The three things conversation

Every day at 3:14, I call N-son for the Three Things conversation. 

(Okay, actually, it's almost every day. Sometimes one of us is otherwise occupied.  Still—unless I shut it off because I'm in a theater or a meeting or something—every day at 3:14 my alarm pings, and I try to stop what I'm doing, and call N-son.)

The topic of this short phone call is to trade our stories about these three things:

1. Something that made you happy.
2. A good deed you did.
3. Something you're looking forward to. 

That's all we need to talk about.

The calls usually last 5–10 minutes; if it gets close to 10 minutes, one of us makes "Mama hates phone calls" noises (which is true), and we wrap it up.  Sometimes saying good-bye after a short conversation would feel rude or dismissive, but we both know that we'll get to talk again tomorrow, so it's okay to cut it short today.

I started doing this a bit more than a year ago, when N-son was feeling particularly lonely and left out, and I wanted a way to connect with him.  The fact that we've been doing this for more than a year tells you how much we really have come to relish this daily ritual.

There have been a lot of ups and downs during the year; some of these conversations have veered off into describing the downs.  I have reminded N-son that neither one of us has to pretend to be happy . . . but that even when things are going terrible, there are small good things, too.  You can acknowledge the hard times, while still using the glimmers of good as the rungs of a ladder to help you start climbing up out of the pit. And this seems to work.  There have been times I've listened to N-son rail angrily or dejectedly through a 15-minute rant about his situation, and then he paused, and said: " . . . . but there have been good things, too.  Here are my three things . . .".

I also like adding #2 (a good deed we did) into the usual mix of gratitude: I try to get us out of our own heads into thinking about other people and our world.

As someone who hates talking on the phone but who loves my kids, I have to say that I've come to treasure this ritual.  The fact that it's scripted makes it a lot easier than the "just saying hi/how are you?" conversation that I find so awkward; it's a good way to catch up quickly.  And during the rest of the day, we both look forward to the time we'll get to chat. Sometimes we go out of our way to, say, pick up a piece of trash from the street so we can count that as our good deed. Sometimes I get to tell another person, "I told my son that you were the thing that made me happy today," spreading the happiness even further.  In fact, my friends all know what the 3:14 alarm means, and sometimes they'll join in on the conversation if they're with me when it rings. 

And that's it: the Three Things Call.  And now I'm getting past my 10 minutes of writing, so I'm going to hang up this post.  Talk to you later.

Stiched handles, and plastic bag bans

Two thoughts on cloth-versus-plastic, when it comes to bags:

1.  Stitched handles

As much as I try to keep my possessions to the only-what-I-need-or-love level, I still seem to be swimming in a large collection of reusable shopping bags.  The handles on one such bag ripped out when I was carrying something very heavy, and I guess the normal thing to do would have been to toss the bag, but I lavished some 45 seconds of repair time on it nonetheless.  Once I had the sewing machine out for another project, it was a simple thing to sew the handles back to the bag.

Et voila.

When cities or counties ban plastic bags, they actually make the problem worse if they're not careful about what goes into the place of those bags: merely saying "reusable bags" encourages stores to give out heavier plastic bags, pretending that those are multi-use.  It seems like the magic words for effectiveness are "stitched handles": that tends to actually lead to reduced plastic use, reduced litter, etc.

2. Economic differences of bag bans

I'm in a neighborhood group that is urging our city council to adopt a plastic bag ban: I've been helping to write draft language and to argue for why our city needs such a thing.  One of the criticisms we often get from people opposed to such bans is that bag bans are hardest on the poorest in our communities.  Surprise/not-surprise, these arguments usually come from white, affluent people who don't normally go around worrying about brown, non-affluent people.  

I was glad, therefore, for this article on the changes to the Philadelphia bag ban: it addressed a lot of the concerns about implementing bag bans, charging for bags and the effect on communities:   

https://cleanwater.org/2026/01/06/philadelphias-bring-your-own-bag-bill-how-we-got-here-and-why-it-matters

An example of a key takeaway:

While the memo suggests exemptions or free reusable bags for low-income shoppers, evidence shows that broad exemptions increase food costs and litter in underserved communities unless reusable bags are widely available at no cost.

Three key findings support this:

1. Eliminating bag fees at discount grocery stores increases food prices.
2. Corner stores, common in low-income neighborhoods, bear the greatest burden when bags are free.
3. Urban neighborhoods adopt reusable bags faster than suburban areas.

So there's that.  We'll keep plugging away with the council, and maybe someday I'll have neighbors using cloth bags instead of plastic . . . I certainly have a few I could share with them!

"Commencement means beginning" . . . of the free stuff

It's that time of year: students are moving out of their dorms and leaving behind oodles and oodles of things that are in perfectly good shape, but that they can't fit in cars or suitcases as they drive/fly back home.

For about a dozen years, a small group of people at my college organized a giant yard sale from the stuff that was left behind: it filled the gym, and pricing things at $1 a bag, we still raised thousands and thousands of dollars for charity.  It was an incredible feel-good thing: keeping so much stuff out of landfills, delighting our neighbors (including recent immigrants and other low-income people) with amazing deals on furnishing their home, and gifting charities with big checks.  

But it was also an incredible amount of work, too much work for people to figure out how to keep doing at a super-hectic time of the academic year.  Eventually, the organizers understandably burned out, and the program died.

There's a new group trying something smaller, but on a smaller scale (and without the yard-sale component--instead going more directly to charitable groups that need furnishings for their clients).  I volunteered to help; I've spent about two hours helping to sort/count stuff that they'd collected from departing students, and I'll spend two more hours later today as well.  As a perk, I get to nab a few things that'd be useful to me.  I've held off purchasing mirrors for our condo for just this reason, and sure enough, there were at least 15 full-length mirrors in the mosh-pit.  Now one of those mirrors is hanging on my bathroom door, just where I needed it.

