The required pic of yesterday's turkey day table. I would love to do a vegetarian dinner next year. This day after it is a super dreary rainy cold day on which I am tracking the online auction and trying to find new emails for about 60 people now that uninets.net is dead. I don't have my snow tires on yet, so I'm not running around in the mixed precip. The auction is doing over $1500 in its first week.

November is a dull gray time in my light-starved brain. Efficiency Maine approved our grant application for car chargers; now I'm working on getting an Amish shed built and installed next to the parking lot so that we can wall-mount the chargers on it. The grant is a 90% reimbursement thing, so I'm hoping to use TIF funds for the other 10% and for at least part of the shed costs where I'm pushing the security and lighting aspect of it. Now that we are officially part of the Maine Regional Library System, I will be pushing to add those perks we have been awaiting: interlibrary loan with van service, cloud library, and database access.

Every morning I play Worldle, a daily game where you guess a country by its shape. I look at a map, try to find the shape, put in a guess, it tells me direction and kilometers of the correct guess; I go in that direction and guess. I am super terrible are remembering shapes; I have to put a verbal tag on it, like flounder swimming northeast, or tadpole headed west, to remember it for a few minutes. The guessing doesn't matter; the point for me is to hit the link to the exhaustive Wikipedia article and read all about it. First the early history, wave after wave of invasions and wars and blending populations. Then how it got through World War II, then its economy and human rights status. Some countries are deeply miserable places to live, with all my favorite things (blasphemy, atheism, homosexuality) punishible by death. Some are land-locked, some enclaved within other countries. This game is the geography course I never took, and it comes to me one country per day. Highly recommended.

If it's a few days before an election that could change everything, then I'm walking about and looking at milkweed. Timothy Snyder says America is on the ballot. Milkweed is melodramatic, flung about, implies a time dimension because it always looks like something just happened. We got word from our regional coordinator that our library has been accepted into the state library system, this about a year earlier than I expected. Coordinator says this never happens. The next step is to get our money requests to the budget committees of the six towns, and then to crank up our second online auction. Our little mission to build community and fight misinformation is doing well. I hope our democracy is still doing ok after Tuesday.

This weekend I read Jenny Offill's Weather, attracted to its small format and opening quote. Its mix of comedy, anxiety, and impending doom in the age of Trump felt familiar. I may begin stopping people on the street and asking What is the core delusion? It's written in short snippets, like doom scrolling, and I could watch a football game while reading it.

Notes from a town meeting in Milford, Connecticut, 1640.
Voted, that the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof;
voted that the earth is given to the Saints;
voted that we are the Saints.

Also read the memoir Gender Queer so I could see why some people want it banned. It bothered me that the author is so self-absorbed and spent so many years figuring out eir gender issues that e lost years of being a productive human being. You can't be happy and productive without figuring out your issues and getting on with it. This book is valuable to have around in the Young Adult section because it might save someone years of figuring stuff out.