The Missteps of Modern Activism: Awareness vs. Action

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Show Notes

In this episode of Enthusiastic Encouragement and Dubious Advice, hosts Patricia and Nicole discuss the significance of community and activism amidst the prevalence of digital misinformation. They delve into how algorithms shape our online experiences, the pitfalls of generative AI, and the importance of real-world actions over mere online awareness. The show also includes updates on their new merchandise shop, experiences at the Oakland Sticker Faire, and tips for creating positive, actionable change in isolationist times.

Mentioned on the show:

Follow the show on Instagram & find us on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, & Spotify

Sound editing by Jen Zink

Transcript

Music: [Intro Music] 

Patricia: Hey there everyone! Welcome to Enthusiastic Encouragement and Dubious Advice, the podcast for folks who would rather curl into the fetal position than lean in. I’m your host, Patricia Elzie-Tuttle. 

Nicole: And I’m just a small town girl living in a lonely world. I’m Nicole Elzie-Tuttle. We’re recording the show on August 2nd, 2025.

Patricia: This podcast is independently run and we’re hoping to be supported by listeners. Downloading, sharing, and giving us reviews and ratings are free ways to show us support. If you have a few bucks to donate, our Patreon memberships start at $3 a month. Even if you don’t wanna engage with the content there, it’s a way to donate to the show.

No pressure. There are three tiers to choose from. 

Nicole: And if you’re looking for other ways to support the show, you can head on over to our Bookshop bookshop. 

Patricia: Our Bookshop bookshop. 

Nicole: There’s a link to that from our webpage, but also in the show notes here. And on that page, you can find all the books that we’ve mentioned on the show.

Patricia: Absolutely. 

Nicole: Purchasing those gives a small bit of money back to support the show. 

Patricia: And it also supports independent bookstores too. 

Nicole: It’s a twofer. 

Patricia: It’s a twofer. And you get a book. 

Nicole: Oh, that’s good. 

Patricia: And finally, I’m so excited to announce that we got the EEDAPOD Merch Shop opened. You can find a link to the shop on our webpage, eedapod.com. I’ll put it in the show notes. 

If you are feeling up for typing in the whole URL yourself, it’s eedapod.myshopify.com. Right now there are three things up. Uh, thank you already to the folks who have made orders. Very exciting. 

Nicole: We’ve got two stickers and a window prism. 

Patricia: And a window prism. Yeah. 

Nicole: Excellent.

Patricia: With, um, very amazing glamor shot product shots by yours truly. 

Nicole: Very professional. 

Patricia: Very professional. 

Nicole: Speaking of stickers. 

Patricia: Yeah. Since we last recorded, we went to the Oakland Sticker Fair. 

Nicole: That’s right, y’all! Oakland has a sticker fair. 

Patricia: It was so cool. Everyone was so wonderful. Oakland also has a sticker club for adults, and I think they meet monthly and you just bring stickers and you trade stickers, and you put stickers on whatever you’re bringing to put stickers on.

And like I said, everyone there was so cool and so incredibly kind, and they were just like, “we never see you at Sticker Club, you should come to Sticker Club!” 

Nicole: Everyone was very impressed by your preparation for the Sticker Fair. 

Patricia: Yeah, so I brought an empty note card box, so whatever stickers I purchased would go in a box that would then like go into my bag so that they wouldn’t get crunched up or anything like that.

I was, 

Nicole: and that’s how they knew you belonged. 

Patricia: I was a real one. 

Nicole: You’re a real one and you should come to Sticker Club. 

Patricia: You know what? I might go to Sticker Club one of these days. It sounds great. 

Nicole: While we were there, you also learned of another event that happens here in Oakland. 

Patricia: Yeah. I saw a really cool sticker that was just like a, a microphone, but like the, like the head of the microphone was like a disco ball, and it had in script, uh, Freakyoke. And I was like, Freakyoke?

And the person at the booth was like. You’ve never come to Freakyoke!? And I was like, what’s Freakyoke? And they’re like, it’s karaoke for freaks. And I’m like, yeah, I’m in. 

Nicole: You were so like ready and onboard to just be down with that. 