I also picked up a few storage cubes that I'm using to pack away my winter clothes on a high closet shelf, and some little notebook disks. These are things I know I don't need to buy, if I'm just willing to wait for the seasonal bonanzas the come from being at a small college.  

Even though I don't have a basement . . .

Of the 85 million different things that are hard/liberating/challenging/freeing about downsizing from a full-sized home to a condo, the basement was about 27% of those things.  (Even though I'm a mathematician, I'm not at all good with numbers, so take those figures with a grain of salt).

The basement is not only a place for storing a bunch of things that it's easy to forget about, combined with those items about which I pretend, "I'll use this someday", it was also, for me, a notable area for some of the hobbies that I loved.  The basement in our row home contained -- most significantly of all -- a woodworking bench with all my tools, and large shelves for holding my canning jars.  Getting rid of the "I'd forgotten about this" clutter was a chore, but it was a chore that I felt good about.  Saying good-bye to my woodworking bench, on the other hand, felt like leaving a huge part of my life behind.

So imagine my amazement and jubilation when I discovered that, in the bowels of condo that I moved into, a bunch of residents had cobbled together a wood-working shop of their own.  Not only is there a space here in which I can do woodworking, but there are fancier tools than I have ever used in my life, and a community of people who hang out there to give advice and to chat.  

The most impressive thing I've built so far is a set of canning jar shelves that go up in the condo. 

The shelves, nearly done, sitting right outside the
woodworking shop, where one of my sawdust-is-glitter buddies
is hard at work on his own project. 

I made this under the tutelage of a regular hanger-out in the workshop: a guy named Ted. He refused to let me throw together a set of ugly shelves, and instead showed me how to use chop saws, table saws, routers, dremels, and more.  He even drove me to the hardware store in his pick-up to help me select plywood and other supplies (things that don't fit in my own little hatchback).

And the shelves came out really nicely! 

The shelves in the condo, 
doing their job of holding canning jars.

This beast is 7 feet high, 6 feet wide, and 1 foot deep.  Most of the shelves are adjustable.

I'm loving this thing I made (really, that Ted tutored me through making), but even more I love that it represents a community-shared-space where I'm going to get to have even more sawdust-inspired fun. I thought my circular-saw days were behind me, and instead a whole new world of amazing tools and the projects they inspire lies before me.

A folding chair fix (observed by a spider)

I love the community vibe in my new condo.  One of the quirks of this group is that during the summers, the social committee hosts "Wiener Wednesdays" on the patio; people bring side dishes (the food is nut-free; the people are allowed to be as nutty as they want), and we grill hotdogs together.  

The powers-that-be have gladly accepted my offer to become the chair of the newly-constituted "Sustainability Committee": a committee that currently has exactly one person on it (yours truly).  One of my first actions was to use Wiener Wednesdays as an opportunity to have the secretary of our association give me a tour of the recycling bins (we want better signage, so people don't mess stuff up the way that people who don't have clear directions tend to do).  Thrilling, right?

While we were still on the patio noshing on our wieners, though, another condo resident sat on a chair whose seat started giving way on her.  She and the chief griller started making "need-new-chairs" noises.  I took a peek, and it wasn't the frame that was a problem -- just some stitching coming loose.

So, the next morning, the entire body of the Sustainability Committee mobilized into action!  I brought the folding chair into my condo, grabbed a spool of gray button thread and a suitable needle, and stitched the chair back together. 

A little gray spider hitched a ride on the chair; I didn't see it until we (the Chair of of the Sustainability and the Chair of Folding) were both inside.  The spider was content to hang out at one end of the chair frame and observe while I hung out at the seat of the chair and sewed; only one of us was doing thread work.  Maybe the spider was getting ideas for new web designs, I dunno.

The repair is not particularly fancy, but it's also not particularly noticeable.  I successfully carried the chair and spider back out to the patio, and notified the powers-that-be that their new committee is already on the job.  

This is going to be fun.

Meta cherry blossom experience

 

Double-magnetic knife rack (my diy hack)

 I am a total fan of hanging things on walls, particularly things I use over and over again.  Even before we moved into this condo, I'd made sure I had lots of hooks for our kitchen implements, and I installed them on what little wall space is available in our long, galley kitchen.  

Also, hanging cast iron.

Because this kitchen has a very helpful pass-through to the dining room, the only remaining vertical space above the counter is on the refrigerator.  I decided this spot was where I wanted a magnetic knife rack.  BUT.  Obviously, I'm not going to screw a knife rack into the refrigerator.  I'm also not a fan of adhesive strips; they create messes when you take them off, and they make changing your mind about where things go much harder to do.

What I really wanted was a knife rack that was magnetic on both sides, so that it would cling to the refrigerator and also allow the knives to cling.  But none of the knife racks I saw online had that option. 

Then, the other day when I was in the Restaurant Store (kind of like an outlet of equipment for people who own/run restaurants), I found an inexpensive screw-in magnetic knife rack . . . and I had a brilliant (if I say so myself) idea!  I bought two of them, and used a trio of thick screws to screw them to each other. 

Voila! Magnetic on both sides!

The disadvantage, which doesn't seem to be too major, is that this is twice as thick, so the knives are a bit further out than on a regular knife rack.  But the advantages are just what I'd hoped: it's easy to move this knife rack up and down along the fridge if I need to do so.  Moreover, if I decide later I want to take these apart, I just unscrew them and they're still perfectly useable as screw-in knife racks.