Toward the Imelda Marcos lifestyle: is that the direction I'm heading?

For decades and decades, pretty much the only shoes to enter my life have been pre-owned ones.  I figure (a) they're cheaper, (b) the world already produces more than enough shoes, (c) I can often get pre-owned shoes without going in real stores.

But in 2013, I decided to buy a bike and start training for an IronMan, and try as I might, I couldn't find used bike shoes in my size.  So, after a couple of months of trying out the two-wheeled lifestyle and getting used to things, I finally bought myself a never-before-owned pair of bike shoes.

(By the way, that is my usual way of starting a new project, whether it's for me or for my kids.  Acquire just the basic necessities -- in this case, the bike and the helmet -- and then get additional stuff bit-by-bit as I dedicate actual time-on-task to the activity.  This not only helps ensure I'm getting the add-ons that I actually would use, but also gives me multiple chances to enjoy the shiny-new-object experience.  Padded pants! Clip-in bike shoes! Neon windbreaker! Powerful headlamp!  Speedometer/odometer! Each one was a separate new thrill, purchased weeks or months apart.)

Two years ago, I spent extended time in Panama, a country that is hot, humid, and very (very!) rainy.  After trying to make my existing footwear work in that climate, I finally gave up and decided I needed something better suited to the sogginess and heat.  And since the used-shoe market in Panama is non-existent, I trundled off to a mall and bought a pair of brand new shoes: sturdy enough for hiking in the woods, aerated on the sides (but not the toes, because of my poor circulation), water repelling, and quick drying.

And then just this past summer, yet another never-before-owned pair of shoes entered my life.  I've been getting a bit of physical therapy to help treat some tendinitis.  My PT was tsk-tsk-ing my existing running shoes . . . what: you don't like these shoes I bought at a yard sale for a dollar in 2009?!?  I had to admit, many of those shoes were breaking down on me.  He recommended a pair of zero-drop shoes, and I duly complied by purchasing them.

Three pairs of purchased-new shoes in the past decade-and-a-half.

Clearly, the rate at which I'm acquiring completely-new (as opposed to pre-owned) shoes is accelerating.  Lifestyle creep, here I come!  

Mine were the first feet in these shoes.

What do I think of this latest pair of shoes?  Or actually, of any of them?  I have to say that, regarding the bike shoes and the sandals, I have no regrets.  I really couldn't find pre-owned versions of these at the time (and with the bike shoes, I tried).  The running shoes are . . . okay.  They're fine, but not noticeably "wow".  They don't feel all that much different from other shoes I've run in.  

It's hard to find running shoes in my size at yard sales or in so-called thrift stores, which has been part of why I've hung onto some of my shoes for a bit longer than was optimal.  So, on the positive, it certainly is more convenient to just get shoes from a place that has a variety of sizes and styles.  But I think if I happen to run across [so to speak] a pair of decent running shoes in my size during my yard sale meanderings, I won't hesitate to nab them.  It's pretty clear from all the PT I've been doing that the tendinitis was much less a symptom of shoe style and much more a symptom of the kinds of strength/stretching I was [not] doing, but am doing now, together with the form of my stride.  

So I'm not quite yet exactly in Imelda Marcos territory, I guess. 

Yup; I'm still a fan of ceiling fans

Back in the Row House a half a dozen years ago, we hired an electrician to install a ceiling fixture and some ceiling fans, and I reveled in those. Two years ago, we were in Panama for an extended amount of time, and although the Airbnbs that we stayed in had air conditioning—after all in Panama, the temperatures are always between 80 and 90, and so is the humidity—they had no ceiling fans, and I missed them.

So when we moved into this condo back around Christmas time, we considered getting a ceiling fan in my bedroom. In February, we had an electrician come and give us a quote, but maybe February is not the best time of the year to be thinking about cool breezes, and we told him, "I'll think about it and get back to you." After all, all that work is a bunch of money, and it's good to sit and think before you randomly spend a bunch of money.

By the time May rolled around, I was very glad I'd given myself time to think, because I had in fact changed my mind: Instead of getting a ceiling fan installed in my bedroom, we asked the electrician to install fixtures for three ceiling fans, one in each room of the condo.

Now, a couple of weeks later, I can say I'm really glad that I made this choice. For a while in early June, the temperatures were hot enough that we actually turned on the air conditioning. (This is the first time in my adult life that I have lived in a place with central air conditioning, so saying that "we turned on the air conditioner" is  big honking deal for me.) Having the ceiling fans in conjunction with the air conditioning meant that we could keep the temperature a little warmer and still be comfortable.

