wraps up VI

a sunny window with many plants on a tables soaking up the sun

The wrap-ups of the wrap-ups are now their own thing! You can view past wrap-ups here: 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023.

I’ve now completely moved over to Mastodon and I like it there. I am also on Bluesky which is fun in its own way. I still have accounts on all the Big Platforms, but I’m there a lot less often. I do put pictures on Flickr if you want to follow along. Biggest deal of the past year was that I’m no longer the legal owner of MetaFilter; it’s been transitioned into a community-owned model and while the site is still going to have some challenges, I was (mostly) happy to have been able to help it stay afloat. MLTSHP is still run by the community, with paperwork and legal stuff mainly done by me, and it’s delightful.

My regular job has been going mostly well. I’ve gotten to oversee adding more people to Flickr Commons which is pretty exciting. There’s a fun content browser here if you’d like to see what kind of stuff is there. My house remains standing despite all my concerns that it’s falling apart. Jim and I saw the total solar eclipse from a few miles up the road and it was transcendent. Thanks for reading.

my year in cities and towns, 2024

photograph of a bed in a small guesrtoom. There is a small cat on the bed and a large chicken head from a mascot costume

I’ve been doing this guestroom tracking for twenty years! Last year I went one place, twice, for one night each. I am enjoying staying put, still. No hotels at all. The longer I stay away from hotels and airplanes, the more they seem mysterious and unpleasant to me. There’s a rhythm to local life here, one that I wasn’t as in tune with when I was traveling as much. I’d still like to get out and about a bit more, go down to Westport, see my sister more than twice, do fun things with Jim in distant locations, see my non-local friends more than rarely.

Past years: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008 2007, 2006, 2005.

Farewell Marian Labonte

This is a short eulogy that I gave at the memorial service for my longtime friend, Marian. The picture above is the two of us from drop-in time, taken on her iPad, a photo her son sent me when he was cleaning up her tech. There is also a short obit in the local newspaper.

Marian was, as we say in my family, a hot ticket.

I met her when I was living in Bethel with Ola O’Dell, who some of you might know, another woman who Got Things Done.

She was always up to something, had a plan or a scheme, and had something she wanted YOU to be up to also. She would point at you with her, scaly hands with nicely painted nails, and tell you what your part in all of her schemes was going to be.

I mostly became friends with Marian through her visits to the library. Not only was she a voracious reader (and we liked some of the same books, so she was there with the suggestions, though she was a little less torture-avoidant than I was so I always had to watch it) and sometimes Scrabble player, she always came in to get help with one of her many tech devices. I knew her from her first flip phone, through her first smart phone. I was there when she got a Kindle, an iPad, a second smart phone to replace the first, a second Kindle, and her Apple watch which she would show off to me because she loved that it had a Snoopy watch face; her love of dogs was pure and extremely inclusive. I first met Todd over text (and Zoom) because we were on Marian’s Tech Support Team, trying to support her schemes while quietly not letting her get too into the weeds.

But she wasn’t all tech gadgets, Marian also loved Vermont and driving around it in her little Miata. She was always planning a ride over this mountain or that gap or that other back road and while I think I only got roped into one of them—feeling all the while like I was on Mister Toad’s Wild Ride in Wind in the Willows—she was always going somewhere and doing something and would send me emails and later texts about her trips.

