Peeps, here’s some flowers (a little bit bigger than a nickel) for your Saturday afternoon. 🌸💘

#photos #flowers #forsale

Get the photo print

I haven’t done much with the yard or the garden since maybe summer of 2015 but today I cut down all the dead flowers, shrubs, and the like and put it all on the garden. Emptied all the pots from the shed that were only holding dead plants and dirt onto the garden, too. Even emptied the compost bin.

I’ll let the garden rest and ferment for another year and maybe next Spring I’ll actually plant.

The yard’s hard, got a lot of emotion tied to it.

Also planted milkweed seeds along the west side of the house. 😊

#photos #garden

Never alone…

I come home from work and nobody’s here. I open the windows and hear the birds chirping. We’re never alone, peeps. ❤️

I was thinking about this more this morning, thinking of how limited I am when I live in my own head, confine myself to only what I see in front of me.

When I’m home alone I’m regularly reminded of my aloneness. The sounds of my feet on the whitewashed plywood bounce around the walls just the same as my thoughts bounce around in my own head. It feels like living in an echo chamber inside and out.

Life is so much bigger than my dining room, than the four walls of my house. When I open the windows and expose my ears to something more…I’m reminded of that. I hear the wind in the trees with their leaves gently clapping. I hear the birds singing to each other and that little puppy dog yapping next door. I hear the cars going to and fro and the neighbors living their lives just a stone’s throw away.

I opened a window at 8:43 am this morning

Opening the windows brings those sounds inside, fills my space with the reminder that we’re never alone. There’s a life-force inside all of us that bonds us together just because we’re living beings. It doesn’t matter if we’re birds or leaves or human beings or puppy dogs. We’re all linked just because we are. A network of neurons each transmitting our pulses to one another in the global space. That’s almost too corny but whatever.

The only thing I need to do is open the window to un-sever that connection.

Sounds riding their waves, peeps. It’s a magical thing.

PS- it’s funny that I have access to the whole world by way of the internet. But when I sit on my phone my life feels small and shallow. When I open the window life is big and full.

PS2- thank god for Spring. Winter makes me wanna fly over the cuckoo’s nest.

#lettherebehope

It’s just after 8am on a Saturday morning. The sun is shining, the coffee has been brewed. Maggie is with her mom.

I think that means I’m supposed to play video games in my underwear until noon.

🎮 🤔 #games

#photos #sugarskull 💀

I come home from work and nobody’s here. I open the windows and hear the birds chirping. We’re never alone, peeps. ❤️

Never alone… (cont) →

#allisnotlost

This is an open letter to the politicians who decided it would be better if our browsing history wasn’t private.

As we all know on March 28th House Republicans outvoted the Democrats to repeal the “Protecting the Privacy of Customers of Broadband and Other Telecommunication Services” law. President Trump signed off on the bill on April 3rd.

I’ve heard and read people say that they’ve nothing to hide so why does it matter?

It matters because it’s not just us but our kids, too. If you have kids with phones or tablets, kids that get on the web and surf around — well what they do online is now up for sale. Comcast or your ISP of choice or cell phone provider can take that usage and sell it to Walmart or Target or whoever else they want.

It’s not just our browser history that we need to worry about either. Before the FCC’s privacy laws went into effect, various ISPs were actually hijacking their customer’s searches.

Imagine if you will:

1. You search for “brownies” in Google
2. Comcast intercepts your search and sends it to their partner before sending it to Google
3. The partner has a deal with Duncan Hines so the partner tells Comcast to send you to duncanhines.com
4. Comcast sends you duncanhines.com without you ever seeing Google’s search results page

ISPs were actually doing this in the past before the privacy laws took hold. Your online, personal data is no longer safe from prying eyes and people with money. We’ll now be profiled and sold and so will our kids and so will their searches.

Imagine again if you will:

1. You’re walking around in public with your cell phone
2. Verizon knows where you are based on the cell towers
3. Verizon analyzes where you went and sells all your travel/shopping patterns
4. Verizon does this every moment your phone is turned on

That’s real life but it’s no different if you swap out “walking around” with “surfing the web” or “snapchatting” or “facebooking.”

When Maggie asked me why the House voted to repeal the law, I told her that our laws often aren’t really about protecting or helping us, especially in this case. This law repeal is about helping corporations. It doesn’t serve us, the people of the United States, at all.

From the way I read S.J.Res. 34 though, we’ll have the option to opt-out instead of the more strict opt-in as before. I hope that’s the case. I couldn’t find any settings in my Comcast account on their website and I imagine it would be the last thing they’d add if they did.

Regardless, I set up PureVPN for Maggie and I to use. All our internet traffic is tunneled through it so Comcast and T-Mobile will only know we’re connecting to a VPN. Where we go from there and what we do will be off limits. PureVPN also doesn’t log our data.

And for the people who voted for Trump, Maggie and I thank you.

#politics #privacynews #maggie

☀️💘 #photos #sunsets

#photos #cats

Definitely at CrossFit.

#photos #facebook