Lots of odds & ends!

• Ahhhhhh!!  It's the Tuesday after Labour Day -- the first day of school for most kids hereabouts. I know there will still be masses of social media posts to wade through over the next while (or skip over... or block, lol)(not that I haven't already been doing so for the past month...!), but I feel like a huge burden has been removed from my childless shoulders, or will be removed shortly.  
• We've been pretty much holed up in our condo for most of the past week. I mean, that's our choice -- and covid concerns are a factor in that too (and the weather has sucked this past weekend as well...!) -- but we've known from years of experience (well before covid!) that going anywhere during the last week before school starts is an exercise in frustration, with mobs of parents & kids shopping and eating out and cramming in all the stuff they meant to do during the previous two months of summer. Avoidance has proven to be our best strategy.  ;) 
• On a related note:  Another CNBCer flagged a Twitter post from an executive at a British retailer called Timpson, patting themselves on the back for their policy of offering employees who are parents a day off on their kids' first day of school.  (I seem to remember a similar post from the same company last year.)  It's had more than 57,000 "likes." and more than 3,000 retweets to date. 
• Needless to say, no equivalent day off is offered to employees without children -- and those pointing this out in the comments are being told to (in the words of one commenter) "wise up and shut up." (Grrrr....)  Nobody is saying parents shouldn't have time off to deal with parenting issues -- but childless/free people could use some extra time off too, for various valid reasons. Fair is fair... 
• We had a rude awakening Sunday morning when the fire alarm went off around 5 a.m. :p  Neither dh nor I had been having a good night -- dh had JUST gotten back to sleep, after being up for hours!  Nevertheless, we hauled our butts out of bed, got dressed, grabbed wallets and phones and put on jackets and masks (I think we're the only people in the building who still wear them in common spaces)(and this time I remembered to put on my wedding & engagement rings) and headed down the stairwell. 
• The fire department had already arrived by the time we got outside, and we were cleared to head back in again within about half an hour. Someone on the 5th floor, at the opposite end of the building from us, had been up and smoking, and the smoke was enough to set off not only the alarm for their unit for the entire building. Yikes! (Thankfully, it did NOT set off the sprinkler system!)    
• There was a SECOND alarm & evacuation later that evening, around 9 p.m. Same unit!!  They're investigating whether the smoke detector is defective. ( #adventuresincondoliving )
• Older Nephew followed up his Instagram video of Little Great-Nephew in a Buzz Lightyear costume with another on Instagram Stories the next day, of him helping LGN, still in costume, "fly" around the house. 
• (I cried over that one too.) 
• Bloglovin' was back this weekend, briefly. It popped up again on my laptop on Friday morning (Sept. 2nd), after an absence/outage of more than a week & a half (since Wednesday, Aug. 23rd).
• And then Sunday morning, it was gone again. :p  Sigh.  :p  
• Also this weekend (sadly):  10 dead, at least 18 people wounded (all stabbed), 13 crime scenes in two communities -- one suspect dead (not, it's believed, by his own hand) and the other still on the loose, in Saskatchewan. :(   It's being called one of the worst incidents of mass violence in Canadian history. There's been prominent coverage in the New York Times and the Washington Post, and on CNN, as well as in the Canadian media. 
• The small town of Weldon, where at least one of the stabbings took place, is just a few minutes down the road from one of the small towns in Saskatchewan where we lived in the early 1960s when I was a pre-schooler. There was -- and still is! -- a ferry there that takes cars (six at a time) across the South Saskatchewan River. 
• I have not been back to that area in almost 30 years (I spent a few hours in nearby Melfort, en route back to Saskatoon on a business trip in the early/mid-1990s -- and it's been at least 45 years since I've been back to the two nearby towns where we lived in the 1960s), but it's an area of the country that's still close to my heart. 
• It's also not that far (about an hour-plus) from the site of the tragic bus crash that claimed the lives of 16 hockey team members from Humboldt (which I wrote about here). 
