Good afternoon. I'm going to start with a story. Try not to drop it. So I'm wearing an Apple watch. Okay? Anyone have an Apple watch? Yeah. So I have this tendency to talk with my hands. You'll notice me doing this when I'm talking today. And sometimes I get excited in a talk like this and afterwards Siri will send me a summary of my workout. Because if I've been swimming, she thinks I've been swimming. Other times she'll actually interrupt me while I'm talking and she'll say, I'm sorry, I didn't hear that. I didn't get that. It's really annoying. So this happened to me recently. I was talking to this guy I work with. His name is Adam. And we were actually, we were talking about AI and I started waving my hands and Siri interrupted and I yelled at her. Does anyone ever do that? You yell at, be honest. No shame. Okay. A lot of nodding. Some hands. All right. So I yelled at her and then I turned to Adam and I said, it's so annoying. Don't you hate it when that happens? And Adam was uncharacteristically silent. Now the thing you need to know about Adam is he's one of the smartest people I know. And he's kind of an expert in designing for AI. He's a designer and he's been focused on AI for about seven years. And after kind of a dramatic pause, he said, you know, I tell people not to ever yell at their robots. And he was serious.  And I said, why?  Why does it matter? And he said, well, you know, there are some experts, there's debate about this, but there are some experts who think there's a slight chance that AI could become sentient one day. And if that happens, they're going to have all the data. And I want them to know that I'm one of the good guys. All right. So while Adam was talking, let's see if the clicker is working. This vision of a dystopian future flashed before my eyes. What if the robots came alive and they knew that I'd been yelling at them this whole time? I mean, imagine it. You wake up in the morning, and your toast is burnt, and you get in the car, and every traffic light is turning red right when you get to the intersection. And you show up at work, and poof, important meanings are just disappearing from your calendar, right? Badly written blog posts appearing with my name on it. This would be a nightmare. All right. I'll come back to that in a minute. My name is Katrina Alcorn. I'm General Manager of Design at IBM. And today I'm going to touch on three themes. I'm going to talk about how our relationship with machines is changing. I'm going to talk about the importance as designers in setting a clear intent when we're designing with AI. And I'm going to talk about ethics, which is interesting. I didn't see a lot of talk at this conference about ethics. I think you're going to be hearing about it a lot more, and I think you're going to want to learn about it. Along the way, I'll share some resources that we've been developing at IBM that I hope will be helpful to you in your work. Whoops. Let's go back one. So just a little bit about IBM, if I can pull that slide up again. Let's start over. So you've probably heard about IBM. You might not know what we do. We're a big tech company. We've been around for 112 years. And for that entire time, for more than a century, we've been helping people and companies do more with their data. And of course, what that looks like has changed a lot over time. Now we got involved with AI. We started making headlines back in the 90s. You might remember when our AI technology beat the world chess champion at chess. And then in 2011, our AI technology beat the world's best Jeopardy champions. And so that made the news. We've developed, we've done a lot of work on our technology since. And today, we're a world leader in hybrid cloud and AI. And we make software and hardware and all kinds of services leveraging these technologies. We recently unveiled our new platform for AI. It's called WatsonX. And it's now helping customers all over the world harness the power of AI very specifically for their businesses. And this is where our designers come in. So as a general manager, I have the honor to lead a practice of about 3,000 designers who are designing all of that hardware and software and all those services and experiences. And they are right at the center of what it means to design for fair and ethical and valuable AI experiences. And I want to call out two of those designers in particular. Adam Cutler is the Adam I was telling you about. He's a distinguished designer at IBM focused on AI. And Milena Pribick, who is a design principal at IBM, these are both technical appointments. And she is leading the effort around ethics around AI. And a lot of what I'm showing you today would not be possible without the years of effort that they've put into this work. Okay. So I want to go back to this conversation I was having with Adam. So after I get over my initial shock, I started thinking about how our fundamental relationship with technology has remained more or less unchanged for thousands of years. I mean, when you think about it, going all the way back to our ancestors who used sticks and stones to make fire. Back to my teenager who plays video games with his friends. The basic power dynamic has been, we're the boss. And when the technology doesn't do what we expect it to do and we want it to do, we get mad at it. In the 80s, my dad used to slap the side of the television set when the picture was blurry. Anyone remember that? And of course I yell at Siri. Well, I used to yell at Siri. But now with AI, we're accelerating at a tremendous velocity beyond this world of a user input and a system output. And we're moving into a completely new relationship with technology. One that I think at its best is more of a collaboration or a partnership. We're augmenting the technology, but the technology is also augmenting us and it's happening in real time. So if you think about it, before AI, human-computer interactions were pretty static, right? The human enters an input, the machine enters an output, and it does it without thinking or adapting. Computers were essentially reacting to what we asked them to do. They had fixed functionality based on their installed software. They had very limited ability to bring in sensory inputs. It's basically clicks on a mouse and on a keyboard. And they're deterministic, meaning that what they did was based solely on their programming. Now with AI that's changing. They're entering a much more dynamic relationship. Machines can now learn and adapt, and they can actually start to be proactive. They can recommend things even before we ask them to. They can also evolve their own capabilities, right? So they can actually autonomously improve what they're doing without us necessarily intervening at all. They can take in other sensory inputs, biometric data, facial expressions, tone of voice, those types of things. And they're probabilistic. What they do is based on probabilities, which means the output to us can seem a lot less predictable, and that's giving rise to a need for more trust and transparency. So what does this new paradigm mean for designers, right? I mean, we're moving beyond a world where we just deliver wireframes. AI systems are taught, they're not programmed. How do you design for that? So I stumbled into this field back in the last millennium, which feels as long ago as it sounds. And back then UX wasn't really a thing. And what I've seen over the course of my career is that designers have been asked to take on more complexity and more abstraction as time goes on. So in the beginning we were designing the interface. And it was information architecture, and that created a new dimension, right? Then we started doing system designing. We heard a couple great presentations today about design systems. That's a lot more complex than just designing a one-off component or even a one-off product. Now we're being asked to do something even more abstract and complex, what I think of as creating the conditions for success. I think we're moving beyond a scenario where as designers we orchestrate a user journey and we encourage people to enter certain inputs for a system output, and we're becoming more like master gardeners. We're creating an environment where these relationships can evolve between humans and machines. Relationships that can grow over time in mutually beneficial ways. Okay, so there's a lot of hype around AI and I think it's really helpful to think about what hasn't changed. We still need to get the answer to these three questions. This is still your job. What problem are we trying to solve? Who are we trying to solve that problem for? And how will we know when we've been successful? It's really hard to surprise me anymore, but I'm still appalled when I hear, and I heard a story about this this morning at breakfast, I'm still appalled when I hear about a team rushing into a technical implementation without understanding some basic answers to these basic questions. It's like watching a really bad horror show where the teenagers keep going down into the basement and you're like, just stop, don't do that. It's not going to work out. So this is still your job. The single most important thing that a UX designer can do is bring alignment on a well-articulated intent. If we don't have agreement on what problem we're solving, we'll never get anywhere. That hasn't changed. What has changed are the actual intents themselves. So at IBM, we've found that when you're staring at a blank sheet of paper starting with an AI project, it can be a little overwhelming trying to figure out what you're doing. So we've identified six what we call core intents. These are six reasons for an AI system to exist. This is not an exhaustive list. The technology is evolving. So you may have things to add to this list. We will probably update this list. But I want to go through this six because if you're