Patricia: Yeah. 

Nicole: Instantly. 

Patricia: Yeah. We’ll see. We’ll see. I started following it on Instagram, so who knows?

Maybe we’ll go to Freakyoke someday. 

Nicole: Also, we got a new comment! Thank you to Ginnette who found our show via Kristal, another listener and friend. Thank you so much for your kind words and for sharing how you like your potatoes. 

Patricia: And remember if you would like to leave us a rating or review. Please feel free to tell us in that review how you like to eat potatoes.

Music: [Transition Music] 

Patricia: So there are a number of conversations I’ve been having with both you, Nicole, and friends, and therapist and online friends that are all interconnected, and so we’re gonna kind of go over some of those today. 

Last episode I had shared about how I asked a food content creator for a recipe that she posted on Instagram, but like it just said like, here’s a little video, and she posted it on her substack. But I don’t give money to Substack, and I wanted to pay her directly. We worked something out and she asked me why I don’t give money to Substack, so I sent her a link to my newsletter where I talk about how Substack funnels money to the far right and giving money to Substack, regardless of the creator is also still giving money directly to the far right.

I mentioned this to someone and she gave me major side eye and said like, how does she not know how awful substack is? Everyone knows about Substack and I told her like this content creator seems to run in really different circles than I do. 

She seems like a nice, cisgender, straight white lady who makes food videos on the internet that I love. It’s very soothing. It all looks so delicious. And also the internet that she sees is different than the internet I see. 

Nicole: Now, in the time since you wrote this script and before we started recording, Substack made an oopsie, *wink*. They 

Patricia: yeah. 

Nicole: quote unquote, accidentally sent some of their users push notifications recommending a not see account.

Now, I’m not being hyperbolic here. This account literally like swastikas and everything. 

Patricia: Yeah. People got this push notification that’s like, you should follow this account. And it’s just like, 

Nicole: yeah, here’s a recommended blog for you or something. 

Patricia: Yikes. 

Nicole: Yeah, major yikes. 

But yeah, I don’t think a lot of people realize this, but people see different websites. People have different internets now. 

Patricia: Mm-hmm. 

Nicole: Back in like the late nineties and early aughts when like, I started giving, getting really heavily online, most of us saw the same things on the internet. 

Patricia: Yeah. Very similar, very similar things. 

Nicole: Like we all had access to the same internet. We were shown the same things.

There were a couple aggregator sites, but like, you know, stuff spread via word of mouth. But otherwise, like it was all, 

Patricia: yeah, of course. 

Of course people were like on different message boards and stuff like that, but everyone saw End of Ze World, everyone saw Candy Mountain Charlie, everyone saw that Ali McBeal dancing Baby, right?

Nicole: Oh god, that dancing baby. 

Patricia: Ugh so weird. 

Nicole: But since then we’ve had the rise of social media and the rise of algorithms. And with that there is a big chance that you are not seeing the same internet as other people you know or follow, especially if they don’t share your demographics or your views. We talked about this a bit in our episode titled We Need to Talk about Misinformation and Disinformation, and we also there talked about being in the Bay Area bubble.

Patricia: Yeah, like this information bubble in the Bay Area and also just like who we interact with in, in our communities. And there are bubbles within bubbles too, right? Like the information I’m getting and the conversations I’m having are often quite different than my straight cisgender counterparts at my day job. And on the internet there are things happening that I see that you don’t necessarily see because they concern black people. 

Nicole: Right. And similarly, I see like trans news that sometimes you don’t catch. 

Patricia: Yeah. 

Nicole: So it’s very believable that no, not everyone knows that substack is terrible. There are people who don’t even know about the genocide in Gaza.

There are, people don’t, who don’t know what the cuts to Medicaid mean, but we get information about this on all of our platforms. 

Patricia: Yeah. We get it. And you know, I imagine conservative family members of ours aren’t getting it. 

Nicole: Right. 

Patricia: Right? Like they’re seeing really different stuff and it’s so hard for me, hard to remember that other people don’t know what I know.

Nicole: Ugh, 

Patricia: I know, I know. Ugh. I wish I could just share my brain sometimes. 

