🥚🛢️ Good morning, RVA: A nationwide test, Walk to School Day, and mayonnaise tattoos

Good morning, RVA! It’s 59 °F, and today you can expect highs around 80 °F and sunshiney skies. It’s another beautiful day in Richmond—take advantage of it! Next week may be the first official boots-and-flannel week, which is exciting, sure, but, until then, I’m going to celebrate every opportunity to not wear socks and there are at least a few of those left in 2023.
 

Water cooler

Today at 2:20 PM FEMA will conduct a nationwide test of both the Emergency Alert System and the Wireless Emergency Alerts system. This means that around 2:20 PM every single cellphone that’s turned on will play some sort of shocking alert tone and display a message reading “THIS IS A TEST of the National Wireless Emergency Alert System. No action is needed.” This should be especially alarming—which is totally the point—in congregate settings with a lot of people and phones like schools or offices or cellphone factories. I will definitely forget this is happening, be dramatically startled, possibly drop whatever I am holding, and probably make some sort of unintentional and embarrassing noise. Maybe the rest of you will remember and keep your cool!
 

Ben Paviour at VPM reports that “the state is working to resolve an issue that caused an unknown number of eligible voters to be removed from the state’s rolls.” This seems bad, and I agree with Sen. Surovell who finds the response to this issue from the Virginia Department of Elections plausible but says the new situation is “part of a pattern of mistakes” at the agency. While this particular mistake most likely effects people with previous felony convictions, I will (once again) recommend that everyone check their voter registration status (again).
 

Today is Walk to School Day! Across the city you’ll find hordes of children avoiding the car line and shambling their way to class. I love it! This means two things: First, if you have a child in your care, consider walking to school (today or any day); Second, if you drive about the town this morning, take it a little slower and keep an extra eye out for packs of roving kids.
 

Last week, Stay RVA organized some folks to volunteer at Fairfield and Lois Harrison Jones elementary, just two of the schools for which they want to galvanize on-the-ground support (the others: Ginter Park, Miles-Jones, and Redd). This is definitely a good use of your volunteer time, and, if it sounds like something you’d be interested in, you’ll need to sign up for a Communities in Schools volunteer training first. This will get you set up for all sorts of volunteer opportunities within Richmond Public Schools. Important note: There’s just one virtual volunteer training left this semester (at least until they post more dates): Tomorrow, October 5th, from 2:00–3:00 PM. If you can’t make tomorrow work, drop Stay RVA a line and ask about additional ways to get involved.
 

Karri Peifer at Axios Richmond reports that if you and your family love Duke’s mayonnaise a lot, like a lot a lot, you can potentially win “two free, custom-designed Duke’s tattoos—one for you and one for your friend/relative/grandma.” This isn’t the first time the mayo brand has partnered with Yellow Bird Tattoo to do a pop-up Duke’s event: “Last year’s event sold out in under an hour with 70 lucky winners chosen—and 1,000 people left on the waiting list.” A thousand folks wanted a mayonnaise tattoo! That’s wild!
 

This morning’s longread

The Only Productivity Hack That Works on Me

I deeply believe that when your brain starts spinning with a swirling mess of things that need to get done, dumping everything out onto a list is the best first step forward. At least for me, so much of the anxiety comes not from what I need to do but from trying to track all those actions and open loops in my mind (this is not a new idea, btw). Also, for what it’s worth, I don’t think you need to write things down on actual paper with an actual pen (although, recently, I have started doing that more). The reminders app on your phone works just fine—just use whatever thing you will always have with you, and for a lot of us that’s a phone!
 

At the end of my rope, I pulled out a notebook and pen, and flipped to a clean page. I made a list of all the things I could remember that I’d left hanging, broken down into their simplest component parts—not clean the apartment, but vacuum, take out the trash, and change your sheets. It worked. When I made a list, all of the clutter from my mind was transferred to the page, and things started getting done. It has kept working, years later, any time I get a little overwhelmed. A few months after my list-making breakthrough, I tried to translate this tactic to regular use of a planner, but that tanked the whole thing. I just need a regular notebook and a pen. There’s no use in getting cute with it. Don’t make your to-do list a task of its own.
 

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Picture of the Day

Wilderness bike.