working on an AI project and you can't match up what you're doing to one of these six things, it may be time to step back and reevaluate. All right. So the first one is accelerating research and discovery. Imagine you're an insurance company with reams and reams of data. We can conduct rigorous domain-specific research faster using machine learning and artificial intelligence to comb through that data and find those nuggets of information that are really valuable and can help us run the business better. Second, who was in the workshop on day one? Yeah. So this was a big scenario a lot of us played with in the workshop we did where we were experimenting with enterprise design thinking methods. Intent two is about enriching interactions. We can understand and communicate customers and employees using natural language, responding to their needs with tailored dialogue and personalized experiences. So this case study we used was imagine you work for a luxury hotel chain. And how might you use AI to improve the experience of a visitor? And you can imagine if you had some information about that user's preferences, you could do a lot of interesting things to tailor the experience. All right. Intent three, anticipate and preempt disruptions. One of the really interesting tech trends that I've been a part of in my career has been this internet of things, you know, where we put sensors on all kinds of things including big, heavy, expensive equipment. Those sensors collect data, of course, about how the equipment is operating. And now we can use artificial intelligence to monitor those reams and reams of data and make predictions about when the machines will need maintenance. And this is important because we can not only prevent unplanned downtime, which is expensive for companies, but sometimes we can save lives because there could be safety issues. Intent four, recommend with confidence. We can use AI to make more confident targeted recommendations. We can evaluate a broad set of information based on a set of parameters that likely you as the designer are setting. Great example of this is in the security software business. Security software can serve up many, many different alerts. More than a human can react to. So AI can help us actually recommend which of those alerts actually need a follow-up. Intent five, scale expertise and learning. We can collect know-how from experts and then combine that with the latest technical documentation in an industry to create a deep well of knowledge that can be accessed on demand by employees. You can imagine in the healthcare space where a doctor is trying to come up with the best treatment plan for a patient with cancer. This could be incredibly helpful for helping them make a decision. And the last intent is sort of using AI to manage AI. So we can detect liabilities and mitigate risk. We can use AI's understanding of the written word to identify the risks to our companies and then make sure that we're actually staying in compliance with these changing rules. All right. So let's imagine you've aligned on an intent. You're designing an AI system. You know why you're doing it. You know who it's for. You know what success will look like. Now you're ready to design the conditions for success. And that means you're probably going to start talking about data. The quality, availability and maturity of your data will determine the value that AI can deliver. Now a lot of decisions will need to be made about where the data is going to come from and crucially where it's going to go. So you're going to have a lot of decisions to make about assessing the quality of data. You can see how this connects to intent, right? Because if we don't know what the intent is of the system we're designing, it's impossible to determine whether the data is ready for this. So at IBM we've developed some frameworks that are helpful here. And one of them is what we call the AI ladder. And this essentially shows the steps we need to walk up in order to deliver, you know, get our data ready for an AI implementation. So it starts with collecting the data, then organizing it, analyzing it, and then infusing it in all of our business processes so that we can actually get the value of AI. It's very unlikely, as you're starting to go through these steps, that there's one single person in your organization who will actually understand all the things you need to know about data and will be able to answer your questions. So we've been developing a set of enterprise design thinking methods at IBM to help kind of lead those conversations. Some of them are available on our website. So if you go to ibm.com and look for enterprise design thinking for AI, you'll find some of these specific methods here. All right, so as soon as you start working with your team and making decisions about data quality, you've now plopped into the deep end of the ethics pool. Who owns the data, right? Do you have a right to use the data? What could go wrong with using this data? How are you going to correct for bias, your bias, your team's bias, your company's bias, society's structural inequalities, which are likely to be in the data that you're modeling? And this is where I think I'm going to say the most important thing I'll say in this talk today. Ethical AI is not just a checkpoint. It's not a framework. It's not a playbook or something that you add on at the end of the project. And it's definitely not something to be left to the regulators further down the value chain. Ethical AI starts at the beginning, and as the designer, that means that starts with you. I believe that ethics and design are becoming inseparable. Whatever your professed ethics may be, your actual ethics, what actually gets implemented will be made manifest in that product. Now back when I was a consultant, clients, I used to do a lot of business development. And clients would ask, they didn't want to pay for stuff. So they'd be like, why should I pay for design? Why should I worry about design? And I would say, you don't need to worry about design. Your product is going to be designed. The question is, do you want it designed by overworked engineers as an afterthought, or do you want it designed by trained professionals who are bringing intention to that process? It's the same thing with ethics. Your ethics will be in the product, but I think you'll get better results if we really bring intentionality to this. And I want to linger on this point a little bit longer. So I've led hundreds of projects in my career. Some of them were pretty meaningless to me. They were brochure ware, websites, intranets, inscrutable middleware. I always gave an honest days work for an honest days pay. I always tried to find that one little thing that would keep me interested and give me a skill that I was learning. But I didn't worry about ethics. There were a few projects I turned down because I didn't want to work with a cigarette company, for example. I didn't think what they did matched my values. But once I accepted a project, it was pretty straightforward. I think that's changing now. I think who you are, what you believe, and what you value is really going to matter when you design for AI. So there's two ways to say this. It's really hard for an unethical person or an unethical company to design an ethical AI system. But we're ethical, right? We're good people. The bad news is it's pretty easy for an ethical person to design an unethical system if we're not paying attention. Beyond the training data, there are hundreds of decisions that will be made in the course of creating an AI system. And each of them will have ethical implications. One of the things that we really recommend at IBM is that people leverage strategic forecasting exercises. We played around with one at the very end of the workshop on day one. These are great for helping us think ahead, not only to the intended outcomes of what we're doing, but also the unintended potential outcomes so that we can try to mitigate any issues that could come up. And I want to make this really tangible for designers. Like, what does this mean you can do in your job? So here's a few things you can do. Number one, educate yourself about ethics resources. I'm sharing a few in this presentation. There are others out in the world. I know I said ethics isn't a framework, but these frameworks can be useful for driving discussions in your project team. So leverage them. Also educate yourself about compliance issues. And this is not an easy area to keep up on. I don't know that you really need to be an expert, but be aware of the big issues around ethics, around things like GDPR, because they have implications for the interface. And it will be part of your job to help your team understand those implications. I said this earlier, but I believe to be a great designer, we also need to be great storytellers. And so you can leverage your storytelling ability to help your project team understand the real-world consequences of the decisions that you're making. Designers can ask key questions to uncover risks. And we can also lead conversations on how diversity impacts outcomes. And what I mean by that is we need to understand if our AI system is going to affect different groups of humans in different ways, let's be mindful about that and decide if that's okay. This is a resource that could be useful for you. It's available at this URL. It's called Everyday Ethics for Artificial Intelligence. We published this about five years ago at IBM, and it was written by designers for both technical and non-technical roles alike. It outlines some other healthy practices you can take back into your work. Okay. So I'd like to leave you with a few last thoughts about your role as we wrap up this conference. While technology and algorithms form the core of AI systems, the ethical character of these systems is going to be the product of countless design choices. Choices that are made by you. It's a lot of responsibility. Have I scared you away from AI design yet? Are you ready to check your career and go start a cake shop somewhere in India? All right, I want to reassure you a couple things because I don't want you to do that. First of all, it's very unlikely that you will design the first AI system to gain sentience, so you don't need to be too concerned. Second of all, I've actually researched this. It's very difficult to run a cake shop here. The hours are brutal, the margins are really low, you'll make a lot more money as a designer, so I think you should stick with it.  