Category: To Occupy my Time

Just one thing mission one completed

I envisioned “just one thing” as running Sunday through Saturday, but Saturday came and went and I still hadn’t gotten the dryer vent tube. But I figure that I posted the original post on a Monday, so a task completed on Sunday still falls within the “week” qualifications. And on Sunday I completed my task. Dryer vent hose was bought, installed and the old one made its way to the trash can.

My “just one thing” task for this week: Goodwill run. I’ve got a ton of stuff to go.

The debut of “Just one thing”

The house has been overwhelming me lately. I’m finding it hard to keep a basic level of “clean” much less all the little niggly things: the fan in the bathroom needs a scrubbing, there’s that cobweb still hanging in the middle of the living room, the vacuum cleaner needs to get serviced, etc. etc.

So each week, I’m going to do just one thing per week. Ideally it will be on top of the weekly cleaning of the house, but if I don’t get to cleaning the house, I don’t. Matt tends to chip away at the cleaning each weekend anyway, even if he doesn’t get all the way through the official list. I’ll post my “one thing” on Sunday and update when I have done it. I will not make a list of five “one things,” I will just do one thing. Because right now nothing is getting done. And if I can do four things in a month, that will be a great improvement.
My “one thing” this week? Buy a new dryer exhaust tube. Ours broke (well actually, I was cleaning the lint out of it and accidentally stuck my finger through it making a lovely hole which I temporarily fixed with packing tape topped with duct tape*) and there is a lot of dryer use in the house. I can see how the temporary fix could go on for months. But it won’t. Because this is my one thing.
*and yes, I know that you shouldn’t use duct tape for ducts anymore. It was just what we had on hand.

Holy Peanuts Batman!

I paid six dollars and something cents for this jar of peanut butter only a week ago. Today:

I’ve been sticking my head in the sand about the rising food costs, but this has shaken me out of it. I’m going to keep a closer eye on what I eat and how much it costs. Peanut butter is somewhat like water in our house in that both Matt and I dip into on a regular basis. Between us we easily finish a jar a week. But no longer for me. My average 2-oz serving of peanut butter now costs $0.44 which (in my mind) is the price of a candy bar. Of course, candy bars cost even more now.

House Frau and others

When you don’t have much clothing (and I have a goodly amount by choice, but not a ton) sometimes you need to wash everything. Other times I desire to be dressed because I have things to do around the house, but don’t want to actually put on pants. What do I need? A House Frau dress. I’ve been wanting one for awhile and my trip to the Goodwill yielded this classic. I love it. It’s a great color, not binding at all and, yes, incredibly unflattering. But that doesn’t matter, because after this picture, the public won’t see it.

It was a good Goodwill trip in other ways. I also got this great shell which is a bit more flattering than the House Frau dress.

And! In the Halloween section, of all places, I got this fabulous car coat which not only goes with the dress, it bridges the gap between the “too cold for no coat, too hot for the lightest weight coat.” Yipee!

Poem for September: Coming soon.

The poem for September is actually the poem for September and October, so tune in for the October 31 post to find out what the poem is. In the meantime, let’s chat about how I keep all these poems in my head.

Or at least that was what this post was supposed to be about as I was going to have the plan in place by the time I got to this post. Alas, here I am with no plan. So we shall create one.
When I started the project, the plan was that I would work on the current month’s poem daily and Sunday would be my review day. I knew the key to remembering all the poems would be to keep them fresh in my mind so I would recite all the poems in order from beginning to end weekly. This worked pretty well until I got about a year and a half in. Then there were too many poems to whip through on a Sunday. And Sunday turned out to not be such a good day for review anyway, as it doesn’t usually involve a lot of biking or walking.
I find that I can usually remember the previous year’s poems, the poem I’m working on and the previous month’s poem, but have trouble remembering the previous six months poems. There seems to be a gap where the poem has to sit forgotten in the brain for a bit before it emerges into consciousness again.
So here’s the new plan. I’ve typed a list of all the poems I’ve memorized. At this point, it’s 31 poems. I’ve also got them listed quarterly by year. For instance: January, (2010–Invictus, 2011 The Pool Players) February (2010–February, 2011–Oranges) March (2009–Incident, 2010–Otherwise, 2011–Wild Geese) These are both in Excel so I can add to them as I add more poems. The plan will be that the current review is the current quarter we are in. September is the last month in the July/August/September quarter. Beginning in October I will review the poems in the October/November/December Quarter. I will also go back over the previous six months of poems.
I won’t have to do this for each poem every day. In fact, that would be a bit of overkill. Instead, I can review one poem per day while I am dressing in the morning. I’ve started a hard copy poem book that contains each poem I’ve memorized. I will also make an extra copy of this book for my bag. A lot of my poem reciting happens when I’m walking or riding the bike. Having a secondary poem book to refer to will be handy for when the exact words don’t come immediately in my head. Right now I get to a point like that and think, “damn it. Something, da dah, da dah da dah something.” Then I have to remember to look it up when I get home which never happens.
The other thing I’m going to do is let the poems I don’t really like go. Such is the case for ‘Praise Song for the Day.” (October 2010) It was a complex poem that I really didn’t like by the end of last October when it was all stuck in my head. Looking at it now, I remember almost nothing of it. I’m a bit overwhelmed by the current month’s poem and don’t have the energy to shove it back in. I may come back to it someday, but not right now.
The September/October selection may bleed over into November. We shall see what October’s memorization brings.