Most importantly, she was all about helping other people. She was a huge accessibility advocate (maybe you didn’t know this but her hearing wasn’t great – I was always slightly hollering when we spoke at the library) and she successfully hassled the library into getting captions for their Zoom book group. She hassled the movie theater into getting live captions for their movies, and one of the things we would do at drop-in time at the library was track down phone numbers for local news stations (and Netflix, do you know how hard it is to find a phone number for Netflix?) so that she could hassle them about the news not having proper captions. She always wanted me to tell people about caption phones, cheaper hearing aids from Costco, and live captions at the movies. She helped so many people in this community get access to the things they deserve. She was always swinging by Veggie Van Go and would leave me a random bag of carrots or apples or a box of water (?) saying “Us single women need to stick together”

She was part of my day to day life and I will miss her at the library and miss her emails and texts. She texted like a teenager. I’ll read you one of the last texts she sent me which I think gives you a great sense of Marian (I’d just sent her a Halloween card a few weeks previous)

Hi J: What a lovely card. And the stamps! I’ve been trying to clean up my house. It’s getting there.[handclap emoji] Did you ever get your kid’s kindle? Do you love it? My replacement kindle is in a coma. Hoping you can bring it up to where it should be. Sorry I missed you again today. I’ve been sleeping a lot, also. Hope you & Jim are fine. [double heart emoji][dog emoji][handclap emoji][thumbs up emoji][warm smile emoji]

Marian was my friend and a force of nature. I will miss her.

How your email finds me…

A small tortiseshell cat sits in a backyard full of tall grass and thinks it is harder to see than it really is

My Virgo Month of Leisure was a blur. Like many people, I’ve been alternating between torpor and panic as the days get shorter and colder. Here are a few things you might like to know if you’re someone who reads this space.

I turned on my heat, meaning the boiler, for the first time this season today. I actually enjoy the Vermont ritual of making small talk by talking about how you heat your house. My heat pumps have been a delight. Having them means I can keep my office and bedroom warm without heating a whole half-house at the same time (I have two zones!). But they can’t really make a chilly bathtub warm up very quickly and today was the day I woke up wanting to take a shower and not be chilly so on it went.

I applied for an ISSN for my other blog today. I just made a post there the other day and thought I should make one here too.

Virgo month of civic leisure

me standing in an empty town hall basement waving a small american flag. I have bright orange sneakers on

Last year around this time I got COVID which I did not appreciate. This year is a bit more under control and as the Virgo Month of Leisure comes around I am looking forward to a few weeks of board meetings. I’ve talked about this a little bit before but not much. In short, being an elected Justice of the Peace, a position I’ve held since 2013, contains a number of smaller positions. You can be a notary if you want (I am a notary), you can perform weddings if you want (I’ve done 31) and you serve on both the Board of Civil Authority (elections, you can see my photos from the primary here) and the Board of Abatement (tax/water bill appeals). There are a few meetings, it’s mostly good.

Over time people cycle on and off of this group and I’ve found myself one of the more senior members of it so I am the chair. I have mixed feelings about this. I am a little too spacey to run meetings well, but I have a good deal with my vice-chair that she will run the meetings and I will run the Zoom part of them. Randolph recently completed a town-wide reappraisal and nearly everyone’s property values shot up. This caused a certain degree of alarm. Because of the way taxes work (the town’s total budget divided by the total value of all the properties winds up being how much tax you pay) an increase in everyone’s property values doesn’t necessarily mean you pay a lot more taxes but you might pay some. It hasn’t been a great few years in terms of everyone’s income vs. their expenses, so many people are appealing the appraisal of their properties. We as a board hear these appeals. There are a lot of laws that tightly govern how we do these and it’s a lot to keep track of. We have six appeals, these each require a hearing, a property inspection, a second hearing and our little board of volunteers has to try to determine a new fair value of the property, or determine that the value the appraisers determined was already fair. One of the people appealing is our community hospital with their multi-million dollar appraisal. They brought a lawyer who was… feisty.

