Indigenous People's Day.

I spend my day trying to figure out my new small sewing machine. I picked it up at Aldi's last weekend. It is the Easy At Home Mini Sewing machine. Upon inspection, it is surprisingly robust for its petite size. It seems to work well with most of the generic bobbins I have kicking around here. It also looks like it will take generic standard sized sewing machine needles.

I wasn't impressed with the needle threader. But it is a style of needle threader that I generally dislike. Unfortunately, it is the only one that will fit through the eye of the needle. My vision is such, now, that even with my glasses threading that is hard.

I took the boys out to the park this afternoon. Snuggle Bug picked flowers and gave them to Gregg the pizza guy over at Pizza Pauls (the pizza shop that is right next to the park). I brought my spinning with me. As the boys played on the swings and then played freeze tag with the other kids their age that were present, I did some spinning on my petite turkish spindle. I charmed people with my work and explained how it worked to the curious. I will say, spinning on a suspended spindle is a lot easier to carry with me when I am out and about. I even was spinning as I stopped in the hardware store to see if they had full spectrum light bulbs. (I think I will need to take a trip up to the city to get some. It is my hope that if I set up some lighting with full spectrum light bulbs, perhaps I will have a reduction in the severity of my depression symptoms over the next several months.

I did not do much for activism today. I wanted to do something for the oppressed peoples, especially the oppressed indigenous peoples, but my day got sucked up with domestic tasks and all that went into keeping the boys out of trouble today. Beloved and I, over the weekend, did our best to explain why Columbus Day was not something we celebrated or acknowledged in our house because Christopher Columbus did some awful things to the people that he met when he came to the Americas.

Cuddle Bear was having a hard time trying to understand it. Beloved was doing his best to explain that it was stuff to horrible for him to describe right now because Cuddle Bear wasn't old enough to understand, and, quite frankly, we didn't want him to have nightmares of invaders bursting into our home, killing us, and enslaving him. So, we just said Christopher Columbus was a man who did very bad things and we don't celebrate him. I'm pretty sure that there are going to be a number of discussions and angry conversations with the kids at school.

Who knows how the teachers are going to take it. We even had a discussion, briefly, with the boys why we don't support zoos. (Animal cruelty is not something we condone in even the remotest sense.)