A Chaotic Week
We’ve had an extraordinary stressful past week here in the Twin Cities. Between the killing of Duante Wright by a Brooklyn Center police officer and the Derek Chauvin trial our city, or should I say cities (St. Paul and Minneapolis) have been on edge. Everyone, especially business owners, were keeping their fingers crossed that protests wouldn’t turn violent.
So far, so good. Our neighborhood, Cathedral Hill, so far has been peaceful. We’ll be keeping our fingers crossed that it stays that way. Between the riots last spring and forced closures due to Covid-19, I don’t think our small businesses could survive another hit.
As a society, let’s hope we begin working together towards some kind of substantial change in racial equality.
Make Sure Your Tray Tables Are In The Upright and Locked Position
Lord how I miss that that preflight speech. After the J&J vaccine getting “paused” just hours before our appointments my wife and I found appointments at separate facilities this past week for the Pfizer vaccine. With the first dose in our arms thoughts have turned to world travel again.
I can’t think of anyone better to reignite the spark of that wanderlust than someone I consider a mentor, Anthony Bourdain. I preordered this book a LONG time ago and it was just delivered yesterday.
Tony had the initial meeting with the co-author, Laurie Woolever, a few months before the world tragically lost him in June of 2018. Laurie vowed to complete the manuscript after his passing. It looks like an amazing read and I can’t wait to dig in.
Vella
Those of you who have been with me for a while might remember my quest to get a short story published by The New Yorker. I’ve submitted countless stories to them throughout the years and all have been rejected. I’ve actually been considering gathering all these stories together and publishing them in book form and calling it, “The New Yorker Rejects”.
The universe handed me an opportunity late last week. I’m excited to share that I was invited by Amazon to try a pilot publishing platform called Kindle Vella. My original short story, “The Bridge” (published in 7 installments) will be amongst the first batch of content to appear on Vella. The first episode will be free but you have to purchase tokens to read episodes 2-6. It seems everyone is jumping on the crypto bandwagon. It’ll be interesting to see how this works. If Vella shows promise I’ll publish more short stories there but I’m reserving judgement until I see proof. I’ll share a link when it goes live in a few months!
Ephemera Updates!
Ophelia is on the home stretch of designing a cover image for this new book.
Beta readers have finished providing all their feedback and the manuscript is ready to hand off to LuCe, the book designer!
I should have a publication date to share with you all very soon. I’m so excited about this project! Although my time away has been super productive, I'm starting to really miss regularly blogging. I should be returning to producing 3-4 blogs per week after this book is published.
Hive Silver Bloggers
Are you between the ages of 40 and 100? Do you have a passion for blogging and cryptocurrency?? Do you have some wisdom to share??? If the answer is Yes to any of these questions please stop by my friend 
Another Chapter Closes
My wife Raymi and I have been skating at the Roller Garden since 2012. That year was a particularly tough one for me. I had been working an extremely stressful job for the previous three years, 70-80 hour weeks, getting way too little sleep. Skating helped get me through that rough patch. We got into the best physical shape of our lives from those two hour skating sessions. The skating community welcomed us with open arms and throughout those past nine years we’ve made some great friends and wonderful memories.
The pandemic brought it all to a screeching halt. We haven’t skated since early December 2019. A large part of our ‘return to normalcy’ was going to be skating at the RG again and reconnecting with all the friends we haven’t seen in over a year. There are a few other rinks in the Twin Cities area but none compare to this one. Add this news to the list of things from 2020/2021 that just plain suck. Roller Garden you will be missed by many!
Here’s an article with some great history on the Roller Garden.
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All for now.
With Gratitude,
Eric Vance Walton
(Gif sourced from Giphy.com)
Most of us have experienced a moment of perfect peace at least once in our lives. In these moments we lose ourselves and feel connected to everything. I call these mindful moments. Words can’t describe how complete they make us feel.
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