All of this is to say, I’ve got a lot of admin and paperwork to be doing in the next several weeks and at least a few contentious hearings and all of it is on a fairly tight timeline. I want to do a good job. I want to sneak in some leisure. I want to get outside and welcome the incoming Autumn season which is by far my favorite. And I’m mostly writing this down here as an accountability step. I know the Virgo Month of Leisure starts today. I know that, like always, I have a bit too many things scheduled in a bit too little time. And I know that I can get a bit too, as my friend Jenna calls it “Atlas-like” thinking it’s all on my shoulders. It’s not. We all help. It’s a nice crowd. I think we’ll do okay.

looking back at bad decisions

wooden stairs go down from a green forrested area and end at a shallow river

One of my part-time jobs is having a big company retreat at a fancy resort in Vermont. This is a good opportunity for me to meet my colleagues in real life. Since COVID I’ve curtailed my travel to nearly zero (first for COVID reasons and now mostly for save-the-planet and “I’m a homeowner now and I like being here” reasons) and it is nice to get a chance for a change of scenery. The place where this event is held is like a Vermont Disneyland, almost unrecognizable to me as Vermont even though the actual town is the same size as the one I live in. I work for a small group (maybe five of us) within a larger group of about 300 people.

I showed up to the event and did not know anyone since my colleagues hadn’t arrived yet. I decided to go for a short hike. The hike, which I’d researched online, said it was “moderate” which me, a non-hiker, didn’t quite understand but I figured it was one step up from “easy” so I would be fine. And, ultimately, I was fine. But the hike was strenuous for me, someone who walks a mile or two most days, but rarely uphill. And it was sort of warm out. The good news was I was well dressed for it and decently prepared. I had the foresight to pack water, snacks, bug spray, sunglasses, a good hat and a well-charged cell phone. But what I hadn’t done was tell anyone where I was going (“on a hike!”) and as the trail got steeper and I got more sweaty and tired out and looked at the rest of the uphill trail as I was in a strangely-empty forest I got a sudden ping of nerves.

I learned a weird family story when my great uncle Johnny died in 2005. He was from the branch of my dad’s family who had stayed in Vermont when everyone else moved to California or New York. I did not know him well because my dad was not a real “hang with the family” sort of guy. There was a photo of Johnny at his memorial service with his brother, my grandfather, and his own father. The caption, written by his daughter, read “Daddy, Uncle Joe and Grandpa West. Picture shot day Grandpa died on the Long Trail.” This seems like one of those stories which, if it were in your family, someone would have told you. But my family on that side were not great storytellers, so I didn’t know this one. Apparently he’d dropped dead of a heart attack, Johnny had stayed with the body while my grandad went to get help. It was 1932 and he was forty-five years old. That whole story sprang into my head unbidden as I scrambled up the side of a short mountain and walked across a stream I later learned was called West Branch Little River. I was on the Long Trail and I was really tired out. I wondered if I should text someone what specific subtrail I was on–at least I had great cell service–but then it felt like one of those ominous portent things and I ultimately didn’t. It wasn’t smart. I realized there is sometimes a gap between knowing the right thing to do and actually doing it.

a bad photo of a sideways photo in a photo album with the caption that it saysin the post. You can barely make out two men standing next to a sign saying Long Trail.

It wound up okay, the trail started going down not up. I came back to the friendly little Barnes Camp visitors center. I sat in the shade and drank a lot of water. I showed back up to the event and saw a few faces I recognized. I introduced myself to the President of Flickr and chatted with the CFOs daughter. The endorphins of the hike gave me a little more capacity for chitchat and I enjoyed myself. Headed home before I hit a wall of tired and overpeopling. Once I got back home I told a few people about the little hike, about how it was lovely but also oddly scary in a way I didn’t expect, and how I’d tell them if I was heading out into the woods alone next time, as much a promise to myself as to them.

results

It’s a weird feeling: this house has a full complement of stuff in it and now I can fine-tune the stuff so I don’t just have Minimum Viable Household going on here.

Biggest recent accomplishment is getting the Dutchman’s Pipe Vine to fill in the space on my side porch with the application of a little monofilament, plant velcro tape, an old metal gear, and nudging. Here’s a before-ish and an after picture.

looking out the back of my porch. There is a thin line of monofilament and some tender small vines gorwing up them

A very lush green wall of vines on the porch