Every time I see someone using, say, Instagram or Facebook for like, I’m having a fundraiser for my birthday and like they’re actually using the in-app widget that has the countdown for, like I’m, I’m fundraising for this organization, this food bank, like whatever, nonprofit, and they’re using it through Facebook or Instagram, I cringe because don’t do that. Don’t use the fundraiser through Facebook or Instagram widgets or whatever. 

There is no guarantee that any or all of that money is going to the nonprofit. I also think there was at one time, I don’t know if it’s still true, there’s like a minimum amount you have to raise or else Facebook doesn’t do the payout. So what? They just eat that money. Like, just link directly to the orgs that you want to have money, like link directly to their GoFundMe, link directly to their donate page. Don’t trust Facebook or Instagram with your financial information, with anything really, but like your financial information and, and that they’re actually going to give money to, to these organizations.

And you know, I know this because in my day job, I am a fundraising professional and also my obsession with misinformation and disinformation. But like my elders don’t necessarily know this, like people who aren’t, you know, chronically online like I am, aside from like the people who are only on Facebook, like they don’t know this.

Nicole: Yeah, knowing that people don’t see all the same things or even see everything that someone they follow posts is why we will share multiple resources on the same thing, or even why we love when people share our show or the EEDA newsletter. The people seeing your posts are different from the people seeing our posts.

Patricia: Yeah, I think that is really important to remember, like people seeing your stuff are different people than seeing our stuff, and I think that’s why it is so important to share information, but also share creators you like and things like that. 

Something related that we brought up in our episode about misinformation that’s worth mentioning again, is that when people do a web search, uh, especially like Googling something, we can get vastly different returns of information than each other.

And this is outside of even the AI overview, which I, whenever I do a search and if I use Google, I just put like hyphen AI, no spaces, and it doesn’t give me that weird overview that’s sometimes incorrect. So, hey, fun fact. But people can get vastly different returns than each other. Not only based on how we each do the search, like the keywords and stuff we use, but the returns are also based on your behavior and history online in the first place.

Nicole: And your behavior and history of how you’ve used that search engine. 

Patricia: Absolutely. Yeah, that too. 

So unfortunately, telling someone to Google it, as satisfying as it may be, doesn’t necessarily get them the information that you’re hoping they get. 

Nicole: That’s, ugh, so, it’s so frustrating. 

Patricia: Yeah. 

Nicole: You just brought up something also that’s not in that episode and that is generative AI.

We as in you, Patricia, and I know how it steals from artists and writers and how it hallucinates or just outright makes things up and how it’s horrible for the environment. Every time I’m on social media though, I see someone talking about how generative AI is theft, and artists and writers are begging folks not to use it.

Patricia: And yet there’s a newsletter I get from a creative who was like, I use AI to write romances, and I publish them straight to Kindle books and that’s how I make extra income. 

Nicole: Ahhhhh! 

Patricia: Like what? Like that’s, that is wild. And I know, I know people are doing this and still that it’s also in a newsletter that’s going out to a lot of people that’s like, here’s a way to make money.

It’s just like eye twitching fuel. 

Nicole: I don’t want to read any creative works, any books, I don’t wanna watch shows, I don’t wanna listen to music that was made with AI. 

Patricia: Yeah. 

And I think, you know, that’s you and that’s me and I, I imagine that’s a lot of our listeners too, and a lot of our friends, but there are other people out there that do not care.

They have different, they have different tastes than we do. 

Nicole: Yeah. 

The thing is that creative you mentioned, she might not even know the variety of reasons why she shouldn’t be using AI to write books. Nor why she should be or should not be selling things on Amazon. 

Patricia: Yeah. 

Nicole: And aside from the whole thing about stealing from artists and creatives, people are using it as a search engine, even though it will absolutely just make things up.

I am seeing this particularly a lot with people asking like chat GPT or whatever, to like identify mushrooms or snakes or plants in the wild. 

Patricia: Oh my gosh. 

Nicole: And there’s been a big problem the last like year or two of things, like people making books that purportedly help identify 

Patricia: Oh, right 

Nicole: mushrooms and plants and stuff and selling them on Amazon.

