Well, it's that day of the month once again - the 11th! I hope your New Year has gotten off to a good start. I have some updates and reflections and perhaps an action or two - welcome aboard. Here are some of the things I'm doing/working on. Even though things at the national political level are a bit of a mess I continue to believe that working on local issues can bring great rewards. I've written about this in the past - see my 11 archives for past issues!

Living Wall - see that pretty picture above? There's a Rite Aid near me that's got a south-facing wall that's constantly getting tagged. I had a thought that they can install a living wall and perhaps not have to spend $3200 every time they need to repaint the wall. It will take some effort (grant applications, interfacing with a corporation), but I've started an email list, of course, to organize this. If you're curious, join the list, here, and I'll keep you up to date on how this goes. I could imagine this happening all over Portland (and perhaps beyond). This is one nifty feature of this program - adding a person from one list to another. It didn't exist a couple of years ago, so I'm still in the "tickled" phase.

City/County Workgroup on GLBs (gas-powered leaf blowers). Our group - Quiet Clean PDX had representation on a workgroup between Multnomah County and the City of Portland. A final report from that workgroup was produced and looks like this. Feel free to use this as a guide for your City/town/state/country vs. reinventing the wheel. I believe the next step will be for the City and County to come together and create a policy out of this. We'll probably all need to continue driving this process, but this is something.

Seeking travel companion - many of my friends are somewhere warm like Mexico or Hawaii right now. I'd love to travel somewhere, too, but am not psyched about doing it solo. I have a few fun destinations in mind, but I'm also somewhat open to suggestions. Columbia, Peru. Silverton.

Seeking Opportunities to Speak/Teach - I have a few topics I can speak on - see the list below. If you know of a group seeking a speaker, please keep me in mind. I just did a paid 3-hour training for an educational organization in Southern Oregon via Zoom. I will speak/train for free for the right organization and also have reasonable rates for those who can pay. More of this, universe!

Any of these can be workshops for people to learn these skills

2nd Monday singalong at EJC - we had a fun Rise Up Singing-inspired singalong at the Eastside Jewish Commons on Monday. My friend Flip Frisch joined me in backing peoples' songs on guitar. We plan to do this again on February 13th featuring songs of love!

Our cat, Louie, got into a pretty intense fight yesterday. Today he's resting deeply.

OK. Here's something honest. Lately, I feel like a jazz improvisationalist - but instead of improvising musically, I feel like I'm doing it with my social life. After attending 14 years of Burning Man; 12 of Beloved; being part of the ecstatic dance and Lovetribe communities and living in Portland for 20 years I feel like I know a lot of people. I know who does what and who lives where. The way this impacts me and possibly you is kind of in process, but I have been tickling myself lately in putting together various groupings of people and networking in various ways. And, at the same time, I feel like this is also changing for me. In the past, I was often quick to answer someone's question online when they'd seek a tradesperson, for instance. Mostly, I'm not doing that anymore - Nextdoor and FB are easy places to search to find a plumber or roofer.

But what I am doing is assisting people with some higher level support. You know of my love for trees. My friend Ralph who is involved in greenoregon.org mentioned he uses Constant Contact so I made him a quick training video of how to get up and running. I guess what I'm trying to do is go deeper vs. broader. I'm still figuring out exactly how to describe what I'm doing, but I see a shift in my approach. Perhaps I'll have more to stay as I figure this out over the next months and years.

At the same time, I'm continuing to work at the neighborhood level. It's really amazing what one person with a laptop can make happen these days.

My heart ❤️ goes out to all of my friends and everyone in California who are weathering many storms right now. I hope it comes to a close soon and that people can safely return home.

For a while, I was teaching people that an email newsletter should have 1 picture, 2 lines of text, and 1 link. Well, this is not that! I hope you enjoyed it all - below find some resources for politics and my most recent biz newsletter. If you want to receive my biz newsletter (which comes out monthly-ish), click here and you'll automatically be added to that list.

OK, that's all for now, folks! I hope you are doing great - feel free to hit reply and tell me what you're up to or if anything I wrote about resonated with you in any way!

It's all a work in progress, isn't it?

Love, Albert

I continue to enjoy reading Robert Hubbell's excellent 5-days a week offering - The Daily Edition. Add to this every edition of Heather Cox Richardson's newsletter. Michael Moore (who predicted that there wouldn't be a red wave and was very right - has had a new 12-part podcast called Blue Dots in a Red Sea recently which is worth a listen.