You don't have to be perfect, but you do need to care. So while I was musing on this idea of creating conditions for success, I started thinking about the two things I've done in my life that I've dedicated the most time to, being a mother and being a boss. So on the mother side, I have two wonderful kids and a wonderful stepdaughter, and I've had to learn what mothers and fathers everywhere around the world have to learn, which is how to let go of control, right? They're growing up, they're making their own decisions, they're going to make their own mistakes, and there's nothing I can do about it. What I can do is remind myself that I did everything I could to create the conditions for their success. I raised them with love. I taught them, my husband and I taught them what we value and how we treat people. I praise them for their successes and I encourage them to be brave and take risks, and it's kind of the same way with the teams that I lead now. I have several hundred designers who report directly up to me, and I have a couple other thousand who dotted line to me. There is no way that I can possibly control the work that they're doing. I can't even see it all, and they wouldn't want me to. What I can do is try to create the conditions for their success. How I've done that as a design leader is I've elevated the practice of UX research because I don't think design can be successful without it. I've done a bunch of work to activate our product management practice. We actually have people on my team right here in Bangalore this week, training product managers, and you know what they're teaching them? They're teaching them design thinking. They're teaching them how to work with designers because designers can't be successful unless they have good partners. I've really focused on our learning programs for designers, and not only the Spark conference, the design conference that I talked about earlier, but we have designer boot camps for people onboarding into IBM, and then we've started creating new programs for mid-career designers so that our designers will stay and grow at the company. But I think the bottom line is any success that I've had in either of these endeavors is because I cared. Caring is the wellspring of ethics, and this is what I mean when I say bring your humanity to the work.  So this is my advice. Start there. And if it turns out that you do design the first AI system to gain sentience, the first knowledge it will have of itself is that it was brought into this world with care. That can't be a bad thing. Thank you. Check, check. Should we start with a question? Yeah, before we felicitate her. Any questions, please put your hands up. We'll pass on the mic. Can we pass the mic there? My question is like you're into design for several years, so suddenly this AI comes, then people feel threatened, actually, especially content writers and UX designers. So can you comment on about the future of the UX designers with the AI? Comment, did you hear the question? Can you come forward? Keep the mic closer to your mouth. You don't come forward, sorry. Just keep the mic closer to your mouth. So my question is like, so everybody is feeling threatened about AI, especially content writers. Now we are also feeling threatened with the AI. So can you comment on this?  Can you comment on this? So the question, I think the question is, there's a lot of hype about AI. People are excited a bit about AI. I want you to be excited about AI. If that wasn't clear, I'm super excited about it.    We've now normalized what it means to drive a car, although I could never drive in India, by the way. I'm amazed at what the traffic is like here. But, you know, how have we gotten there? How did we normalize it? We had rules, we had standards. AI is new. This is like the early days of the car. We're like, there's no traffic lights and we don't know where the road is. And so I think there's a lot of that, it's incumbent on us to feel responsible for the outcome of how this technology will affect people. And it means we need to bring a different level of intention to the work. Does that make sense? But I don't want to dispel excitement. I mean, I'm super excited about what AI can do. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Any questions? We'll take one more last question. You have this side. Hi, thanks for the nice talk. I'm Ram. What's still a little bit of, there's a little bit of vagueness in my mind about is as a designer, building products which leverage AI. How does my role change? A lot of the people here are individual contributors who probably do user research or prepare mockups or do test out the prototypes on a day-to-day basis. One thing is basically using AI to create your designs, et cetera, where content creation, et cetera, comes into play. But let's say, just as an example, I'm building a chatbot. In the past probably a human agent is talking on the other end, and now there's a machine talking on the other end using AI. As a designer, do I look at things differently while I build my designs? What does necessarily change in my day-to-day life? That's still a little bit of, there's a little bit of vagueness in my mind if you could set your thoughts on that. Did you catch that whole question? I only got parts of it. It's the echo in here. Come on up and I want to make sure. So I got part of it, which was, yeah, yeah. You can use AI to create your designs. Okay. When you're building a product that leverages AI, okay. Let's say an example of a chatbot. Yeah. Yes. But the way you go about that will change. Well, I think it does change. So that, you know, we're not just designing the interface of the chatbot anymore. We're designing conversation, as Susan talked so eloquently about. I think it was yesterday. It's been a long day. I can't remember. We're designing the logic behind that experience. We're helping our team get clarity on the intent of the chatbot. Should it be able to answer all questions? Is it really being targeted at this one thing? What does that mean? What are the implications? So what I'm trying to say is, again, I think we've moved into a higher level of abstraction than we ever have before. The interface, you know, it's not that it's not important, but it's the tip of the iceberg. The work, a lot of the work, is gonna be under the ocean. It's gonna be the part of the iceberg we don't see. And that's where a lot of the ethical considerations come up. Yeah. Thank you.


Rami Chowen's reaction to Stage 6 load shedding takes the cake This is when Eskimo takes the Jesus out of you Scores of South Africans have taken to Twitter to react to Stage 6 of load shedding implemented by SA Power Utility Eskimo But actor Rami Chowen's response to the power cuts take the cake On Monday, the Power Utility announced it would cut the power up to Stage 6 Which is the highest stage SA has ever experienced Eskimo said this was due to a technical problem at the Maduki power station The power utility also attributed the unprecedented power cuts to the recent heavy rains The heavy rains have caused coal handling and operational problems at several power stations Later on Monday night, Stage 4 load shedding was reintroduced While many complained about the inconvenience that comes with the power cuts and have shared hilarious reactions to Stage 6 load shedding, Eskimo is posing a much bigger threat to Chowen Who said the stage of power cuts are when Eskimo comes and takes the Jesus out of you To back it up, she quoted the Bible verse John 8-12, which reads, I am the light of the world Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life Here's a glimpse into the reactions


Community members from Kericho County came from high and low to celebrate the launch of their reviewed Participatory Forest Management Plan. For almost two years now, CIFO has worked with Laundiani Community Forest Association to develop a Participatory Forest Management Plan. The forest plan development process involved members of the Water Resource Users Association. The ceremony began with tree planting by the invited guests and community representatives. Before the handover, the Laundiani Community organized a parade of activities that they are undertaking. The CIFO organized a tree planting and protection for the people concerned. The Laundiani Community Forest Management Plan is a prehistoric site. It was considered a holy place. In all generations, prehistoric site is marked or rather considered a homeland of the Kalenjin tribe. It is a place of blessing. The official handover of the document was quite spectacular. In the serene setting of the Laundiani Forest Station, a jovial community featuring local artists sang and danced their way through the ceremony. The PFMP was officially handed over to the Laundiani Community Forest Association, the Water Resource Users Association, Kenya Forest Service, and the County Government of Kericho. Now, thank you. We are going to have CIFO now to receive their own. We normally give to our strategic partners officially. So, CIFO, our Chief Guest, this one for the Chief Conservator of Forest, we appreciate the partnership and it is good that we have it on record that they have done us proud.


