Circle Time // 10.23.25
Athletic feats by Benny, my crush on Keri Russell, the best laundry product ever, Ultrahuman Ring vs Oura Ring, and the rise of the "chill girl."
Hello!
This week’s Circle Time is snappy and sweet — between my procedure prep, the very loud drilling happening on our street to replace old gas lines, and volunteering my time and labor to help keep my beautiful new home state of New Jersey blue for this very important Governor’s race, time has felt a bit scarce and my brain more scattered than a playroom of Legos.
As this issue lands in your inbox, I’m likely under some sleepy drugs, for my sigmoidoscopy check-up for any new tumors, dreaming of all the food I’ve been unable to eat for a few days. Hoping to crank out a few additional bonus issues next week!
‘Til then— take care of those brains and bodies.
Quite a few sprinkles of joy igniters throughout this past week!
I’d been dreading my fall planting because it required a lot of garden cleanup prior to, but got those spring bulbs in the ground (ranunculus, tulips, daffodils, paperwhites, muscari, anemones!) and onto the war with squirrels I go!
Fall cloooothes. While I look like Adam Sandler while WFH most days, the occasional days I get to dress myself like an adult during this weather thrills me. This coat is sold out right now, but I’m pretty sure it’s the best coat I’ve ever owned.
My mom interacting with Benny is never not the cutest thing in the world — for a bit of context, my mom has had a lifelong fear of dogs, so her petting him and being comfortable around him physically is a huge feat in itself. But she is low-key obsessed with him now, sneaks him food constantly when we’re not looking, and non-stop has full conversations with him. Her phone background is all three of her grandkids: my niece and nephew (my sister’s kiddos) and Benny.
We are in the phase of lots of physical therapy for our boy, and getting Benny to be carefully more active. He’s gained a bit of weight due to all the inactivity he was forced to do, so we’ve been taking longer family walks in the early mornings to various neighborhoods. One of the areas he loves, he’s gotten zoomies on the grass a few times, and J caught a photo of one spectacularly athletic leap that give pole vaulters a run for their money, on the height achieved. Enjoy:
Once more, rip off the band-aid style!
ICE (and HSI) has officially started raiding in NYC, as of Tuesday— downtown Manhattan along Canal St. and Federal Plaza drove military vehicles in, throwing people indiscriminately to the ground, anddetaining and loading people into unmarked vehicles. They also detained U.S. citizens. New Yorkers naturally pushed back, and I’m proud of my city.
New study shows that peanut allergies are on a major decline with kids, thanks to updated food allergen exposure guidance! WE LOVE SCIENCE-BASED MEDICINE.
AWS (Amazon Web Services) had a massive outage, and because we love conglomerates in this world (/sarcasm), pretty much everything internet broke (Venmo, Amazon, Ring, Snapchat, Microsoft, Zoom, Adobe, Pinterest, Roblxo, Reddit, Instacart, Alexa, etc) ! The outage cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and hows you how there might be a *slight* problem with one company controlling far too much — AWS controls 1/3 of the global market and is the largest cloud provider, to provide context and scale.
The government is in it’s third week of a shutdown with federal workers and essential service workers (like air traffic controllers, coastguard) not getting paid, but don’t worry, ICE and border patrol agents are getting paid, and have gotten a 700% boost in weapons spending. Also, not sure it feels that great to know that 3/4 of the staff at the agency safeguarding our country’s nuclear stockpile is getting furloughed, thanks to the shutdown too.
Yes, yes, the POTUS posted an AI video of him dumping his fecal incontinence (a lot of it) on No Kings protestors. I can’t believe I’m typing this right now.
Rumptydumpty is going forth with his $10B lawsuit over WSJ’s piece publishing Epstein’s birthday book with his slightly concerning drawing. PSA, Mike Johnson still has yet to swear in Adelita Grijalva, who would be the 218th signature to force the release of the Epstein files. Related: Prince Andrew gave up all his royal titles.
We’re living in a time during which the WH Press Secretary responds to a journalist’s question with, “your mom.”
