Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

2017 was the year when I've actually thought "I haven't called my senators this week, it's time." Like a lot of us, I've felt both that I wanted to be doing more to resist Trump and fascism, and that I didn't have the energy for as much as I was doing (occasionally on the same day).

In part to reassure myself that I have been doing stuff, I kept records in a spreadsheet. So:

In person, I went to ten rallies, protest marches, and vigils (these overlap, obviously) and attended one legislative committee hearing. I've also been volunteering to help new citizens register to vote (three times so far). I think I posted about all of these at the time.

I made sixty-one calls to government officials (probably at least ten times as many as I’d made in my entire previous life). That includes both Massachusetts senators, two members of Congress (plural because we moved from Katherine Clark's district to Mike Capuano's, three members of the state legislature, the governor of Massachusetts, the state attorney general and the Middlesex County district attorney, plus the Department of Homeland Security, House Judiciary Committee, and Senate Committee on Homeland Security. Some of these I was fairly sure were a waste of effort at the time, but it was effort I could spare; what seems most likely to have made a difference were the calls to the attorney general and DA, calling for them to reverse tainted convictions for drug possession.

I also sent a bunch of emails, faxes (before resistbot overloaded Congress’s fax machines), post cards, and online comments, and donated to a few organizations that are doing relevant good work.

The rest of this semi-quantitative review of my year is more personal:

Exercise continues to be mostly either body weight stuff or exercises using resistance bands, and I’ve either increased the weight, resistance, or number of repetitions, or kept them steady, in the course of the year, which pleases me. (Most of the increases in resistance or number of reps have been in the past few months.) I haven’t done as much walking as I’d like since late summer because of hip pain. I’m going to follow up with my doctor about that in two weeks, and probably schedule PT. I'd like to be walking more, but am otherwise pleased with how this is going.

( numbers and some discussion )

I read (or had read to me) seventy-two books, of varying lengths, including some rereads. Quite a lot of that was either while traveling or during the part of the summer while I was healing a case of tendonitis and using the keyboard little, and pens barely at all. I also bounced off several books, ran out of time on a couple, and am in some sense in the middle of a few more.

I slept in four cities this year: Arlington and Somerville, Mass., New York, and Montreal. One of these years I may take another vacation that isn't primarily to visit people I care about, and maybe even go somewhere new.

I tried two new foods: pineberry, which is apparently a variety of strawberry, and nutmeg jam, which is made from a different part of the nutmeg plant than either of the spices that are made from it (nutmeg and mace).

This morning I tried nutmeg jam: it's a Grenadan food, made from the "juice and pulp of nutmeg pericarp," and worked well as a flavoring for plain yogurt. It's a milder flavor than I expected, but that just meant needing to use a bit extra. This is definitely an example of a flavor I can have by mixing my own, and not by buying flavored yogurt. So is the cactus jelly I had in Monday's yogurt, courtesy of Jo, but that didn't quite feel like a new food: when Jo offered me cactus jelly my reaction was "yes please, I like cactus fruit," and with this I had no idea what to expect. (The spices nutmeg and mace are prepared from the same fruit as that jam, and taste significantly different from each other.)

Discussing the nutmeg jam with adrian_turtle this morning, I mentioned I was going to post about it, which led to talking, and thus thinking, about what counted as a new food for me: it tends more toward ingredients than preparations, but there's some fuzziness here, given that the nutmeg jam feels like a new kind of thing.

Along similar lines: some days after my birthday, cattitude splurged on Nantucket bay scallops at the farmers market, because he'd been disappointed by the bay scallop appetizer at Legal Seafood. Based on both flavor and the discussion with the fishmonger, those scallops are a different species than the bay scallops we got in New York, which were from the Great South Bay next to Long Island. (And that in turn suggests that the flavorless (though cheap) bay scallops imported frozen from China may not be closely related to either.) So I'm noting those, though at this point I may be getting into varietals, like my apple and cherry posts, rather than majorly different ingredients.

The nutmeg jam was a gift from Cyd and Keith, who brought it back from Grenada last month. The label said "Moine Delice Nutmeg Jam" and lists the ingredients as "Sugar, juice and pulp of nutmeg pericarp, pectin, citric acid." The company that makes it is de la Grenada industries Ltd, St. Paul's, Grenada, W.I. (I am noting this despite doubting that it will help me, or anyone, find more.)

cattitude and I just got home from an Arlington meeting for the livestream/beginning to do stuff of the ACLU's "People Power" grassroots initiative. (Yes, a national organization trying to organize a grassroots anything is weird, but we have information on getting stuff done at the city, town, or county level.) The first project is to try to get local law enforcement not to cooperate with ICE, with specifics on what to do and not do, that apparently were developed by ACLU lawyers working with police chiefs and such.

There's a proposal to make Arlington a sanctuary town on the next town meeting agenda; someone at the meeting is going to get in touch with the state ACLU to see whether he should try to get the proposal amended, or whether it's close enough. Someone else is going to be contacting the attorney general, I think to ask what the state is doing (I've forgotten the details, so I'm glad it's not my task). We might also be calling the Middlesex County sheriff to ask about the pieces of this enforcement thing that are relevant to his job.* It was good to talk to other locals who want to do something, and we have another meeting scheduled in a few weeks. (This was one of at least three events in Arlington, so we may wind up coordinating, or people who went to this meeting may go to the next meeting of one of them, or vice versa.)

I was surprised to see Cyd (WINOLJ/DW) there; she said she hadn't been able to find a Belmont meeting, and left when we got into discussing Arlington-specific plans.

Side note: the host offered tea (several choices of tea, and a proper electric kettle), but when I asked about milk and sugar had only hemp milk, so I tried it, and didn't like it at all (unlike soy milk). I gave up on that and had iced tea instead, for the caffeine.

*I gather that in most of Massachusetts, the sheriff's job is only to run and set policy for the county jail, so "don't turn people over to ICE or ask about immigration status" is relevant, but reminding them about the importance of warrants isn't.