NOW v3: Adjusting to US life, fires in CA, poll worker training

Another Now page update. Contents below for posterity.

We’ve been in SF 🌉 for four and a half months now. The first month or so was strange but it was beautiful in the city, we went for a huge walk and I went swimming in the Pacific 🌊 for the first time in probably a decade. Then the Bay had an intense dry lightning storm and the fires 🔥 started. We started checking PurpleAir every day, and on 9 September it was if the sun never came up, like we were stuck in Blade Runner 2049. Have very rarely been able to meet up with old friends between the pandemic 🦠 and the air quality 🌫. But it will get better at some point.

We got a used car 🚗 about a month ago. I’ve learned more than I ever expected about cars and can recommend a great mechanic in SF. Now that we’ve got a car, we’re spending a lot of time at my family’s place in Nevada to escape the smoke and be a bit more active in general. We’re incredibly lucky to be able to spend some time out of a city. It’s pretty interesting to experience both SF 🟦 and rural NV 🟥 politics and pandemic approaches in the run up to the November election. In SF it’s considered super rude (and borderline illegal) not to wear a mask around others at all times. In NV, it’s considered very rude to wear masks around others unless you’re in a store. The contrasts are… stark.

Speaking of the election, I’ll be a poll worker 🗳 in SF on November 3rd. Just finished my poll worker training last week. It will probably be equal parts exhausting and fascinating. I’m thankful that I don’t live in a swing state considering how dicey everything feels.

Work-wise 👩🏻‍💻 I’m currently: helping out long-term collaborators Corridor8 with some website improvements; rebuilding a website for NY-based visual artist reps Camera Club 📷; developing a bilingual website designed by John Morgan studio for a London-based gallery 🖼; developing a new website for Gort Scott Architects designed by Polimekanos; collaborating with Bec Worth on the WIP 🚧 open-source WordPress theme that powers this website; and consulting with a few orgs and individuals in North America and Europe 🇪🇺.

The most recent sites I’ve developed are the Open-weather 🛰 site with Sasha Engelmann and Sophie Dyer, the new Open School East ✏️ site designed by Sam Baldwin, and “Eternal Return” designed by Jules Estèves for artist Elizabeth Peyton. Read a little bit about “Eternal Return” in the New Yorker.

I’m still settling in to life in the US, but I’m very open to new projects and particularly teaching / talking opportunities. Get in touch if you’d like to learn or work together.

Limited free time is currently taken up by: walking and foraging 🍄; working harder on how I confront obvious and not-so-obvious racism in myself and others; catching up with distant friends on FaceTime and Signal; figuring out how to make friends in a new place during a pandemic 🤷🏻‍♀️; contributing to the Feminist Open Source Investigations Group; cooking, baking, making drinks; remotely contributing to the choral collective Musarc 🎵; and finding a new choir in the Bay Area.