• I was stunned when a friend we met through our pregnancy loss support group, almost (gulp) 20 years ago now, posted on social media last week about the death of her ex-husband (who often came with her to group). Although they both found new partners since those days, they remained friends as well as co-parents, which is always nice to see. He was just 53. :(  
• Did you see "The Baby Business," a special report on the fertility industry, on CNN last night? It was reported by anchor Alisyn Camerota, the mother of IVF twins and a former board member and support group leader for RESOLVE, who wrote about her personal experiences and what she learned while researching this report for CNN's website. Nothing that I didn't already know, but still some pretty shocking stories and calls for more oversight of the industry. 
• Watch the embedded video in Alisyn's article, in which she and four others talk about their infertility experiences. I was heartened that Susan Hendricks -- who admits fertility treatments worked for her, and wondered whether she'd suffered "enough" to speak on this panel -- mentions that treatments don't work for so many others -- and that the doctor on the panel mentions childlessness as one of the options that some people choose. Progress? (Albeit none of the people featured in the video or in the report, wound up childless after treatments...) 
• Loved this piece by Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post:  "I usually ignore the sexism and ageism directed at me. Now I’m calling it out." 
• Speaking of sexism -- I stumbled onto an obituary in the New York Times for a woman named Marilyn Loden, and had a shock of recognition. I haven't heard the name or thought of this in years, but she spoke at a conference I attended early on in my career -- mid/late 1980s. I remember reading her book at the time, but I did not realize or remember that she coined the term "glass ceiling"!
• I first encountered Carrie Hauskens via the recent Childless Collective Summit. She's childless/free after infertility and loss (including stillbirth), and blogs at Blooming With Care (which I've added to my blogroll on the right-hand side of the page) and on Medium, where she's posted some really excellent stuff -- most recently "Where Do Stillborn Mothers Belong?" and "Do You Have Kids?".  You can also find her on Instagram. 
• While I'm (obviously) not a mom (in the conventional sense anyway), I've long been fascinated by modern parenting culture and, more recently, "momfluencers," particularly as I became more and more aware of how heavily pronatalist our society is. 
• So when I stumbled onto Sara Petersen's Substack newsletter, "In Pursuit of Clean Countertops," via Anne Helen Petersen's "Culture Study," I signed up for a free subscription. 
• The particular article that had me clicking on the "subscribe" button was a few weeks back in the archives, titled: "On blaming the victim for their reproductive struggles: Ableism, baby soul readiness, and neglected "womb voices"." Just go read it!
• Sample quote from near the end (boldfacing and capitalization are the author's): "Some people cannot get pregnant without medical intervention. THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THEIR RIGHTNESS OR GOODNESS AS HUMAN BEINGS OR THEIR BABIES’ SOULS. Fertility is morally neutral. And to suggest that the sometimes incredibly painful experience of infertility can be magically cured by more carefully attending to one’s “womb voice” and dealing with one’s latent CONTROL ISSUES is irresponsible and potentially harmful."
• Also worth a read: an article Petersen wrote for Harper's Bazaar -- "Momfluencer Content Enrages Me. Why Can't I Look Away?" 
• Sample quote: "[Jo] Piazza [author and journalist, whose podcast "Under the Influence" explores momfluencer culture] praises momfluencers for figuring out how to monetize the unpaid labor of motherhood, and I do too. Full stop. I’m still bothered, though, that the particular flavor sold by the most successful momfluencers is one conceived by patriarchy: a beautiful mother made happy by her beautiful children in her beautiful home."
• Good article about friendships between women with and without children in The Guardian today, including some insights from Jody Day of Gateway Women (...somewhat tempered by some slightly tone-deaf observations from the author at the end about her own child and parenting experiences...!). 
• As usual, caveat emptor when it comes to the comments... 
• Housekeeping:  New tag/label added for "eyes/vision." I'm also working on changing the posts labelled "Facebook" to the more generic "social media," since these posts are often about a lot more than just Facebook. (Since I started posting with the "Facebook" label, I've added Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, WhatsApp and goodness knows what other social media apps to my repertoire...!)  
• I've noticed that the formatting on some of my early posts is all wonky -- the currently posted version looks fine to readers, but if I go in to change anything, the formatting is gone (no paragraph breaks, so the sentences all run together...!) and needs to be recreated. So I may put off changing labels on those posts until I can go in & fix the formatting. Sigh...