their yards, I'm getting ready for Ann Arbor to be a lot less safe in about a week and a half.

I couldn't imagine living through the pandemic without a car, I was a big public transit user, but got a car after I tore my ACL and needed easier transportation. The idea of dealing with the stress of busses *on top of* pandemic era shopping sounds awful.


Gotcha, I was missing the context & Background that it was/is other Black activists making the case. The Black Power Fist I understand warranting discussion. I don't understand white people not participating in those particular chants. Do they feel ownership to those chants as white people likely lack the experiences that gave rise to them?

For me, in either case, I think the clear invitation is pretty important. It would feel inappropriate for me to be the one to be the first to throw the Black Power Fist unless we'd already created that in-group behavior as an ok thing, and that could be misinterpreted by someone who wasn't in that particular protesting cohort.

I'm a sucker for context. and it mattering 😀
With those two chants in particular, the argument is that we as white people don’t experience that oppression so we shouldn’t participate in them. I have a lot more sympathy for that argument and do feel more ambivalent about participating in those.

However when the group is 50-ish percent white, and the chant leaders are clear about wanting everyone in, I choose to look at it as amplifying Black voices/messaging. As someone who has called chants in the past, it really sucks when you start a new one and participation plummets amd the volume drops noticeably.

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