And it’s wrong. It’s a hundred percent wrong and it will absolutely get people killed. Because it’ll tell them things like the death angel mushroom is not deadly. Or at least the picture and the information describes something like that, but it’s, then it tells you it’s a different mushroom that’s actually harmless.

Patricia: Yikes. 

Nicole: That’s the terrifying thing about this. 

Patricia: I’m gonna go on a little tangent, but I need to tell listeners about, I’m gonna be that guy. I’m gonna tell you about a video I saw on TikTok, uh, but I told you about it the other day. Where a guy, he’s on a date and he goes to this restaurant and he’s waiting for his date to arrive and she comes. And she’s like, oh, sorry I’m late. And it’s a restaurant like neither of them had been to. And he watches her pick up her phone, open chat, GPT, and ask what she should have at the restaurant. Like, I don’t even, he didn’t say she took a picture of the menu or anything like that. Maybe she put the restaurant name in there and then she goes to order whatever chat GPT said, and like the bartender or server looked at her and was like, we have never had that.

Like, we don’t have that here and we have never served that. Like people outsourcing their thinking, people outsourcing their ability to choose like, eh, like I, it’s so many, so many alarm bells going off in my head. 

Nicole: Yeah, there’s a whole, I mean, we could go down a deep rabbit hole right now about the research coming out about the cognitive impact, and in particular, the cognitive decline being seen in people who are outsourcing their thinking to generative AI. 

Patricia: Yeah. 

Nicole: Okay. Circling back around again to what I was saying about like people using it as a search engine, I do wonder if these people even know that they shouldn’t be using generative AI in this way, and the the dangers it poses. 

Patricia: Yeah, exactly. And while as you heard in our voices, it can be incredibly frustrating. I am trying my best to also look at things through a lens of compassion because people truly may not know. 

At the same time, I am also trying to recognize that it’s not my job to teach everyone, nor is everyone interested in learning.

I’m also trying to come to terms with the fact that, and this is a tough one for me, people may know and they just don’t care. 

Nicole: Ugh, this is one of the hardest things to come to terms with in life. Even if you are sharing things, the people who need to see it probably aren’t, or they’re just swiping past because like you said, they just don’t care.

You recently shared a post from The Progressivists that you’ll link to that talks about a number of things we’ve mentioned in the past, almost two years of this show. Being online can be great in many ways, but in others it can be incredibly isolating. One of the quotes that really resonated with me was we’ve somehow convinced ourselves that awareness is activism.

Like just knowing everything terrible going on is somehow helpful. Just the knowing. The analogy they use is, it’s as if watching the world burn in real time through a six inch screen is the same as grabbing a bucket. 

Patricia: That’s such a good one. There’s a similar analogy in the book, Let This Radicalize You. That is something to the effect of being politically aware is activism just as much as watching football is the same as playing football. 

Nicole: You know, there are a lot of, I have seen many people that are heavily into football who seem to act as though they’re on the team while watching it. 

Patricia: Absolutely. Like they’re right there. They’re right there. 

I think of the white allies reading books by Black authors in isolation, like just reading the book, not discussing it with other white people, not taking any actions. Uh, ditto for straight people reading queer books in isolation. Again, not discussing them with anyone or taking any actions. Like us reading these books in isolation is not helpful.

Like it might, it might be helpful to educate you and change your worldview, but it doesn’t actually help other people unless you are sharing that information, unless you’re talking about that information. Unless you’re putting things into action. 

Nicole: I mean, this is the whole argument about you know, theory without practice.

Patricia: Mm-hmm. 

Nicole: Or whatever. 

Patricia: Yep. 

Nicole: Right. 

Patricia: Yeah. 

Nicole: But what you’re saying in particular about these things and like reading books in isolation and everything, that has me thinking a lot about another thing we talk about a lot, which is the necessity of being in community and solidarity with other people. 

Patricia: Yeah. Yeah. The revolution doesn’t happen in isolation. 

Nicole: No. 

