This was a very odd week and the week coming up will be odd as well. On a good side, this is what I consider “Democracy Week” in our small New England town. If you remember, last week I talked about setting up a “Meet the Candidates” night for local candidates. This coming Tuesday is when we elect town officers. On Thursday we will have Town Meeting, in which the people of the town will vote on things like budget items that are different from the normal. Saturday we had the School Budget meeting, where the town votes on the school budget.
There was little to smile about as this meeting seemed to last forever ;) But it is important to attend and participate. In the end I was in the little auditorium for five hours.
One thing I did was doodle as I listened to person after person give their opinions. Here is one page full of little doodles, ink pen on one of the handouts:
My smile participating in small town democracy at is most basic level and spending part of the time doodling…
What made you smile?
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Come on, I’m sure you smiled at least once last week. Why don’t you share it? I hope you can join in!
Here is list of “rules” and guiding ideas. If you don’t have time to read it right now, just remember that this is an exercise to spread positivity. Don’t smile about the misfortune of others. Don’t smile in a way to excludes others. Make sure a 12 year old can read it.
And remember, the Smile can be anything, large or small. Nothing, nothing at all is too small for a Smile! Sometimes taking time to notice those small, every day smiles is more important than those once in a lifetime huge ones :)
To join in, write a post to share your smile and then leave a comment on this post with a link to your smile. Or, if you prefer, do a pingback to this post (pingback = have a link from your post to this one) (Note – pingbacks have been very inconsistent – please leave a comment :) ). You can post any time until next Sunday evening (to be simple, I will say midnight GMT, which is 7 PM Sunday for me). Next week I will compile all of the Smiles and do a separate post of them on Monday morning just before the smile. (I will shoot for around 7 AM EST).
Try to use the hashtag #WeeklySmile when you use Twitter or other social media that uses hashtags. I searched Twitter and found that #weeklysmile had been used only a handful of times back in 2012 and 2013. It hasn’t been used since. So it’s ours! I also registered it on Twubs.
You can use the graphic at the top. It is the official graphic for the event.
Now go out there and find something to smile about! :)
Trent's World (the Blog) 
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I think I need to fix the link I posted. I will try again here: hope this works better.
https://myhorsestories.blog/2020/03/10/my-weekly-smile-rain-and-crochet/
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I didn’t try the other but will this one…
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I Love your smile this week. It is so wonderful you participate in your small town democracy, I do applaud you and your doodling is great! I do love the eye with all its shadows. :D
Here is my link to my wehttps://myhorsestories.blog/2020/03/10/my-weekly-smile-rain-and-crochet/ekly smile:
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Thanks! I think more people need to participate, and not just when they are angry or whatever. I do enjoy doodling :) I’ll be by in a few minutes.
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Doodling is like finding little treasures in your brain. Sitting for 5hrs in that circumstance is a great time to treasure hunt.
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It is finding a little treasure in my brain. It is also the only way to keep sane for that amount of time ;)
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Five hours is a long time! Love your keyboard doodle! Here is mine in “Need of Sun” https://wp.me/p9EWyp-1AT
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Thanks! I’m obviously not an artist like you, but I love to doodle :)Five hours is far too long to be cooped up in a small room! But, it is part of the democratic process in a small New England town (usually they last 2 or 3 hours, but several citizens brought up a bunch of stuff…). I will stop by in a few minutes to check out your smile.
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I enjoy learning more about your democratic process, Trent. It seems much more appropriate than ours. We get no say over how our tax money is used and a lot of it is mismanaged.
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Thanks, Robbie. There are a few things – different regions in the US are differen, so what I described is typical for small towns in New England – obviously a city like New York can’t do this! The next thing is that the democracy gets more direct the closer to local you get. We elect local people to work on budgets, but anyone can go to meetings and comment and then there is a vote for the budget. At the state level, we have a couple of people in our small town represent us in the state capital, but the people themselves have little say other than that. And then when it gets to national level, it’s that much farther away.
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I think it’s great, even if it is only available in the smaller towns.
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It is great, one of the benefits of living in these small towns – I just wished more people participated!
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I couldn’t spend 5 hours in an auditorium listening to people. I’d have to get up and run out of there. We get to vote in our primary tomorrow….then maybe there will be fewer ads on TV for us. For awhile.
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I’ve been to other school budget meetings that were more like 2 hours, so this was a bit… you can see why I doodled ;) Yes, they are calling tomorrow Super Tuesday Number 2. We’ll see how it goes. Since we had our primary last month, tomorrow is just town offices, but still a big vote. And the ads might go down a little, but you’ll be avoiding the TV long before November rolls around ;)
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https://christinebialczak.com/2020/03/09/the-weekly-smile/
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Some nice drawings you’ve done. I like the items with shading (the hat, the eye, the speaker or dryer? next to the word Appendix).
Here’s me smile for this week: https://natalietheexplorer.home.blog/2020/03/08/glass-vessels-that-bring-joy/
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Thanks. It is a speaker, which is a little more obvious on the original (it looks very 3-D). I’ll be by in a few minutes to check out your smile.
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Although I scribble a lot of notes I rarely doodle, but doodles may be more interesting to look back on in an old notebook. Better than grocery lists. I am going to have to remember to do that in the future. I like the curved keyboard at the bottom.
Here is my smile for this week: https://frankhubeny.blog/2020/03/09/spring-has-sprung/
For some reason I am not able to “like” WordPress posts this morning, but at least comments are working. That is something to smile about as well.
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When I was a student, my notebooks had almost as many doodles as actual notes ;) Doodling really helps me stay focused more even than trying to take notes. If I do nothing, I drift off….
WP does some odd stuff… I think they made more upgrades recently, and it seems that every time they do “improvements”, something breaks.
I’ll be by soon to check out your smile.
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