January 2025

There were 3 posts published in January 2025.

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.