Thursday, January 29, 2026

the care and feeding of an introvert

Just in case you are not an introvert and you're wondering. 

I think there are (at least) two kinds of introverts. There are the kind of introverts who avoid groups as much as they can, but really enjoy intense one-on-one conversations. If you're dealing with that kind of introvert, don't invite them out for a drink with a group of work friends, invite them out for lunch with just the two of you, and be prepared to go deep into whatever subject(s) your introvert wants to discuss. 

That is not the kind of introvert I am. I am the kind of introvert who mostly would rather stay home, but if I'm going to make myself go out, I want to go with a group. I will not necessarily participate, but I will observe, notice, laugh along. I love sitting with a group of my friends, listening and enjoying their company. Not that I would sit there like a lump— I ask questions, comment, sympathize— but I’d rather not have the attention on me, all heads turned in my direction.

Never underestimate an introvert's deep-seated anxiety about how they will come up with things to talk about. A car ride with one other person? what the heck will we talk about? a coffee date with a friend I just saw last week? what will we talk about? (I just saw you!) My need to see my friends again is about three weeks longer than theirs is, I think. I can't imagine talking to someone on the phone every day. What would we talk about? 

This is one of the deepest anxieties of my life. It even happens with therapists. You can't shut me up for the first session or two while I'm explaining what's going on, but then I just sort of ... peter out. We just talked about that last week, how in the world will I be able to talk about it again for an hour? AN HOUR? I guess I just don't process things verbally.  

If you want an introvert to come to a party that they are resisting, give them a job to do. Keep the ice bucket filled and pick up empty cups (if they're the type of person that wouldn't mind doing that)(I am exactly that type of person). Run the spotify playlist. Give them a clipboard with survey questions on it. Take tickets at the door. Whatever. Just don't expect them to be excited about having to come up with things to talk about for three hours. 

I thought I was going to have a lot to say on this topic but that's kind of it, I guess. 

Ok, well, here's an anecdote. Years ago, like maybe 25 years ago, long before we had the terminology of being on the spectrum, a friend of mine whose son is autistic told me, "you should tell people you're autistic, even though you're not, not really. Because then they wouldn't expect you to be.... " she paused, and I realized later she was worried about hurting my feelings, "... normal." My feelings were not hurt. I don't think I've ever felt so seen. I do think if I were a child now that I would be on the spectrum, but now everyone thinks that, so who knows. Maybe we're all just awkward and anti-social. 

so yeah. Just leave me the fuck alone. ha. My spouse keeps threatening to get me a t-shirt that says sorry I'm late I didn't want to come. 

Monday, January 26, 2026

Ruminations on Retirement

I should point out first of all that to call me "retired" is a bit of a misnomer because even though it's been almost ten years since I had a real job, I never really had a career. But with that caveat, I'm still going to talk about retirement, because some of it applies to everyone. 

My spouse finally fully retired at the end of 2025 after several years of cutting back, and as anyone who's been through this knows, you're not really retired until both of you are retired. While he was working, I still had a job, and it was called "keeping everything going while my spouse works." There is still all of that to do, but now there are two of us to do it, and fortunately my spouse is not the type to refuse to help out. He's playing a lot of tennis, but he's also doing more of the grocery shopping, mopping the floors, etc. (That's not to say the transition has always been easy in terms of our relationship, but we'll save that discussion for another time.)

What I wanted to say is something I've been thinking about quite a lot. Because when you finally reach this point in life, where you no longer have a paid (or unpaid) part in keeping society going, but you need to feel like you have something to contribute, and also boredom is lethal. You have to figure out what you're going to do. 

There are probably some people who move to a golf community and do nothing but play golf and eat out for the rest of their lives, but that was never going to be me-- although I fully support your right to do that if it sounds good to you. 


Is finally having enough time to read all I want enough to keep me going? (my golf equivalent)(ha). I'm still involved in a number of volunteer activities-- I still work at the food bank on Monday mornings, I'm in a couple of senior music groups (I play flute in one and percussion in the other), and I am an A/V tech at our church. I could increase any of those activities, or add some new ones, and stay plenty busy. They're all things I enjoy. 

