Kimberly Hirsh

Information is my love language and how I like to learn about the world, but I also can start to drown in too much of it and need to scale back. So if you are like me, especially right now when there is A Lot Going On, you might like to do what I’m doing.

For calls to action, I have picked one main issue to focus on (library advocacy) and follow a few organizations dedicated to that work (Every Library, For the People, ALA). For broader concerns, I am reading my local Indivisible group’s newsletter.

I am focused on taking one action daily, ideally one that doesn’t activate my nervous system extra. So today I emailed my senators and told them to vote NO on Vought’s confirmation. (Please don’t at me about the effectiveness of email vs. phone. Or how I should really show up in person. Please trust me to know my own availability and capability.) I also emailed my representative and asked her to demand accountability re: an unelected private person’s access to the treasury.

I am also trying to remember to do other things that keep me grounded, like crocheting and reading romance. I’m trying to find joy where I can.

I hope this has been helpful for you.

🔖 Read The Logic of Destruction by Timothy Snyder.

Nothing is inevitable. Do not be alone and do not be dismayed. Find someone who is doing something you admire and join them.

🔖 Read How to organize under authoritarian creep in a closing civil society.

This is my playbook moving forward.

🔖 Read Trump’s education department says book bans are a ‘hoax.’ Teachers disagree..

Finished reading: Rule of the Aurora King by Nisha J. Tuli 📚

🍿 Watched Dog Man.

Exactly what it says on the tin. If you enjoy the Dog Man graphic novels, you’ll enjoy the movie, and if you don’t, you won’t.

Today’s Progress: Completed the freeCodeCamp certification project, “Learn CSS Colors by Building a Set of Colored Markers.”

Thoughts: This was fun to do and after doing some reading, I’ve realized that for my purposes, I don’t actually need to know how to draw with CSS unless I decide to try and make some wacky layouts with shapes or something. In which case, I’ll review. But in the meantime, CSS is for styling HTML that structures content, just as I feel it should be. This project is not hard but I definitely had to use references sometimes. Which is fine! But slows things down a bit. For this project, the use of a checkbox gave me the idea to make this a Mystery Shack feedback form so I could use Mabel’s rigged “Do you like me?” form.

Link(s) to work: Mystery Shack Feedback survey

Today’s Coding Progress: Completed the freeCodeCamp projects, “Learn CSS Colors by Building a Set of Colored Markers.”

Thoughts: CSS is already breaking my brain here. Using it to style empty containers chafes against my feeling that it should be for styling content, not styling blank space. I thought this was a thing of me not being smart or with-it enough to understand this use of CSS, but now I think it’s a conceptual problem. From this conceptual problem flow all kinds of struggles with understanding properties and the arguments they take. This is definitely a place where a reference will come in handy. So I think I’ll hunt down some writing about using CSS this way and a resource that will be a good reference.

Little coding update! Completed the freeCodeCamp projects “Learn HTML by Building a Cat Photo App”, “Learn Basic CSS by Building a Cafe Menu.” This is all familiar stuff, but I always appreciate the reminder to use semantic tags like section & the refresh of how forms work.

🔖 Read Primark launches clothing range designed for people with disabilities.

I love this. I hope we see it spread to other retailers.