MAHA’s latest obsession: abortion in the water! Sounds ludicrous, is ludicrous, but the movement has teeth.
In the first Circle Time of October, I mentioned a few shows returning to Netflix with new seasons: The Diplomat has blown us away so far for season 3 (we are on episode 3!).
The casting and acting is incredible, the storylines are INTENSE and weighty, and the writing is *chefs kiss.* Allison Janney takes a bigger role this season, along with Bradley Whitford, for a mini West Wing reunion. Please put Keri Russell in every political, sexy drama and give her the Emmy, she is absolutely magnetic. And if you haven’t seen her other gem in this genre– The Americans is also one of my favorite must-watch TV series, starring Keri Russell and her now husband Matthew Rhys (they met on the show), who play KGB spies posing as Americans.
I’d seen this brand, Dirty Labs, being raved about a few times on Instagram, so when they offered to no-strings gift me a few products to test, I was very curious about it since I’m quite picky about cleaning products and the ingredients in them. I haven’t tried the dishwasher detergent yet, but holy shit.
The laundry booster is never not going to be in our house now, I used it on 3 specific loads this past weekend and is a hail mary for: microfiber cloths that lost their absorbency due to detergent / buildup, bath towels that still have a mildew-y smell a few days after even a hot heavy duty wash, and light-colored bed sheets and shirts that have sweat stains/sebum stains. Also love the sustainable packaging, too many cleaning products come in heavy-duty plastic (for safety, I know, but whew!)
Never not squawking about these damn sweatpants and sweatshirt from Gap, my true GOAT of comfy clothes and cotton forever staples. I have in 3 colors now, and just got my mom a set because today’s the last day of their family & friends 40% off sitewide sale (+ an extra 20% off with code YOURS)! All my Gap faves are linked here.
In another previous issue of Circle Time that due to Oura Ring’s new deal with the Department of Defense (I’m not calling it the Dept of War, pls) and by sorta proxy, some ties to Peter Thiel’s Palantir.
After some consideration and research, I cancelled my Oura membership and Natural Cycles (had been using NC since 2017, so this was sad for me) after downloading my data, and just got my Ultrahuman ring last week. It offers similar biometric data features, alongside some other additional insights, is a lower price (but without the monthly membership fee model to access your own data, which always bothered me about Oura).
The Ultrahuman Ring is normally $349 (which is the cost of the Oura ring in silver, but the gold finish is $499 – Ultrahuman’s gold is the same price, with only their brushed rose gold finish being $50 more expensive), but I got it for $299 during a sale that’s still happening right now, and I paid $39.99 for 1 year of their Cycle tracking plug-in (compared to $79/year of Natural Cycles).
My ring is still calibrating all my biometrics and needs about two weeks of data to give me proper insights, but I am very impressed with it so far! Will report back after some time with it, with my full review.
We did No Kings, now what? I think marches and demonstrations are super important on a psychological, human level, but we must not let it replace more actionable items too. Loved this outline of next steps.
As the boys shift to the right, here comes the rise of the “chill girl.” This piece, written by a current high-schooler, made me want to scream; scream because I knew this was the inevitable pendulum swing back towards catering towards the patriarchy, encouraging young women and girls to keep silent in favor of comfort and to not disrupt social norms.
Long Covid is real, and it’s changing an entire generation. Bless Rolling Stone for publishing this, because no one wants to hear it but it’s simply reality. Long Covid has now surpassed asthma as the most common chronic condition in children, and I sincerely hope that we as a society take these long-term complications more seriously.
Circle Time is our weekly huddle on Thursdays (the evolution of The Weekly Report). A digest of *all the things,* if you will. Every week I’ll be sharing things bringing me joy, current events to stay informed, recommendations, and thought starters.
And I’d love nothing more than for y’all to share what you’ve been consuming, too!
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I have an oura ring and am thinking about moving to the ultrahuman ring for similar reasons! I haven't pulled the trigger yet bc have read uneven things about the ultrahuman ring...please keep us posted on your experience!