Loose Leaf Notes

1. Everybody looks better with flowers, even Steve Bannon. See HERE.

2. The first protest in space just happened, and it was against Donald Trump.  Thanks to the Autonomous Space Agency Network (yes that’s NASA backwards).  The team printed out a giant tweet from their own Twitter account, which read “Look at That, You Son of a Bitch,” tagging Trump’s personal Twitter account. They then attached the sign to a weather balloon and flew it at 90,000 feet. See HERE. 

3. The reason they wrote that on their tweet was because Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, the sixth person to ever walk on the moon, once said:  From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’

4. On Earth Day, I like to say “take a hike,” although we never grew up saying that. For us, it was “go jump in a lake.”

5. On Easter I like to say, “Go fly a kite or go to an art museum.”

6. Going to an art museum is like going to church for me. Looking at certain works of art gives me a sense of wonder and a connection with the divine.  It stretches my mind beyond what it thinks it knows and renews my faith in beauty and the unseen.  So, you can see how when Republicans get in power and cut support to the arts, it makes me feel like crying and like I’m being persecuted.

7.  Once again a new study links art access to better health, safety, and education in lower-income neighborhoods. See  HERE. 

8. A couple of weeks ago my youngest son got married.  This week my older son proposed marriage to his girlfriend.  Along with that, Senator Tim Kaine came to Floyd and I covered it for the paper. I wrote a story about my friend Kari Kovick’s new professionally produced CD for and with kids, danced till I couldn’t anymore to Urban Soil at Dogtown, went to Taubman’s Museum’s for Easter and had a luxurious Easter Brunch at the historic Roanoke Hotel.

9. This is the lavender pathway that I slipped and sunk into, living for a few seconds in the scene, walking behind the mother and child, breathing in the flowers that were nearby. And these are the peonies that that made me swoon.  See HERE.

10. Sometimes Joe’s hip hurts when he drives too long and I have a bad knee. After a trip up and down the mountain and a long, fun day celebrating Easter, he said, “I can’t sit but I can walk. You can’t walk but you can sit.”

11.  SWAMP THING You Make My Heart Sink. That’s what I sang to myself Tuesday morning when I read THIS article on Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, the man booted out of his U.S. campaign slot over close ties to Russian interests who is now advising a Chinese billionaire on how to get a piece of the business if the president successfully launches a $1 trillion U.S. infrastructure plan, the Financial Times reports.

12. You might catch an art opening in a renovated dairy barn, known today as the Floyd Center for the Arts, take a historic walking tour or an artisan studio tour, check out Cocoa Mia’s chocolate lounge, pet animals at Riverstone Farm or plan for a hike up Buffalo Mountain, Floyd’s highest elevation of nearly 4,000 feet.  You can sample wine from one of the wineries or a drink a Red Rooster Roaster espresso at the Black Water Loft, where the baristas won an “America’s Best Espresso” competition in 2016.  You can even sample homemade moonshine made from old recipes at Five Mountain Mile Distillery or see a prohibition-era moonshine still at The Old Church Gallery that blends contemporary art exhibits with the showcasing and preservation of heritage art, oral histories, and mountain culture…  This is an excerpt for an article I wrote for Real Small Towns HERE.

13. Urban Soil and how we dig it HERE. 

_____Thirteen Thursday