My career as a platelet donor for the Red Cross has come to a halt due to the presence of HLA antibodies. This link from Mayo Clinic explains what they are and how you get them. Anyway, it doesn't affect whole blood donation so I'm still going to donate that.

I've been postcarding again and I sent off 2 sets of postcards this weekend. I wrote out a batch of 100 news boosting postcards for Postcards to Swing States and sent those to Georgia. And then, for Markers for Democracy, I wrote out 30 postcards for a school board campaign in Arkansas.

My mom and I were big into watching figure skating back in the 80s and 90s. We would follow who was in the Olympics and we even went to ice skating shows that would come to town. But, once mom died, I kind of lost interest in following it. That was our thing, no one else I know follows it and it just went by the wayside. Every now and then I pay some brief attention to what's going on in the skating world and, with the Olympics currently going on, I'm paying a little bit of attention again!

A couple weeks ago, I watched an interview with Amber Glenn. Now, she's been skating for a while but this is the first I ever heard of her, which I think just goes to show how out of touch I am with what's going on in figure skating! But I was really amazed by her story!

She has openly come out as pansexual/bisexual and other skaters talked about her being a role model for them because of that. And I was really touched with how awesome, supportive and careful her parents have been of her throughout her career. For example, Amber has an athlete's physique, not the typical very slender look of a figure skater. And, when she was young, coaches would want her to change her eating habits to lose weight. Her mom put her foot down and said that would cause muscle loss and they weren't doing THAT. How wonderful that her parents stood up for her because I don't know that a lot of parents would go against a coach like that. Anyway, she's found a way to work in the system and also be her authentic self and I just thought that on the whole her story was wonderful and affirming.

After that I stumbled on this routine by ice dancers Anaëlle Kouevi and Yann Homawoo, who are cousins. Here's a story about how they got started. They are in juniors now but maybe they'll be in the next Olympics. The routine was so fun and well done - definitely a pair to keep an eye on. Here's another routine of theirs from last season that was also really neat.

And then this weekend I've been watching videos of the Olympic team routines. I really liked Charlene Guignard and Marco Fabbri's Backstreet Boys routine and Yuma Kagiyama's routine was just ... WOW.

So, yeah, I'm back into ice skating, at least for the moment. Is anyone else a fan or watching it during the Olympics at least? Who are you rooting for, who are your favorites?

Listening

Some podcasts I've listened to this week:

I've been listening to the audio drama, Celeritas, for the past few weeks and I finished it. This was well-acted and had a good story. It's all about an astronaut's flight that has gone wrong and his struggle to find out what happened and when he is.

It was Bandcamp Friday so I bought a few more things off my wishlist:

That last buy, the one from Thomas Vent, was such a disappointment! I've been following him for years and I've really liked what he's put out. I thought this latest one sounded a little ... processed ... but when I played it for Best Son he was like, "That's AI." And he was right! I looked through the comments on his YouTube video and he responded to someone asking if it was AI with a weaselly statement about his sound "evolving", and experiementing with "new techniques" and it's still him behind the music. So lame. He was talented as it was - I don't know why he gave in to AI. It's like someone already being beautiful and then ruining themselves with unnecessary, bad plastic surgery.

Reading

I finished up Dave Barry's autobiography, Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass. I was liking it last week because it was light and funny, kind of a palate cleanser after all the history. The humor got kind of old after a while but he's had an interesting life and has done some neat things. It was an ok book!

Now I'm reading Clementine: The Life of Mrs. Winston Churchill by Sonia Purnell. I've been meaning to read this for years and just never got around to it before now. Clementine and Winston both had wretched childhoods and they were both, especially Winston, kind of different, but ultimately they seemed very suited to each other.

Can't remember where I heard of it but I signed up for a newsletter called 28 Days of Black History and every evening I've been reading something interesting. Some topics so far have been: How June Became Black Music Month, Celebrate Haiti Independence Day, This is the love story that changed America. You can still sign up if this interests you and read through the archives for anything you've missed.

Watching

Haven't watched a whole lot this past week. I'm now doling out episodes of Royal Flying Doctor Service since this is the last season (hopefully just for a while!) so I allowed myself one episode of that this week. And I also watched one episode of My Life is Murder. I'd be surprised if that didn't get renewed but it's so long between seasons (or, maybe like a year but it seems so long when you're waiting!) that I'm doling that out, too.

This week I'm sharing the cooking channels I watch on YouTube. These are pretty much just cooking. I watch other channels that have cooking as part of it (like Townsends) but that's not all the channel does.

OK, that's about it for this week. I do still have lots of extra links I want to share out but I need to corral them and make sure I haven't already posted them. Some are in a note on my phone and I have 2 different drafts in my e-mail with links. It's a complete hoarding situation!

When I first started using Zonelets I had Disqus set up as a commenting system but it looked obnoxiously ugly and I ditched it. Some people are happy to not have blog interaction but I'd love to hear from you if you have any thoughts you want to share! You can respond through my guestbook or email. If you found this link on Discord or the 32-Bit Cafe Discourse, you can message me there or leave a message on my Neocities profile page.