luzula

1) My sister has just given birth, and I now have two nieces! I went down to visit and cook and bake a lot of food for them. I'd forgotten how tiiiny newborn babies are. My four-year-old niece has more maternal feeling than I do, though—she fusses with the baby constantly and admonishes it not to cry in a way that makes the adults in the room try not to laugh.

2) I started hiking one of the local trails up the Swedish west coast, since I do love hiking and it would be good to do more of it during the fall/winter/spring. My plan is to do the parts near town as day hikes and then the parts further away as weekend hikes. Annoyingly enough, though, I got blisters on my toes on the first part, which is weird--I didn't get any during the summer and I have the same boots and socks as then. Grrr. Also I actually got lost, which I have never done in the mountains. I was talking on the phone and got off the trail, and then when I backtracked, I started going the wrong way, which I didn't realize until after maybe 2 km. /o\ Take it as a lesson, I guess. Now I will wait for my blisters to heal before I start again...

3) I defaulted on Yuletide last year, but I will sign up again this year. *determines not to be scared by past failure*

4) I've fallen out of my habit of posting about volunteer and activist work regularly. But I'm pretty much doing what I usually do. Here's a recent sample:
- planning board meetings
- preparing a presentation for the half-year meeting with my environmental org, about what we've been doing recently,
- planning the food for the weekend-long half-year meeting, and cooking a lot of it,
- accounting for environmental org,
- planning the content of some stickers for the union, and asked someone who knows layout to design them,
- planning a dinner for people active in the union, to have a more informal meeting place than member meetings,
- reading hundreds of pages of a government policy investigation about forest stuff and then writing up our organization's response to it,
- writing up complaints about forest companies to environmental certification bodies,
- donated large chunk of money to Agent Green, a Romanian environmental organization trying to stop the logging of virgin forest in Romania.

Oh, and remember the climate action I took part in in September, to protest against a planned fossil gas terminal? The government decided not to grant permission for it! We won! \o/