We want to be something more than the appendages of society. We want that women should be the co-equal of man in all the perils and enjoyment and interest of human life. We want that she should attain to the development of her nature and her womanhood. We want that when she dies it may not be written on her tombstone that she was the relic of somebody. Judith Kaloora is a professional actress, historical interpreter and educator. She founded History at Play in 2010 to chronicle the lives of influential but often forgotten women. Judith holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Syracuse University and has performed on stages from 42nd Street to London to Boston. And now I'd like to present to you Mrs. Lucy Stone. I am truly glad to be able to stand here today and say that we who advocate the principles on which this convention has been assembled have reason to congratulate ourselves on the progress of our cause. It is now five years since we first met in Central New York, a mere handful of friends to the reform we seek and of our little meeting we thought nothing was heard. It is 1853, the city of New York, our women's rights convention proves more difficult than most. More than once the police are summoned to control the protesters, the men grunting, growling. They clearly had no mothers to teach them better. But by 1853 I already knew freedoms that had been unattainable in my younger years. The simple act of speaking in public before an audience of men and women. What we call promiscuous audiences had been illegal and dangerous. Yet since the days of my youth it has been my hope to dispel the absurdity of our oppression. There is not a man before me now who, if abused as we are, would not make protest like our fathers of the revolution with bullets. But we are not going to do it because we know that thoughts are mightier than bullets. Maybe it was my father who inspired me thus. I am from Massachusetts, West Brookfield. I have nine siblings. I am one of nine siblings. And we have a very close knit family. We watch over one another. We care for one another. But as with any family we have our demons. You see my father has a fondness for cider. And when he drinks his temper flares and my mother works in earnest, but my father will not allow her even the most meager allowance to buy clothing, to buy shoes for my brothers for my sisters and for me. We live on my father's farm, but as my mother forfeited her property rights upon marriage she has no part in the ownership. She works diligently, but every scent that she makes she forfeits to my father as is the law in Massachusetts, as is the law throughout the land. And I remember as a small girl, one night I heard a noise outside the room where I was sleeping and I crept carefully to the doorway and I peered around to see. And I could see my mother tiptoeing to the table where my father kept his coin purse. Finally she untied the purse, removed a few bits of silver, gingerly tied it up once more and placed it down and crept away. My mother would use this money to buy a pair of shoes, to buy clothing for us. But I knew in other homes it was far worse. To see in other homes a woman would work, work earnestly, work to the bone only to forfeit her money to her husband. And would he buy food? No. What would he buy with that money that she had worked so hard to give him? Tell me, cider, the dangerous drink. In many homes it was far worse than in my own, but my mother did toil. Now my brother and my brothers and my father are ardent abolitionists. The plight of the slave is on the forefront of their mind, but the plight of the woman that could be easily explained. Just look to your holy scripture. When I was a young girl I used to question my pastors and time and time again they would quote me Bible scripture. But first, Genesis chapter 3 verse 16, unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception. In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children, and thy desire shall be to thy husband. And he shall rule over thee. When I was a young girl I would sit and muse upon this text. I felt sad at the subservience to which it consigned my entire sex.  But when I grew older I learned to read Hebrew and I suggest you do as well as if you want the pages of this book thrown open to you. And I learned that the same word which means shall in Hebrew also means will. Therefore, that very same text might just as reasonably in fact and far more accurately in truth be read as thus. Thy desire will be to thy husband and he will rule over thee. Which you see, it was a prophecy of what was to happen and what will continue to happen just a little while longer. But it was not a commandment to be obeyed. This education, this advancement of my mind, this I have always known to be paramount to achieving equality. My father supported the education of my brothers for each and every one he paid their college tuition. But when I voiced the same desire to receive that same college education myself I was met with nothing but reproach. It seemed the money that I earned was more important to my father than the advancement of my mind. All sixteen dollars per month that I earned was given to him as was the law. I could not tolerate this. We must not wait for the doors to open. We must open the doors ourselves. And so when I was nineteen years old I applied to enroll in the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. My father refused to assist me and so I promised him I would pay my very own tuition, my own room and my own board as well as signing a promissory note to repay him every last cent that he would lose while I was obtaining an education. I was nineteen years old and I arrived at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. I didn't care what I had to give. I wanted an education and here I was and as soon as we started our classes I realized that we would not delve as heavily into the ancient languages, Greek, Latin, Hebrew. I wanted so desperately to understand to realize the true meaning behind the word of God. In just a few months after I began my studies at Mount Holyoke I received a letter. My sister, and my sister Eliza, she has passed. She's ten years my senior but we are very close with one another. She has ten, she has two little daughters and they are very precious to me. My nieces have for once realized that an education would not be mine. I had to be with my family and so I left the Mount Holyoke Seminary and I returned to Westbrook Field and I helped to tend to my mother and to my two young nieces who now were without their own mother. But just one year later tragedy struck my family once more and my sister Rhoda was lost and my mother she tumbled into a depression unlike any I had ever seen before her mourning and her grief it was unparalleled. I desperately tried to lift her up. I desperately tried to wipe away her tears but I was not yet twenty years old and there was so much that I wanted to say and I did not yet know how to do it. I felt I needed to escape. I felt I needed to learn how to speak my mind and there was nothing more I could do for my mother as there was only one college in the United States of America that accepted women and the colored race. I intended to go there. I applied and in the year 1843 I began to travel. I had never been more than twenty miles from my parents home in Westbrook Field but now I traveled by steamship and by railroad and by stagecoach for days I traveled and as I traveled I read the newspapers articles about the Grimke sisters Angelina and Sarah their national lecture tours the promiscuous audiences that they drew they spoke on the issue of human rights something I desperately wanted to speak of reading about the Grimke's filled me with such hope and at the same time filled me with such fear I began to see things that were not there and my speech began to stutter. It felt as though there were a vice a clap squeezing down upon my head just speaking of the migraines which would plague me throughout my life awakens the pain. I'm sorry you must excuse me for a moment. Finally after traveling for several days I was finally at my destination Oberlin Oberlin College in Ohio the only institution to accept both the colored race and women and we were welcomed when we arrived but all was not equal. You see my favorite class was rhetoric but as it was illegal for women to speak in public we were to learn by watching the men speak how ridiculous my friend Antoinette and I dared otherwise. You see my rhetoric teacher was a southerner a very liberal man he had released his slaves long before it was even popular to do so and Net and I approached him and asked him if we could debate one another just for our classmates no one else. You see Net wanted to enter the realm of public speaking as a pastor I as a lecturer and our professor agreed I shall never forget standing across from Antoinette in our classroom looking around the room I could not recognize many of the faces in there these were not only our classmates clearly word had gotten out and there were many more from the school in attendance there was standing room only in the classroom that day I told Net we should have charged admission and then we began to debate one another and I realized I was born to be a public speaker I was born to speak on the issue of human rights although it was a successful discourse all was not accepted you see we were punished for our debate who do you think it was that punished us so tell me my friends who do you think it was who punished us do you think it was the students no do you think you think it was the professors no it was the professor's