Immortal Trees Bookshop weekly newsletter: Issue 14

Friday, August 4

 Hello, readers!

We don't know about you, but we have been feeling droopy and dull from the summer, so we have decided to proclaim August as "Intellectual August" because it's time to clean the dust off our brains. This month we are hosting our discussion series every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday from 4-6pm - free event! - and we will be sharing a virtual museum with you each week here in our newsletter.

Hooray for learning and growing, even if it's from our couch! Happy journeys!

SALE EXTENDED!!!!

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Say goodbye to the cobwebs in your brain; we are going on a virtual museum tour! There are so many museums that have created 360 degree turn-arounds and walk-throughs. We have picked just a few for this month, but there are so many that you could keep going for the rest of the year!

However, before we "step" into any museums, I found a super activity to share with you that will work with your virtual museum adventures. Introducing Google Arts and Culture:

Did you know about this site? So much to do! This website isn't a specific virtual museum, but it does have a lot of information collected from other museum collections, and they are organized by date, style, time, location, peoples, etc. You can see there are already several directions I could go explore just on this page, and then there are tabs - Explore, Play, Nearby - that have even more fun things to look at. But I am suggesting you go to the three-line drop down over on the top left. Go ahead; I'll wait.

Open the "Achievements" tab. Does your page look like the one above? Scroll down and look at all the digital badges you can earn by doing things within Google. I currently have Art Inspector (the only colored one in the pic above), Adventurer, Museum Explorer, Bookworm (of course), Color Explorer, and Time Explorer.

I have to be honest with you; I'm still working out how you actually get these badges. I was searching on my phone for museums and they just started popping up as I earned them and did certain activities. I'm guessing you need to use the Google search engine to earn the digital badges, but you don't have to be just in the Google Art and Culture section. Some of my badges came from being on a museum website.

I'm going to keep exploring and trying to earn all of these cute and free awards; I'm hooked now! If you discover how to earn any of them, drop me a line so I can start a how-to list to share with each of you.

Also, let me know if you fall down a rabbit hole and discover something worth sharing. I'm always looking for fun ways to acquire new information. Good luck, Smarticles! Go earn those badges!

Reaching out to our community

We are looking to reach out to more people through newspaper and magazine paid advertising and then hopefully hire a few employees so we can plan more events and programming for our shop. We are asking our community to help us out by spreading the word about our Go Fund Me account. You can read all about our shop and our plan to use the funds at the link below. (I took the previous really long-winded descriptions from previous newsletters out so I could add new stuff to this newsletter.)

Thank you, as always, for supporting us!

Update: Many, many thank yous to everyone who has donated! :) These generous financial gifts are being put in a pot to apply toward paid advertising, hopefully soon when we get enough for contract requirements. Yay!

Editor's last words: Let's give them something to talk about...

We had our first Round (Rectangle) Table Discussion last night, and it was awesome! Having the opportunity to get people's perspectives on things - especially non-political things - just never gets old. In our 2-hour discussion, we only used three prompts because we got distracted and started talking about other things and then other other things! It felt nice to just take a fun, light topic and spin it around, question meanings and possible interpretations, come up with answers like "well, if it was this way then _____, but if you add or change to ______, then my answer would be ______." My favorite answer of the evening was to the question, "If you could be any animal, what would it be?" and the answer was, "any loved and pampered pet of a celebrity like Taylor Swift." Yes, I think I agree. :)

So tonight we will have session 2. I wonder what questions will come up. We have session 3 tomorrow night if you'd like to join us. You are welcome to bring your knitting/crocheting, your Dutch, your dinner, your sweetheart, your bestie, or just yourself. Just get a sitter for your kiddos. :)

Come be silly, talk with people who are pretty good at pretending to be adults, and let your imagination take the wheel.

I will leave you with a question you can discuss over the dinner table:

"If you were chosen to go up in space to go live on Mars, and you could only take one type of animal, what would it be?"

Come by and tell me your answer, and I will tell you mine. :)

Have a great weekend!

~ Charity and Amy (and Jack and Toothless)