Another month has come to an end. Goodbye August, it was real. A bit too much rain, but I’m not complaining. I’d much rather deal with rain than extreme heat. We are just a small patch of habitable land on a slowly dying planet. And most don’t have a clue as to how they might assist in keeping the planet alive.

Today, what a day. I spent the morning sending emails out to people I know, asking them to vote for the BLBP as their favorite nonprofit. I further explained that if we get enough votes, we’ll be invited to a reception at the Captain Cook hotel in downtown

Stormy on State Fair milking stand

Anchorage. I’m thinking that if we are invited to this reception, that I’d stay overnight, and in this way, celebrate the accomplishment. We’ll see. I’m defying convention right now by sending out individual emails rather than doing the group thing – I want assurance that one on one communication works. I am sure that some organizations will put a single message on Facebook or Twitter and in this way get their vote numbers up there.

I kept at this very repetitive task until 12:30 p.m. when I then attended a Zoom Conference with a member of the Foraker Group. I think it was successful. I was really pleased with how it went. Pete had to bow out at 1 p.m. and go and teach a class. So I did double duty, providing my commentary and what I presumed was his commentary.

I came away from this meeting feeling like a weight had been lifted off my back. We are going to get much needed advice on how to continue with our Bright Lights Book Project endeavors. It was agreed, we do need more board members, and we can and should recruit them at our open house.

I then went to work. I unpacked boxes of books and moved them to a more central location for sorting and categorizing. I wondered as I was doing this if I was making more work for myself. I then started cleaning books and getting them into boxes with marked categories. I then realized that I’d done well by putting in this supposed extra step, for I was able to go through three boxes in the time that I used to go through one box.

Pete appeared and we went to the Alaska State Fair, first straightening out and then adding books to four of our five newspaper boxes. Then after, we walked around the agricultural building, looking at all the livestock. It’s four days from the end of the fair – all the animals looked to me as though they were more than ready to go home.

Sad to say, some won’t go home. They will be auctioned off as market animals, then taken directly to the slaughterhouse. Above their pens are posters with their names on them. In seeing this, I likened their situation as like being on death row. In my mind, the worst thing you can do is give an animal a name, then send it down river. This is betrayal.

Well, I can do nothing about this, a sad state of affairs.

Next: 239. 9/1/23 Here it is, September