I am one of those people who is deeply affected by the emotions of those around me. Someone could walk into the room in a bad mood, and I absorb that and spend the rest of the day wondering why I am so damned depressed. As you can imagine, life has been hard for me since a certain malevolent ignoramus has taken over as president of the U.S. for the second time. Everywhere I go, online and in real life, people are depressed or angry or ready to give up. Just when I've gotten myself to a positive state of mind, someone comes by with a new travesty to lament and I sink back down into the muck. I don't want to despair. I understand why we are despairing. But, I also think it's important to set aside the chaos that is the U.S. right now, and focus on our…

I don't know what I am doing here. I have this urge to write. I missed the golden days of blogging, at least as far as writing goes; I was and am an avid blog reader. So, I researched how to create a blog these days. All of the big platforms were overkill for what I had in mind or they required ads or they were run by tech companies I don't trust. I found neocities. It's free. It's basic in a good way. I know a little html and css, and I tried to set something up that I could easily update. It was a lot for me. It didn't have enough "blog" functionality. I didn't have the skills or the patience to get it there. I found some templates & tools like zonelets and bimbo. Still I found my skills and patience were not up to it. Eventually,…