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Sara 🏳️‍🌈

@saralovesyou.bsky.social

1.6K followers 380 following 4.8K posts

Minneapolis, nonsense, higher ed, tech, genealogy, and Minnesota in general. PhD in education. Have been called “secretly nice.” Saved a child care center, ran a tech conference. I make excellent pierogi and strudel.

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · Sep 3

Hey look! I have a website now. It will have other things eventually, but for right now it has three posts about what I'm calling the St. Paul Death Register Project.

More will come--including MN-specific genealogy work.

Syndicate & Hague

Digging into Minnesota genealogy and history, and how our past still affects us today.

www.syndicateandhague.com

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 20h

I’m personally too angry about this to manage any expression of that on here.

However, it is worth making sure your red state family (if you have them) know about this. There are an awful lot of families who rely on this who just have no idea what they set us all up to experience.

Leah 🐸 McElrath @leahmcelrath.bsky.social · 22h

⚠️ USAToday reporter confirms the office in charge of special education funding has been “decimated”:

Zach Schermele
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@ZachSchermele
NEW: The Education Dept. layoffs continued overnight, w/ the main office in charge of special ed funding being
"decimated," as one person described.
"They cut just about everyone that works with IDEA funding," said another.
"I'm not sure how these programs exist moving forward."
10:21 AM • 10/11/25 • 2.1K Views

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 22h

Like—no one gets adequate training in disaster response and people serve poorly prepared food at a shelter site and sicken people whose homes were leveled by a tornado…

Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 22h

The only times you notice CDC / ppl funded by it is when something bad happens—something doesn’t work, people get very sick, some kind of bioterrorism happens, or the response to something with public health implications gets botched.

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 22h

They worked with people I know on addressing zoonotic disease, working across governmental entities (it’s complicated), incident command systems, so many things that you’ll never know about beyond a recall or the right people responding in a disaster.

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 22h

Funding is always limited, so in every e-learning thing we did my main goal was to make things work for 10+ years. Nothing that I thought wouldn’t make it at least 10 years would be okayed. Because people don’t want to fund preparedness when they forget about crises.

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 22h

These things are that simple—but also they take expertise and experience to figure out what the point of failure is. There are always possibilities, but figuring out the cause? That’s what they do.

I got to make fun (to me) education opportunities.

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 22h

I know several “disease detectives” — one I spent a lot of time with worked on the Schwann’s salmonella outbreak in MN in the 1990s, which sickened a lot of people in the upper Midwest.

They were storing ice cream in the same trucks as eggs without properly sanitizing.

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 22h

I got to work with preparedness and response on a grant (actually, a few grants over the last 20 years) on education/training development. We made trainings for public health emergency response that were taken by tens of thousands of people across the country. Adopted for entire health departments.

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 22h

I’m really upset about several gutting happening right now, but let me tell you a little bit about the incredible people who have worked with the CDC that I know personally. (Image with alt text. )

I regret to inform you that you are being affected by a reduction in force (RIF) action. Please find attached a notice memorandum explaining the RiF and next steps. This RiF action does not reflect directly on your service, performance, or conduct. It is being taken solely for the reasons stated in the memorandum.
After you receive this notice, you will be placed on administrative leave and will no longer have building access beginning Friday, October 10, unless directed otherwise by your leadership. Additionally, please save this email and its attachments, or forward them to a personal email address, for your records.
Leadership at HHS appreciates your service.

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 1d

Fine, but not totally accurate. Only one grandparent was from the region. My other large chunk, Irish, is now basically chunks that cover the whole island. That tracks.

Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 1d

Unrelated to anything important, ancestry updated their regions and I think they really struggle with Eastern Europe. Granted, I can’t find everyone, but I have so many people in the same Slovenian town that have it’s kind of weird.

Now it’s very heavy on the northwest balkans, which is fine.

Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 1d

I need to make my blog less spare. It needs a logo, but I could just let it be text and not care. Also need to keep the DFL letter only on pages about my family when I start writing about my grandfather. I simply have no design energy at present.

Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 1d

*travel back in time with me.

Autocorrect hates grammar. I also have a Croatian keyboard on here too so I keep getting mixed up.

Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 1d

I’ve been sidelined by parent duties and dual citizenship prep this week, and finishing my first MN political genealogy post (gov Perpich). But my next death register post will be on one of the few who died of “old age” and we’ll see how the rest of that family fared…

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 1d

Oh. Well then.

We’re really hurtling back to the dark ages. Travel back in with me as I write about how individual people and families died.

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 1d

It does have more info—it’s the steps involved for making it formal (and the duplicativeness) that is eating up my time and patience.

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 1d

I’ve spent probably 90 minutes on the phone about various vital records-related stuff for the last two weeks and then additional time and unnecessary expense in person and I think I’m going to lose my mind.

Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 1d

Each needs its own apostille stamp.

Build into this process being told that the county cannot do it, calling, getting told it can, getting questions about whether that’s what you actually need, etc.

Why did we make this so hard in 2023??

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 1d

Anyone applying for something like dual citizenship needs more than what is on our standard forms.

So what you have to do now is:
1. Get the certified copy
2. Get a non-certified copy
2a. Print out a memo saying that MN has no certified long form records
2b. Go get this packet notarized

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 1d

I don’t know why MN stopped issuing “long form” birth certificates, but let me tell you—not enough people working at the service centers know that people need and can get non-certified images or whatever (I get to return to get one after being told they couldn’t).

Was there a state statute change?

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 1d

Fun fact—my dad took me to go see Gorbachev (speak? Something?) when he was here then and we didn’t make it because I was running and hit a hole in the ground and sprained my ankle.

I am a nerd and clumsy.

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 1d

I think that’s the thing I’m maddest at the mayor and the more conservative wing of our city for doing. The mayor didn’t need to use that time as a way to scare people during the 2021 election. That was a choice and the city’s residents have been paying for it. So we already have that as baseline.

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 1d

Lastly. The more people you know who are directly affected, the more presence an event has in your life, the more you’re going to be reactive. We’ve never had a real healing process post-Floyd’s murder and everything that stemmed from that. It immediately turned into a politically exploited event.

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 1d

The number of false alarms we had after that day are too numerous to count. Running out of the subway because of a suspicious bag, repeatedly having to get up and go outside because a bomb threat was called into where I worked/went to school. It keeps everyone on edge (in their own unique ways).

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Sara 🏳️‍🌈 @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 1d

2. The more intense the experience, the more easily panic sets in. The more visible the reminders of the threat are, the more your baseline ongoing level of anxiety keeps you ready to snap.

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