wives the wives the women who we thought to uplift were the same oppressors holding us down and we were forbidden to have any sort of public forum or debate and so like witches the female students of Oberlin cast out to the woods we set a century at each perimeter so that no one would hear us or see us and there in the middle of the woods of Oberlin Ohio we debated one another I would not leave that college with the reputation of a thorough collegiate course yet have no rhetorical training there was not a single one of us women who could state a question or argue it in successful debate until we had those meetings in 1847 my fellow students nominated me to write the commencement speech for the class of Oberlin but then the faculty told me that I could write it yet I could not read it no act or deed of mine should ever look toward the support of such a principal nor to its toleration I denied and refused the honor and every single one of my fellow classmates both men and women who were asked to write the commencement speech also refused that honor I may not be the commencement speaker for the class of 1847 but I am the very first woman from Massachusetts to earn a college degree I told my mother and father that I wanted to enter the realm of public speaking and they begged me not to or if I must I should move as far away from Massachusetts as possible surely if I sought a life of ease I would not be a public speaker I began to receive invitations to speak my very first from my brother Bowman he had his own congregation in Gardner Massachusetts and he allowed me to speak on the issue on which I was most emotional and most passionate women's rights but after I began speaking within one year I received an invitation from a man who I held in great esteem his name Garrison Mr William Lloyd Garrison his office is not too far from here right now where we stand and where you sit Mr Garrison and Mr Wendell Phillips approached me and invited to meet me to be an agent in their American anti-slavery society they would pay me six dollars a week to speak on the issue of abolition and as I spoke I realized the vice the clamp would squeeze down upon the side of my head once more I was a woman before I was an abolitionist and I must speak for the women and Mr Garrison and Mr Phillips did not like it it seemed I had stepped out of my acceptable social sphere suffrage and Paul suffrage was seen to be a political topic and women were not supposed to speak on issues of politics suffrage and equality my friends is not political suffrage and equality is moral it is religious it is human these are not issues upon which I could remain silent and so Mr Garrison and I came to an agreement on specific days of the week I would speak of abolition only and on my free days I could speak of women's rights as well and when I did the protesters arrived every time I spoke to promiscuous audiences on the issues of women's rights the protesters would arrive in numbers that I could not imagine they would surround the meeting halls with cayenne pepper and then set it ablaze you know what this causes wheezing the eyes tearing and burning am I the reason that they set fire to cayenne pepper no am I the reason that these protesters threw ice cold water rotten fruit eggs and hymnal books at my face no this this is not a weapon it is fear that drove these protesters to attack me thus and I am not afraid of the fears of the simple-minded and neither were my colleagues Mrs Lucretia Mott and Mrs Elizabeth Katie Stanton at this time were organizing the very first women's rights convention to be held in 1848 Seneca Falls New York and there 100 attendees both men and women gathered to create the declaration of rights and sentiments we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men and women are created equal Seneca Falls 1848 Seneca Falls drew mostly a local audience we realized if we were to gain the attention and the momentum that we deserved we needed a meeting of a grander scale and so just as soon as 1848 had concluded we began to plan our own women's rights convention a truly national convention convention it would meet in Worcester Massachusetts in 1850 I began planning and working me and my colleagues all working day in and day out but life has a very funny way of skewing even your best laid plans I received another letter dear Lucy Luther is ill and I am with child I am afraid for the health of my unborn baby if I care for him any longer please come quickly all my love Phoebe Luther is my brother Phoebe his wife I never wanted a family of my own but I will do anything for my own and so I passed my work on to my colleagues and I traveled to Chicago Illinois and I arrived just in time to see my dear brother Luther in the final horrifying stages of cholera his face and skin were white his lips blue his eyes had sunk into the back of his head I arrived just in time to hold his hand as he passed Phoebe was grief-stricken she was now a part of our family and she would travel back to Massachusetts with me and as we began our travels via stagecoach perhaps it was the strain of travel perhaps it was the grief which bore heavily upon her but she went into labor and the child was born many months early and stillborn and now Phoebe tumbled down into a despair I had seen once before when I was not yet 20 years old when my mother lost Eliza and Rhoda within the span of a year she could not travel she was incapacitated by the grief and so we took up lodgings in a hotel in eastern Chicago and as I tried to care for my dear sister in law wouldn't you know I contracted typhoid typhoid it's known as nervous fever my fever began to soar for over a week it held steady at 104 degrees Fahrenheit I began to stretch at myself there were bugs on me and in the bed I was certain of it I desperately needed a sip of water and Phoebe was too weak to help and I typhoid typhoid generally lasts one month before the infection subsides that is if you survive but the power of the mind is strong and there was somewhere I needed to be there was a women's rights convention that I needed to attend and so I overcame typhoid fever in two and a half weeks and we resumed traveling from Chicago to Worcester I arrived in Worcester two days before the start of our convention and I have attended many conventions in my life but I will always remember my first I was so happy to be there and I was so happy to be alive we want to be something more than the appendages of society we want that women should be the co-equal of man in all the perils and enjoyment and interest of human life we want that she should attain to the development of her nature and her womanhood we want that when she dies it may not be written on her tombstone that she was the relic of somebody and this is what I fear most the loss of identity upon marriage was absolute in massachusetts and throughout the land it is for this reason that I sternly supported divorce you may raise your eyebrows but let me explain my grounds for obtaining a divorce were explicit a woman need be married to a man who was a drunkard and if he were a drunkard she had grounds to leave him and it is for this reason that we earned growing support from the growing temperance movement we were invited to attend temperance meetings throughout the united states but when they invited us to speak the men would not hear us my good friend Antoinette from Oberlin in three days time she could not complete a speech that should have taken three minutes and one one convention I attended in new york city the chairman said women in breeches are a disgrace I'm wearing pantaloons sir not breeches am I so disgraceful I never felt such physical comfort as when I wore my pantaloons and I never felt such mental anguish as when I wore my pantaloons the simple act of no longer needing to hold my petticoats up when I walked up and down a flight of stairs what could I hold in my hands now that I did not need to hold my skirts books knowledge but I could not wear them in public the outcry was tremendous and so I saved the pantaloons for my private home and I resumed my petticoats formally in public it seemed we would not have the support from the temperance movement that we had hoped for so I continued to speak on the issue of abolition I continued to tour the united states and draw hundreds and thousands to see me and hear me and then I met Harry Henry Brown Blackwell he was introduced to me by a friend of mr. garrison's here he is he's a looker don't you think the day I met Harry I had just given a speech and he approached me and he said to me that he believed I was a born locomotive and that since he believed he would never see me again then he better ask me to marry him right then and there I'm sorry but I refuse your honor yet I knew I would see Harry again and we were indeed married two years later at my parents farm in west brookfield you see Harry believed that women and men should be co-equals in all aspects of their lives and their partnership it was Harry who suggested that we write a marriage protest and this protest was read at our nuptials and published in every single newspaper across the united states of america my favorite part read thus we protest against the whole system by which the legal existence of the wife is suspended during marriage so that in most states she neither has a legal part in the choice of her residence nor can she make a will nor sue or be sued in her own in her own name pardon me nor inherit property once Harry and I were married I began to refer to myself as mrs lucy stone blackwell and all at once I realized something did not feel right I had spent my entire life