So is that enough? And I guess there's no way to know except to just keep going and see how it feels. That's a life-long hangup of mine, I want to know ahead of time whether or not something is going to work out and/or be successful, and of course you can't know that until you actually try. dammit. But do I "need" to keep writing a blog? Do I need to work on writing a memoir, as it seems everyone is doing these days? Should I keep writing book reviews on Goodreads? Those are all things I do because I enjoy them (well, not the memoir, I haven't done that)(yet?), but they're a fair amount of work, and no one would care if I quit. I don't mean this as a complaint, but simply as a statement of fact: no one said anything-- good or bad-- when I quit posting here. There's no reason to start up again other than the fact that I like to do it, and it fills a certain lifelong compulsion I have about putting words to things I think/feel as a way of understanding myself and my experience. 

But is it necessary? There was a time maybe twenty years ago when writing teachers responded to comments like this by saying that EVERYONE SHOULD WRITE! WE SHOULD ALL BE WRITERS! But of course that's not right, either. There are millions of people who have zero desire to write, or on the other hand, millions of people who believed them and self-published on Amazon and now we're all afraid to download anything self-published because two-thirds of them are unbearable to read. (yes, of course there are exceptions).

So that was a lot of rambling to say that I'm feeling my way through this transition, as are many other people. If I'm going to keep blogging, maybe I should change up how I do it. More pictures. Shorter posts. Less editing. We'll see. 

Maybe I will start a new thing, go a little crazy and just send posts off without agonizing. A WHOLE NEW WORLD. 

But not this one, which I've edited half a dozen times now, and which is serving as a warning sign about the carefree posting, because it makes a whole lot more sense now than it did three days ago. 

Hmmm. I wonder how pictures work when you're emailing posts. LEARNING CURVE AHEAD. And I did figure out how to schedule a post! 

Have a good Monday. 

Friday, January 23, 2026

new migraine strategies, and also various odds and ends to catch up, and why this is publishing at 2:12am

I know I have a couple of followers who also have headaches so here is something new to try, or at least new to me: taking riboflavin, otherwise known as vitamin B-2. I got mine at GNC for the highly technical reason that when a friend who is a medical professional recommended B-2 in a text, I was walking through a mall with a GNC. I started with 200 mg a day, and after about a week, I just stopped being so headache-y (bonus: neon yellow pee). 

Not that I never have headaches anymore, but they are less severe, and also don't turn into multi-day misery as often. I've been taking magnesium and CoQ-10 for a long time, but neither of them made the difference that riboflavin has made. There is research about this, check this out for starters

You do have to get Riboflavin (B-2) by itself-- even a multi-vitamin that is specifically "B vitamins" only has a tiny fraction of the recommended dose. Also, I still get mine at GNC even though we don't have a GNC in our town. I tried some from our local health food store and it didn't seem to work as well. And another also, after about three months I cut back to 100 mg a day. It seems to me that if you're deficient in a vitamin or mineral, of course you're going to feel better if you take mega-doses of a supplement and get your body caught up. But after awhile, wouldn't it just be too much? This is where my local medical professionals are rolling their eyes and grumbling under their breath about therapeutic doses, and saying out loud: the studies say to keep taking it. And I do my own thing anyway. 

Also in the migraines department: on the advice of my neurologist, I stopped the Ajovy injections and started on Qulipta. Like the B-2, it's not 100% effective, but overall I seem to be having fewer headaches, and when I do have them, they are less severe. More telling, if I forget to take it, I have a pretty bad migraine in 24 hours. So for now I'm sticking with it. The most common side effects are nausea, constipation, and drowsiness. I haven't had nausea, but I have had drowsiness, so I take it before I go to bed. I've also had constipation, but even though I'm Ancient of Days I can't quite bring myself to discuss constipation in my blog. Maybe someday. 

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Grandchild #2 arrived the first week in August and I have to say I highly recommend being a grandparent. It is amazing. We have especially adorable, intelligent grandchildren, and I'm not biased at all. They live about four hours away and we try to see them at least once a month. We do not spoil them. No, of course not.

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I've said about a dozen times before that the reason I blog is for me, not for you, dear reader--although I'm so grateful that you're here. I've recently discovered that is more literally true than I realized. Without doing this, producing words that come out of nowhere but my own head, I feel weirdly stagnant. It took awhile to figure out what that feeling was. Other than a handful of posts about migraines and whatnot, I barely posted last year. I didn't miss it at all at first. But the longer I've gone without writing, the more I've missed it. 