Patricia: I’ll link to the newsletter issue where I shared that article from The Progressivists, if anyone’s interested in reading it. All this conversation, and especially what you said about community and solidarity also makes me think about the role of friendship in all of this. Recognizing that your friends aren’t necessarily also your community and vice versa, and sometimes there’s overlap. 

But still making sure that you are talking with your friends and meeting up in person if you can, and talking about things that aren’t The Horrors. Although I did have coffee with a friend the other day and we sat for a couple minutes assuring each other that yes, all these things are happening and they’re very real, and yes, it’s weird as heck that so much is still just business as usual. And then we switched gears and we talked about the fun things one of her kids is learning in preschool. And I think that’s the thing is that it can’t all be The Horrors because that’s how we burn out and we need to keep going.

Nicole: Yeah. You can’t just focus on the awful all the time. 

Patricia: This isn’t toxic positivity. This is trying to mitigate harm, mitigate emotional and psychological harm so that we could keep showing up. 

Nicole: This is, and I’m tangenting again here. 

Patricia: Yeah. 

Nicole: Going off script if you will. 

This is something I think about a lot of this kind of balance in emotions and feelings.

Patricia: Mm-hmm. 

Nicole: Like you can’t, you can’t be just happy all the time. You can’t be just sad all the time. These things, in some ways require experiencing both of them or all of them in order to like fully understand them. 

Patricia: Also, the old, you know, you can’t have rainbows without rain, right? 

Nicole: Yeah. 

Patricia: Like, you know, and I think that’s also in a lot of zen teachings I’ve read, and there’s also a quote that I cannot remember for the life of me where I read it, but it’s that life is never a hundred percent of any one thing.

Nicole: No 

Patricia: It’s always a mix. 

Nicole: No. 

Coming back to what we’re talking about here, I think you’re touching on some important things about, in particular, relationship care. It can’t all be activism because folks will burn out real fast. Or rather, caring for each other is part of the activism. The people in power want us isolated and scared and ignorant, not together, and sharing food and laughing and learning.

Patricia: Yeah. Yeah. They want us outsourcing our intelligence. 

Nicole: Oh gosh. 

Patricia: Honestly, like before we get to that, or while we get to that, and even activism in the wider sense. I know that some of us need to go back to basics, and this is kind of what I think about if someone’s even going through like a depressive episode or something like that and just really being like, are you sleeping? Are you eating? Are you bathing? 

Nicole: Are you moving your body in some way? Are you going outside? Are you seeing people and or speaking to people in situations that don’t involve work? Are you doing things that don’t involve the internet? Or staring at a screen? 

Patricia: Yeah, it’s easy to stick our heads in the ground or in books. And I say that from personal experience. I am definitely sometimes a card carrying citizen of Dissociation Nation. But I really also have to remember that revolutions run on hope. Hope is necessary, and then your actions are grounded in hope. And for me, it actually feels better when I do something. Like, I truly believe that the antidote to feeling like garbage about everything is doing something. Doing something about it, and not just spiraling on the internet.

Like even if I’m using the five calls app to call politicians. If I’m checking in on friends, I guarantee like even after I leave one of those voicemails, I feel better because it feels like when you do something, you start to reclaim some sense of control because there’s so much out of our control. And that’s, for me at least, that’s what makes me spiral.

So like doing something is like, no, I can control this one thing. 

Nicole: Yeah. And this, this kind of relationship maintenance and getting out of The Horrors, as we say, is a big part of why we’ve been trying to have things like monthly get togethers with friends where maybe we have some good food and laugh together 

Patricia: and remember what it’s all about.

Nicole: Yeah. 

Patricia: I know I’ve mentioned this book on the show before, but Micro Activism by Omkari L. Williams really helps you focus and pick where your activism is going to be kind of revolving around because it could be incredibly overwhelming, like there’s so much, and you’re overwhelmed by choice and the book also encourages small bits. Like not everything you do has to be big.

It’s important that you do something. The Enthusiastic Encouragement and Dubious Advice newsletter is over six years old now. I’ve probably shared hundreds of things to do in the free issues at this point, and those are all available in the archives. 

And remember, what you do doesn’t even have to be a big thing.

