We live in a fairly quiet neighborhood. And our house is fairly quiet. I spend a lot of time upstairs, and Pete spends a lot of time downstairs. I am usually on the computer when he is cooking. Like tonight, I can smell it. Onions, garlic, greens, tonight he mixed these in with rice. We additionally had beans and kale.

Pete listens to the radio when he cooks, cleans, makes bread, or does any other type of household activity. I don’t hear it if I’m upstairs because I’m partially deaf. This is the only upside to being hearing impaired.

Outside, cars and trucks hit the pothole at the base of the hills. I think that the borough gave up on filling it in because it reappears. It’s worse when there’s a lot of traffic. And right now we have traffic because someone is living in a shack on the Rafter T property. Also, Mike’s Land was purchased two years ago and has been cleared out. The family has put up a farming gazebo and shed and has cleared an area that is either going to be a large garden or spot for a mansion.

The population in the Mat-Su Valley is on the rise, so we are seeing that more people want to move to this area. I call this pseudo urban sprawl. Well this bodes well for the book project.

Used to be that we could ride all around the hood on horseback but no more. Homeowners have fenced in their private property.

More people, more readers. This is going to become my mantra. It’s my way of putting a positive spin on growth, which is running unchecked, nationwide.

My day actually began with and ended with Zoom meetings. I don’t particularly enjoy these meetings, but the survival of the program is dependent upon taking advantage of communicative entities.

This rant makes me think of the BLBP board and all our partners. The more that we’re out there, the more effective we’ll be in fulfilling our mission.

I’m so tired that I can’t remember the rest of this sentence. I pause before moving on to the next one.

It was a very long day today. I worked on my writing after breakfast and cleaning the horse pen. Then I zoomed, listening to what my cohorts in the Foraker Group had to say about acquiring human resources. Sad to say, being the only person who runs a volunteer organization, I had little to say. Imagine it, me with little to say. The descriptions of the various types of things you have to do when you are a nonprofit with a staff were off putting to this volunteer.

At one point, we were broken into groups of three and given a statement to ponder, which was a statement with the word burnout in it. This was a red flag for sure. It was as if those in my group and I were saying, “Forget the administrative crap. Let’s talk here about what’s important.” And yes, this is what we did.

Next: 121. 5/2/25: More Signs of Spring