Home And Elsewhere

I guess I’ll take the long way ‘Cause every way is the long way

[thefaultinourchickennuggets]

Hi im a librarian amd that's not now this works. If a library allows you to have a digital card and not live in the area, you are NOT taking away resources from other people, that's not how anything works. Please keep doing it!!! The more people that use our services, the more money we can get from funding sources!!! Please use us!!! We are not utilized enough, by people in or out of our community. Thanks.

[autotrails]

American Auto Trail-Missouri, Iowa & Nebraska Railroad (Memphis to Kahoka MO)

This American auto trail closely follows the former track bed of the Missouri, Iowa & Nebraska Railroad.  The travel route starts in Memphis, Missouri, and runs east along U.S. Highway 136 to Kahoka.

[cilantrhoes]

[tragicburnout]

i feel like there is a sleep in me that needs to be slept but each time i sleep i don't sleep that sleep

[sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog]

[home-and-elsewhere]

“I poured everything I had into this little book.”

Thank you so much John.

While it’s a big ask, that is truly all I ask of my fellow humans. Put everything you have into your little book. Into your little painting. Into the little sidewalk you’re pouring. Make this world beautiful and practical and accessible by making it out of yourself.

[home-and-elsewhere]

Iowa State Capitol building on a sunny Wednesday morning. Des Moines, Iowa 6/24/2026

[princetonarchives]

Menu Monday: Breakfast on board the Burlington Zephyr, December 29, 1937. The Princeton University Triangle Club was on tour with “Once over Lightly” at the time.

Triangle Club Records (AC122), Box 10, Folder 4

The entire Menu Monday series

[ofchaosgoddess]

help I’m having ideas beyond my available free time

[tuckedinbugw]

Nothing like holding my love

[vivid-sector]

doomscrolling thru the weather app

[dispelzine]

Walls / Johnson Street, Keokuk, Iowa.

[curtdenham71]

Checked out a riverboat museum.

[home-and-elsewhere]

Dallas City, Illinois 7/5/2026

[home-and-elsewhere]

[onceuponatown]

Burlington, Iowa. February 1942. 

Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information.

[sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog]

do you have any advice on how I can work to "retrain my default" for lack of a better term. I feel like i always default to scrolling social media and would love to retrain myself to make my default like, writing or going on a walk outside or something

You have to remember: People are being paid a lot of money to use the most powerful tools in the history of the world to capture your attention, and then they are giving you access to those tools for free.

(This should give you some idea just how valuable your attention is.)

So the first thing I'd say is that you should not be too hard on yourself that you spend a lot of time scrolling. Scrolling is incredibly and (literally) unprecedentedly good at distracting us from boredom or ennui or whatever else we would otherwise be feeling.

Walking and writing, meanwhile, are much less good at distraction. They are better than staring at the ceiling, maybe, but not better than Instagram or Tiktok.

The problem, which you point out above, is that Instagram and Tiktok both solve for anxiety/boredom/isolation in the short run and worsen anxiety/boredom/isolation in the long run. And so you have to make incredibly difficult, counterintuitive decisions to resist the most powerful attention-holding tools ever created.

That's difficult! But it's also possible. For me, it begins with acknowledging the difficulty but also acknowledging that what I want out of life is more and different from scrolling. Instead, I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here. And on that front, both walking and writing are good work worth prioritizing.

[sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog]

After ten years of dreaming, eight years of government support, six years of fundraising (we needed $50,000,000!), and five years of construction, the Paul Farmer Maternal Center of Excellence at Koidu Government Hospital finally saw its first patients on February 14th.

13 babies were born at the MCOE that day. Several were admitted to the NICU, the first in Sierra Leone's history. The MCOE is already radically transforming the kind of maternal and infant care available in eastern Sierra Leone.

Five thousand babies will be born at the MCOE this year. 5,000 more will be born there next year, and the year after that, and the year after that--hopefully for decades. The healthcare workforce of the entire nation will grow stronger because the MCOE is a teaching hospital training the next generation of Sierra Leonean nurses, midwives, and doctors.

The heroes of this story are those caregivers along with the Ministry of Health, PIH, and the hundreds of skilled laborers who worked together for years to build the hospital despite so many challenges. But if you're supporting this project directly or indirectly (by buying good store socks or soap), thank you. Thank you. Thank you.