Hi! I'm Kimberly. This website is my online home and commonplace book. A large language model called it "a digital diary that no one asked for." This front page houses a complete stream of all of my short notes, blog posts, and photos.

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🗒️ Week Notes, 2024, Weeks 3 through 5: A Link to the Past and Link’s Awakening Are Super Fun

It’s three weeks’ worth of week notes at once!

My son M’s school has a “Day On” on Martin Luther King, Jr. day. They choose a theme for the day and hold a celebration where the whole school community, including parents, is welcome, and then spend the second half of the day on service projects. Our family only did the celebration part of the day this year, but next year I plan for us to help with the part of the day where you sort book donations to Book Harvest. I’m also planning to join the celebration for the choir next year.

The theme for this year was “Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.” The choir sang 3 songs I love: “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” “Heal the World,” and “Stand By Me.” Middle and high school students read poems they had written. Pauli Murray’s niece and biographer Rosita Stevens-Holsey was the keynote speaker and shared wonderful insight into Rev. Dr. Murray’s life and work. I was so happy to have attended.

At the end of that week, I took a quick overnight trip to Baltimore to present at the American Library Association LibLearnX conference. In the end, my session was less a presentation or workshop and more a conversation, as we only had about 5 people attending. We were able to really customize the conversation to the participants’ interest. My BFF lives near Baltimore, so I got to have dinner with her the night before the presentation and hang out with her after, when we went to the Edgar Allan Poe house and wandered around a cute shopping area.

After I got home from that trip, I was exhausted and then a little bit sick, too. So I rested a lot and had a pretty quiet week.

Then this past week was more quiet time at home and handling administrative stuff like having my car inspected and renewing the registration, rescheduling a dental appointment I canceled due to a migraine, and completing the job application to be the half-time school librarian at M’s school.

It was a good time for consuming culture. I’ve been reading romance novels, The Age of Cage, and How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are. I watched Emily in Paris. I played A Link to the Past, which is phenomenal and deserves its status as a classic, and the Switch remake of Link’s Awakening, which is super fun.

Saturday M developed a nasty case of pinkeye. He’s on his second day home from school and on antibiotics for it and seems to be improving.

That’s it for this post!

Parents who are freelancers/self-employed, what do you do when your kid is home sick? Do you just sort of give up on getting work done?

🎮 Finished Link’s Awakening.

Super fun!

📺🎄 Watched Christmas Flow, mostly for the Parisian locations.

📺 Watched Emily in Paris. All of it, fairly quickly.

Gorgeous views of Paris and fun to see how much of the French I understood but I don’t find Emily herself particularly winning (she’s like a caricature of what Boomers think Millennials are like).

Finished reading: Then Came You by Lisa Kleypas 📚

Classic 90s pre-Victorian historical, medium spice level.

📺 Watching Emily in Paris, mostly for the gorgeous locations and Sylvie’s fashion. Emily’s relationships with men stress me out.

I just shared in a fibromyalgia Facebook group what it takes for me to get decent sleep. Thought I’d share here as well:

  • 300mg gabapentin (prescription)
  • 250mg GABA
  • 10mg melatonin
  • 50mg CBD oil
  • 900mg oral magnesium
  • 400mg topical magnesium

All selected with my doctor.

Finished reading: The Charm Offensive by Alison Cochrun 📚

Lovely! What if the dude who was producing The Bachelor fell in love with the bachelor? This book is all kinds of sweet and affirming, with great queer, neurodivergence, race, and mental illness rep.

📚 Reading Notes: A Quaker Book of Wisdom by Robert Lawrence Smith, Chapter 9, “Education”

…a good school is one that is constantly engaged in self-examination, in improving itself, in becoming wiser in its ability to both teach and inspire.

Smith returns to this idea many times in this chapter. Every school I’ve worked at had some sort of process for this, but Smith says that in a Quaker school, everyone in the school is involved in this process. In the public schools where I’ve worked, there was always a School Improvement Team (PDF). This is basically a committee and it consists entirely of adults. Students aren’t on the SIT. Further, as you might expect in a public school, the success of the School Improvement Team and the School Improvement Plan is evaluated based almost entirely on students’ scores on standardized tests, which to my mind is an incomplete measure of learning.

It’s a school that is intent on turning out good people who will help make a better world.

At the beginning of every school year, M’s teachers have us complete a survey and one of the questions is always about our hopes for the school year. We always answer that we want him to grow into himself and to continue to learn how to be a caring member of our community. I love this idea. While I suspect most teachers in most schools have this in mind as their intention, the systems and structures of compulsory public education, at least in North Carolina when I was working in public schools, tended to focus on performance in a few academic subject areas and compliance with school policies. I like the idea of a whole school taking this approach, rather than only individual teachers.

It’s the soul of a school—its intangible persona, its character, its principles, its daily life over time, the impressions it makes, the efforts it inspires, and the moral authority it possesses—that helps mold a child into an educated, assured, humane, and caring adult.

Yes! Especially the daily life over time: how we spend our moments is how we spend our days is how we spend our years is how we spend our life. The life of a school is in the day-to-day.

