At the end of August this past summer, we quit Amazon Prime and Netflix. A number of factors were at play, but the main thing is that our memberships with those two companies weren’t in keeping with our family values, so we said goodbye.
Now, my kids have rediscovered PBS and are totally into The Great British Baking Show and Wild Kratz. And on the occasion that we order from Amazon, things take a lot longer to get here.
Our evening streetwalk in Saratoga Springs was easy to write about because it went so well. We got dropped off by the shuttle bus, walked down the wide street on one side, and back up the other. We got back just in time to catch the last shuttle to our parking lot. And the whole thing was really, really fun.
The Troy Stroll was different.
Daylight Savings Time is the worst.
Last year, we stumbled upon a lantern making workshop at our local library one Friday in the middle of fall and the kids made lanterns. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was part of the library’s participation in a community event that has occurred in a local park for the past four years: The Lantern Parade, which occurs the Sunday of the weekend of Daylight Savings Time.
This year, I saw the lantern making event at the library ahead of time, and we went on purpose. The description of the workshop on the library’s website explained the lanterns were intended for the parade a couple of days later, so the plan was to make the lanterns, then take them to the parade later in the weekend.
Do you have any idioms or inside jokes that only your significant other or family members would understand?
The Chaplain and I have developed a few. NIEE (pronounced NEE!), short for Nothing Is Ever Easy. It was coined after we became homeowners and found ourselves at the home improvement store several times a week for months on end.
Our other stand-by, besides Randy-Jacksonisms, is “Jah will provide.”
Instagram has me pegged as a privileged person who can sometimes be convinced to buy away my guilt over my carbon footprint and that of my family. A swarm of ads for compostable toothbrushes, reusable silicone ziplock baggies, and earth-friendly dish detergent regularly pop up on my feed to remind me that I could be doing better.
Egged on by this, when I ran out of face wash over the summer, I stood in Target feeling paralyzed by the options and annoyed that every one of them came in a plastic container that fell in the grey area of recyclability.
I reluctantly asked an employee if there were any face wash options that didn’t come in a plastic container. She shrugged. I left without buying anything.
