1. Defend DACA: I know not everyone wants to read about political stuff on a blog that’s rarely about politics, but I can’t go without saying something about the orange dickwad’s call this week to end DACA. 800,000 young people who were brought here illegally by their parents are now at risk of deportation from a country that’s all they’ve known. It’s wrong, pure and simple. Please call your representatives and urge them to support DACA! I used the excellent website 5calls.org, which gives you a script to read and provides the phone numbers for your local representatives.
Friday Five
Friday Five
With the flooding and destruction caused by Hurricane Harvey over the past week, I don’t feel right doing a usual Friday Five post. Instead, I’m going to list five things you can do to help people affected by the hurricane.
1. Donate money to a food bank: Houston Food Bank, Galveston Food Bank, Corpus Christi Food Bank, and more will all need help.
2. Donate money to the Harvey relief fund established by Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner at The Greater Houston Community Foundation.
3. Donate money or send diapers to the Texas Diaper Bank. Diapers can be dropped off at 5415 Bandera Road, Suite 504, San Antonio, Texas, 78238…or you can order them through the organization’s Amazon wish list and have them shipped there.
4. Donate money to the SPCA of Texas to help the organization help pets that have been affected by the storm. My local animal shelter, Humane Rescue Alliance, is urging people to adopt animals so they can free up room to take in animals that have been displaced. HRA board member Erica May-Scherzer and Washington Nationals All-Star pitcher Max Scherzer are covering all adoption fees through September 3 to help clear space in the shelter! I imagine other shelters around the country are also trying to clear out room so they can help, so if you’ve been considering adopting a pet from a shelter, this might be the right time to do so.
5. Donate money to Global Giving, which has a goal of raising $2 million for Harvey relief. As of this post, they’ve already raised more than $1.8 million! Funds will be used for emergency supplies for immediate relief—food, water, hygiene products, etc.—and for long-term recovery efforts.
NPR and the New York Times have more information on these and other ways to help (and the NYT has tips on how to avoid scams)!
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Friday Five
Weird—I thought I had scheduled this post to go up last Friday, but I just now noticed it wasn’t published! (It’s been a crazy week.) Sorry for the delay…here is my Friday Five for August 25. 🙂
I haven’t been out and about much lately because my feet have been really bothering me. I’ve been staying off them as much as possible…which is difficult, but it accounts for my lack of cool DC activities this week. I had some adjustments made to my orthotics yesterday and will rest my feet more, so hopefully I’ll be back in walking shape soon!
1. THIS SUNSET: last week we had a crazy evening thunderstorm, and then the sunset was out of this world.
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Play! by Sephora: August 2017
I can’t believe it’s already more than halfway through August! My Play! by Sephora box arrived this week, with an “Elements of Beauty” periodic table design on the front and back of the brochure. Each box in the table lists an ingredient found in certain beauty products and explains what it’s good for (e.g., “guarana seed extract is best for deep hydration”). Cute…and helpful!
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Friday Five
1. Hive: I’ve been wanting to check out this exhibit at the National Building Museum since it opened, and I finally made it there this week! The installation feels like it was constructed to be Instagrammable, but I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. We also checked out the Asylum exhibit (interesting for someone like myself with a background in psychology) and colored Frank Lloyd Wright designs on the wall with Dry Erase markers. Because the NBM isn’t a Smithsonian museum it’s not free, but the $16 adult ticket price is well worth it!
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Friday Five
1. Ai Weiwei: Trace at Hirshhorn: by the end of last week I finally felt recovered enough from SDCC to do a fun DC activity, so I went to see this Ai Weiwei exhibit. The artist created an installation of 176 portraits of political dissidents…made entirely out of Legos. It’s very impressive and definitely worth seeing in person. To learn about each portrait’s subject you can either ask a museum worker or use one of the many touch screens located throughout the exhibit. Because I didn’t bother to explore the rest of the museum after seeing the infinity mirrors there this spring, I made it a point to check out the other floors this time around. It’s not a huge museum, but there’s some pretty cool stuff! I especially liked the sunrise, sunset mural by Nicolas Party.
Friday Five
I’ll admit this is not the most inspired Friday Five post; I’ve been taking it easy and resting my poor, tired feet a lot since returning from Comic-Con so I haven’t been out and about seeing cool stuff in DC as much as usual!
1. Double Rainbow: this week we’ve been having surprise evening storms (by “surprise” I mean that my iPhone weather app didn’t predict any rain), and last night brought us a doozy. But with it came the benefit of a stunningly bright double rainbow, which I was able to see quite a bit of from our deck! The rainbows lasted awhile, too—the main, brighter one you see in the below photo stuck around for about a half an hour. I don’t know if this is typical for double rainbows and it’s not something I’ve ever noticed before, but the colors of each one actually mirror that of the other. You can see that the second rainbow (the fainter one) has its reds along the underside, while its purples and blues run along the top. The first rainbow has the standard red on top, purple on the bottom. Pretty magical, right?!
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Play! by Sephora: July 2017
My July Sephora Play! box arrived late in the afternoon the day before I left for Comic-Con, so I was too busy packing to start playing around with my samples. I did take a couple of them with me to San Diego, though, and now that I’m back home I’ve finally had a chance to use each sample a few times so that I could sneak in my blog post before August!
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Friday Five
1. Bizarre States: last year I randomly ended up at a panel for this podcast when I went to Camp Conival, and it was very entertaining. For some reason I only recently thought to start listening to the podcast, but once I started I was hooked. I’ve been on a total Bizarre States binge! Andrew Bowser and Jessica Chobot keep me company while I’m at home cleaning or out walking, and their guests are always interesting. I’m a total skeptic when it comes to ghosts, aliens, and other supernatural phenomena, but I love hearing stories about that stuff (duh, I’ve watched all twelve seasons of Supernatural). I missed their panel at Awesome Con, but I was happy to be able to go to their SDCC panel this year!
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San Diego Comic-Con 2017 Recap
I’m pleased to report that I returned from this year’s San Diego Comic-Con feeling much happier than I did last year! The 2016 con was pretty rough for me, and by the end of it I felt like I didn’t know how many more of these I could take. Fortunately 2017 turned out to be way better, even though the exhibit hall mostly looked like this:


















