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Hard times, but good signs

Hard times, but good signs

Hey all! A little housekeeping before we get started: I'm about 80% sure that I have the reply-to settings for the newsletter set properly this time, but I could have sworn I fixed them before and apparently they unfixed themselves. So if you've ever replied to one of these newsletters and I haven't gotten back to you, it's because Ghost (our newsletter host) has been sending replies off into the ether and I still haven't found a way to access them. Once this issue of the newsletter goes out, I can test the reply function myself and make sure that it's really working this time. In the meantime, you can always get ahold of me by emailing wiley@montaguecommoners.org. (I'm still a bit rubbish at replying to email, but I'll generally get back to you within a few days.)

This Week in the Commons

I was out of commission for most of this week with a minor back injury, so most of my time was spent trying to unlock a Skyscale mount in Guild Wars 2. Once I was back to being fit for light duty, I was looking for something I could do in short bursts without too much lifting or twisting, so I decided it was time to make a proper sign for our Artisan Market cabin.

In my usual style, I forgot to take pictures of the first few steps, which involved grabbing a piece of scrap plywood out of the garage and painting it white with some exterior furniture paint I got at Hunt's a couple of years ago. Apparently I hadn't gotten the paint can 100% closed the last time I used it, so there was a dried crust over the top of the paint, but once I broke through that the paint underneath was still useable, and there was enough to do one coat over the whole piece of plywood, plus a second coat on the "good" side that would be most visible.

(It's important to paint all the surfaces of a piece of wood that's going to be outside, because the paint protects the wood from moisture. If you only paint the visible side, you risk the unpainted surfaces swelling up when it gets humid and causing your board to warp.)

Next, I measured the board and messed around in Canva to figure out how big the lettering should be to look proportional. Once I had the right font size, I printed out the letters I needed on normal sized paper and cut/taped them into the right configuration.

A piece of paper with the letters "n e r s" is upside down on a light pad. Wiley's hand is tracing the edges of the letters with a heavy pencil line in order to transfer the outlines to the sign.

Next, I used my lightpad to trace the outlines of each letter in heavy pencil on the back of the paper. This is an old trick for transferring lettering to surfaces that you can't print on directly.

A close-up shot of the letter from the front, with Wiley's hand using a pencil to trace the outlines of the letters.

Next, I taped the printout to the sign board, and went over the outlines of the letters again from the front. The pressure of the pencil transferred the graphite from the back of the paper onto the sign board, giving me nice clear outlines of each letter.

The sign board, with "Montague Commoners" outlined in graphite.

(Sorry about the weird lighting in a lot of these pictures. I was doing a lot of this work on the screened porch where the paint fumes would be able to dissipate, and there's no lighting out there so I was using a headlamp.)

A picture of the finished sign, with the Montague Commoners lettering painted in and the weekly turn-in, project, and specials sheets attached at the bottom.

And here's the finished-for-now sign! The "This Week" pages along the bottom are laminated, so that we can write the details for each week on with a dry erase marker, and they're velcro-ed to the sign board, so that we can swap them out if we want to. I'm hoping to get some time in the next week or two to add some artwork to the top half of the sign, but the minimalist version works for now 😉

The new sign in place at the Artisan Market
Protesters lined up along the sidewalk in front of the Weathervane.
Photo Credit: KP Mahoney

In other news, the No Kings protests nationwide were a huge success. The best estimates I've been able to find are that 5-6 million people attended one protest or another. Here in town, we had close to 200 people turn out at the Weathervane! Not bad for a town with only about 2000 residents 😆 I wasn't able to find any photos of the crowd at its thickest, but at one point people were standing 4-5 deep from the blacksmith sign to the entrance to Montague Foods. We helped send a strong message that we are not going to take the corporate authoritarian takeover of our country lying down, and the contrast with the sparse attendance at Trump's birthday boondoggle was a joy to behold.

Coming Up Next Week

  • Monday, 7pm at the Montague City Council Chambers - Montague City Council Meeting
  • Tuesday, 5-7pm at the Fox Lake Park Pavilion in Lakewood Club - White Lake Area Futures is holding a "Walking Tacos" fundraiser to support progressive candidates in the White Lake area.
  • Wednesday, 6-7pm at Book Nook - White Lake Climate Action is having a brainstorming session to come up with ideas for attracting new members and building community among current members.
  • Friday, Noon at the Weathervane - Join us for Dance For Democracy and get all that authoritarianism stress out of your body.
  • Saturday, 9-2 at the Artisan Market - Come browse our Artisan Market wares, and learn how to turn aluminum cans into durable plant tags.

Food of the Week: White Clover

A closeup of some white clover flowers nestled among the grass

One of my favorite things about living in Montague is that most of the public lawns and green spaces aren't treated with broadleaf herbicides, so they tend to have lots of clover, plantain, and other friendly companion plants mixed in with the grass. This was the norm for all lawns until 1945, when herbicide 2,4-D, the first successful broadleaf herbicide was introduced. Chemical companies spent millions convincing the public that "weed free" lawns were the way to go, and far too many grassy areas became barren grass monocrops with no biodiversity or foraging opportunities.

