Pre-travel odds & ends

• Bloglovin' saga status:  Back up again on Monday morning, Dec. 12th. Out again Wednesday morning (Dec. 14th). :p  Still not up again. Sigh....
• Sorry I missed #MicroblogMondays this week, for the first time in ages... it's been busy, and I just couldn't find any inspiration in time... :(  
• The countdown to flying "home" for Christmas is in full swing right now... and... I'm fighting off a scratchy throat. Ugh. Warm saltwater gargles, tea, ibuprofen and essential oils are helping. I am inclined to believe it's more the result of how very dry it is in our condo right since the colder weather hit (despite our very expensive Dyson purifier/humidifier working overtime...) and less the result of any bugs we might have picked up. We have been out & about more often in the past two weeks than we normally have, but aside from that one restaurant lunch (two weeks ago today)(after which Little Great-Nephew's other grandma came down with covid...! -- but that was a full two weeks ago now...) and staying with LGN a couple of times, we've worn our masks everywhere when we've been out in public places.   
• And -- I think my gout has returned -- or is, at least, lurking in the shadows...  :(   I had it (and wrote about it) a year ago, in September 2021. No redness or swelling (yet?), but my left foot and the big toe in particular has been a bit achy lately, and it was enough to wake me up one morning this week at 4 a.m. I took some ibuprofen and wound up just getting up because I couldn't go back to sleep. :p  I don't think my diet has been particularly bad lately, but perhaps I've slipped up a bit on my sugar and water consumption (i.e., too much and not enough)?  (Of course this WOULD happen just as I'm heading "home" to see my parents. where abundant once-a-year Christmas treats await...!  Sigh...) 
• Katy Seppi of Chasing Creation and Lighthouse Women and Carrie Hauskens of Blooming With Care chatted on Zoom recently about "Navigating the Holidays."  The scheduled hour turned into an hour & a half!  and it's chock full of great ideas and insights! The link to the recording hasn't been posted yet, but I'll flag it when it's available.  
• I haven't had time to watch this one yet, but the lovely Karin Enfield deVries of Pure Transformations also chatted about the holidays in a recorded webinar with Yvonne John, Lauren DeVere and Sarah Lawrence. 
• I saw this story on the news recently and searched out an online version I could share here:  two Halifax universities are sharing a Mi'kmaq "auntie-in-residence" whose role is to help Indigenous students to navigate campus life. The "auntie" they hired is just 28 years old -- obviously, she may still have children someday herself. Still, as a proud auntie, I was kind of tickled by the idea :)  and also by the fact that she pointed out, in her TV interview, that the focus is often on moms & grandmas while the special role aunties can play is often overlooked. Yes!  
• From Anne Helen Petersen's Culture Study:  "You Don't Need To Get Married or Have a Kid To Have a Party." (The comments are great.)  Here's how it starts:  

When I was in the my late 20s and through my 30s, I spent a lot of money on engagement gifts, wedding gifts, baby showers, and baby “sprinkles.” I spent money on bridesmaids dresses and bachelorette parties and traveling to weddings and staying at the wedding and getting home from the wedding. I did it to celebrate my closest friends, and I’d do it again.

As it became clearer to me that I wouldn’t have those sorts of socially-validated celebrations in my own life, I remember feeling a sort of soft, very background, very subdued form of resentment. Not directed at anyone in particular, but at the way we’ve organized our celebrations towards a very narrow slice of “achievement.”

• Last week, I mentioned that Frank Bruni of the New York Times had challenged two recent NYT articles about living & aging alone in his subscriber newsletter (which took the view that this is not a good or desirable thing). His response was titled: "I Live Alone. Really, I’m Not That Pathetic."  This week, he continued: 

Last week I also explored the pleasures of living alone, and that clearly struck a chord: Hundreds of you chimed in to say that you, too, bristle at the assumptions that others make about our households of one. Several of you used a word that I wish I had: solitude. That’s what we have and what we relish and what sometimes gets mistaken for loneliness or mislabeled as isolation.

Several of you also brought up an adjacent misimpression: that people without children failed in their attempts to have them, are failing everybody else or are somehow incomplete. Or can’t process the world in the same deeply feeling, exquisitely concerned way that parents do. One reader noted how common — and how grating — it is when television news journalists weigh in after the latest school shooting with some version of the statement, “As a parent, I really understand this.”

We childless people really understand it, too, because while we don’t have offspring, we have hearts and brains. We have souls and consciences. We care about a world beyond ourselves, just as parents do, and we care about the future, even if we won’t have direct descendants in it.

To that end, I’ve never noticed some stark dividing line between how parents (or grandparents) and childless people vote, with the former group demonstrating greater concern for a safe, clean, civil society. People aren’t reducible that way. We’re maddeningly and gloriously complicated, and we’d do better by one another to hold tight to that thought.

    (Beware the comments!)