Laurie Anderson said this. I used to listen to her cassette tapes. Now cassette tapes are passe – we have our collection on wood shelves, gathering dust. Maybe I should try and find an old cassette player.

It was a major ideas day, oddly enough, collaborative. I had my math lesson with Skye, the math tutor mid-morning. He had put the math lesson, which involved slope and interceptors, in story form. And the stories mainly centered around the book project.

We began by going over my homework. Then we went off on this quantifiable tangent, one in which we first, using the y + mx + b formula, figured out how many books the BLBP had given away and will later give away. Then Skye figured out how many books are in a tree. (Just 30).

The conversation took off from there. I am now going to write an article, maybe for Sierra Club magazine, using very imprecise figures to argue that acquiring and getting books back out into the mainstream is a sound ecological practice.

I don’t recall ever having a collaborative ideas day before.

People often ask me why I am taking a math class/getting math tutoring – all I could say up until this point in time was that I didn’t want to be math illiterate. There also was the unfulfilled wish of mine, to make up for my not having, when I had the chance, the opportunity to become math conversant. Even now, I find math difficult, and I don’t grasp the concepts very easily, if at all.

Today, another answer came to mind. I briefly saw the applicability to my own life – I could, if I was good at math, single handedly use it to quantify and thus, in using numbers, quantifying if you will, lend legitimacy to this project.

The problem is, I can’t do this. However, Skye can. So I will write an article or two and let him plug in the math data. Tonight, while cleaning the horse pen, I began in my head to work on the Sierra Club article, wisely deciding that I will first write the article and then the query letter. I can’t write a summation unless I know what I’m writing about.

The collaborative aspect of this is what’s so exciting. Someone who’s area of expertise is math and someone who’s area of expertise is language are going to work together to further promote the book project. This is a form of writing across the disciplines.

Maybe I will have Pete join us next week, which is if I get a draft done.

Pete can think the way Skye does, and so he might have some numerically related ideas.

Tonight I went to a Palmer City Council meeting – we were a part of a consent agenda, meaning we were listed along with many others requesting funds. The city council members approved all of the listed requests in one big beautiful vote. This happened so fast that I didn’t realize that it happened.

Summer in the Park(s) is becoming a reality.

Next: 117. 4/29/26: The Truth Be Known