So like, one of the interesting things about seeing any famous painting in person is that these images, you know, their images are - especially in the age of the internet, are just everywhere, right? Like, the amount of times I've seen The Birth of Venus on t-shirts, online, in ads, in YouTube videos, in, you know, whatever. Same with Nighthawks, same with, you know, The Old Guitarist. You cannot escape many of the images of the world's most famous paintings. And, you know, just because I'm a philosophy major and I like to talk about this kind of thing, I was reading an essay, and to be fair I was reading it late at night and I don't remember all of it and some of my knowledge of this essay, despite the fact that I've read it, is, like, summarized from YouTube videos. So I guess I'm not, you know - this is probably a bit of an under simplification. But I was reading an essay by the literary critic and philosopher, theologian, and whatever. He's really all of those things, yet kind of none of them, but Walter Benjamin. He wrote this work called the "Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction". In it, he kind of, you know, wrote that that art has, I guess, I think what he calls an aura. In other words, the fact that this image is existing in some kind of object, presents a kind of special effect to the viewer in that you kind of recognize kinda the physicality of the image and it's uniqueness as that particular - the uniqueness of the image as that particular object, right? The Mona Lisa is the one and only one Mona Lisa. And yes, there may be copies, but there's something, you know, historical and kind of physically present in the object that makes it, you know, unique. That's the Mona Lisa. That's the - and he worried that in the age of mechanical reproduction, right? Where copies of these works are mass produced, and this is long before the internet too, that the art was a little bit in danger of being cheapened, of losing that aura, of losing that significance because - in large part, because of it's the sudden lack of uniqueness, the lack of uniqueness of the image, right? But I think his concerns, I guess, may have been…

Our furnace went out, and my husband - after having sat through the ice storm and having no power for eight days during that, the power came on and then it was out again two days later. We were out for three days. And then just the other day, poof, there's no heat. The electricity's on. We had 30% power in our tank, or fuel in our tank. There should be no reason for it to go out other than the furnace broke. It acted like it was turning over and doing - making the noises it was supposed to make, but it just wasn't producing any heat. So I called the landlord and he come right over with the heater to heat the house up. It didn't work. It stayed pretty chilly in here for a couple of nights, but he put the item on order, the part that we needed. And it took a couple days for it to get going, but it finally - finally, he fixed it. And he ordered a new thermostat, that's the last thing, but it's working without this thermostat. So that's a good thing. But I'm really tired of this winter taking out our power. I packed up the puppy and my husband, I went to his mother's house when we were eight days without power. God love her, she took us in.

We have something I'm looking forward to. Well, coming up this week at work, we have Battle of the Books coming up. So fifth graders read 10 books that were chosen - before I started, the books were chosen. But I did get to help write the questions for the books this year. Next year, I'll get to help select the books. And we... Yeah, so there's probably around 50 fifth graders who are coming in in teams and they will compete answering the questions about these 10 books. And I have never participated in a Battle of the Books before so I'm kind of interested to see how it goes. How the kids do, how hard or easy our questions were. It's kind of - I felt like it was a little bit hard for us to judge what a hard or easy question will be for these fifth graders. So we'll see how that pans out. And I also contacted all the authors of the 10 books. Well, nine authors and Roald Dahl's estate, to see if they would send any, you know, congratulation words or a video or something. And I think we had seven out of the ten authors responded and sent something in. Some of them sent even like bookmarks and stickers and things like that, several videos and a couple, you know, written things that we'll read out to the kids. So I think they'll be kind of - I think they'll be surprised about that. You know, hearing from the authors, seeing some of them, and getting, you know, congratulations from the authors of these books that they read, so I'm excited to see how they react to all of that.

"Have you ever experienced a strong feeling of deja vu or a glitch in the Matrix?" Actually, yeah. And this was a shared glitch in the Matrix that several years on I just, I don't understand. And I still, I work with the person now that that happened with and we talk about it, you know, rarely, but when it comes up, we're both like, "No, that, that happened." And we don't know why. So I was in nursing school and I was doing my first clinicals, and this woman, who I now work with on the floor, she is a nurse practitioner. And she's like the nursing supervisor now. She also still teaches at that school, she still does clinicals, she's still an instructor. She was my instructor at the time. And we were about to pass meds, we were about to give out patient medications. 10 a.m. meds. So we go in the med room and I have my little sheet, my MAR, my medication administration record. I know the two meds my patient is going to get. These are not their actual medications, but let's say their medications are lisinopril and ibuprofen. Those are not their meds, but let's just say they're close to those. So, I go over my sheet. I've never passed meds before, so she shows me how to use the machine, the checks that you do to ensure that this is the right patient, the right, you know, all the seven rights of medication administration, all that. Right patient, right med, right dose, all that. So I get the meds out of the machine. I put them in my little baggie with my little med cups, and I have signed out the meds under my instructor. And we wheel the little moving computer out of the med room and we're going to my patient's room. And I knock on the door and the patient says "Come in." Open the door, and it's the door to the med room. My instructor and I - it's the door out of the med room. So, we open the door and you can see outside the med room, rather. My instructor and I look at each other and we look around, and we are in the med room. Turn around, there's the med machine. Look down, my meds aren't there, the baggie's not there, the two meds…

We have Everything Everywhere All at Once winning the Oscar. Again, that's like the first time any of us have, I think, ever really done that. And then, Michelle Yeoh winning Best Actress, Ke winning Best Supporting Actor. It just - all kinds of fun things for us. And, like it felt nice. It felt - if you had listened to the speeches, it was touching, it was really touching. It was good to see people who look like me winning. That we could do something, that we could be up there with all of these other people that are, you know, great actors and actresses and movies. And we're finally being represented in that way now. We're finally being represented on such a national stage, so that, I think, has been, like, the biggest thing. I mean it was - you know, for me, as someone who gave up on my dreams to do that. As someone who, you know, didn't really see people who look like me up on stage winning these awards, like, it meant a lot. It really did. And so yeah, that's the big one, just Everything Everywhere All at Once winning as many awards as it did.