Mutual Aid
I’m continually inspired to learn and to practice mutual aid in my daily life. I recently finished a book called Practical Anarchism that talks about how a lot of anarchism is supporting and taking care of one another right now. I thought it was inspiring, but the book was denser than I expected. I hope to learn more about mutual aid with the book Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next).
I’m also continuing to practice mutual aid by volunteering at my local Food Not Bombs chapter. Last week I helped chop a bunch of veggies and pick up produce from a grocery store as well.
Not quite mutual aid, but I had a ton of apples that I needed to go through fast last week, so I learned how to make caramelized apples. They didn’t exactly caramelize (I cooked too many apples in one go) but they turned out well. I ended up giving them away to a few friends and neighbors near me.
Debian
I’ve been solidly using OpenBSD on my Eee PC for maybe two months, and it’s been fun learning about an unfamiliar system. It has, unfortunately, been unbearably slow at times. Updating packages takes a long time, managing photos on digiKam is almost impossible, and navigating to any website takes forever unless I use Lynx or NetSurf.
I assumed that this is just how things are on 15-year-old netbooks, but everything sped up once I installed Debian on it. I’m just blown away at how much faster it is now. I bought a new battery for it, too–I can’t believe people still sell them!
Kombucha
My partner and I haven’t made kombucha in a really long time. Our scoby has probably been sitting in our fridge for about a year. We’ve been feeding it every now and then, but we were sure our scoby was dead. But last week we brewed some sweet tea and we took our scoby for a swim.
It ended up fermenting! It’s alive! We’ll probably do the second fermentation this weekend.