1/1/26 Austin holiday was perfect. Still we worried about return trips. Barb flew into Syracuse last night. Syracuse Airport brags about how much snow they clear. Today’s New York Times reports double the average snowfall in December and on Dec 30, over two feel fell – the snowiest single day recorded since 1946! Barb’s car was parked outside on the garage roof.

1/2/26 From a NYT Opinion piece entitled Before you toss your books…. It may be tempting to toss them, I know, because they take up so much space and gather so much dust. Yet every book you have is a story of who you are and who you were when you acquired it. And who you became when you read it. It’s part of you, your present and your history. We may think we finish with books, but they don’t finish with us.

1/3/26 Barb called during my walk along the beach, around the port, and out on the pier so I continued into town. Water Street was all lit up for the First Saturday Art Walk, so I went on, stopping to wish friends Happy New Year while Barb waited patiently through these short exchanges. Then at the Grover Gallery, I said good bye and went in to have a nice chat with Max Grover and the curator of an exhibit featuring works by local folks to celebrate the 200th birthday of photography. A fine pre-supper transition from light to darkness.

1/4/26 This from today’s Guardian on a single now-identified victim of the New Year’s fire: Charlotte appears to have regularly spent time in Crans-Montana, which is about 62 miles from the French border. She has advertised her services as a babysitter on the ski resort’s website, saying she is often in the town and able to work at weekends and during school holidays. I’ve never been to Crans (and weekended at Verbier perhaps only once), I embrace the freedom of being able to travel and drink publicly as a teenager. But what resonates here is Charlotte’s making herself available to work as a babysitter or au pair. The Letters Project reminds me I did the same: scrolled ads in the IHT and got babysitting gigs in Montreux, a city where I could safely come and go at night. The New Year’s fire is certainly shaking the Swiss sense of safety.

Books for January: Reading King of Kings along with Jack on Selena’s recommendation. Lots of memories of the 70s on. Next “Where’d You Go, Bernadette”, unread in my library. To add to reviews: Ocean by David Attenborough. Next, What a Fish Knows for a PTMSC book discussion.

Books for future: The Things We Never Say essays about family dynamics by Elizabeth Stout. Also, her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Olive Kitteridge.

My Adventures page needs retitling. Maybe Excursions? Excursions and Encounters? Excursions. One word. Now how do I change it?

With the FisherPoets Gathering on the calendar, the prospect of visiting Astoria distracted me. Columbia River Maritime Museum, 1792 Marine Drive (An FPG venue but admission is required for exhibits: $15 Seniors; 9:30am to 5pm. Oregon Film Museum, 732 Duane Street, Astoria (a block west of FPG venues). Admission $6; Open 10am- 4pm. This museum used to be in my Portland neighborhood. Astoria Heritage Museum, 1618 Exchange St, Astoria (a block west of FPG venues) 10am – 4pm. Admission $5. Movies Shot in Astoria with info on production support to filmmakers from the city and state.

1/5/26 A day lost and found to binge-reading King of Kings.

1/6/26 Back to the gym on a dark morning. Finished King of Kings. Good review here leads me to “Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novel Persepolis (2003–04), in which the author and her school friends are forced to line up and beat their chests twice a day to honor the war dead in funeral marches.”

1/7/26 Despite the satisfaction of finishing a job, today was hard. Managed to turn my hair blue sanding the bottom of Bear, the Vancouver era long boat. Then ruined my clothes, while painting the bottom red. After a morning simply masked and goggled, the afternoon was full respirator, with the shop doors open to late-afternoon winter. The only good part was lying on my back. ergonomically easier to managing the heavy Bosch RO sander and managing stuff around me: cords, vacuum hose, work light, scrappers, trays, headlamp, brushes rags. Boatshop lunch resulted in a delicious free dinner as well, before I peddled off to a talk by Paper Dunlap at the Sailing Association.

Good, not new, video from Strong Towns looks at the emergence of cities – from the featured Chicago to Houston – where people have figured out that the old unregulated ways of doing things often work quite well.

1/8/26 With holiday relaxation is still holding, this account of small boat design problem-solving touched my soul.
https://smallcraftadvisor.substack.com/p/birth-of-an-eccentric-mini-raid-boat

Despite the frustrations of managing auto-subscriptions, I getting fresh magazines in the mail, especially when they are almost free. Today I fell for a $6 2-year sub to Travel & Leisure with a 1-year sub to Gourmet in the works. With tourism taking over undiscovered places, armchair travel is enough. However, pdf’d Hot List of luxury hotels leaves me eager to return to formerly undiscovered places. In Adelboden, Switzerland, I stayed at the Girl Guides and Scouts Chalet in 1963. I spent a night in “the unglamorous port city” of Genoa, from which my ancestors sailed to America, on a 1967 road trip with fellow Université de Dijon students. And Rajasthan in the 1980s where I spent a joyous day in street celebrations of Holi and returned to my fellow teachers (who’d refused to join me), covered with red and blue paint. A better version of yesterday.

