I meant to post about this last week but I totally spaced it despite writing myself a note about it. A couple of weeks ago I went to the local natural history museum for a lecture. This was done in conjunction with an exhibit they had running at the time. First of all, this was on a Wednesday and it was 112F/44C that day. Who wants to go out in the middle of the week in that kind of heat? The museum was PACKED. I was so happy to see such support for the museum!

Anyway, the lecture was on prehistoric exchange networks and the significance and use of Scarlet Macaws in the Southwest. It was presented by the Phoenix city archaeologist and was super interesting! Scarlet Macaws are native to Central America yet remains have been found well into Arizona and New Mexico. There is no written history so even though remains have been found, there is still a lot that is unknown.

By the way, not very many American cities have dedicated city archaeologists and Phoenix is one of them. It's been an official city position since 1929.

I've been doing some postcarding again! I signed up with Markers for Democracy to write get out the vote cards for voters in Virgina. Every group is a little bit different in how they do things. With this group, you have to provide the postcards and they give you the instructions and addresses. They encourage their writers to use lots of different colors or highlighting to make dates and names stand out. They also want you to print out a disclaimer sticker stating that the card was paid for by you. That's the only group out of 4 that I've worked with that requires such a statement. I figure it must be some kind of legal postal and/or campaign requirement.

I also wrote cards of support to the 3 US Fish and Wildlife and 6 US Forest Service sites in Arizona.

I was running out of my stash of postcards so I ordered a batch of 25 old blank postcards from a seller on Etsy. There were a lot of Seattle and Cape Cod cards in the batch, some of which I used for the support cards. There were also 4 advertisement cards that were postcard sized, which I thought was kind of a cheat. Those will be used as book markers or scratch paper.

Listening

Since I've been postcarding I've been listening to more podcasts than usual:

Reading

I finished Downbelow Station and it was really good! Kind of confusing at times because of all the competing factions but quite a ride! If you like space opera, then I would definitely recommend this. I would say if you're familiar with The Expanse and enjoyed it, you might enjoy this, too. I've just started the next book in this series, Merchanter's Luck.

I definitely don't need any more books but Martha Wells (Murderbot) has a Humble Bundle deal going on right now and I caved. Well, it helps support the World Central Kitchen so it was for a good cause! Anyway, it's a 14 book bundle and I believe all the Murderbot books are in it.

Watching

So I am absolutely not into boats, ships, the ocean, travelling on the open sea or anything of that nature. However, one of my fairly recent YouTube rabbit holes has been this channel, What's Going on With Shipping?. I can not believe how interesting this channel is! The description from the page is:

"...focuses on Maritime Industry Policy, and current events in the Maritime Sector, along with Maritime History. The channel features videos that examine the world's merchant marines, the international maritime sector, current events in the maritime trade, and history."
That sounds pretty dry but I've seen ships on fire, the Chinese and Phillipine coast guards going after each other, stories about the Dark Fleet. Super cool, give it a go even if, like me, you think you have no interest at all in shipping.

In my Babylon 5 rewatch I just finished "Point of No Return" and I am still feeling like what's happening on the screen is too-close-for-comfort as far as what's happening in real life. I love B5 but this rewatch is turning slightly uncomfortable.

That's it for this week! I've got to get going and do some room prepping because tomorrow I'm having a kitty visitor! His mom is going to be travelling and he's diabetic and needs a daily insulin shot. She isn't leaving till the end of next month so we decided he would have a couple of field trips to visit me at my place and get him comfortable with being here. I'm so excited!

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