fighting to become the person that I am and now I relinquished my name a woman should no more take her husband's name than he should take hers and so I demanded that I be referred to as mrs lucy stone and I requested that newspapers and publications treat me the same and call me by that name though they rarely did thus I am the very first woman in the united states of america to maintain my maiden name when I was married and that was not my only protest you see shortly after Harry and I were married we gave birth to our daughter Alice and I realized very quickly something that I had feared had been entirely inaccurate I thought I would lose my identity upon marriage upon having children but it was not true in Alice my identity grew stronger but as I cared for her Harry went traveling you see Harry was certain that he knew where the railroad was going to be built he was wrong nevertheless he was away for quite some time and while he was away I received a property tax on our home in new jersey I thought this rather interesting I was responsible enough to pay a property tax on my home yet not responsible enough to vote is this not what our fathers of the revolution fought for taxation without representation I refused to pay the tax and the constable came to my home he barged into my home and he began to drag a furniture a dining table and chairs a portrait of Mr Garrison which hung on the wall he dragged these items out into the front yard and proceeded to hold a public auction of course it was meant to demoralize me neighbors came and watched and one neighbor kept volunteering to bid over and over he bid on my furniture and my housewares until the property tax had been fulfilled when the constable had collected his ten dollars and fifty cents worth of taxes he laughed and my neighbor returned all of my items to me Alice's infancy coincided with the great civil war I had fought for 20 years on the issue of abolition and now it seemed we would finally see our dream come true but the great war put a complete halt to the fight for women's rights and perhaps it was the wisdom of a mother that taught me that small steps are best for achieving a larger goal for with the end of the civil war and the proclamation from president Lincoln father Abraham the emancipation of the slaves was fulfilled the next question on the table suffrage for the colored free man but the man only not the women I realizing that small steps were needed supported the colored vote while my colleagues miss Susan B Anthony who had heard me speak in New York City and Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton did not agree you see they believed in universal suffrage or no suffrage at all and it is for this reason that we began to split they becoming more radical believing in easy divorce I now happily married and with child believed that free love is free lust and I shall have no part of it as our division increased Stanton and Anthony came to be known as new women while I and my more conservative approach was a steel engraving feminist our differences continued after the war ended Alice and Harry and I returned to my home of Massachusetts and settled here in Boston we opened a publishing office where we began a publication intended to educate the people on the issue of human rights we all organized a group called the American Women's Suffrage Association my pride and joy to this day Mrs. Anthony and Miss Stanton organized their own group the National Women's Suffrage Association it allowed only women while our group allowed both men and women you see I knew that if we were to obtain the vote it is the men who would give it to us we could not get it on our own we needed to work with our brothers our women's journals started out small a circulation of just 2,000 homes we released the first issue on the two-year anniversary of Miss Susan B Anthony's publication which she called the revolution the revolution was meant to shock and scare only female writers were allowed to submit a woman's journal on the other hand was meant to cultivate and educate the minds of all men and women encouraged to write I would serve as editor my husband would serve as editor my daughter would serve as editor 61 years a woman's journal reached a beautiful circulation of nearly 40,000 homes 20 years would pass while the National Women's Suffrage Association and the American Women's Suffrage Association operated independently from one another we had spent so much of our lives working toward the same goal yet now we had a schism dividing us and we were not seeing the progress that we should have been seeing at this time it was almost the turn of the 20th century yet women still did not have the right to vote I couldn't bear the thought that I would leave this world without seeing our organizations combined without having our forces united once more and so when I was 69 years old I approached Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton and I asked them please let us have a merger after many talks there was agreement we could do more working together than we could divide it the National American Women's Suffrage Association was formed and almost at once my heart began to fail I was not able to attend the first of our many meetings I would have to pass my work on to others I could no longer travel and lectures were impossible for me to obtain at this point I passed my work on to my protégés women like Carrie Chapman Cat would take on the women's rights movement for me the morning star as I was called was burning out but at 1893 I traveled for one last trip to Chicago with my daughter Alice it was the last convention that I would have the strength to attend of today not and can never know at what price their right to free speech and to speak at all in public has been earned they do not realize the power they have been granted only recently my speech was weak Mrs. Stanton was brilliant by comparison my back was bowing my heart was breaking and the morning star of the women's rights triumvirate was burning out when I died it was the most highly reported death of a woman in the United States of America newspapers all over the country posted word of my death my final will and testament stated that I was to be cremated but as no crematorium facility existed in massachusetts my body remained in mortuary for two months while one was built at forest hills in jamaica plain there my ashes remain in the columbarium 40 years I spent over 40 years of my life fighting for women's rights the rights of the colored race and the rights of humans all over the world and for all of this more people remember me for my stubborn refusal to keep my husband's name when I married miss anthony and mrs. Stanton created an anthology of the women's rights movement and perhaps because of our 20 year schism my name is mentioned a mere handful of times now there are women all over the united states who maintain their maiden name upon marriage lucy stoners they are called they may keep their names but may they keep my legacy it is now 96 years since women have earned the right to vote we know that all brothers fathers and husbands who are truly honorable men and all mothers sisters and wives who are truly worthy of those names will stand by our side they will put their hands to our hands their hearts to ours then we will travel together as fellow voyagers then we will change this system which is based on disorder into a system based on right then will the fellow voyagers through life travel once more then will the morning stars sing again for joy and the old paradise shall be regained I am your morning star I am mrs. Lucy stone and I thank you I have been writing his elegy in my head during the seven hour drive there and trying not to thinking meant not thinking it meant imagining my brother surrounded by light


Do you ever wonder what happens when the police leave? Crime scene cleaners are private companies that handle the cleanup after the police are gone. Spalling Decon is one of the nation's largest cleanup companies handling the aftermath of homicides, suicides, decompositions, hoarding and much more. These are our stories. We are doing a massive level 5 hoard here in bottles. Everything is new, but it's damaged by the rats. There's a whole reptile room. Looks like they were mostly snakes. So sometimes during these cleanouts, we find things that are disturbing. Is a gun safe in there? Oh. These boxes are real, aren't they? It doesn't look like it's a real gun. Is that one loaded? Is that loaded? There she comes! Oh my gosh. 2016. Oh my gosh. Four of them. Five of them. Nature Center. It's a donate all of our... There's one in the way. There's one in the box. Oh my god! Oh my god! That was the new one. I'm not consuming anything, right? Just trying to put everything back in place. Yeah. Looks good to me. And I'm not a decorator. Well, now you can add it to your resume. Right? Curio cabinet layout artist. Right, how are you? Oh my god. Look at all that. Just give it a spray. I'll give this other one out. Literally.  