postcards.nadalex

Christmas in Merida. New Years in Akumal.

JULY: Watering watering water. It was so hot and it never rained until July 25 when it rained like a monsoon scene. We finally moved our goldfish into their outdoor pond. As the deadline for my Gun Violence Memorials map approached, I rethought it as a data aggregation project. I explored the Gun Violence Archive and other databases of peculiarly American violence.

AUGUST: Family and music and books and grantwriting. My nephew got married and we all road tripped to the wedding. Later we spent a week in Nova Scotia. My daughter and her aunts visited the Acadian Musuem and found records of their first ancestor to arrive on Turtle Island. Fantastic concerts. TOPOS music festival at EMPAC, Jon Batiste at SPAC and more. Sudden jump back into grantwriting as New York State thankfully replaced some funds that the Feds had eliminated, but the deadlines were fierce. Siddhartha visited.

SEPTEMBER: New gardens. Working for peace. Hard work and the best Sundays of the year. The Compass Roses exhibit opened at Opalka Gallery. The maps of Albany were all so different and refreshing. I led a walking tour of our neighborhood to accompany Karley Sullivan's map. I joined the beginning of Taina Asili's Fever Pitch pilgrimage.

OCTOBER: Re-weaving my life with old friends & new friends. One non-stop weekend with Ragas Live Festival and Vera List Forum smoking lots of weed and talking and listening with my best old friends, forgotten old friends, an exquisite new baby, and one new dear friend. More new babies arriving in Albany. Decades of movement people and old friends gathering at the Grafton Peace Pagoda anniversary celebration. A cohort of new friends and movement people walking the Landback Pilgrimage from Muhicannituck to Housatonic to stupa, learning from Shawn Stevens from Red Road Reclamation.

NOVEMBER: Home and family and movement. Peace Action Annual Gathering honored Mark Mishler and the with our 2nd "Pat Beetle Award" it is now a real thing; however our annual gathering was still a very white-haired affair. My family decided we would NOT try to move to Montreal (my wife's hometown) after thinking about it obsessively for much of the year. Instead of uprooting our lives, I unprooted the sedimentary spill of home improvement (storage, hardware, tools, building materials, assorted junk) at the bottom of our staircase to make room for N.'s goldfish to move inside for winter. A neighbor gave us a 75 gallon tank, Alex built legs for a discarded desktop. N. scaped the big tank with sand and river stones and I did my best to plant it with some goldfish-proof plants. I discovered the magic of grow-lights in northern winters. We moved the fish inside just before we left for Pittsburgh for Thanksgiving.

DECEMBER: Grants, letters, vacation. Good news from Empire State Development for Digital Equity. Hosted a "Letter Writing Party" with my Peace Action chapter and I think small gatherings are maybe the better way to build intergenerational movements. May you have a year full of small gatherings full of meaning and impact. We came to Yucatan for a 3 sisters reunion. At midnight, we said farewell to the old year and threw rocks into the sea.

The major themes of 2025 were death, goldfish and priorities. The first few months of the year were marked by many deaths - three above all - a beloved artist friend & mentor in January, the new brother-in-law in our tangled extended family in February, and the "mayor" of my street in April. Overlaid upon the general uncertainty of American life this year, I alternated between feeling lost and feeling a need to cultivate hospitality. I took solace in watching my daughter's goldfish swim. Providing ever larger homes for them became a part-time job this year, pushing to the side other projects which I didn't have the mental capacity for this year. The sound of splashing water soothed me and my block. I met a new cast of creatures - humans, insects, and birds - as I dug a pond for her goldfish and worked to keep water flowing through its filter and bog.

Here is a month by month for January through June.

JANUARY: The month of JAN. Long live Jan Galligan - 75Grand. Chris Funkhauser interviewed me for WGXC. LA on fire on TV, while a climate denier moved back into the White House. I started hosting my monthly "Sunday Langar."

FEBRUARY: I went to Grafton for a writing retreat. On the last night, my young brother in law died. There was an ice storm but my wife wanted me to get home so we could get to her sister. After digging my car out, I went off the road twice on the way home, saved by strangers. For February's langar, we read "The Metaphysics of Self-Immolation." We fled to New York to escape our mourning to celebrate the opening of CAMP's installation. Watch their videos at pad.ma

MARCH: Spring but with funerals. I wrote grants while uncertain if the Feds will pull the funds. I started a garden hoping that my daughter and I would restore a goldfish tank. Work was very busy with requests to decode tariffs and shifting regulations. I stared at goldfish in my free time to stop from reading the newspapers, while listening to audiobooks about technology - AI, Palantir, crypto, etc. Did you find yourself watching fish more this year?

APRIL: The Mayor of Grand Street - Abdul Nur - left the world. After my 50th birthday at Beach 59 in summer 2024, I learned that Abdul came from Beach 59! We had made a plan to drive down to Rockaway together in June--now that would never happen. I dug in at home, finding a good rhythm at work with my cat sitting right next to my desk. I announced a one-year break from gardening in Gabi's Garden: after South End Earth Day, I turned my focus to the secret garden, my flower garden, and new ponds.

I met so many friends of Madeline at Bard CCS one day.

MAY: May was exceptionally pleasant. At work, our staff meeting gathered in Saratoga Springs. I rode through the park one morning tasting all of the springs and decided that Polaris is my favorite. The healing waters strengthened me to get home and plant flowers. The Radix Center provided aronias and vibernums for the native flower meadow in the Wilbur Woods. I learned more and more to read water, water plants, water animals. At the end of the month, one of my mother-in-laws lost her home in an avalanche. The government of Switzerland had said for a month that it might happen, but no one really thought it would happen. No one ever things such a thing can happen. All that is solid melts.

JUNE: Networking and sharing and connecting. I presented on "15 years of EMPAC publications" at the ARLIS Upstate conference. I went to Pittsburgh for the Special Library Association conference. This was a pivotal moment for SLA, which added tension; personally, it was my first conference in years with no poster or paper, which was so relaxing! There was a huge rainstorm on my birthday and no one showed up at my impromptu bday party which was in a garden. I sat by the fireplace inside the bar and phoned by brother, my favorite cousin, and some old friends for long and loving conversations.

The goldfish came back from foster care in May but N. and I werent able to seal up the 375G pond in the secret garden. I kept working on the network on 30G and 40G bins in the flower garden. The goldfish moved there in June and I turned it into a tropical plant paradise this summer. A trip to the beach in August turned high stress--the garden pond with my daughter's goldfish kept losing water! Our catsitters dad came every day and refilled their bin with 20G of rain water. I found the loose hose connection when I got home... but that was scary. And also that these little outdoor plastic bin ponds were small and risky. The three little goldfish moved to a neighbor's pond, and after another week of trying to clean out the 375G, we decided that my daughters goldfish would move inside for winter. A friend gave us an old 75G and we made room for it at the bottom of the stairs. I cleaned some big river stones from our community garden... My daughter used almost every one when she 'scaped the tank! I couldn't bring their sponge filter in until they moved, so I moved the media from the outdoor trickle filter into a mik jug... I learned about the difficulties of cold water cycling. Her fish were happy when they moved into the aquarium, but very slow the first 7 days as their bodies warmed up and their appetite returned.

Nikita Gale, Tempo Rubato. Photo from installation at Whitnet Biennial.

A Player piano but it doesnt hit the strings... we only hear the movement of keys. There are two benches in the room which conceal speakers and a subwoofer amplifying the sound of the keys and hammers.

Beautiful trip today to @nybg and the LuEsther Mertz Library. I brought home some Kale seeds for fall and some empty envelopes to send them flower seeds for the seed library. And I got a library card!