The last two weeks, in which the weather has been glorious, has mostly meant opening up the windows all night and closing them during the day. As anybody who has ever read anything at all about passive solar heating and passive solar cooling can tell you, our condo is oriented in the very worst possible way for taking advantage of the sun and the wind. Because the bulk of our windows are on our long western and eastern walls, in the summer this place heats up like a greenhouse – think about parking your car in the sun. The prevailing winds in our area from west to east, but a building to our west blocks those winds, so at night, even with the windows open, the house would not cool down if we didn't have these fans circululating the air.

There's something wonderful about sleeping under a ceiling fan; my time in Panama with only floor fans and wall-mounted air conditioners makes me doubly or triply appreciative of how quiet, unobtrusive, and comfortable these ceiling fans and breezes are.

**

Here's a little irony.  My husband has spent the last two weeks on a trip to Europe for some IEEE stuff. He called me to describe the irony of this trip. For much of our married life, his summer travels meant he got away from our un-air-conditioned home and basked in the hotel air conditioning. This summer, for the first time ever in our married life, we own a place with whole-house (well, whole-condo) air-conditioning, but the beautiful-yet-historic hotel in France had zero air conditioning, AND there have been epic heat waves there, and so he sweltered in style.  

Fortunately, we've had a lot of practice at that!

Musings on downsizing: particularly, heirlooms

Last November/December, my husband and I downsized from a row house into a two-bedroom condo.  I had so (SO!) many thoughts about this process, but at the time I didn't write much of that down because I was of course completely overwhelmed with doing the gazillion tasks with purchasing the new place, getting the row house ready for sale, and of course, downsizing.

(There was also the fact that I was getting ready for a surprise job that landed in my lap at the same time, but that's a different story).

At any rate, here I am 6 months or so after moving, and thinking about the aftermath of downsizing, and I have to say: thumbs up all around. I am happy to be in this compact space with things that I truly love around me, and also without nearly as much baggage to deal with lurking in storage or taking up space on shelves, getting in the way of those things I love.

In fact, one of my goals over the next few years -- once I finish up the surprise job that plonked down on me for the year -- will be to sort through about 3 or 4 bankers boxes of ancient family memorabilia to organize it, digitize it, and then get the physical copies the heck out of here.  These are boxes that I inherited from my grandfather, or that were sent me by distant relatives, all of whom knew that at the time I was interested in family history.  But the family history isn't nearly as compelling when it's packed away in a disorganized jumble in banker's boxes.

All this is to say, downsizing many other heirlooms was one of the things I am super glad I did before we moved (although some of these things hadn't exactly achieved "heirloom" status; I'll use that term because I'm not sure what else to call them).

I went through boxes and boxes of photos of my kids, sorted them out by who's who, and mailed each pile off to the appropriate kid.  I included a note telling them they were welcome to save the photos, share the photos, or toss them:  better to have that choice now than several decades from now, I figure.  

I took photos of the stuff in my home that I thought might have sentimental value for my kids, and asked them to let me know if there was any of it they might want to have now or someday.  There was actually very little of that.

As a side note, that's one of the aspects of "stuff" that my friends complain about: their parents insist on saving/storing/hoarding stuff because "you're going to get this someday", but it's things the kids don't want: furniture that's bulky/fragile/impractical, dishes that require special care, clothing or decorations that come from another era . . . even when the kids insist they won't want it, the parents insist they should.  My friends tell me they dread having to go through their parents' homes some day.  Meanwhile, the more stuff from our row house that we gave away or re-homed, the more my children said, "Thank you", because they won't have to deal with it themselves. 

And on the flip side, if the next generation really is going to appreciate something, there's an argument for letting them do so now.  If I live as long as my dad did, my children will be geriatric by the time they'll be reading my will together.  I'd so much rather they get to enjoy the things that delight them while they are still at the stage of building their own memories, and for those that have children of their own, while their kids can appreciate the stuff, too.

There's also this: inheritance drama can be real.  My sisters and I are a delightedly unified front, but my dad's second wife, who outlived him, has decided she doesn't want us anywhere near her home.  There are small things my dad left behind that I would love to have: his childhood photo albums and the albums from our own childhood, for example, so I could include those in my heirloom project.  There's a teddy bear I made him when I was in high school.  My sisters have their own wish-items, I know, of things that his wife doesn't want but is keeping nonetheless.  Maybe someday after she passes, we'll go through the home with her children and get access to those . . . but what a ghoulish, uncertain way to think about those things that would otherwise give me warm, fuzzy thoughts.  The whole process taints the memories that come with those objects.  That is nothing that I would wish upon my own heirs.

