Good evening, Kibitzers! This is the story of a very tiny little house. It’s actually just over outstretched-hand size, and it’s made of some manner of ersatz Lincoln Logs that are square with rounded corners rather than round. They were mine once, so they’re 1950s-vintage, but they don’t exactly wear out.
This house was made by my younger nephew, oh, ten-ish years ago (he’s in high school now). My dad had gone poking around in the attic to find something the two boys could play with, because they were too young yet to be glued to screens all the time. They received the can of logs, and the older one got busy making various implements of destruction. I don’t know why, because he was and is a very peaceable person, but he was fascinated with fictitious weaponry.
I think he’d made maybe a catapult, and was building and bombarding little woodpiles. His younger brother, meanwhile, had focused all his attention on building the smallest possible cabin out of the logs. At some point, the older nephew demanded that his brother get out of the way, so the cabin could be properly demolished by whatever juggernaut.
“No!!! It’s my little vacation cabin!” Ultimately, the cabin was removed from the battlefield via the intervention of adults with a sheet of cardboard, and a sacred vow to guard the cabin from harm was extracted from the said adults.
Accordingly, the cabin has since sat in my parents’ living room, on top of a boxed set of art books in the corner, and I alone remain to defend it. I dust it, and a while ago, because I live here by myself and I am free to do strange projects with no one to look askance, I made it a little pipecleaner Christmas wreath, and then I snared one of those little American flags on a toothpick, and then I found some teeny Easter eggs so I made it a little origami Easter basket.
But I didn’t really go to crazytown until earlier this year, when it was March and there was still a snowstorm. every. week. I decided I wanted the cabin to have a flowerbed, so I went hunting around Amazon and found some LegoTM vegetation in the right scale, and then I started following links to their other suggestions. I was looking at green Lego baseplates to serve as a lawn, and then I found a baseplate that was mostly sand with some ocean lapping at the edge. I was about 2 seconds from putting it in my basket so the cabin could be at the beach, when I thought, STOP IT!!! This beach thing is, like, thirty bucks! This is not a Lego cabin! It doesn’t need a Lego beach or even a Lego lawn!
So I did buy the set of Lego flowers and evergreen shrubs (also some Lego tape that you can stick on stuff to make the surface, uh, Leggable). And then I hauled out some cardboard that had come behind sheets of postage stamps, and my paints, and I made the cabin a front yard for each season, plus a beach. Because that’s much saner, right???
Here are my seasonal yards, with Lego gardens added.
And that, I realize, is more of a WAYWO diary, but there you are.
Next week, I am away for NN, so someone else will kindly fill in on Tuesday. See you back here the week after, hopefully with pictures!
Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share part of the evening around a virtual kitchen table with readers of Daily Kos who aren’t throwing pies at one another. Drop by and tell us about your weather, your garden, or what you cooked for supper. Newcomers may notice that many who post diaries and comments in this series already know one another to some degree, but we welcome guests at our kitchen table, and hope to make some new friends as well.
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🌟 GOTV 🌟
🌟 POSTCARDING: If you are looking for a way to help and can’t do things like canvassing or phoning, consider hand-writing postcards asking people to vote. It’s easy because you’re given specific talking points from the campaign you’re working with, so you don’t have to think up what to say, and no one will be coming back at you with questions. And if you like to color, you can get creative decorating the cards. Note that you are responsible for buying postcards (and stamps if you don’t use pre-stamped ones.) Postcard stamps are 35 cents each; pre-stamped postcards from USPS are 39 cents each; two pretty designs. To get started:
🌟 CONFIRM YOU ARE REGISTERED, REPEAT REGULARLY, AND GET YOUR FAMILY AND OTHERS TO DO THE SAME!!!
- Many kossacks have been surprised to find that their or a family member’s registration has mysteriously disappeared, even though it had been active. Don’t wait until too late to catch and correct this bullshit.
- HEADCOUNT.ORG will direct you to your state’s Department of State/Division of Elections (or similar) webpage, which is the horse’s mouth, as it were. My state page shows me as registered at my current address, for example.
- VOTE.ORG looks you up in its own database, which they admit is older than states’ databases. They do not show me as registered at my current address.
- Or, google something like “am I registered to vote” plus your state, and go to your state government’s page directly.
🌟 FOLLOW Yosef 52: Several times every day, the dauntless Yosef 52 posts GIANT resource diaries, containing links for virtually every Democrat who is running this November for just about anything north of dogcatcher. At the end, there are links to online tools for taking a wide variety of action. Please rec and share these diaries as you can, to get more eyes on these resources, and also, don’t forget to make use of them if you’re looking for a candidate to help or a way to help them!
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It is now Day 54 of the new hurricane season.
Puerto Rico has already sort of dodged one hurricane, although Beryl’s remains did knock out power to 60,000 customers. Mind you, this was a storm that the NWS declared no longer anything and quit tracking over the weekend, but its remaining rain and wind were enough to black out 60,000 customers of the jury-rigged grid.
PLEASE FOLLOW Denise Oliver Velez and the SOS Puerto Rico group for the latest news about developments in Puerto Rico and the USVI. Denise’s most recent Puerto Rico diary is here. She generally collects resonant tweets at the top of her comment threads, as well, and in the APR’s thread most mornings, to make it easy to retweet. If you tweet or FB, please share something about Puerto Rico and USVI regularly.
PUERTO RICO and USVI DISASTER RELIEF DONATION LINKS
The Daily Kos community has its own project: Puerto Rico resident Bobby Neary (newpioneer) leads a small team dedicated to helping a specific rural elder who was left by the storms without power, water, a roof, or any belongings but a moldy mattress. If you like to see concrete results, this is the project for you. See newpioneer’s diaries for ways to help. See this one in particular, and this comment with photos. See also his lovely and heartbreaking poem.
(🌅 = most recently recommended by Denise)
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