I have to deal with this weird thing in my head that starts tying my self-worth as a person on this planet to the number of people who are reading my posts. (Yeah, I know, could I be any more self-absorbed. Apparently not.) I've tried various different ways of dealing with this in the past, and the one that worked the best was emailing my posts. There's no way to type a post at the blogger website without seeing the stats about how many people are looking at this thing, but emailing them avoids that. I can just send them off into the ether and pretend that either (ether)(smirk) no one or everyone is reading them. The only downside is for years now, I've scheduled my posts to publish at 2:12am and I am oddly attached to that timestamp. But doing it by email would mean I have to figure out how to schedule an email, and I don't think I care quite that much. 

So that's the plan. I don't think I have enough readers after this long silence to worry about posting on a schedule, so just check in every once in awhile. I've missed this. 


Tuesday, January 20, 2026

*tap* *tap* is this thing on?

Well, first of all, HI. 

I guess I'm going to start doing this again. I'm pretty sure the RSS feed is still turned off, if you want it back on, please let me know in the comments or email me. Apologies for this not-interesting post, and possibly a couple more-- I'm experimenting with emailing my posts. I've done it before, but it was years ago and I don't remember how it works. So there will be a few test posts while I figure things out. 

Hope 2026 is treating you well so far (is 2026 treating anybody well?) and I will be back with more interesting (I hope) stuff soon.

Wednesday, November 19, 2025

The Vanilla Ice Cream Problem

 You know what is hard to define? Vanilla ice cream. 

I mean, first of all, there's vanilla. What does that exactly mean? The organic compound vanillin? The seeds of the vanilla bean, which you can scrape off the plant and use to flavor various foods and flavor bases? a chemical compound created in a lab that resembles the flavor of the vanilla bean closely enough that most people can't tell the difference? 

And then take ice. Are there actual ice crystals in vanilla ice cream? How are they created? If ice is frozen water, does a frozen dairy liquid even qualify? does the word "ice" even have any meaning in this context? 

And cream. Is there any cream in the vanilla ice cream in your freezer? I mean, come on. Have you even read the label? how uninformed are you? Are there any dairy products at all in your ice cream? If you walk into a Dairy Queen and order a cone, did you know that you are technically not ordering ice cream but a soft serve product*?  

If you ask for ice cream in Siem Reap, even if you say the words in Khmer, will it mean anything to them? will they hand you something that resembles what you want?

And yet.... and yet.... if you walk into any ice cream parlor in the US, if you ask in any grocery store, if you order at any restaurant, and say you want vanilla ice cream, they will know what you are talking about.  We may have had an interesting pseudo-academic conversation here today, we may have dissected the idea of vanilla ice cream and "proved" that it does not exist except as a cultural construct in the United States, and yet every single one of us reading here** knows what I mean if I say I want vanilla ice cream.

Dial it back, people. Dial it back. 

* to be fair, I only know this because I googled while doing three minutes of research for this post. 

** I mean, probably. I've never seen any evidence that I have any international readers. 

Saturday, April 19, 2025

so, yeah, about those otc painkillers (a Migraines on Monday post that is not being posted on Monday)

Remember last year I told you I was no longer taking over-the-counter pain meds for headaches? Yeah, about that. Apparently I decided to punt on that today. I've had an entire week of migraines (which doesn't happen very often) so I am frustrated and pissed and also beyond grumpy (pls send Ts&Ps to my spouse). This morning I woke up with no headache (for the win) but a really bad, stabbing pain in my left shoulder (trapezius, I think) and neck. 

I've told you before that neck/shoulder pain is often a migraine pre-cursor for me, but after six days in a row of taking migraine meds, I really didn't want to take them again. Not only because I just didn't want to, but because I don't want to run out before my next refill date. So I tried stretching, I tried icing it, I tried meditating, to no avail. So about an hour ago I thought fuckit and took three advil, an extra-strength tylenol, and an aspirin. I feel better. Maybe not 100%, but better. (Also a Diet Dr. Pepper. I mean. It was an emergency.)

In other news, I've been on a cooking binge. Starting a couple of weeks ago, suddenly nothing in the fridge sounded good for breakfast or lunch. I still have not solved this problem, especially not for breakfast, but I've been making big pots of various things for lunch. I don't usually cook for lunch, but if I make a big pot of something and it lasts for several days, I can live with that. 

