Debi Simons 
We continue to make our way through the chaos at our new home. Last night Jim started putting up the beautiful new sliding panel blinds on the patio door. I couldn’t begin to tell you how much time we spent agonizing over how we wanted to have those done.
I went in and spent at least an hour with this nice woman in the window treatments department at Lowe’s. Then Jim and I went in. Then we went back home and re-measured. Then we went in yet again
How I love Wednesdays, because that’s the day when the “Happier” podcast with Gretchen Rubin and her sister Elizabeth Craft drops. (Podcasts “drop”–did you know that?) Anyway, every week the two sisters spend a little over half an hour talking about all kinds of things that may sound superficial but really aren’t.
(You may remember that I got into the podcast universe by listening to Season 1 of “Serial”–that one dropped on Thursday
I ran out of books to read while we were on vacation, and since I didn’t have a phone or a laptop I had to make do with, like, actual printed books. We visited a great bookstore in Durham, NC, on our final weekend of the trip and this book was available at a reduced price. I’d seen references to it before and thought it would be an informative read, so I went ahead and grabbed it.
You might think that a book about the leadup to 9/11 would be a little stale and irrelevant, but you’d be wrong. I think of myself as being fairly well-informed about actual Islamic terrorism and its roots, values, and goals, but this book clarified those aspects of this threat. In addition, the book makes the main players so fascinating and human that you come away with a new understanding of how this whole horrible tragedy was brought about, both by its planners and executors and also by the failure of many in various law enforcement agencies to follow some obvious clues.
I’m always hearing snatches on the radio that intrigue me; sometimes I even follow up on them. One of my favorite sources for these snatches is “The TED Radio Hour” on NPR. As you may know, and as I’ve written before, TED Talks are a great source of short talks on a wide range of subjects. “TED” stands for “Technology, Entertainment, Design,” but you can shoehorn almost any topic into those three areas.
I almost always worry that we won’t have enough to do on our trips, a worry that Jim reminds me of when we arrive home after having crammed each day to the fullest. This trip was no different.
Somewhere I read a study on memory that asked, “Would you go on vacation if after it was all over your memories of the trip were erased from your mind?” Would all the money and effort be worth it if you had no memory of what you did? I honestly don’t know. It seems to me that there would be a happy “residue” left in your mind even if specific items were gone.
I find to my great surprise that I’ve never done a post about French Women Don’t Get Fat by Mireille Giuliano. (The link is to her website. She’s wearing a very odd outfit in the current main picture on the home page, but, as she would say, c’est la vie!) While we were on vacation I found myself thinking about that book’s ideas quite a bit as I tried very hard, and for the most part succeeded, in following them.
Here’s her main principle: Eat food you love and eat deliberately and mindfully. Eat real meals. Don’t eat standing up, or in the car, or in front of the TV. Remember that you get the most enjoyment out of the first few bites. You don’t have to eat a lot of something delicious in order to enjoy it; in fact, overeating destroys the enjoyment. Better to have a small portion and enjoy every morsel than to scarf down a huge serving without tasting it much and then paying the price of feeling bloated and stuffed.
I didn’t get much writing done during the two weeks we were gone on our big drive-to-the-east coast/eat-barbecue/hike-in-the-Blue-Ridge-Mountains/attend-the-Charleston-family-reunion/deliver-Gideon-and-his-car-to-grad-school trip. One big lesson from the trip is, Nothing that you worry about ahead of time is too likely to happen, but something totally unexpected will inevitably crop up. So we had gotten on the road two weeks ago, with Gideon’s Subaru Outback packed to the gills. My big worry was the question of how we’d get him a mattress set for his new digs, something that ended up being supremely simple to do.
Do you ever finish a book with a feeling of regret because now you have to leave its world? That’s certainly happened to me many times, and my son said once when he was younger that he wished he wasn’t such a fast reader, since he sometimes didn’t want a book to end. Yesterday, because of a memory brought to mind of a phrase from a 1960’s detective novel, I loaded up the audiobook version of A Clutch of Constables by the New Zealand mystery author Ngaio Marsh. I had returned a couple of audiobooks to Audible.com that I knew in my heart of hearts I was never going to finish and so had some credits to spend. Constables wasn’t available as a download through the library, so I went ahead and spent a credit.
I am plowing through the Covey book, and maybe you should, too.
I’m at the beginning of chapter 13, so only 95 more to go. Mercy! I can’t even begin to imagine what he can possibly go on about for that long, but at this point we haven’t even gotten to the first highly effective habit; he’s still hammering away at his introductory stuff.
I’ve said several times already that the book is boring, but that’s not quite the right word. It’s just very, very dense, and he has all these proverb-like sentences that make me feel that I should be writing them down, or cross-stitching them, or something. I just cheated and went onto BrainyQuote to look at ome of his sayings. Follow the link to get a sampling.
. . . and more on things I can!
Almost exactly a year ago, on July 4, 2016, I started posting about the upcoming election on my personal Facebook page. I had never been particularly interested in politics before but had become greatly exercised about the possible outcome in November. My goal was to change a few minds or at least open them a crack. (I don’t post directly about politics on this page or on my author Facebook page.