1/9/26 Housekeeping! Note to ST following an unclear ad or solicitation, I may have inadvertently subscribed to online Seattle Times access. I do receive the weekly Sunday newsletter.

I have been billed monthly on automatic pay for $19.96 on my debit card at First Fed for months now. (The readout ST SUBSCRIPTION POS was mysterious to me.) However, I cannot get access to the news although I have logged in to this account. Please help clarify and rectify the situation.

1/10/26 Saturday morning with Scott Simon, who read Renée Nicole Good’s poem On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs, which she wrote as a college student.

After learning about the riots across Iran and about Renée Good (a Minneapolis martyr in the tradition of George Flores and Philando Castile), I calmed down with this fine personal profile of Mario Miralles, a luthier with a renowned sense of how wood resonates.

Among my Kickass Octogenarians is Buddy Guy. Interviewed here by Scott Simon.

1/12/26 Cleared subscription troubles, created alerts for annual due dates, and updated bookmarks in Account$ & $ubscriptions.

1/13/26 My patience ran out into the street and got hit by utter frustration. So I called for help from a nice woman, perhaps a retired accountant? – who has a general IT help business. Booked on line with this message: I’ve been a Mac user since 1984, with a MacBook Pro running Sequoia 15.3.1. Key problems are storage limitations and current inability to back up on LaCie hard drive. Workarounds include online work & use of iPhone. I’m poor at learning things independently without understanding the basics of perpetually evolving programs. An initial session should lead me to fixes I can implement. I’m happy to answer questions/complete a questionnaire to focus on issues.

1/14/26 Boats all day. On my way to my Wednesday gig, I saw Swiftsure, the largest of the Puget Sound Express fleet, pull into Point Hudson. At the boatshop, I enjoyed Joel’s instructions to Maritime High School students as they built a fleet of sturdy I-beam sawhorses. Then Jake, the new lead boat builder on the longboat Townshend, gave us some bad news: the discovery of hidden rot in three ribs. They need to be replaced. Next, a chat with Chris King, the new VP of PTSA, asking about the Lightning and explaining the new program to train future race crew with free Saturday sails on Mustang Sally and other Thunderbirds in the Fleet. At the regular PTSA Wednesday (rainy) evening event, it was great to be in a small crowd of 25 watching The Weekend Sailor, a charming, funny, family saga about the 1973 Whitbread Race. Highly recommended..

1/22/26 Boats all week! After last Wednesday on Townsend, this week I was busy on Mustang Sally, Adventuress, Firefly, and Morning Light. Three days of dirty, essential maintenance on the schooner Adventuress – a National Historic Monument – feels like a part of something big. I spent a morning in the sun chipping rust and paint off a century-old windless, helped rebuild the middle section of the winter cover from shards of plastic left from a freak storm that destroyed the earlier structure, and did efficient, joyful work alongside a couple of nonbinary kids as the three of us knocked off a varied series of tasks.

Over the past few decades, the schooner Adventuress has been a steadfast beacon for human rights. This annual work weekend is an appropriate way to celebrate the legacy of MLK. I’ll be back. Consider signing up; do it early if you want to stay on board.

1/29/26 It has come to this. First, the President as Pope. Then a stream of adolescent adulation from his media department. Now a growing album of slop.

2/15/26 Ever since Selena took us to Door County, Wisconson and I saw my first ice vessel in the loft of a historic boat shop, I’ve been intrigued by ice sailing. Barb Trailer, the industrious, illustrious Wooden Boat Festival Director must get tired of my plea to focus on the Great Lakes sailing cultures. “Imagine how cool it would be to spotlight ice sailing!”

With my research lagging behind my intrigue, I’d taken these high-speed races to be a midwestern thing. They are not. They are far-flung in time and space.

This year, old wooden ice boats – “looking like huge elegant crossbows – took to the winds over ice as two legendary yacht clubs met on a New Jersey tidal estuary.

