Category Archives: How To

How To, Renewal

Designing a Creative Sabbatical

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One month ago, I left my job without having a new one lined up, being lucky enough to have a supportive partner with a well-paying job that offers health coverage to spouses and a healthy savings cushion. I’ve been struggling with health issues, so was eager to get a break from the daily grind. But I know rest alone isn’t enough; creative work, play and connection can also be forms of active restoration.

Being free of work may sound like a dream, but knowing myself I’m aware I’ll get bored long-term if I don’t have projects to work on. That means I also need to consider what’s next. I’ve been taking steps towards starting a freelance consulting business. I’d also like to launch my side hustle idea I had this spring.

I’m thinking of the July and August as a kind of creative sabbatical to give myself recovery time, explore a new type of work, play and learn new things, and make progress on creative projects.

Post-Day-Job Goals

  • Rest, recuperate, and let my body recover
  • Give myself space to learn, think and play
  • Launch side hustle business
  • Start freelancing business
  • Make decisions about the series I’m writing so I can finish revising my novel
  • Make small changes that make everyday living nicer, with the long-term goal of making my house feel like a sanctuary
  • Continue to not get COVID

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How To

How to advocate for climate in your city or town (part 1)

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Advocating to your local government is a great way you can make a real impact on climate in your community. Local government is where the rubber meets the road on what gets built in your community. They control how sustainable the buildings are that get built, whether you’re allowed to build a mother-in-law unit, whether you have bike lanes and sidewalks in your neighborhood, and so much more. Decisions made at the local level directly shape your experience living there, and the way places are built shapes how people behave. And a lot of emissions come down to where and how people get around.

But, it seems like no one knows how local government works, or how much of a difference they can make with advocacy at a local level.

I’ve worked for local government for nearly eight years. My time has made clear just how much happens at a local level — and how much of a difference decisions made at the local level can influence climate outcomes. Local government does SO MUCH.

I’ve also seen how few community members advocate for anything — and that the folks who do make an effort get taken seriously. There’s also a lopsidedness in who participates in public processes: overwhelmingly, homeowners participate significantly more than renters. You can do the mental math on those demographics. So, it’s even more important for you to advocate if you’re a YIMBY, under 40, not white, or live in an apartment. Council isn’t hearing from many people like you, but they want to represent your interests too. It doesn’t matter if you just moved there, you have a say in the place you live.

Allow me to translate local government for you, so you can effectively advocate for things that make a difference in your community’s climate impact today and long into the future. This post gets into the how of local advocacy, and in Part 2 I’ll recommend what you should make sure your city is doing.

Caveat: This is the only city I’ve worked at so details may differ — I’m an “insider” but not a poli-sci major 😉 Also, I work in a city of 90,000 people, so this advice probably applies best to mid-size cities, but I assume would also work in smaller cities and towns (keep in mind that small governments have much fewer staff and resources).

Key lessons:

  • Everything comes down to budget
  • Reach out to Council
  • Make specific, concrete asks
  • Don’t shit on staff
  • Follow up

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How To, Reflections

Routine upgrades

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I’ve started working with my health coach again, this time looking for ways to upgrade my routines that aren’t working for me.

I’m not a morning person, and getting out of bed is always a struggle for me, so I tend to wind up reading in bed too long before jumping up and being in a rush to get ready for work even if I had plenty of time after waking up.

In today’s atmosphere of doom, I’ve been turning to social media more as my stress levels rise, but it only reinforces the negativity I’m feeling or shifts it from personal troubles to bigger picture fears about the state and future of the world. As I’ve been working to get away from worrying about things that are out of my control, this isn’t helpful or healthy behavior.

I’m using a few steps to attack these routines:

  • Figure out what need(s) the action is meeting (or trying to meet) to identify a good substitution or modification
  • Increase friction for the undesired activity
  • Making it easier to do the substitute or modified activity
  • Remind myself about the substitute activity

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How To

Joining the Indie Web, One Step at a Time

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Homebrew Website Club

There are lots of things to be excited about in joining the Indie Web, like supporting a more human-centered version of the web and connecting better with others across the web. Joining the Indie Web involves a few steps to set up the tools so you can interact with others, but also a bigger picture shift in how you use the web to fully embrace and make the most use of the tools and system.

When I first stumbled across the Indie Web last summer, I was intrigued but not sure exactly what joining entailed. I’ve taken my time easing in little by little, starting with installing the IndieWeb plugin on WordPress last year. Others probably adopt all the tools much faster than I have, and I haven’t followed the most efficient process, but I thought I’d share the steps I’ve taken as someone who can install WordPress and do some basic stuff on cPanel but not much more on the technical side :) (“Generation 2” on the IndieWeb)

My Step by Step Adoption of IndieWeb Elements

Here’s my experience so far with getting more aligned with Indie Web principles and infrastructure:

Installing and experimenting with the first pieces on My Website

1. To set up the basic infrastructure and enable my website to receive notifications from others’ websites (and let me respond to others’ websites), I started by installing the WordPress IndieWeb plugin and activating 3 of its plugins in summer 2019: Webmention, Semantic Linkbacks, and Post Kinds. Those allow me to post things other than articles (what I’ve traditionally used this blog for), and enable better connections between articles if another website links to mine. I didn’t start using the features right away, though, since I wasn’t sharing my articles anywhere for people to see.

2. Over spring 2020, I started experimenting with posting more kinds of posts on this blog (like quotes and quotes with commentary versus only articles), which has meant more short posts and more posts, period. It’s been a shift in mindset since I’ve had very firm ideas about what should go on this blog in the eight years I’ve been running it.

I had planned to go to the Indie Web Summit in Portland this summer to learn more about the Indie Web, but that was cancelled due to coronavirus, so I decided I’d been putting off taking more steps long enough.

Adopting Some IndieWeb Philosophy

3. In July, I decided I’d like to get this website in front of more eyes. While writing here is useful for me, I’d also like to share my thoughts with others and engage in some more conversations. I don’t track visitation, though I assume my traffic’s probably about the same as before I deleted tracking in summer 2019 (~11,000 unique pageviews a year), unless I did something to anger the Google overlords, who I honestly don’t give any thought to when writing here ;) About half of the visitors to Cascadia Inspired went to a single article (a good one if I do say so, if getting a bit long in the tooth), another couple chunks of visitors follow links to two other articles from that one, and then the rest of the visits are scattered throughout my archive.

To kick me off with the Indie Web principle of “publish on your own site and syndicate elsewhere” (POSSE), I posted on Twitter about rejoining for the intention of syndicating my blog content there. I got a friendly and helpful response from Chris Aldrich who’s involved in the Indie Web, inviting me to join in one of their upcoming online events to get some of my questions answered.

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How To

Taking Care of Myself in the Age of Coronavirus

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Pink flowers on branches in blue vase in front of window

Made myself an impromptu bouquet for my office, where I’m spending almost all my time working from home and working on my own projects

As a person who struggles with health anxiety and mild hypochondria anyway, living through a pandemic is not my idea of a good time.

Though it’s not required (yet) we’ve been trying to shelter in place since Sunday, six days ago. I started working from home on Monday, and anticipate doing so for a good long while. All my routines are interrupted, including my weekly meetups with friends and working sessions at the local coffee shop. This could be a bad recipe for me, letting me fall into bad practices of staring at my screen all day without moving and staying up too late.

So I’m trying to get on top of staying healthy and creating a new routine throughout this undefined period of time – PLUS trying to do things that support my mental health and keep me hopeful for the future.

Flower seeds packets with floral design book

Giving myself something to look forward to this summer – flowers! I ordered these seeds online from a local flower grower

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