You can eat the flowers and the leaves of white clover, and the flowers are often pleasantly sweet if the nectar hasn't been recently harvested by a bee. You can eat them raw or make them into teas and infusions. I like to snack on the flowers when I'm out in the field, and I've also gathered them and dried them for use in teas during the offseason.

Another perk of clover in your lawn: it's like having built in fertilizer! Clovers and other legumes form symbiotic relationships with bacteria that can turn atmospheric nitrogen (N2) into nitrates that act as plant food. They host the bacteria in nodules on their roots, and the nitrates spread from there into the soil, feeding not only the clover but the other plants that it grows alongside.

Solidarity Steps

For Solidarity Steps this week, I want to talk a little bit about what's been going on in LA this past week. I've seen posts going around that reinforce the "good peaceful protester" vs "bad violent rioter" dichotomy, as well as ones that offer some dangerously bad advice. As someone who has spent a LOT of time in a wide variety of protest spaces over the last 20+ years, I wanted to stand on my tiny soapbox and throw in my two cents.

We'll start with the simplest one: if you are ever at a protest and some sort of violence breaks out, RUN AWAY! DO NOT SIT DOWN! Sitting down is a good way to get trampled and/or take a teargas canister to the face. Cops have a very wide array of crowd control weapons designed to make people panic and flee. They will step on you. You do not want to be on the ground.

Now onto the more complicated one: solidarity with "scary" protesters.

Every time police misconduct or other abuse of power sparks mass civil arrest, posts pop up priming us to ignore why people are protesting, and instead focus on how they're protesting. Mainstream voices come out of the woodwork to divert attention away from the beatings, kidnappings, or killings that sparked the unrest, and focus their cameras on a burned out car or a spray-painted anarchy symbol.

It's important to ask yourself why.

On the one hand, we have the fact that federal agents, whose salaries are paid with our tax money and who are supposed to be fixtures of public trust, are kidnapping everyday people out of their homes and workplaces for the sake of meeting the unrealistic deportation quotas imposed on them by political appointees.

On the other hand, some kid who just lost his grandma to an ICE raid smashed a window to let his feelings out, and now an insurance company is going to have to pay to replace it.

Which is the bigger problem? Where should our focus land?

When we buy into the myth of the perfect, unimpeachable protest, we set ourselves up for failure. They will always find a reason that the protesters aren't doing it "right". Remember Colin Kaepernick in 2016? He engaged in silent, entirely non-disruptive protest, and a huge chunk of the country still lost their minds.

I believe strongly in the power of nonviolent protest. There's a reason that I organize dance parties at the Weathervane and not guerilla raids at the Amazon warehouse. I've studied armed revolutions in a lot of detail, and they tend to end very badly for basically everyone. I genuinely believe that we can achieve a better future with community outreach and collective action than we can with Molotov cocktails.

And, I stand with the protesters in LA. They are being brutalized by an out-of-control law enforcement apparatus, and no amount of spray-painted trash cans or overturned benches could make them the main problem here. They're making choices that I wouldn't make, but they're facing circumstances that I'm not facing. We can keep holding our joyful, song-based local protests at the same time that we recognize that it's not an option available to everyone.

I have so many more thoughts on this, but I know that most of you are here for the event notifications and foraging tips, not Wiley's Grand Unified Theory of Protest Movements. If you found this interesting, and you want to talk about it more, come hang out at the Artisan Market and we can make some plant tags while we talk about the history of urban uprisings 😆

If you're looking for a way to send aid to folks who are directly affected by the LA unrest, Ktown for All is a mutual aid organization that's been vouched for by a number of LA organizers I trust. They're working with street-food vendors who normally sell tacos and tamales in affected areas to buy up their food and distribute it to people in need. They've already helped 30 families pay their bills for the month so that the vendors don't have to risk getting swept up in ICE raids.

Recommendation Corner

To counterbalance that last section, I'm going with a lighter recommendation this week: the Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir. It's funny, it's engaging, and it's about sword-wielding lesbian necromancers in space. Nate and I have listened to the audiobooks together several times, because it has the sorts of reveals that make you want to read the whole thing over again in a new light. (Also, every time a new book comes out, we end up re-reading the entire series because we've forgotten who half the characters are 😅)If you want to take a break from the real world and immerse yourself in something new, this is a great series to do it with.

Concession to Capitalism

Thanks to another generous donor, we're only $20 away from meeting our goal of covering the hosting costs for this newsletter for the year. If you've got $20 to spare, you can help make sure that this weekly dose of extremely random information keeps showing up slightly late in your inbox every week by donating on our Ko-Fi page.

This Week's Nails

You made it to the end of the newsletter, so that means you get to see this week's nails! For newcomers: I generally write up the newsletter while I'm doing my nails each week, since there's a lot of waiting around for layers of polish to dry and typing is unlikely to cause any smudges. I include pictures at the end of each newsletter as a treat for anyone who actually reads to the end. (Or for nail polish enthusiasts who scroll to the end, I suppose. I'm not the boss of you 😉)

When I first decided on these polishes for the week, the plan was to alternate the blue and the green across both hands. But then I got distracted thinking about the newsletter, and did three green fingers in a row before I remembered I was supposed to be alternating. So I decided to try different colors on each hand instead. I kinda like the effect, might do it again on purpose in future weeks.