One of the things I tried was the famous Marry Me Chicken recipe (there are a million versions out there, that link is to the one that popped up first in a google search). But I did it in a crockpot using chicken thighs. It was OK. I thought the flavors would transfer, but it was very bland. I kept adding tomato paste and salt and lemon juice and even a half a teaspoon of brown sugar but could not perk it up. Did not stop us from eating it, but can't really recommend.  

As we've discussed ad nauseam, I'm not all that interested in cooking, so now I'm trying various different kinds of veggie soup-- the kind where you sauté onions and celery, then dump in a bunch of veggies and enough broth to cover, then cook the snot out of it. Kidding. Simmer for a couple of hours on the back of the stove. These have been good, but so far nothing that I'm excited enough to share.

It has occurred to me that I might be becoming vegetarian in my old age. I'd never be 100% vegan, and probably not even 100% vegetarian (vegan is no animal products at all, vegetarian is no meat/poultry/pork/fish but you still eat animal products like eggs, cheese, yogurt, and honey). I think I'm too old to be 100% anything, actually. But more and more often meat just doesn't sound good. That might be part of why the Marry Me Chicken recipe didn't work for me. 

And finally-- my Wordle streak was up to 178 days or something like that (173?) until I missed curse/nurse/purse last weekend, dammit. I'm considering skipping every Sunday so that I don't feel pressured to do it every day, as I sometimes did before that. Right. Like that's going to happen.

I am possibly overthinking this. ha.

Anyway. I don't know why I thought you'd want to know all this but here you go.

Wednesday, March 12, 2025

Whaaaaaat?? An S?!?!

I’ve moved on from Twitter, now known as X, because there’s no way I’m supporting, uh, that man. But oh my do I miss it today because there is an S ON SPELLING BEE. I mean!!!! Like NYT games nerds everywhere, I am gobsmacked. If the #nytspellingbee hashtag still exists I’m sure it exploded. I was still bleary this morning when I opened the bee, and I actually typed in a word starting with S before my jaw dropped— THERE’S AN S. I even checked to see if someone else edited it today, but it still says Sam. (*waves* Hi, Sam!)

I guess we are easily shocked, us word nerds. I have no idea if it’s a good thing or a bad thing to include S, but it is different! I’m taking deep, cleansing breaths. Whoa. 

(For the non word gamers, the editor of the Spelling Bee, Sam Ezersky, has previously said there would never be an S while he is editor because it explodes the number of words available with all the plurals. But according to Google, today is the 2,500th edition, so I guess he decided to shake things up a little.)

Monday, March 3, 2025

Migraines on Monday: Lingo continuous glucose monitor

As soon as I heard last year that you could order a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) online without a prescription, I knew I wanted to try it. There are currently two on the market, the Stelo, made by Dexcom (which I haven't tried), and the Lingo, made by Abbott Labs.  A Lingo lasts for two weeks, and with my intitial order, I got two of them. I paid $89, a slight discount over ordering one for $49, and shipping was free. So I was able to monitor my glucose levels for a month. I was mainly doing this out of curiosity-- what would spike my blood sugar? what would make it fall?

But I also wondered if there was something about my blood sugar levels that was triggering or contributing to migraines. After all, I am often low-grade hungry when I have a migraine. When I'm in that state, it doesn't seem to matter how much I eat, I'm just hungry. When I mentioned this to a neurologist years ago, he said, oh, your blood sugar drops, but he didn't offer any further commentary, and I've always wondered if there might be a connection.

So after a month of wearing a Lingo CGM, here is what I learned. Keep in mind that I am not a medical professional, so this is just a layperson reporting what she observed. Take with a grain of salt. Maybe a dump truck full of salt.

- First of all, there was no obvious correlation with migraines. Maybe my blood sugar level is slightly more erratic during a migraine-- a bit more ups and downs-- but even that wasn't obvious. There was no big dip or rise in blood sugar level before or during a migraine. 

- Logistics: It doesn't hurt to put it on. You apply it to the back of your upper arm, and it doesn't even "pinch" as much as getting a shot does. It has an applicator with a small needle, but the needle doesn't stay in your arm, it just inserts the filament that reads your blood sugar. There are several YouTube videos of people applying them if you want to see how it works. 

With the first unit, I placed it about midway between my elbow and my shoulder, slightly toward the "outside" of my arm (if there were a clock face with 12 being straight in front of me, it was at about 2 o'clock), a location I could easily reach. Since it's sweater weather here, I didn't have to worry about it being visible under short sleeves, but you can see the outline of it if you're wearing something thin, like a cotton turtleneck. I put the second one a little higher and a little further back, which didn't seem to make any difference.

