A Business Owner's Right To Choose

An owner's right to refuse to host a meeting by an organization that is against a woman's right to have autonomy over her body set off a tsunami. Jim Sheehan, the owner of a coffee shop in Driggs, was filmed in mid-August telling members of an anti-abortion rights group not to hold a meeting in his cafe, he has found himself the subject of national news stories and columns. He and his wife have been doxxed, and his business received so many angry calls — even death threats — that staff turned off the phones. Ironically when people try to protect a woman's body autonomy people threaten to kill them, making it all too clear that this is not, in fact, about life. No, it is about controlling women, making them at best second class citizens when you take away their ability to choose what is best for their bodies. It all started with a Facebook post by members of Students for Life of America, a group that opposes abortion rights, advertising that it would hold an Aug. 17 meeting at Wydaho Roasters to discuss efforts surrounding Proposition 1, a 2026 ballot initiative in Idaho that seeks to increase access to abortion. Sheehan, who supports Prop 1, also called the Reproductive Freedom and Privacy Act, responded to the Facebook post in a comment, asking the group to hold its event elsewhere. He said he didn’t give the topic much more thought after that. But the next day, he said, he looked up from grinding coffee to see that the meeting was taking place anyway. He confronted the group, reiterating that he didn’t want them meeting in his shop. An event in the cafe, he reasoned, would give the appearance of support from the business and its owners, and he strongly opposed this group’s efforts. In a confrontation the activists filmed, they pressed Sheehan on what they saw as hypocrisy. His shop advertises its desire to be inclusive, flying an LGBTQ+ Pride flag and displaying a sign that reads, “Everyone is Welcome Here.” Well, not racists and not people who see women as less than worthy of the rights that men are afforded. They can buy coffee, but they cannot advertise they are holding meetings in a business without the owner's permission.

That Summer by Jennifer Weiner

I read this for one of the reading badges in a Goodreads challenge--I read incessantly but somehow two of the 12 summer badges did not have a single book that I had either read or was hoping to read, including this one, which was that the book had 'summer' in the title. The book has two Dianas. The first Diana we meet as a teenager where she works as a nanny for well-off family vacationing in Cape Cod. She loves the beach and the ocean and even her job. As the summer progresses she develops a crush on an older boy and when he invites her to a party with all of his friends, she happily accepts. But the boy betrays her and Diana is assaulted, which changes the trajectory of her life forever. The story fast forwards to 2019 and we meet the second Diana, called Daisy, who a stay-at-home housewife who is working on growing her cooking business. She married her husband Hal when she was very young and he 13 years her senior. She is quite financially dependent on him but also beholden to him--she dropped out of college intending to go back but never does. She wanted more children but only has one. She is isolated after the one friend she had that was hers dies. Otherwise he controls her life--what they do socially, where they travel, and what happens with their daughter. Everything changes for Daisy when she starts to receive misdirected emails meant for a woman named Diana Starling, whose email address is just one punctuation mark away from her own. Daisy gets a glimpse into Diana’s glamorous life and she begins to wonder, what if things were different for her? Eventually, the two connect, meet and become friends. But as you can imagine, this connection isn’t accidental. And you probably know exactly where the story is going from there--this is not a book with twists and turns. So that said, I liked but did not love this--it is a good story though, so I would recommend it.

Amish With A Twist Tula Pink Style

2026 is the Block of the Month year for me, and while the other 3 I am invovled with I have slipped behind in, this one has been easier to keep up. One is that the Facebook group is replete with people who do all the month's blocks the day they get the material and post their results lickedy split. I was gone when the first month arrived, the second month came a couple weeks later and while I was away for the Fourth of July the third month arrived, all while I had yet to open even one ofr them. So, not a great start for me, but I have rallyed and was done with the third month before the fourth arrived--one thing about the Pink Door preparation of the fabric is that it is possible to figure out what color is what, even with so many coming at once. I am really enjoying watching this come together, there is some space to go a little off road in some place, and after quilting for 50 years, I discovered two things that are pretty common and yet I had neither of them. One is design boards--there are so many different fabrics in each block that cutting out is a bit tedious, and it would be very unlikely that I could keep them all straight when sewing them together, and a 14" design board has been key. I have made some cutting errors, but with the design board as well as what the final block is supposed to look like, I have not had to seam rip because of wrong placement. The other is that I bought a ruler organizer--there are so many rulers that I have been regularly using for this quilt that it has been great to have them all organized and propped up so they are easy to move between as needed. We are a third into the quilt and it is coming together beautifully. The Facebook group has been a great source of inspiration--including someone who FPP a butterfly for her blocks! And provided the pattern so we all could if we wanted. There are a few people who I sew regularly with in my guild who are doing this as well, and the whole experience has been great. I would do another Pink Door Block of the Month if the pattern and final quilt moved me, but in some ways I would be just as likely to try this one again with fabric of my own choosing.