Went on a soup container in a can? The plate is bummed, dude. Gonna put it in here. Gonna make it? Alrighty. Do not remove until TV has assembled. Yeah. There's one more. What's that? it? That's a double barrel, shingled, tamarind head under there. That just acts as a box. You know they're probably gonna come jumping out at us. Hey! All right, just some ceiling pamphlets. Yeah. Taking them on a trip. All right. Or it could be a paddle. Oh, perfect. Clock doesn't know how to work when there's not rats running over at every spot. It's moving too freely now. Here's something of value. I think Kristin needs one of these for our next discussion session. Looks like, what is this thing? Like a dehydrator. Look at that. Just took it off in there and it's good to go. There's even one right on the paintbrush right there. So I guess this is her working classroom. This is what living with about 40 to 50 rats will do to your stuff. Oh, we got rats. Right here in the corner before I start flushing them. Well, I'm gonna start doing some snacks and grabbing slinging here in a second. Oh yeah, they are. Got one here. There you go. Coming your way. It looked like he was coming right on my face. Oh God, I didn't see him. I thought he was right there. I think there he goes. Oh, he's over here. He's gonna miss her. Oh, here. Come in here. You get it, bud? Oh, there. He can't fit in the hole. Let's go grab him. Oh my God. Oh, he's in there. He's in the bathroom. Sorry. There he goes. There he goes. We're gonna have to put that lid on because he's a jumper. He'll jump out. I'm gonna try and flip this. Yeah, but he's gonna go for it. That's when he jumps though, you know. He's in there. A storage locker that she she rented. So this kind of is a little bit of new news, but so she rented a storage locker and says about, you know, well, it's a big one. So, you know, you can fill it up or whatever. So you want to keep everything obviously, you know, with that type of thing. But the other challenge is that that was the bid to purchase the house included a storage locker, the bid to do the hoard, you know, necessarily that wasn't exactly how we put this together. So we've got to talk to her about, you know, what goes to storage. Look through some of these and probably just start making some decision what goes to storage and then try to get a hold of her. Yeah, I believe you're right. They are. They're blank canvases for her art. So we'll keep that here. They probably are. He's gonna be in that corner a while. Three of them. Three of them. Oh, I got one here. I got him or no. Yeah, I think so. He's just kind of hanging out. He's just kind of hanging out a little bit behind some of the thought process behind someone who hoards. We understand the the sentimental value, you know, maybe it was your your grandmothers, you know, you didn't take the best care of it.   But I mean, I can clean it up and disinfect it. Can't do anything to change the appearance of it too much. But, you know, I do want to appease her a little bit, you know, start breaking as it's my luck. It was important to her. So it's important to me. Do they still have their cat? They have one of their cats. And she said the other one died. So we weren't sure if she meant like it died in here somewhere or it died and, you know, rather down to one. So she's done with the animals, no more reptiles, you know, just the cats enough. Dude, I'm going to get some of this. I'm going to throw it, I thought it. Teresa? Yeah. Can you give me a moment here? Looks like some sort of rope is hanging out. Ah, I'm coming! Running to the overplay! I'm throwing a can of camel. You thought it was one, didn't you? In this place, absolutely. Absolutely, I thought it was real. Here we are, the end of day four. We've got one more day left and got some things over to storage, which was a good thing. It's a good goal today. One of the things we wanted to accomplish. We've got all the carpet removed from inside the house. Tomorrow, I think the plan is we still have a garage full of a lot of stuff. So a lot of that's going to be going over to the storage. Well, we're still seeing a lot of little critters jumping out. We've cornered them all into the final room back there. You know, there's a lot of little nests going in. So we're getting really good at catching them. That's for sure. Catching them and then taking them. And we've got terrariums in the back where we're kind of restoring them for right now. The final day, so it'll be a big push. We'll probably be a little more energized because it is the last day. We know we've got a lot of things we've got to get done and things that we want to get done. We're looking forward to it. All right, so here we are day five. We're about halfway through. This is the final day. We're going to get ahold of the homeowner this morning to come out and give us the last final directions on some of the stuff we took out of the garage. It's been pretty uneventful. We've got a second landscaper here taking care of some trees in the backyard for us. So getting that taken care of for her too as well. Nice thing is we still have people reaching out to us wanting to come over and help. But I think we've got enough people here. So that all kind of worked out nice for us today. We're just coming up with a game plan for this room in here. Our client just left and gave us a few instructions. She's ordered a new mattress and stuff. And so she wants to kind of change her room around, which is good. This is all going to come along with the deep clean that she's agreed to, which is the best thing for her health. I haven't been able to sleep. Just wanting to do this right, to be able to do it for somebody and to do it to the level that we'll do it. But I think we'll do that. We'll set up some stuff outside for the deep clean team to take anything, kitchen pots, pans, all that stuff. Kind of dunk and scrub and, you know, thriller pads. I think we're going to have five, maybe six people price sets on the deep clean. Yeah. Two days. Two full days. Walls, everything. Four days. Yeah, five or six people. We can do it. We're going to deliver probably two loads of those today for the nature. In the back shed that we really wasn't a part of the horde clean out. I think there was like six or eight. Terrarium's back there. There's how many fit in here. Planetarium Nature Center. From South Africa. He's full grown. He's in his 30s. Oh, look at that. He's got about 120 more years to live. Oh my, I want to be him. Hello. Thank you for coming here to Caloosa Nature Center in Planetarium. And just wanted to thank this building, DeCon, for donating 18. I think it's 18, right? 19. 19, 19 terrariums. That's awesome. Here to Caloosa Nature Center and Planetarium to help us get some of our animals and new enclosures and come see us. Flowers and albinos kunk. And Pepe is a stripes kunk. Cool, huh? Oh, very cool. They're full grown. They're five years old. They're a bonded pair. So they mate. We did. It was an incredible amount and they're very, very thankful. And apparently they also help out. They partner with some other people to where, you know, different situations pop up. So they'll donate the terrarium to, you know, that other organization or to an individual. Well, we saw, you know, what was the name, Billy? The turtle? Billy the tortoise in his 30s? 30-some-year-old Billy.  He was pretty cool. We found some taxidermy rats at the horde, I guess you could say. You should donate those. If I were a snake, I wouldn't want to eat those rats. You wouldn't? I'm a picky snake. I need gourmet rats, farm rays. Those rats actually ate pretty good. I mean, ate pasta. They ate great, yeah. So we're going to put together her exercise equipment in here in her lanai, where we just removed about, I don't know, 10, 12 aquariums, our terrariums for snakes from the lanai here. So now we're going to build her exercise equipment, which for someone that's in recovery for cancer, I mean, this is huge. So she's very excited. It's actually, it's kind of a surprise for her. Got her little artsy classroom kind of put back together. So hopefully we'll get to kind of cleaning this up. Maybe when we get back to lunch and maybe create a spot where she can sit down and create. Listen, she's pretty crafty and pretty creative. She did some paintings over here. She started to do some landscaping. That looks kind of cool. So hopefully, you know, maybe now this will give her the opportunity to come in here and sit and, you know, something that's probably very good for her. A little meditative. Wrapping up the end of day, day five. We'll be coming back for about 16 more hours. Lots to do. We're also going to be doing the deep clean on this house. Coming back to do that and just to do some of the finishing touches. Never, never thought we'd get to the moment that we've actually going to consider phase one complete, which was a five day D-Hord project. We did a lot of extra things in there, like we always tend to do, get a little carried away.  And I think, you know, considering everything about this home, we couldn't be more pleased. The homeowners were here just a few hours ago walking through.  Today I had to have the uncomfortable conversation with the homeowner about, you know, our proposal was to basically D-Hord the house. Just clean it out, get rid of things. And it wasn't about cleaning, doing the deep clean where we, you know, clean disinfect, sanitize. You know, we had a lot more rodent droppings than we had anticipated and, you know, their notorious for carrying germs and diseases. And, you know, I just couldn't sleep at night, so. Well, you made it through that conversation.  Well, I guess we're going to say that, but I mean, it's not as healthy. We're here for a little bit more than we want to. She deserves better, they deserve better. They do, they do. This is just one of, would we come up with five phases? Four or five, yeah. Four or five phases. So this is just the end of phase, phase one was, you know, D-Hording the place. Phase two is going to be cleaning the entire house. Then we've got doors and windows going in. Then furniture delivery. So it's getting new furniture, not to be exciting. Oh, we will definitely see you next time. Absolutely. See ya.


