Debi Simons
What Does Hiking Teach Us about Life?
My husband Jim has often said that his experiences on youth group backpacking trips taught him that the stragglers are the ones who don’t get any rest. The group moves ahead along the trail and stops at a certain point, waiting for everyone to catch up. As soon as they do, the leader says, “Okay, let’s go!” And so the slow ones just have to keep going. The whole group can’t just sit there and wait for them, but they’re the ones who need rest the most. (If you want a tale filled with drama, pain, and endurance, ask Jim to tell you about the time he went on an eight-day trip with an ingrown toenail. Although it sounds kind of funny now, it most certainly wasn’t then. Isn’t it interesting that the size of the painful body part doesn’t necessarily bear any relation to the size of the pain’s affect? Jim remembers very little from that trip other than his having to slog along feeling that toenail dig into his flesh with every step.)
The Hedonic Treadmill Is Alive and Well . . .
in Seattle.
Three Books I Didn’t Finish This Week
I usually have a book or a blog of the week, and I had a candidate for a book this week but then realized that I just didn’t want to finish it. I had bogged down in it. No problem, I thought. I had some others. But I couldn’t seem to finish them either. Others might like them, though, and if nothing else I can share with you the core idea I got from each one. Here goes:
Make Your Own Bread!
This is going to be a long post for a very simple recipe. I want to try to convince you that making homemade bread, especially rolls (pictured), is so simple that, as Peg Bracken says, it would “have any cordon bleu chef pounding his head with his omelette pan.” People are always so amazed when they realize that you’ve made bread, as if you’d taken out your own appendix. So read on,
Hold Things Lightly . . . But Do Hold Them!
Over the past few months as Jim has continued his job search, there have been two strong possibilities that would have involved a very long commute. One job was in Longmont, 60 miles each way, and the other in Westminster, about 45 miles each way. Both jobs were temporary contracts with the possibility of permanent hires. So there was no way that we’d move for such a short term, but we’d never continue the situation of living such a distance from Jim’s job. We’ve always taken into account the length of the commute when we’ve bought houses–admittedly only two so far, but still! So when we first moved to the Washington DC area we said that Jim’s commute was not going to be his second job. We knew that we could get a much bigger and somewhat cheaper house by buying something “outside the Beltway,” but we just didn’t want that. So we bought a small ranch house that in theory was 15 minutes from Jim’s job at the Old Executive Office Building, right next door to the White House. He did end up leaving that project and taking something just over the border into Maryland, so if we had bought something way outside of town in Virginia we would have had to move.
A Nifty–And Free–Tool
My first attempt to do a screenshot! It’s a bit blurry, but I think you get the picture. (In a manner of speaking.) This view is of the homepage of the website called “TomatoTimer.com,” which is an online timer that incorporates the principle of something called “the Pomodoro Technique.” Again, as with so many great ideas and websites, I have no idea how I got onto this. I have a vague memory of its being mentioned in a YouTube video. Anyway, there’s a whole cottage industry (books, an actual little tomato-shaped timer, etc.) around the very simple idea of working for 25 minutes, taking a 5-minute break, then working another 25 minutes, and so on.
How to Grow a Mustache
Mr. Money Mustache: Financial Freedom through Badassity, mrmoneymustache.com. by Pete, no last name given. No, that’s not him in the picture.
Yet again this week there’s a blog instead of a book. I promise that next week I’ll post about a book. (I’m in the midst of reading it right now, in between my stints on the MMM website.) And, another yet again, I don’t know how I ran across this site. The power of Google, I guess. Mr. Mustache addresses the age-old question of whether or not money can buy happiness. The answer is: only if you use the money to buy freedom instead of things. (And why a mustache? Well, guess you’ll have to check out the blog for yourself.)
From the Sublime to the Mundane
Yesterday I took on the Big Question of free will vs. fate. Today I’m talking about cleaning out my Sonicare toothbrush. No one can accuse me of being in a rut!
Here’s the thing: The inside of the head of this appliance gets gunked up with this black stuff, toothpaste residue, and it drives me crazy. ( Yes, I do rinse out the bristles. It still happens.) So I periodically spend 10 minutes or so cleaning it out with q-tips, but at some point it’s just hopeless. Recently I replaced the head, as you’re supposed to do every three months (but who does that, really?) and I determined that I was going to keep it clean. So now, every time I use it, twice a day. I unscrew the top from the base, rinse it out inside, and shake out the water before screwing it back on. Takes about 30 seconds, tops. So far it seems to be staying clean. No more black gunk. A good illustration, once again, of the principle that it’s easier to keep up than it is to catch up. (I will spare you the description of how awful my sink stopper gets because I let hairs go down the drain instead of cleaning them out. You don’t want to know about that, believe me.)
How Do I Exercise My Free Will?
I said in my post last week on Joseph Luzzi’s new book In A Dark Wood that I’d be writing more posts about his ideas. Here’s the first of those.
One of the most vexing topics we face, whether coming at it from a secular or a religious viewpoint, is the question of the limits, or even the possibility, of free will. Modern scientists have postulated that there is no such thing; that the existence and location of every particle in the universe is the result of random chance and is therefore (somewhat counter-intuitively) preordained. As I sit here writing this post, my ideas arise only from the purposeless chemical interactions that are occurring down there within my brain. (There’s a great discussion of this concept in the book I wrote about back in the very first post on this blog.)