At a good school teachers and students are jointly engaged in a search for truth…

This jibes well with a school librarian’s focus on inquiry-driven learning.

Teachers… work to provide a climate of sensitivity to the human condition.

This is so critical. When I was a student teacher and first set foot in my mentor teacher’s classroom, I was appalled by what seemed to me to be an out-of-control class with absolutely no attention paid to Latin, the class’s subject matter. (I was 22 and I like to think I’m less judgy now.) By the end of my four months in student teaching, my perspective had totally transformed: I saw that my mentor teacher was more concerned with supporting her students than with a laser focus on their academic achievement, and that her love and support was a critical foundation before they could have academic success.

Without input from people of differing life experiences and cultures, a school quickly becomes insular and intellectually stagnant.

It seems obvious but it’s absolutely necessary to say.

…moments of silence help students center themselves amidst the hubbub of the school day.

To quote the Carolina Friends School website:

Settling In and Out
We use this Quaker practice of shared silence as a meaningful way to make oneself present in the moment, focus or redirect attention, and create a shared energy and sense of intention with a community.

Back to the book…

Another characteristic of Quaker schools is that they have involved students in community service at all grade levels.

Experimental education is the name of the game in Quaker schools, and they are constantly cooking up new ways of doing things.

And what’s probably my favorite quote from the chapter:

There is no formula for imparting love of learning. Despite new methodologies, there must always be reliance on the old virtues of skills, care, love, patience, and time.

Care, love, patience, and time are all things that the structures of public schools make it hard for teachers to prioritize, though I bet most teachers would love to be able to prioritize them.

My kid has started randomly singing “Bela Lugosi’s dead” (like, that one phrase) so I can retire now. My adorable babybat.

🍿 Watched Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Can’t believe I’ve never seen this before. Surprised to find that Sean Penn was my favorite part of the film, but then, Jeff Spicoli is a spiritual big brother to Ted Theodore Logan and Bill S. Preston, Esquire, so it makes sense.

🗨️📚 “Take the time to take time because nobody else will do it for you.” Anne Berest, Audrey Diwan, Caroline de Margaret, and Sophie Mas, How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are: Love, Style, and Bad Habits

I went upstairs to get my glasses. I came downstairs with two books and no glasses. This is peak Kimberly. (I’m nearsighted so I don’t need the glasses to read.)

Finished reading: New Adult by Timothy Janovsky 📚

Like if 13 Going on 30 was instead 23 Going on 30. Timothy Janovsky’s characters make me so happy, they’re so heart-full. Also lots of good stuff about keeping comedy in its proper place in your life rather than letting it become an all-consuming obsession.

<img src=“https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/17595/2024/1000002085-01.jpeg" width=“600” height=“600” alt=“A book titled ‘New Adult’ by Timothy Janovsky is centrally placed on a textured fabric surface, surrounded by colorful tarot cards and small heart-shaped stones. The book cover is adorned with illustrations of young adults engaged in various activities and has stars scattered around. The image features a quote from the New York Times praising the novel as “witty, playful, heartbreaking, and intensely poetic”. The overall mood of the image is whimsical and colorful, evoking a sense of curiosity.">

People of the Internet who wear scents from small businesses, what do you do when your signature scent is discontinued? I have a bottle of Whisper Sisters Goth Club ‘89 and when it runs out, I won’t be able to get a new one.

Finished reading: A Dish Best Served Hot by Natalie Caña 📚

A lovely, slightly spicy romance. This one resonates a lot because one of the main characters is an oldest sibling who feels responsible for everything.

Finished reading: A Proposal They Can’t Refuse by Natalie Caña 📚

Super sweet and a little steamy romance.

I was in Baltimore for just over 24 hours for a conference but I did find time for just a bit of goth literary tourism.

A plaque on a brick wall outside the Baltimore Edgar Allan Poe house, marking it as a National Historic Landmark honoring Poe for his literary achievements.

Sorry to have missed the Micro.blog analog meetup! My sense of timing is a bit discombobulated due to conference travel and changes to it. See y’all next month!

Want to read: Grove Hollow Metamorphosis: A 1980s Gothic Paranormal Romance Novel by Shelby Nicole McFadden 📚

Probably going to buy this one but I’ve told myself I have to finish one of the books I own before I may.

Finished reading: In the Case of Heartbreak by Courtney Kae 📚

Highest of recommendations here. This book is a cute romance but it’s also healing to read.

📚🗨️

You are not a burden… You are a blessing.

Just Courtney Kae still wrecking me with In the Case of Heartbreak, that’s all.

📚🗨️

Your feelings are valid and important no matter how they make me feel… you aren’t responsible for my response.

Read this in Courtney Kae’s In the Case of Heartbreak last night and then wept uncontrollably for a while. Is this what a trauma response feels like?

🗨️

Get a group of people around you that you love, and that love you… Give them an idea that has enough empty space in it that they can make it their own. When you get it back, it’ll be better than you ever thought possible.

Jim Henson, quoted in this article about Miss Piggy’s creator’s home