Some things that happened last week that I liked.

An exercise in not being drowned in the horrible stuff.

I didn’t get a chance to write a proper piece this week. I had a writing assignment that put an end to doing my substack writing.

Although also putting a crimp in everything is…you know…EVERYTHING in the damn world. It’s getting harder and harder to look outside my cubicle and not sink into fear based paralysis. In fact, just one minute before posting this, I checked my e- mail and saw a fundraising plea from Al Franken (who I love). I happily contribute to anything he endorses. But this e-mail had the title “ARE YOU TERRIFIED YET?” Really…I mean…this does the opposite of motivate me.

And that is exactly why I am doing a weird thing with my offering this week. I made a list of all the things that happened last week that I liked. Sometimes that is the only way to navigate the bigger more treacherous spiderweb that it feels like the awful people have set for us. So here is that list.

1. I bought, and then cooked and ate, orange and black Halloween pappardelle from Trader Joe’s. Far and away the prettiest pasta I have ever experienced. So pretty in fact that i went back to try to buy five more packs, only to learn that it’s seasonal. It’s no longer for sale. Damn.

   

   2.Jim Jordan lost 3 rounds of votes! I was so relieved. SO relieved.

   

   3. I placed a new milestone in the dog-walking hall of fame:

   

   

   4. The last of the butterflies I have been mid-wifing was born. This all starts because I find the caterpillars on my milkweed plants and want to save them from predators. To refresh your memory…here are the assorted Monarch incarnations.

   

   If you are still interested, here is a short film I made of one of them coming out of the pupa. It always reminds me of a little of a green pepper giving birth to a Mars Exploration Rover. The complex and spooky engineering of this creature is second only to the mind-boggling weirdness of the whole idea that a black and yellow striped caterpillar turns into a small green pepper that gives birth to a Monarch butterfly. In my opinion, nature out runs science fiction every single time.

   And here is the video of me releasing him/her/them a short twenty four hours later. That’s what butterfly advisors on-line say is the right amount of time to let the butterfly recuperate from being born! Twenty four hours and he/she/them are ready to start a migration to Mexico. Whereas twenty four YEARS later, human offspring still don’t have a functioning frontal lobe.

   

   Monarchs born in the fall live for months so they can migrate to a big Monarch convention in Mexico. The ones born in the spring only live for two weeks: just long enough to lay the eggs that will eventually produce the future conventioneers. How do they find their way to the convention in Mexico? Google says they have light sensitive magneto-sensors to follow the earth’s magnetic poles . Oh..

   5. Andy and I tried to figure out how to celebrate our anniversary .

   

   If you haven’t had one lately, I recommend it.

   But that was just the beginning of the festivities. We also went to my favorite museum: The Getty Center. You take a tram up to the main building and by the time you arrive, it always feels to me like entering a different country.Among the wonderful things I saw this visit, this one won my heart:

   

   6.. Once a week I feed tiny orphan baby squirrels who are too small to be released by The California Wildlife Center (where I am a volunteer). And by released, I mean back into what we laughingly refer to as “the wild”. When they are little, and presumably nursing with their mother, they eat five times a day. So that’s how often they need to be fed. We wait until they are a certain weight and on a more independent feeding schedule before letting them back to find their way in the world. Here is one of the baby squirrels I met this week.

7. But wait! Wait! There’s MORE! Last but definitely not least:

   

   So…on balance, a likable week…as long as you can find a way to somehow not see any headlines.

8. Onward. And good luck to us all.

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