It can be little things like just donating some money, and that doesn’t have to be big amounts of money. Kicking in little, you know, five bucks here, 10 bucks there. If a lot of people do that, it can go a long way. Make those five calls. Maybe do a grocery run for an immigrant family you know. Help a trans friend fill out their paperwork for their name and gender change, or their passport or something like that.

Check on your friends and loved ones who are targeted by this administration. 

Something I don’t have in the script that I actually put in the newsletter. That reminds me when you said donate money and it doesn’t have to be a lot. You know, one of the things I am prone to do is buy things to make myself feel better.

And I have taken to, like, every time I get that urge to spend money to buy something, I then donate that money to an org. 

Nicole: Huh. 

Patricia: Most recently it was just like, I was like, I want this perfume. I have so much perfume. I want this for… Nope, I’m gonna, I’m gonna send this 40 bucks to NPR. 

Nicole: Oh! 

Patricia: Also, it is important to remember we wouldn’t be us if we weren’t mentioning this.

Perfection is not possible in any of this. We’re all cooked if people are waiting until they’re perfectly rested and have spare time and consistently eating three square meals a day or whatever, which I’m pretty sure has been disproven, but you know what I mean. 

Nicole: Yeah. Your activism doesn’t have to be perfect, and it probably won’t be.

The text you send to a friend to check in doesn’t have to be the next great American novel. Also, I know I don’t wanna read the next great American novel. 

Patricia: That too. Especially in text form. 

Nicole: Yeah. 

Perfection really is keeping so many of us from moving forward, and I’ll be honest, I am my own enemy on this too.

Patricia: Yep. That is something for you to think about and work on. 

Nicole: Yep.

Music: [Transition Music] 

Nicole: And we’re just gonna move on from that. Patricia, what do you want people to take away from this? 

Patricia: So much today? So much today. If I had to choose one thing, it’s just that because you saw something a hundred times online doesn’t mean the person you’re talking to has even seen it once. 

Nicole: Mm. Yeah. 

Patricia: Nicole, what do you want people to take away from this episode?

Nicole: Awareness isn’t activism, and I think we have to remember that. We have to be doing things, and doing them in community with others. And that’s, that’s the hard part. 

Patricia: Yeah. 

Yeah. It’s easy to be aware of things. That’s not where the work is. 

Nicole: I’m aware of so many things. 

Patricia: I’m too aware. 

Nicole: Too… 

Patricia: Too much awareness. 

Nicole: I have too much awareness. I have been made aware. 

Okay, so I know the awareness can really, I know it can weigh me down. 

Patricia: Yeah. 

Nicole: I’m pretty sure it can weigh you down. 

Patricia: It could drain me. 

Nicole: What’s been filling your cup lately? 

Patricia: I am really excited our merch shop is open. That I got that opened. I hit some road bumps that we’re really frustrating. 

But it’s done. I did it. I did it myself, and that’s very satisfying. And also what’s satisfying is I got new tires on my truck. 

Nicole: You did. At the same time. I put new tires on my car and we’ve both been like, wow, the cars are so quiet and the tires, like turning is so responsive and it’s been amazing. 

Patricia: I’m like, huh? Did the road get smoother?

Nicole: I think though, you wanna share a little story about like, we’ve known we needed new tires for a while. What, uh, what happened? 

Patricia: Oh my gosh. It was raining, like it was raining. It’s been mostly under 70 here in the Bay area. Like cool weather. Some days the sun doesn’t even completely come out. And so like a week and a half ago it was raining in the morning after I dropped you off at work.

And there was a truck at the light who was turning left. I was turning right and that, the person driving the truck was driving a little recklessly. And as I turned right, I heard all kinds of squealing and I looked in my rear view mirror and this truck was like sideways. He was like slipping and sliding all over the place.

And I was like, well, that’s the universe’s sign to me that I should get my new tires. ‘Cause I was just thinking on the freeway before I took the exit. I was like, you know what? It’s wet out. I really should get my new tires. And then that happened and I was like, well, loud and clear. 

Nicole: I am so amused by the idea that the universe would just be like, Patricia needs new tires. She’s been thinking about it. We, we need to give her a sign to do that. Heck to that guy! 

