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    Finding Sanity Amidst Wedding Planning Craziness

    A colleague of mine is getting married soon, and I volunteered to do something off of her to-do list in an attempt to help reduce her stress. She asked me to sew 10 gift bags for her guests. 
    With any DIY project, the prospect of doing it seemed much easier than the reality. At the beginning of the project, I texted her and asked, “If I have leftover fabric, do you want me to make more than 10?” Thank goodness she said no. The project was so hard! 
    She wanted the bags to be lined, which complicated the process. Also, I ran out of fabric when I was trying to
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    The End of the Summer Gardening Season

    On Saturday we ripped up all the watermelon, cucumber, and tomato plants from our front-yard garden. It’s such a cathartic process to purge everything. 

    We had a pretty good season. We didn’t stake our tomatoes well and bought the really sprawling kind, so those didn’t go as well as they could have. Our watermelon plants got aphids, but they continued to produce a ton of watermelons all summer long. Next year we’ll be more intentional about which kind of tomato plants we buy, and we’ll do some proactive organic stuff to head off the aphids. 
    Last year, I was so spent from work that I had no energy for the
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    Racially Integrated Schools

    I’m embarrassed to say that I just now got around to listening to the This American Life episodes about the importance of racially integrating our schools called, “The Problem We All Live with” (Part One and Part Two).
    Here’s the synopsis:
    Right now, all sorts of people are trying to rethink and reinvent
    education, to get poor minority kids performing as well as white kids.
    But there’s one thing nobody tries anymore, despite lots of evidence
    that it works: desegregation. Nikole Hannah-Jones looks at a district
    that, not long ago, accidentally launched a desegregation program. First
    of a two-part series.
    I started my career working with nearly 100%
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