I was worried that it would catch on something or fall off, so I spent the first couple of days being extra careful--I even covered it the first time I took a shower-- but the adhesive must be really strong, because it never budged. After 3 or 4 days I quit worrying about it. It must have some kind of miracle adhesive, because even though it stayed on with no problem, it wasn't difficult to take off-- similar to pulling off a bandaid.

You download the Lingo app, and then you can connect the unit to your phone via bluetooth, which worked exactly as the instructions said it would work. Once it's connected, you get a countdown timer for an hour--which apparently is the time it takes to set itself up-- and then you can track your blood sugar in real-time until it quits working two weeks later. 

So what did I learn? 

- For some reason, I thought if I had something sugary, my blood sugar would spike immediately. But that didn't happen, and I tested that out several times over the four weeks (you know, in the name of medical research). Usually it would take 15-20 minutes for there to be a resulting upward trend. 

Lingo App 

- I've read that caffeine impacts your blood sugar, and that's one of the main reasons you're supposed to get off caffeine. But every day I had my morning cup of black tea with a splash of oatmilk, and it never seemed to make any difference at all. In the screenshot, I had my tea around 7:30 and breakfast around 10--my levels are pretty steady until 10:30-ish. It would be interesting to know if coffee is different, but for tea and my metabolism, there was very little change. (In case you can’t read it, the times across the bottom of the graph are 6am, 9am, and 12pm/noon.) 

- Apparently, I have a pretty healthy pancreas. In a healthy person with a normally functioning pancreas, if you eat something that causes your blood sugar to rise, your pancreas releases insulin and brings it back down. My blood sugar would rise about twenty minutes after I ate, and depending on what I had eaten, it would continue to slowly rise for about 20-30 minutes, and then it would gradually come back down. It never stayed at its high point for more than a few minutes (except once, but I confess I didn't take the greatest notes and I don't remember what I ate at that meal. But still, once out of a month isn't all that concerning to me, and even then, it only stayed high for maybe twenty minutes). 

- The Lingo program told me at the end of the month that a healthy average blood sugar level for the month would be below 117 (I have no idea if that's what it tells everyone, or if it was specific to me and my situation), and mine was 110. Overall, my takeaway from this experiment is that I am pretty healthy, at least in terms of my blood sugar levels.

Which brings up the question: why do I beat myself up with guilt about how unhealthy I am? Why do any of us? I read an article in CNN this week about things to do to keep your brain healthy, and one of the things they listed was to moderate your blood sugar levels. The expert they quoted in this article said, we like to see our patients keep their average blood sugar under 105, and before I caught myself, I bit right in. Oh no, my immediate, not-quite-conscious guilt-prone self said, I am bad! I should try and get mine lower! But you know what? No. I reject that. I bet he is making a lot of money playing on people's guilt and getting them into his program so they can optimize their health. But I think I'm pretty OK with being average. 110 works for me.

In conclusion: I'm glad I did it, and I may do it again after some time to reflect. If you can afford it ($89 for the one-month supply of two monitors), it is fascinating. But I didn't notice any effect on migraines.

Friday, February 28, 2025

amazon boycott update

After the post below was written and scheduled, I found out that Bezos is no longer the majority share owner of Amazon, which is my own ignorance. I should have been more informed before I sat down to write either the previous post or this one. According to the Motley Fool website, in an article published last March, Bezos is the largest single shareholder of Amazon stock, but he only owns about 9%. More than sixty percent of shares are held by institutional investors. I didn't know that Bezos sold off billions of dollars worth of Amazon stock last year. So far that doesn't change anything about what I said below, but it might affect what I decide to do at some point in the future. Now you know. Or at least, now I know. 

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Just when I was thinking maybe I should slack off and not be so strict about my Amazon boycott, Bezos announced that he was restricting the opinions page in The Washington Post (which he owns) only to columns about "personal liberties" and "free markets." Per Bezos, they will not be publishing opposing viewpoints. 

That sounds so innocuous. Who is opposed to personal liberty or free markets? But it's the refusal to publish opposing viewpoints that is just downright scary. He probably has a PR staff that spent days trying to figure out how to say "we're shutting down free speech on our opinions page" without actually saying that, and making it sound like he's striking a blow for freedom. These billionaires say that they want free speech, but really they just want it for themselves-- the freedom to say what they want without anyone fact checking to see if it's actually true, or if there are reasonable opposing points of view. The Bezos PR machine claims it's a non-partisan move, but only conservatives are applauding.

