Circle Time // 7.30.26

As I updated the date of this Circle Time, I just got a little whiplash from seeing that we are on the precipice of AUGUST. Already?! July being full made the time fly by, and it’s weird to be sowing seeds for the fall garden and thinking of fall plans.

I’ve got a lot of great reads, TLDR news, and recommendations for you in this week’s issue, but before we get to that—please enjoy this still from Benny’s first physical therapy rehab session. We are doing 6 weeks of rehab to hopefully get his back in a better place, since we’ve hit stagnation on his recovery with what we’ve been able to do at home. He got cold laser therapy, TENS e-stim, some PT exercises, and then we attempted the underwater treadmill which… as I anticipated for my nervous little boy that doesn’t love the water, was not successful. He did make out like a bandit by ingesting about half a jar of Skippy’s peanut butter he hustled with his scared, sad eyes. We’ll be trying again though next week, so fingers crossed!

Potato bulldozer for treats

• My garden definitely has been waterboarded basically this week with the extremely heavy rain and thunderstorms, with some dahlia and zinnia stem carnage that made me almost weep, but Benny’s green beans are finally coming in and so are my super sweet 100 cherry tomatoes! My elves blend sunflowers also have popped up, my first to escape being eaten immediately by birds and squirrels before sprouting. I’ve started a few fall seedlings indoors, which is crazy that it’s already time for.

• Very much looking forward to the return of Ted Lasso next week for season 4, and even better is some Jeni’s ice cream to go with it— their Biscuits with the Boss flavor is truly peak PR marketing.

• Been sooo nice to have my mom living even closer to us, not only to see her super often, but also makes supportive caretaking duties easier. While it’s not quite multigenerational living like my friend Jules Acree is building with her family, it’s the closest we’ll be getting for a bit and I’m so glad for it!

• On top of the ongoing cyclospora outbreak that has become historic, there is now a salmonella contamination with eggs produced in Texas, and 1.6 million dozens of eggs have been recalled. All of the product details on the recalled items can be found here.

• Meanwhile as a predictable distraction maneuver from the Republicans, Rand Paul has unleashed his obsessive witch-hunt of Dr. Anthony Fauci, releasing pages of his private diary and calling him to a Senate hearing during which Fauci repeatedly invoked the 5th amendment. This is a national embarrassment and a symptom of this country’s delusional denial of the realities of Covid, the pandemic and how it unfolded, and the basic mechanisms of science and public health communications. A reminder that Biden pre-emptively pardoned Fauci before leaving office, as he knew Fauci had become a Pavlovian dog whistle for the conservatives during the pandemic (that associate him with a denial of freedoms with vaccine mandates and masking mandates) and that the incoming administration would seek to use that accordingly.

• Troy Jackson has been chosen to be the Democratic candidate for Maine’s Senate seat against Susan Collins, replacing Graham Platner.

• War criminal Netanyahu came to D.C. for his seventh visit to the Oval after Lindsey Graham’s funeral, marking the first in-person meeting between him and Trump since they jointly started the Iran war.

• A tragic shooting at a Seattle food festival by the Space Needle, with three people that died and a fourth person, a 2-year old child, was wounded and hospitalized. Four more people were injured Police arrested 1 suspect, a 15-year-old boy, and the other suspect was a 19-year-old who died on the scene.

• Climate change in the global spotlight: Spain and France are experiencing historic wildfires (with 330,000 people forced to evacuate) with another heatwave approaching this week. A 6.8 magnitude earthquake hit Japan, collapsing a shopping mall.

• At the WH Correspondents dinner, Butternut Bonespurs did his usual worst and predictably targeted women and trans women like Kaitlin Collins and Dylan Mulvaney. The way powerful and unapologetic women live rent-free in that tiny little head.

• AI companies are buying up rare antique books, pilfering its contents to train their AI models, then destroying them. This is a physical alteration of history, and it’s important to remember that digital books can be altered at any time— consider protecting and growing your physical library, y’all.

• Some peoples chats with Claude have been easily and publicly available online through basic search engines. This is not new with AI chatbots, as this has happened with ChatGPT and Grok, and this is once again a reminder of why you should not share personal information with LLMs.