Everyone should start blogging again. Own your own site. Visit all your friends' sites. Bring back the artisan, hand-crafted Web. Sure, it's a little more work, but it's worth it. You don't even need to stop using social media! It's a "yes, and" situation, not a "no, but" one.

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• I signed out of Twitter for probably the first time since I opened the account 2007. Regular readers of my blog can probably guess, but the straw that broke the camels back was letting 45 back on the platform. Life's too short to spend it in proximity to self-important fascists. If you're interested in my Twitter-like microblogging, I'm on Mastodon. 
• After getting my flu shot the previous week, this week I got my omnicron booster, shot #4. I went with what was readily available and switched back to team Pfizer. Beyond my arm being incredibly sore for a day, I didn't have any real side effects this round.
• Leo is taking more and more interest in letters and realizing that there's information encoded about the world all around him. When walking to school today he saw where stop (Tomaere) was written on the street – and he read "re" and asked what the middle character "ma" was. Though he kept insisting it said "rema" on the street because that's the order they're written in 🤣.
• Next to our house is a field. Part of it had a huge vegetable patch where one of our neighbors would grow everything under the sun. The owner of the land sold it recently and it will be turned into houses. After my neighbors harvested all their veg and grass and weeds took over the patch at an incredible rate. You'd hardly realize it used to be cultivated land, unless you look closely.
  
  I'll miss living at the end of the street and not having any through traffic, but it was bound to happen. I'm glad we got over 3 years, especially while Leo was little, so he could play out front without needing to worry about cars.

• Last week I joined Mastodon and this week I've got to say, I'm enjoying it. Social media without the algorithms and outrage machine makes connecting with people on the web great again. While I'm using indieweb.social, browsing some hashtags, I also discovered some instances like social.coop and mastodon.green where I've been able to find some interesting people to follow. I also donated to my first patron to help keep indieweb.social's lights on.
• The US mid-terms happened and, by Jove the Dems managed to hold the Senate and the House is still up for grabs (though leaning Republican, slim majority). Typically when there's full party control of House/Senate/Executive by the same party, the mid-terms results in 60 seat losses in the house, but that wasn't the same this year at all. That's incredible. Given all of the "red wave" talk in the media to see them be so wrong is great.
  
  I reckon there's a number of reasons for this: Roe vs Wade energizing women, the Biden admin making actual action on climate with the ira, and Gen. Z getting out the vote. To his credit Michael Moore was on TV a few days before the election saying that the red wave won't materialize because of sheer numbers i.e. the number of registered Dems out numbers R's, so if people show up the Dems will win. People showed up.
  
  Glad to see that my hastily prepared ballot was accepted and counted.
  

  

• Leo has been getting more and more into his own room. He decorates it with things he's made and makes lists of stuff he needs for it (mirror and a printer?). On Saturday he said that he was going to sleep in his own room, instead of with us. Or rather we (me and him) were going to. He slept like he always does and I slept...about the same as usual (so-so).
  
  Sunday he said that he was going to sleep by himself. We did the regular reading routine in his bed and I left after he fell asleep. Going back to my own bed, it felt a bit lonely. I've grown so accustomed to just being able to roll over, open my eyes, and see the little guy snoozing. Leo starting to sleep in his own room by himself is a bit more bittersweet than I was expecting it would be. Thankfully he came in to our room at 2:30am and joined us 🥰.
  
  I've heard people (in the West) argue against co-sleeping with kids when they're young because it's difficult to get them to sleep in their own room...but he's taking all leadership here.