So anyway. I'm still boycotting Amazon. It won't be 100%, because we have a family kindle account, and I'm not forcing my kids to boycott if they don't want to-- they're 34 and 27, they're not children. But neither of them is a frequent buyer, either. (Between the two of them, they've bought three books in the past year.) 

I'm allowing myself to use credits/points I've already paid for--like on Audible, where I have credits I paid for last August-- but so far I've been pretty strict about not handing him any new money. I'm sure he's quaking in his boots, but there's only this one way I can stand up for what I believe, and I'm going to use it. 

I'm just so disgusted by these tech billionaires and the blatant self-aggrandizing they try to disguise behind a lot of blathering about free speech and unrestricted markets. I'm not enough of an expert to argue with them here, but it doesn't take a lot of knowledge to distrust businessmen who are getting rich off "unrestricted free markets" that aren't all that free and unrestricted for anybody who isn't a billionaire. 

I told you in my last post that I had bought an e-reader that I didn't like from another company. It is a Nook made by Barnes&Noble, and it is sadly slow, with a clunky user interface. But I discovered that I can download the Nook app to our iPad and that works great. I've already bought several books from Barnes&Noble that I would normally have purchased from Amazon. I'm actually happy to support Barnes&Noble, who have returned to the winning strategy of loving books and the people who read them under their new CEO (James Daunt, who took over in 2019). 

I'll let you know if anything changes. (uh, besides what I already said in the paragraph at the top. ha.)

Friday, January 24, 2025

Resolved. (an amazon boycott)

Like many, I avoided the news and the inauguration entirely on Monday and Tuesday. I finally started skimming through the headlines on Wednesday, and no surprise, the whole thing was disturbing. But I think I was most struck by a picture of the four tech billionaires lined up in a row. Something inside me just curdled at the sight. 

I try to be open-minded, I try to see things from both sides--to the extent that I've alienated some of my liberal friends. But we all have our limits, and apparently this is mine. I guess I still had my Star Trek idealism buried somewhere inside of me, the idea that tech was going to lead us into a shiny new future. And then there they were, up on that stage. I cannot understand them. Wtf are they thinking? We're united in our willingness to sell our souls to make more money, seems to be the message from these four men who already have more money than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes. We’re united in our determination to remake the world to suit ourselves. We demand a world where no one can tell us no. 

It’s just so disappointing. So I’m stepping back where I can. I was already working on some of this. I quit using Twitter not long after Musk bought it, and then back in October I deactivated my account--which apparently is what you do to delete it (if you don't access your account for 30 days after deactivating it, it will be deleted, so presumably that has happened). I can't quit Facebook because of a few commitments, but over the past year I've gone weeks without checking either it or Instagram (and honestly never missed them, although I did miss some important news from friends that demonstrated why I'm not entirely quitting it). 

But I've still used Amazon. I almost wrote an entire post about this several months ago, about not being a pie-in-the-sky purist and recognizing that things are complicated, and that independent bookstores are stronger than ever, and authors and creatives are making more money than ever-- including thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of now-successful authors who would never have been published before Amazon revolutionized self-publishing.

Kindle is a great product. The last time I got pissed at Amazon and tried to untangle myself from it, I bought an e-reader from another company, spent a couple hundred dollars on books for it, and ended up never using it because it just wasn't as good. Also, I live in northwest Montana. I saw an outraged post on FB not long ago, written in all caps, about how “LITERALLY ANYTHING YOU CAN BUY ON AMAZON YOU CAN GET LOCALLY.” We have plenty of places to shop, but that is literally, demonstrably, not true. Ha.

But enough is enough. I'm not sure how long it will last, but I canceled my kindle unlimited subscription, ordered a last shipment of an item that I have not been able to source elsewhere, and I'm done. I’m sure that most things I  buy on Amazon I can get from another online source. And I have dozens of unread physical books on my shelves, plenty of unread already-paid-for books on my kindle, all those books on the other e-reader, and the library. I will not lack for things to read. It will be fine. Jeff Bezos will never know or care, but I just can't support him right now. My own line in the sand.

And I’m figuring out how to avoid Google, which is actually the hardest of the four. I could go on but maybe that’s enough for now.