Hold Still by Sally Mann

I read this after hearing about it in the Parnassus weekly vlog It Is Friday And IF You Haven't Read This It Is New To You--which has been a rich source of books that are not new and therefore that I would have almost certainly missed without being alerted to them in this way. I have no fewer than 5 such recommendations on my bedside To Read stack and I finished another one earlier this week. It turns out a lot of things are new to me. Sally Mann is a photographer who is best known for photographs of her three children – the collection called Immediate Family-sometimes naked, often not. They gleaned wider attention than art photographs typically got in the early 1990s, when Mann was the subject of a lot of bad press, and specifically a profile in the New York Times magazine that saw a journalist(who shall remain nameless because, well, no need to toot that horn) lifted her life and work almost wholly from its context. She became a figure of a favorite kind of modern controversy: a bad mother, one apparently willing to sacrifice the psychological wellbeing of her children on the altar of art. This is especially ironic in the Instagram/Tik Tok era, where influencers shamelessly flog their children for extra clicks. In any case, this is a far reaching story, sprinkled liberally with photographs, that goes back several generations in her family, to draw a clearer look at who she is, what made her, and what she is not. Some quintessential take homes are that she herself would not wear clothes--at all--until she went to school, making me think of some sensory integration challenges (maybe not where every reader went with that), she married young to someone who many years later she still sees as having saved her, and that she is driven to create. A probably unintended consequence of the journalist calling her art problematic, if not pornography, was that her in law's murder/suicide was re-examined by the police with her spouse as a suspect in a murder-murder. Why was unclear--the pair were deeply in debt, which was known to the author and her husband, and they literally had nothing to gain from such a violent course of action. Well, the adage of May You Live In Interesting Times certainly applies and the book is an outstanding version of peeling back the curtain and looking at the artist's process, messy as it is.

Patricia Belyea and Japanese Textiles

Patricia Belyea is a well known textile artist who imports Japanese textiles and leads trips to Japan for people to both learn more about the Japanese textile philosophy and to use more of them in textile art. Her origin story in quilting is that she made a baby quilt for a coworker, and has been a quilter ever since. I myself started with making a pinwheel quilt with fabric that my grandmother had used in the 1930's, 40's, and 50's, which I tied and used on my bed in college, and I too have been quilting ever since. It is a seductive craft, especially if you love fabric, and Japanese fabric is especially luscious. She is living these days in Wauconda WA with the ground squirrels, deer, and bears--it meets the definition of frontier living, which is an area with less than 2 people per square mile. She did a Zoom lecture to our guild from her studio there. Her relationshio with the textile process in Japan extends to growing indigo herself. It’s a big story — germinating seeds the size of a dot to growing plants with bright green leaves to extracting magical blue dye. It was the second time that Patricia Belyea attempted to farm and harvest Japanese indigo at her highland home. And it worked — with a yield of 5 pounds of indigo dye!

Harriet The Spy by Louise Fitzhugh

This book, when I read it as a kid, made it seem possible to be independent, brainy, and comfortable with all that. The author illustrated the book herself, and Harriet is a decidedly unfeminine character, and one who is comfortable in her own unconventional skin. I reread it probably 50 years after my first reading, thinking that perhaps it would be a good gift for our granddaughters. Harriet is a flawed but very relatable protagonist. She is dedicated to her routine of spying on her peers and her neighbors--she is an outsider looking in. There are a lot of things that are very relatable about her, and it is not a book for tweens where everything comes out okay in the end, which is much like life itself. Harriet tells it like she sees it in her journal of spy observations, and she is not one to sugar coat it. When her fellow students get ahold of her journal and find out all the unkind things she has said, they shun her, and her struggle to figure out what to do about that is so relatable. The person she listens to best writes her a letter and tells her that sometimes you have to apologize and sometimes you have to lie. Period. Harriet struggles with that mightily. What I did not realize before I reread this is that the author herself was gay and that Harriet the Spy has a gay cult following. There is not a hint of sexual preference to my ear in the book, but Harriet is an iconoclast and an outsider, she has tomboy vibes, and she is fine with all of that, so it makes sense, but I did not know.

Don't Say Good Luck (2026)

There was an awful lot to cry about in this recently released Happy Gilmore film. The opening scene is Sophie just before her big audition for her school play, for which she’s been practicing and rehearsing diligently while occasionally eyeing a boy of interest and being supported by her best friend. She gets called back, which is deserved but she didn't knock it out of the park either, but while she is waiting her turn, her forever butt dialing her father does so unknowingly while they are receiving the devestating news that Sophie's mom's cancer has come back. Sophie pours all that pathos into her audition, and she lands the lead role, much to everyone's surprise. Having battled a cancer personally that I had not good reason to think I would beat, all the while trying to be a parent to my much older than Sophie's mom's kids I totally get trying to hold back the terrible news that this is the end while supporting Sophie spending long hours rehearsing the role of her young life. I also really feel for Sophie's daad as he tries to face losing his wife and balancing that with being the sole parent to his kids going forward. They try to bring in the grandparents briefly and while they offer a few helping hands, overall their grief at losing their daughter overwhelms their ability to be a plus and they have to leave--it is all so beleivable and while these are not the steps that I ultimately walked in my cancer journey, I shed a lot of tears then and when reliving it watching this. At this point, as my spouse occasionally says, we are too old to die young, at the time I was thinking I had something unbeatable, I had had a good lie, but I was too young for it to be over. Bring a handkerchief if you check this Netflix presnetation out.

On The Way To The Wedding by Julia Quinn

Yes, I finished the eighth Bridgerton novels, and at the end this one, all Bridgerton offspring are married! The challenge in a series of eight books, all romances and with stories that must be distinct and different from each other is that an author just runs out of gas on new and different ways to reluctantly fall in love. And so while this would likely shuffle to the bottom if I were to rank them, I very much enjoyed this book in much the same vein that I enjoyed the other seven, that is to say as light diversionary stories that kept my attention, I cared what happened, I was interested in the snippets of information about Gregory's siblings and their families, and overall I would give it a thumbs up. Gregory falls quite early on first for the obvious woman--the one everyone has their eyes on--but then settles on her best friend, which is the right choice for him. The unfortunate piece is that she is spoken for. Her uncle has promised her to another, much like a head of cattle, and so there are some shenanigans that ensue in order for him to wed her. The epilogue is a bit longer in this one, being the last as it is. And while I read right through this this summer, I won't be diving right in to the prequel just yet--though will likely get to it eventually.