To Do 04.02.20

BINGE: Your Own Life

You probably have a phone or tablet with lots of video and pictures of you and your family and friends from days and years past. That hike at the Pinnacles National Park; the birthday party at MyMuseum; that one time at dusk when you came out of the store and looked up and saw hundreds of crows flying across the sky. All the produced and packaged bounty from streaming services can get old. This is a good time to plunge into the stories of your own life. Apps like Flickr, Apple Photo Book, Dropbox and even Amazon Prime let you easily and cheaply store your photos and videos, bundle them into albums, and share them with others. My favorite is Google Photos. It’s free, easy and will even put together montages with deft editing and a music score. Or you can gather your in-place family around the monitor or TV or console, connect your phone, and enjoy your own life again on the screen.

LEARN: Common Sense Media

Parents, right now it seems like the restrictions on the real world have forced us to go to the online world for our kids’ entertainment, schooling and socializing more than ever. Well, Common Sense Media is a good guide to steer you to its safer, better regions. They are an independent nonprofit that started in 2003 to help teachers, families and lawmakers navigate the wild jungle of digital media. They conduct research on the effects of screen time; rate apps, shows and games; help craft laws like California’s SOPIPA that protect kids online; advocate for equal access to technology; put out content in Spanish; created a Digital Citizenship Curriculum. They even encourage people to put away digital devices to spend time with family. We should all do that. But when it’s go time for kids on devices, go to Common Sense Media first.

DRAW: A Poster

If you’re like everybody else, you’ve been getting a torrent of emails revolving around Covid-19: cancellations, postponements, warnings, encouragement. So now when you see an email that doesn’t have anything to do with the pandemic, it’s a refreshing bearer of rare good tidings, so you pore over it with gusto free from anxiety. So it was with an email sent March 26 by Reid Norris, executive director of Everyone’s Harvest, about their 2020 certified farmers’ market poster contest. It calls upon students, aspiring graphic artists and graphic designers to submit “engaging, informative and creative” posters, digital or rough sketches and illustrations, now through April 25. Three winners will be awarded cash and prizes. And not a thing in the announcement about viruses or pandemics or staying home. I know. I checked. And farmers markets are “essential services,” and many are still open – no panic buying necessary.

So go to the website (everyonesharvest.org, click on workshops and events), see the rules, and sit and think about fresh organic vegetables and fruits, and mingling with neighbors in a market, and draw something about that. Doesn’t that sound like a nice project for you and your kids?

CHECK OUT: Your Library

Accessing digital movies, shows, e-books and music costs you money in the (ironically named) free market. But if you are on a budget or you’ve been laid off or had your hours cut, it’s harder to get to the kind of cultural stuff that keeps our inner self alive and flourishing. Your library card is your free pass to these things, brought to you by our local libraries which contract with companies like Hoopla, RBdigital Magazines, Overdrive and others to give you access to millions of streaming and digital works. Canopy has 30,000 award-winning documentaries, rare, film fest and indie movies. At LibriVox, a free archive of public domain books, you can volunteer to be a voice reader for a book. All this is free (to you anyway) with a library card. If you don’t have one, borrow the card number from a friend; digital materials expire when they’re due back, and there are no fines right now anyway. For Monterey County Free Libraries’ Tumble Book Library, which will read aloud an e-book or animate it, you don’t even need a library card. Check outPacific Grove Public Library, Monterey Public Library, Salinas Public Library and Monterey CountyFree Libraries websites for more.