Mail mystery

I received a mysterious package in the mail on Saturday. It consisted of a DFTBA* sticker and five of the postcards pictured below. Where did it come from? The return address gave no clue, and I had no idea who would send me Nerdfighter material.

Nerdfighters are, of course the awesome fans of John and Hank Green, known as the Vlogbrothers. They fight to decrease world suck and increase awesome. I’ve spoken of them before in this post. This random package had certainly increased my awesome, but where did it come from?

I set it aside, pondering it now and then over a few days. Then the answer came. It was Shawn from Pike Schemes, knowing my fandom of Nerdfiteria, had randomly sent me some postcards.

Thanks Shawn. You must be a Nerdfighter too!

*Don’t Forget To Be Awesome! Which is a Nerdfighter’s slogan.

Photos and Compliance.

I’m a member of the Religious Education (RE) Committee at church. At my church Religious Educators were called Sunday School teachers when I was growing up. The RE Committee has many duties, one of which is to assist during trainings. Last night was the first night of the two-day teacher training before the start of the church school year and I and two of my fellow committee members were tasked with creating a sandwich dinner. One person did the “big shop” for supplies, and we all unloaded the food, chopped things, plated things, gathered enough plates, glasses and silverware for everyone and arranged everything buffet style.

As the teachers were going through the line, we observed, taking care of needs here and there; refilling water pitchers, chopping more tomato, picking up dropped items and exposing them, what have you. After everyone had been served, we served ourselves.

I was standing with my fellow committee members near the buffet table eating a rice cake sandwich and had just taken a rather large bite when a woman approached with a camera. She held it up, the now universal command of “arrange yourself for a portrait!” and my fellow committee members moved in on both sides of me. I don’t mind impromptu portraits, but was not really thrilled to be captured with a large amount of food in my mouth. Still, I made the best of the situation, shifting the food to the middle of my mouth, dropping the plate to waist level in anticipation that the photograph would be from the chest up and giving a great big closed mouth smile.

At that point, another woman noticed that I was holding the plate at waist level. “Patricia!” she said in a scolding voice, and held out her hands to me to take the plate. I handed it over, attempted to move some more food in my mouth with my hand and straightened back up for the picture that I was at this point not at all interested in being a part of.

“Are you done and ready for the photo?” The photographer asked in a rather dismissive tone, as if I was being the troublesome one.”

“Just take the picture.” My lack of enthusiasm came through despite the food in my mouth, I reassumed my closed mouth smile the picture was taken and we all moved on.

The incident was over, but sticks with me. Who was the rude one here? From the scolding tones of both the bystander woman and the photographer I am left with the impression that I was. But having a camera in one’s hand does not guarantee cooperative subjects. In fact, with the ubiquitous of cameras, we seem to have lost the ability to ask permission to take a photo, grandly assuming that everyone is ready to smile for the camera. The same photographer took many photos earlier when I was setting the food out. I was busy and concentrating on my work and so ignored her efforts and went about mine, but felt a twinge of annoyance and would have preferred not be photographed at that particular moment. Later, if she had asked to take my fellow committee members photo in appreciation of our efforts, I would have been able to say, “can you wait a minute, so I can finish chewing?” and posed in the grand style my women’s college social education has prepared me for. But she just held up her camera and assumed compliant subjects.

When I was growing up and film was expensive photos were comparatively rare. A few years ago, looking at the photos my friend had amassed from high school, I marveled that the number of photos she had taken of our entire high school experience was equal to perhaps a month of our photos taken today as we’re both bloggers. But when film was expensive, there was much more of an opt-out clause. In fact, several of my friends didn’t like having their photos taken at all, going so far as to hide their faces in the nearest corner to avoid the camera. With the expense of film removed from the process, one can now snap photos of the reluctant subject until they comply with our wishes. But should we?

I see the effects of digital photography at school. It has become another means of teachers for teaching, for illustrating the passages in their classrooms. At the beginning of the school year, the teachers take close-up portraits of students, enlarge them and hang them on the wall with the students’ names. They tend to do this at recess, and I watch their progress as they work through their class list. Every student complies, standing at attention, smiling for the camera. None of today’s generation seems to be camera shy and I don’t think it occurs to them they could be, as the digital photography revolution happened before their birth.

Still, I think people with cameras in hand should keep in mind that the photograph they would like to capture isn’t necessarily a priority for the people in the photograph. A simple, “May I take your photo?” would be helpful to those who are not willing to be photographed, either in the moment, or ever. And when asking, photographers need to leave room for a gracious “No thank you.” For whatever reasons.