Underneath the Moonlight

We were children looking up to our Shepherd. We believed our little world was perfect and nothing bad could happen to us. Then something rocks our world and we must take the bad, difficult things and learn to cope. We had the realization that not everyone has the best intentions for us. We learned that grief can be a powerful tool, that pain doesn’t need to stop us from doing what is right. We learned we couldn’t do everything on our own, and that everyone has value if you let them play to their strengths. That first impressions and bias can lead us down the wrong path. That religion is full of contradictions but faith rooted in love, justice and acceptance can offer peace.

And then all the other Sesame Street character accounts joined in:

And now I’m thinking maybe we’re gonna be okay… 💗

"So, boss... I may have messed up."

"What did you do, Ray?"

"Well, I made a post for Elmo saying 'Hi, how's everybody doing?'"

"I mean, that's kind of what we pay you for."

"Yeah, but.... <sigh> it turns out pretty much everyone is hanging on by a thread, badly enough that they needed to tell Elmo."

"Oh."

"God help me, boss, I think Elmo needs to be there for them."

SIMPLE SYRUP SIMPLE SYRUP SIMPLE SYRUP

I got some REALLY AWESOME local strawberries from my feed mill, but I absolutely could not eat the quantity of strawberries I got before they would have gone bad and the birds are not huge fans of strawberries. So instead of wasting the last 8 or so, I jam-packed this little container with strawberries, added an equal weight of white sugar, and stuck it in the fridge for about a day and a half.

The sugar leaches the juice/water content from the strawberries and creates a saturated, thin syrup (lower sugar = thinner, more watery, higher sugar = thicker, more like maple syrup). As you can see, the container is not jam-packed with strawberries, they have considerably shrunk in size, as all their delicious, delicious juices are now trapped in a fucking fantastic fresh simple syrup.

BUT

How about these NEW rules, mate? 🇦🇺

➡️ Go to Dropout to watch new Game Changer now

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.