It’s a beautiful day again here, and I hope wherever you are that you’re safe, dry, and doing OK.

In California, The San Diego Union Tribune has dropped the paywall for the storm coverage. Yes, they’re gonna ask you to drop your adblocker for the page.* Looking at the radar, it’s very, very, very wet in SoCal right now. Hope everyone is doing as well as they can be.

WordPress has a writing prompt on their landing page, and today’s was “What do you love about where you live?” I got nothing, except Lily and my little brother. I don’t hate Fairfax County, but I don’t love it – but I also don’t know where else I’d go. Liberal, affordable, smallish, and good weather seems to be a bit of a unicorn location, LOL.

And speaking of Lily – it’s the third Sunday in August, which means it’s International Lily Appreciation Day! Established in 2019 by my brother, likely after a night at the bar. We’ve had breakfast and brushing time and she has a full basket of towels, and of course there will be extra treats today.

I think I’ve worked through my weather/Covid existential dread from yesterday. My friend Ashley let me know about an upcoming book by Adam Greenberg, Beyond Hope: Collective Power and Mutual Care in the Long Emergency – it’s currently only available for pre-order in the UK, but I will definitely be pre-ordering as soon as it’s available in the US.

The fact of the matter is – and we’ve seen it over and over again – we’re all we’ve got, and honestly, at least in the US, this “I have to do it myself or else I suck” thing that has been drilled into our heads since childhood, welp, that’s left a lot of folks with no damn network.

Well, I need to figure out what I’m going to do with myself for the rest of the day. There’s lots of things I should do around the house, but nothing critical, so…

You have a great day.

* Someone on Mastodon who doesn’t even follow me, decided he had to point that out. FFS, I know we all love our adblockers, but journalists also need to eat. Get over it for a couple days on one site.