Last Thursday I spent the day as a substitute teacher at two of our local schools. Teaching was, hands down, the Hardest Job I’ve Ever Done. I checked in at the middle school office and was handed a few pieces of paper that stressed the importance of emergency procedures and safety for the students. When I got to the classroom, I had to read the notes left for the sub by the teacher. Thankfully, the…
“Nonprofit With Balls” is a blog that’s all that and a bag of chips (with some unicorns thrown in for good measure). Its posts, written by Vu Le (pronounced “voo lay” – because I know how to read an About page), offer a typically irreverent, but uncomfortably honest look at the nonprofit world. Vu’s humor makes the uncomfieness easier to bear. (And, frankly, darn it, we do-gooders are not the dour types that we are…
Finally! It is done! Last night, I tied my crazy quilt and hand-sewed the binding, completing a project I started probably a decade ago. I can’t tell you exactly when I started it because I don’t remember. It was quite the process, though, with lots of lag time between tasks. I was inspired to create a crazy quilt after hanging and examining some at work. (I work at the Weyerhaeuser Museum, which gives me the…
I’m reading a book called “What We Leave Behind” by Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay. It is depressing as hell. It explains how people are murdering the earth, which we absolutely are, but hasn’t offered any solutions thus far. I’m only part-way through the book and am hoping there will be some concrete suggestions that help me feel as though I can do something. Being left in a hopeless morass by a book is no…
With the debacle that our federal government has become (yes, the entire government appears to be a debacle at the moment), I’ve been trying to figure out how government can be improved down to its core. I put forth 9 ideas for revamping U.S. elections in October 2016. Now I’m rethinking one of those suggestions. One of the biggest problems (if not THE biggest problem) with our government at both the federal and state levels…