As an example of this moderate approach I give you our kitchen cabinets. They are high quality, with sturdy drawers and doors, soft-close hinges (which make a surprising difference in how I shut them), and solid-wood fronts with a beautiful factory finish. They are miles removed from the cabinets I made do with in my much bigger and more expensively-countered kitchen in our old house. And they cost about half of what we would have spent for the ones you order and then have to wait weeks for.
Debi Simons
That First Step Down the Road of Choices
What did we do in the kitchen? The floor was the first step, locking us in to certain future choices.
This is not a home decorating blog. Having such a blog is like having a food/recipe blog, for which the hapless blogger has to come up with new projects all the time. Hey, once I’m done, especially on the decorating front, I’m done. And while I’m a fan of new recipes, I’ll let others do the day-to-day work of developing them.
What’s Your Downtime Look Like?
I define “downtime” as time that isn’t directed to a specific task or end but is what I do when I take a break from my work. Usually I read something, these days from some news website or the other. Oh for the days when I just read books! That type of thing seems like a distant memory. I used to gobble up murder mysteries by the ton, and when I’d be eating lunch by myself at home and reading I’d keep on eating so that I could keep on reading. (This former habit may help explain why I used to weigh more than I do now.)
Yet Another Book about Personality Types
Reading People: How Seeing the World through the Lens of Personality Changes Everything by Anne Bogel, available in several formats, published Sept. 2017. Link is to the Amazon page; I mistakenly said in an earlier post that I could not include direct Amazon links in my reviews. Anne also has a very popular website, Modern Mrs. Darcy, which deals with, well, how to be a modern Elizabeth Bennet.
So last week’s book pick was the new Gretchen Rubin opus on her Four Tendencies framework; I hope you’ve read it by now. It is really, really good. I promise. And this week’s book was brought to my attention by Gretchen’s interview with its author, Anne Bogel. I am very sorry that I didn’t get in on the pre-order bonus that would have allowed me to get the audiobook and the paperback versions together for the price of one. Since I had an Audible.com credit available I used that, but I wish I’d just bought the paperback or Kindle version.
These Peaches Aren’t Gonna Poach Themselves.
I have a book post to write later today, but for some reason this phrase has popped into my mind recently. It’s from a TV show of several years back called Leverage, and we really enjoyed it for awhile until the writing got so bad that we couldn’t stand it any more and stopped watching. But, in spite of all those flaws, it had some memorable characters, among them an ex-mercenary soldier kinda guy named Eliot Spencer who had a lot of facets to him. In one episode the team has infiltrated a wedding that involves some crime figures, and the soldier guy is acting as the catering chef, primarily because he can cook. He gets really into the whole thing, almost forgetting why the team is there in the first place. People are coming and the food isn’t ready! It’s more stressful than a hit job. I actually looked up the quotation above; it’s what he says to another team member when she’s trying to get him to leave the kitchen and get on with their investigation. (Season 1, Episode 7: “The Wedding Job.”)
But it’s a good mantra, something for me to say to myself when I’m doing my usual complaining about something that needs to be done instead of just, well, doing it, a surprisingly useful little jab to get me going. The outdoor mat is still sitting in our living room space because no one has swept off the patio? That mat isn’t gonna move itself. The space between the tile and the wooden threshold in the bathroom needs to be re-grouted? It isn’t gonna grout itself. The company that came in and measured my table for a custom glass top hasn’t ever gotten back to me? That phone call isn’t gonna make itself. (I know—I hate the word “gonna.” Got to be true to the quote, though!)
What could you just go ahead and do, right now, instead of letting whatever-it-is just sit?
Fitting in Work Around Other Work
Well, I just spent at least half an hour trying to find a quotation from the British classicist Mary Beard about her writing and I haven’t been able to do so. It’s always a mistake to let a good idea go by and then have to hunt it down later. So I won’t be able to give you an exact quotation, but she said something like, “As I was sitting and working on my few sentences.” Mary Beard is one of my heroes; her book The Fires of Vesuvius is a true time-travel tool.
The Joy of Tackling a Big Project
My current Big Writing Project (BWP) is the finishing up of my commentaries on Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana for publication. I’ve been using the writing software Scrivener, as everybody who’s anybody says it’s magnificent. Well, I’d been finding it magnificently hard to use, to be honest. The final step in my project was the addition of images, and Scrivener just wasn’t cooperating. Until, suddenly, it was. I’m not sure what I did, but I think I had somehow created a table where I didn’t want one, and Scrivener was stubbornly following the
Gretchen Rubin’s New Book Is Here!
The Four Tendencies: The Indispensable Personality Profiles That Reveal How to Make Your Life Better (and Other People’s Live Better, Too) by Gretchen Rubin, 2017. Link is to the book’s page on the author’s website.
I have now done something for her books that I haven’t for anyone else I can think of: Buying them, in hardback, as soon as they come out. This is number four in her series on happiness, habits, and now . . . heuristics? I can’t come up with a third “h” word. It’s actually a deep dive into her theory about what she calls personality tendencies. I’ve read the sections that have to do most with my own tendencies: Obliger and Upholder, and gotten bogged down with the Questioner and Rebel sections. I’ll come back to them later.
Hurricanes and Human Nature
If you’re like me you’ve spent the last several weeks reading and watching everything you can about Harvey and Irma, those two most unwelcome visitors to our shores. I feel especially sorry for those who were just starting to crawl out from under the rubble left by Harvey, only to have the nation’s attention diverted to Florida’s woes. As I sit here, safe and dry, it’s easy for me to do a little pontificating about what these storms reveal about the human condition. To be honest, I’m finding it quite difficult to write
Wearing the Iron Pants, Sticking to the Schedule, and Staying in the Chair
I don’t know if the muse is going to show up on any given day, but by golly, I’m going to be at my desk every day from 8 to 12 every morning in case she does.
Flannery O’Conner
Yep. Hard as it is to swallow, the only way I’m going to get any writing done is to sit in my chair and do it.