Ok fine, I guess I'm running for city council 🤷
Hey all! Bit of a change of pace this week, because I'm reluctantly running for public office! 😅
There are three seats open on the Montague City Council this election cycle, and only two candidates signed up to run before the ballot printing deadline. I had four or five different people reach out to see if I'd be willing to run as a write-in candidate, and after thinking through some of the practical challenges, I decided to give it a go.
My main reason for not wanting to run was that Montague Commoners work keeps me pretty busy. I didn't want to divert energy away from my MC work into running a whole campaign, and I didn't want to half-ass a campaign and waste people's time. Plus, as someone who's spent most of my adult life bouncing back and forth between electoral organizing and direct mutual aid organizing, I'm a lot more comfortable in the mutual aid box.
What changed my mind was the realization that I didn't necessarily need to choose. I've been meaning to knock on doors to ask people if the sugarbush can tap their maple trees and let them know about the community crafting workshop, and this might be an opportunity to do that. I can just tack "BTW, I'm also a write-in candidate for City Council" to the end of the conversation. That way, regardless of the election outcome, we'll have gotten something useful done.
So I filled out the paperwork this morning, and I am officially an eligible write-in candidate for the City Council election in November.
No to donations, yes to volunteers
I'm not going to be accepting campaign donations, because it's a write-in City Council race, and I'm hoping I can pull it off with word-of-mouth and some home-printed flyers. (Fun fact: that doesn't mean I won't have to fill out a bunch of campaign finance paperwork to show that I spent my own $10 on printer paper 😂)
What I could really use some help with is knocking on doors. Specifically, I need people who are willing to come with me to knock on doors. Solo door-knocking is intimidating as heck, but having someone along with you makes it a lot easier. There are about 1200 households in town, and I think we could probably hit a decent number of those doors by the time the election rolls around. So if you'd be willing to tag along with me for an hour or two as I knock some doors, let me know.
Market News
The shop hit a big milestone this week: we have broken even on rent for the season! Last year, it took us until the last day of market season in November, and we only crossed the finish line because Kelly felt bad for us and gave us a dollar 🤣 This year, we've still got four months left to raise some money for next year's programs! It's been fun seeing all the iterative improvements we made from last year's shop pay off, and I hope we can keep growing
Workshop Weekdays!
I've been experimenting for the past few weeks with opening up the workshop on some weekday afternoons, and it's been working pretty well. I wanted to test out the idea before I made any public commitments, but I think I'm ready to say that we'll be open from 1pm-4pm Tuesdays-Thursdays as well as our usual Saturday 9am-2pm hours. It's a great time to stop by and learn a new skill or have an in-depth conversation without having to worry about the Saturday crowds. You can bring a project of your own, or pick any of the projects we have available in the workshop.
Also: the workshop has air conditioning now!
While Nate and I choose not to have air conditioning at home, I did decide that if I'm trying to make the workshop a welcoming community space, some AC might help with that. We got a portable unit, so that we can easily move it around to other spaces as needed, and we went with a new one over trying to find something used for the sake of energy efficiency.
So come hang out in the afternoons, enjoy the AC, and let's work on some cool projects together 😄
Electronics Recycling Update
I got another big load of circuitboards off to Boardsort this week. This one included most of the desktop motherboards, as well as the RAM, CPUs, and boards off of hard drives. My porch is starting to be a lot less full of old computer parts 🥳 We still have a bunch of laptop screens and keyboards to take apart, so we're not quite to the other side of the project yet, but it feels like it's getting closer. We've learned a lot along the way, and when the next electronics recycling event rolls around, I think we're going to be a lot more prepared to process material efficiently.
Recommendation Corner
Those of you who have heard me talk about emergency preparedness have probably heard me recommend Live Like The World Is Dying. It's a preparedness podcast that focuses on practical, community-based strategies instead of the individualistic gold-and-boner-pills weirdness that makes up so much of the online prepping space. I recommend starting with the earliest episodes for a good introduction to basic emergency preparedness and community resilience skills, and then browsing through to find the episodes that interest you the most.
This Week's Nails
You made it to the end of the newsletter, and that means you get to see this week's nails! I went with an assortment of blues this week, because I haven't done that in a while and I do have a LOT of blue polishes. Plus, our home decor strategy most consists of "when in doubt, pick the blue one," so now I'm color coordinated with quite a lot of our rugs and wall paint 😂
Enjoy the good weather while it lasts, and if I don't see you around town I'll see you back here next week.
Pre-meme-ium Content
Now that we've got a few people supporting us with premium subscriptions, we wanted to find a way to thank our supporters without putting anything useful behind a paywall. So I've started tacking on a couple of memes to the end of each newsletter! Free subscribers will see one meme below, while paid subscribers will get to see all five. If you're living on less than $35k/year, please do not give us money. Just let us know and we'll hook you up with the memes for free.