The two teams on the ice — the North Shrewsbury Ice Boat & Yacht Club (founded in Red Bank in 1880) and its tenacious rival, the Hudson River Ice Yacht Club (established in 1885 in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.) are among the oldest ice boating clubs in the country. But this would be only the fourth time they, or anyone else, competed for the Van Nostrand cup in nearly 140 years.

I learn this in the New York Times. Ah! The ideal Sunday read!

2/17/26 Port Townsend has a remarkable free online weekly, The Jefferson County Beacon. It’s a competently edited nonprofit news outlet that enables aspiring young reporters and seasoned retirees to do fine work close to home. In “Dove House Faces Federal Grant Funding Challenges”, Angela Downs looks at the impacts of federal cuts to Washington State, to organizations that strengthen local communities, and to residents in distress.

Since local exchanges on Facebook are unusually civil, I occasionally post. Today seemed a good time: This item in The Beacon has thrown a chill over me this morning. Dove House and its Recovery Café are essential services in our community!! If you don’t understand that, stop by at noon for lunch and a chat with your tablemates at the Café. Now they face a funding crisis because of federal stipulations they cannot abide. Such as collaborating with ICE and considering domestic violence merely a legal issue, not a social one. In addition, WA state funding fell after HB 1169 prohibited courts from forcing defendants to pay legal fees if they were unable to do so, without financial verification; this reduced financial support to their victims for medical, mental health, and funeral costs, as well as lost wages. Please read and donate if you can.

2/19/26 This was my wake-up news today. Gaza death toll for first 16 months of war far higher than reported, says peer-reviewed study. It’s the horrible toll on children that deems this genocide. Kids who suffer under occupation are likely to die as kids for a whole bunch of reasons. Now a respected British medical journal tells us we’ve underestimated the devastation.

The Guardian brings more disturbing numbers. ‘We’re no longer attracting top talent’: the brain drain killing American science. Brain drain in the US? Sure. Punch a hole in global scientific research and you get a gravitational exit of talent. Arresting foreign students after Oct 7, 2023, sent a strong message that they should go elsewhere. One year after Trump’s cuts to NIH staffing, the future demise of science is clear.

While it’s still dark, I click and delete my way through email. In an item on Strategic Stillness in the monthly newsletter from Port Townsend’s Clarity Consulting, I read this: The Courage to Say No

The most mature discipline in nonprofit leadership is refusal. Saying no to misaligned funding, reactive expansion, unscalable partnerships, or pressure beyond capacity protects integrity — and integrity builds long-term trust.

BOTTOM LINE Disciplined refusal is stewardship. It protects mission integrity and strengthens long-term credibility.

That resonates with me. Like many older people, my work is largely as a volunteer for nonprofits and I choose carefully.

2/20/26 As we were discussing publishing in our writing workshop, I asked our instructor to clarify whether something published on one’s publicly-available personal blog is considered “published.” She didn’t know but promised to check. Then I stumbled on the answer, which complemented her own a week later.

It comes from a writer who has been blogging for years as well as publishing. Like me she is interested in spotlighting the work of others. In a brief post entitled Guest Writers: Guidelines for Submissions, she clarifies the issues:

Publication on a curated blog (i.e. one with an editor, in this case–me) is considered “publication” where contests are concerned. If you think you might want to submit a particular essay to a contest that is open only to unpublished work, don’t submit it to me–if I publish it, I blow your chance at that contest.

You retain copyright to any essay you write that I publish on True Stories Well Told. The © symbol is used to indicate that an artistic or intellectual work is copyrighted. When it appears with a date and name, it indicates who owns the work. That’s why you’ll see it at the end of posts on this blog.

So I will clarify this if and when someone sends me something to see if I am interested in publishing it here on Baggywrinkles Blog.

3/3/26 This gem came in a newsletter: The Courage to Say No

The most mature discipline in nonprofit leadership is refusal. Saying no to misaligned funding, reactive expansion, unscalable partnerships, or pressure beyond capacity protects integrity — and integrity builds long-term trust.

BOTTOM LINE Disciplined refusal is stewardship. It protects mission integrity and strengthens long-term credibility.

3/22/26 Being happily lost among 850,000 fans welcomimg the Seahawks home after their Super Bowl victory in February, I have new respect for the power of spectator sports. Now the attack on Iran has ruined the prospects of countires that have invested in international sports facilities. See It’s come at the wrong time’: how Iran war has floored the Gulf as a sports hub. Conflict has not only hit sporting calendar but laid bare weakness in plans for diversifying economies through sport.

3/28/26 My signs for the past three No Kings rallies reflect my increasing exasperation and everyday outrage at the currrent US Administration.