Patricia: Right? F that guy. 

But you know what I’m thinking? Maybe the universe also needed to teach that guy to not drive around like an a-hole. ’cause he was, he took that corner too hard.

Nicole: A bit recklessly in the, in the wet.

Patricia: Patricia needs new tires. F that guy.

Nicole, what’s been filling your cup? 

Nicole: Some of you may be aware that I, a couple years ago, started what I called my chaos garden, which meant, uh, we had a little planter strip in front of the house that I just like emptied a whole seed packet of wildflower seeds into, and every year they come back and they grow and they’re beautiful and lovely. And then by like midsummer, like everything’s dried up and done. And then there’ll just be some scattered poppy plants because those seem to never dry up around here. 

I spent some time in the garden the other day. I clipped back all the dried stuff. Got it out of there. We had some like wire mesh we laid down because early on when it was just a dirt patch, cats kept getting in it and we put down that and the cat stopped getting in it and 

Patricia: yep 

Nicole: plants have just been growing through it.

So I pulled that all up. And I’ve had some native plants just growing in pots for the last couple of years that I like put in the ground. I put some new soil down. I laid down some nice wood chips and everything, so I completely revamped the little garden strip. And one of the neighbors who walked by who I don’t think appreciates my wild gardening all the time.

And doesn’t speak a lot of English. He, he looked at it as he walked by and he was like, very good. And I was like, okay. 

Patricia: It does look really good out there. 

Nicole: It, it looks really good. And I really hope my, my little native plants that have lived in pots for the last like two years or whatever, I am really interested to see them like thrive in this space in the next year. Also, they’re ones that are like, they need minimal water. They may not need to be watered, but maybe once a month in the summer or something. And that’s my other hope for them, is that, 

Patricia: yeah 

Nicole: really cut down on the water usage for that space.

So that, that has felt really good and I go out there every day and just admire my little, my little garden work. 

Patricia: You also picked your first two tomatoes and we ate them. 

Nicole: Oh my gosh, yes. My first two tomatoes, we ate them yesterday. They were so dark and so like delicious. I don’t know. I’m not a big tomato person.

I, like, if you asked me what a tomato tastes like, I can’t explain it to you. But you said they were very good. 

Patricia: I thought they were lovely. Yeah. We ate them with like some mozzarella and balsamic and 

Nicole: some little basil leaves we trimmed from our herb garden. 

Patricia: Yeah. 

Nicole: I am really glad you liked them because there’s a lot more tomatoes out there that are not yet ripe. But we are going to soon be lousy with tomatoes and, and some peppers. 

Patricia: Oh, those too? Yeah. 

Nicole: Yeah. 

Patricia: Well, that’s our show for today. We’d like to thank our awesome audio editor, Jen Zink. You can find her at loopdilou.com. We’ll leave a link to that in our show notes. 

Nicole: You can find the full show notes and transcript at eedapod.com.

That’s E-E-D-A-P-O-D dot com. There you can also find a link to our Patreon, our bookshop link, and a link to the ongoing, Enthusiastic Encouragement and Dubious Advice newsletter. You can also find us on Instagram and Bluesky at eedapod and email us at eedapod@gmail.com. 

Patricia: We are nothing if not consistent.

Nicole: We would also appreciate it so much if you would subscribe and rate us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts that allow for rating. It really goes far in helping other people find us. And also, thanks again to Ginnette for the comment on our website. If you’d like to leave us a comment, you can do so at any of the places I just named or email us.

And remember, we’d love to hear, uh, how you like your potatoes. 

Patricia: Yeah, always looking for new ways to have potatoes. 

We would also appreciate anyone who can subscribe to us on Patreon. Support There is going to help us keep the show going, especially without ads. You can find us at patreon.com/eedapod.

In the meantime, we hope you find ways to be kind to yourself, drink some water and read a book. We’ll be talking to you soon.

Nicole: As we were starting the outro, my brain was trying to insert the outro music over us and I was like, why isn’t the music playing? 

Patricia: Baby, we’re recording. 

Nicole: I know that happens in post.