Welcome back, everybody to Older and Wilder with Joy and Claire.

Is everyone in a vortex of Frozen?

Because that's what the news is saying.

I know.

Well, by the time people hear this, maybe the vortex will have lifted.

This has been happening to us

from time to time since COVID times where we record and I'm like, by the time people hear this,

it could be a completely different world out there. Things just feel like they are changing very,

very fast and not in a good way. Well, hopefully the East Coast, like as of this recording, I feel like this

episode we need to put a timestamp on because stuff's happening so fast and furious. It's

Sunday, January 25th at 8 a.m. Mountain time. Yeah. Exactly. So by the time you hear this,

again, maybe we'll be in a completely different space. Hopefully things will have slightly improved. But, you know, we're not holding our breath. But I don't think, I think the polar vortex thing is only the next couple days. So hopefully everyone who's listening, none of your pipes burst. Yeah, I feel especially bad for the people who don't have like all the road treatments and all the snow plows like they're not their city

isn't set up for stuff like that a lot of my friends in texas are like anytime like we get just a scosh

of cold people freak out that's a great point if you're if your city does not have the infrastructure

for that it's a different situation not just weather wise though i'm also like thinking politically

and like with all the different types of ice because it feels like there's just a fresh hell every day right now. We have a listener in the chat from Minnesota, not just thinking about Minnesota, but donating in Minnesota and protesting in our communities. And it's been a big—I don't need to say this to anybody, but we're all feeling it and we're

all freaked out and we're all just trying to do what we can to have the biggest impact that we can.

I did see a, a post that I thought was like, it was interesting and I, it was on Instagram where

you posted it and it says, I probably read Number of the Stars by Lois Lowry 100 times as a young girl. And not once did I realize that children's moms still had to make them sandwiches and sweep the floor like the world hadn't changed. And they had to keep sweeping even as the children slipped past the enemy on sleds. I never read about domestic perseverance in any 1990s Holocaust novel. Of course, this was not the main plot, but at the moment, I am the new narrator. All is wrong and there is still so much laundry. And I really felt that. It's like,

yeah, we got to keep. That is the cognitive dissonance of like having to keep the lights on and having

to keep the lunches packed while you like the brain space and the intensity just continues to ramp up and up

where there is no there has not been a break I don't see a break in the future but something that

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