Good morning. We are at the dog park. It's a beautiful day. The weather is awesome. I'm in short sleeves. A little bit of chill bumps, but that's okay because we've got the sun. If you don't follow me on social media, then you haven't seen the dog park before. This is the dog park at my apartment complex. How cool is that? The girls love it, especially when they have been inside for the whole weekend, basically, because I feel bad leaving them at home for five hours at a time. They're little, but they still have to get some energy out, so I'll take them here and let them run around for a bit. It ends up being like this sometimes, where they don't run around and they just hang out with me, but I don't know. It makes me feel better. It's probably more of a selfish thing than anything. All right, so here's the deal with the car. I called the guy today, or the dealership, and he's like, it's probably fine to drive here, but only drive it here.  He's like, try and just drive it here. He's like, I can't tell you for sure because that's a liability. You know how people are these days. He said that based on what I'm telling him about the lights, that it doesn't seem like it's in like dire, can't be driven, and that the EPC light can be triggered by lots of things. He made me feel a little bit better about it, so I am going to try and drive it there.  Drop it off. He can't officially get me an appointment until tomorrow, but he's like, if you just have it here and we have some extra time, we can probably get to it today. I just can't guarantee it. Okay, so that's the plan.  That's going to be me. So I have to unload the car. There's not a lot in there, but I have a little apartment, so the little apartment fills up fast. So take it there and then I'm going to ask about a courtesy vehicle. I know that they have the shuttle. I just don't know if like the shuttle person is just like sitting there waiting for me or if like he's out helping somebody else that I have to wait a little bit. So depending on what they say about that, I'll either just take the shuttle right back or the target is across the street. So I'll go to the target and then just get an Uber from the target back home because I do literally need groceries, shampoo. There was something else on my list. I can't remember. Toilet paper. Like I got things I need. You like I had a plan today to go run all these errands. So all right, you guys, here goes nothing. All right, here goes nothing. No. It will be just my lock if I go through all of this and take it to the dealership and everything and then they run their little diagnostic and they're like nothing's wrong. I guess that really is a best-case scenario, but yeah, it looks normal. Okay, wish me luck. I'm headed there. All right, treating myself to Chick-fil-A cop salad, if you're wondering. No tomatoes, avocado, lime, dressing, and yes, I put the little pepper, crunchy things on there. Welcome to the target. The guy said that at the dealership said that it might be nothing because I didn't have any issues driving over. Like the lights never came on. He's like, but it's good that you brought it in because you have a lease. If anything ever does happen, like we want to have all this on record. Okay, cool, fair, no problem. I'm, you know, taking one for the team today. So I am not going to do the grocery shopping. I'm just going to get like the shampoo and the melatonin and those sorts of things.  And then if I can't, then I'll figure that out later. But there's a good chance that I'm just going to get my car back today. It doesn't feel like it was like dying or dead, like I thought it was yesterday. So anyways, almost here. This is, you know what, like blessing in disguise. The weather is so nice. I would never have gotten that salad from Chick-fil-A and it was so delicious. Hit the spot. You know what I mean? Like who knows what I would have done today, if not for this? That seems like a very positive attitude that a therapist would really enjoy. Really fine in the silver lining, proud of myself. All right, let's go shopping. Remember how yesterday I was like, I'm done with Starbucks? Only because they have it at the Target and did you know? Fun fact that if you get a Starbucks at the Target, you can get a refill. Does that make sense? So you get one on the way in, do your shopping, mill about, then on your way out, you can get a free refill of whatever drink you got the first time or I think anything else. I've tried it before and it worked. I'll try it again today. This is their new gingerbread milk latte. So like a take on the, what is this? A take on the brown sugar one? I haven't tasted it yet. Okay, gingerbread cookie for real. All right, so since we're killing time today, I never look at the quota target. Like what is the point? But let's see what we got. So I'm ready to wear. Let's see what, let's see what fast fashion is cranking out these days. Oh God, we have not only silver, pleather pants, but pink, right? Some ready to wear in spo. I don't recommend you buying these things. You can definitely make them simple, sweater knit, ribbed, sweater, pencil skirt. Isn't that the Marlowe sweater? It's just a basic cardigan with three buttons, but that would be super cute together with the cardigan kind of like tucked in, or you can do it with like a plain tank top and then like do the cardigan tied, but now we're not tying around both shoulders. We're tying asymmetrically these days. Don't look like a millennial, okay? But yeah, that is a cute little set, I thought. The fabric feels really good. Like I, it doesn't feel cheap. Like I would actually recommend for my non-selling friends to buy this, but we can just make this. Okay, this is the new true bias skirt. Look how cute it looks with like just your plain oversized Oxford button down.  And this material is, I think it's twill. All right, if I were going to buy anything today, which I'm not, but if I were, when I do shop ready to wear, I only buy things that I can't make or I don't like making. There's very few things I don't like making, but like I can't make a sweater like this with that detail on it. I know that you can get sweater and rib and all of that and put it together, but it's never the same. It's never the same.  This one feels really good. I bet it has some acrylic in it. There's the tag. 100% cotton actually. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, it feels smoother than that. So I'm surprised it's not a blend. And these like oversized ones are again, super easy to style even with what I'm wearing today. I could put on like, there's not a navy one, so I could do this beige one. Here, let's do it. Let's do a try on. I'd probably go a size up to a large. They're just really easy ways to like layer with these. I think I might put this in my cart online and wait for it to go on sale. It is nice. Okay, this. They're touting a cashmere like feel. Look at that. Honey did that. And it is very soft. It's a poly acrylic. Yeah, poly acrylic spandex blend. These also feel incredible, like butter. They're literally so soft and they have like a good amount of weight to them. I thought it was going to be ponte, but it's actually poly rayon spandex. There's the, I don't know if you can read that. It's probably backwards. Yeah, these feel really, really good.  But yeah, this fabric feels really, really good. How much are they charging for these? 28 bucks. It's not a bad price. Yeah, there's like a little foe. They did pretty good. I mean, you could wear these to work and you would be in pajamas. Nice deep pleat or deep hem and then this little pleat along the front. Nothing on the back. These are really, really nice. I would recommend these again to my non-sewing friends. Maybe even with just a little tank like this and one of those sweaters. That would be a really cute outfit. Excuse me. This is the same fabric as that cashmere thing.  Pink, red, white, and lime green. It feels so good. So good. Okay, tell me why this cheaper version, cheaply made without the details, without the faux fly, without the deep hem, still has this is more expensive than those other ones. This is a cotton poly span. The rayon spandex feels a million times better. Okay, I put it in my cart. I don't know if I'm going to get it, but I did find this little set. It's this and some shorts, like a little loungey set, $10 in clearance. Also, I'm in the sock section because we're on the street is that no show socks are out. And you have to show a little bit of like an ankle sock. Okay, dealership is called. The car is ready. I'll tell you about it whenever we get out of here because I got to pump to it. But we are not using sulfates and silicone anymore, right? You guys aren't putting that in on your hair, correct? We need sulfate free and silicone free. This is my favorite brand, Maui moisture hair care. And before you're like, Oh, it makes my hair so heavy. They have different levels. So they have one made with hibiscus water that's very, very lightweight shampoo and conditioner for like thin hair that's like already pretty silky and healthy. Then it goes up and up and up from there, where coarse hair, dry damaged hair, all of that gets more and more moisture as you go up the scale. Okay, I'm going to get it on Amazon or Target, but it's in like the specialty hair care place. Okay, dealership. So my car is ready. I was right. It isn't, it technically isn't broken. They said that when they ran the little diagnostic thing, they could see in the history that there was some little blip with the catalytic converter. Am I saying that right? He said this can happen for a variety of reasons. Those sensors are all very sensitive, but they checked it all out and everything was fine. He said something about using off-brand gas, which I never do. He's like, if you go to the same gas station every time, that's probably not it. And then I remembered the last time that we got gas, Dan pumped the gas for me.  So I said, could that be it? He's like, oh yeah, definitely. I can't wait to tell him that he nearly broke my car by putting that much gas in it. So that's the deal with the car. So I'm headed back to get it all my way home. I'm going to stop and get groceries. I got myself a target. I did not get the set, the $10 sleep set passed on that, but I got socks, shampoo, melatonin, and some new blue light glasses that I really actually need. Okay, busy intersection, gotta go.