In the meanwhile, I'll just return to the fact that it's lovely to have a home space where I get to see things that I enjoy seeing, and where (most of) the things that I had been hanging onto because I think "my kids will appreciate this someday" don't have to wait for "someday" to be appreciated: I've already sorted those out and passed them along.

Tiny toys in tiny bags

 Here are (almost) all of the tiny bags I bring to church.

My sister made tiny drawstring bags that she used as gift-wrapping, and that started my collection.  After a while, I decided to switch to using up my stash of rescued zippers, and I love how they look like teeth once I add eyes drawn with a sharpie.  The zippers are much easier for small fingers to manipulate, too.

And why do small fingers matter?  Because this collection of tiny bags contains tiny toys.  I carry these bags to church, and pass them out to the children sitting in pews near me.

A toy in a bag is much more interesting than just a toy, and the kids have come to love the surprise of what comes in this week's bag.  I almost always get the toys back at the end of church: there used to be a matchbox car among this collection, but it apparently has driven away.

It's very easy to make these tiny bags, and now when I happen across a nifty tiny toy in a free box or such, I snap it up to add it to the collection.  I don't know who likes this collection more: the kids who play with them, the parents who mouth big "THANK YOU"s to me, or me!

Second-hand compliments: even better than first-hand ones!

Like many people I know, I try to remember to thank people for what they're doing: our department coordinator, the department chair, the people that clean our building or organize the behind-the-scenes computer systems. 

But here's a twist that I've really been enjoying: it feels even more meaningful when I get to pass along something that someone else was saying.  Like, the other day, I was talking to someone who I'll just call "Amy" here, and I mentioned a compliment someone else gave her: "I was over at the registrar's office, and they were talking about how they asked you for help with pre-commencement work because you're so good. They said, 'Amy's the bomb'."

And Amy paused, and then told me how much she needed to hear that: she'd just applied for a position that would have been a kind of promotion, and got passed over for it, and hearing that she was valued meant a lot at that moment.  I think the compliment felt all the more real because it wasn't face-to-face.  I mean, we're supposed to be nice to one another in person; it's a whole other level of compliment to know that people are saying good things about you behind your back.

One of the passages from the Bible that has struck me comes right after Jesus is baptized, and God says to those hanging around: "This is my beloved Son, in whom I take great delight".  What strikes me about this is that the introduction isn't about the role that Jesus takes on, but about the interpersonal relationship. 

After I read this, I started trying to introduce people I know that way: instead of "this is X, who runs with me," but "this is my dear friend X, who makes my life better by keeping me active"; "this is my one of my favorite pew mates; she always makes me smile"; "this is my inspiration as a department chair; we all know we're in good hands with her." In other words, I try to not just say who the person is, but who they are to me.  I love how much that seems to touch people. 

A salad gift

 Our CSA season is underway. (That's "Community Supported Agriculture", not "Confederate States of America", to be clear).

Back in February we forked over (heh) a couple hundred dollars, and now every week we get to pick up a giant box of vegetables, grown locally and organically.  When we signed up, we could have chosen "small, medium, or large": we chose "medium" for historic reasons, but that turns out to be a LOT of vegetables for just two people.  And when my husband is traveling, as he often is, I truly can't eat all the veggies myself.

The organization we order from calls each week's delivery our "share", and I've been taking that term literally.  I visited a far-off friend last week and took her a head of lettuce as a hello gift. I made a huge salad (recipe below) for our condo's bi-weekly patio party.  I'll be taking veggies to my daughter tonight when we have dinner together.

The friend I visited told me that one of her friends gives salad as a birthday present to her other friends.  We all loved that idea, and spent a bunch of time chatting about that idea.  I'm definitely filing that one away in my back pocket.

At any rate, having vegetables in my fridge that are not stuff I bought in the store, but are rather the vegetables farmers happened to choose to grow for me, means that the recipes I come up with to share can be rather quirky.  My condo-mates at the patio party marveled at the salad I brought: they asked for the recipe, and said in almost-admiring tones, "I never would have thought to put those things together!". 

Yeah, me neither.  Before yesterday, I never would have suggested a bok choy/fennel/radish salad.  But you know? It turned out great.

So here's the recipe:

The base: 

• hardy vegetables, finely chopped. 
• The recipe I was riffing off used Swiss chard, but as I noted above I had bok choy, fennel, and radishes. 

The dressing: 

• oil and vinegar (I used olive oil & cider vinegar)
• salt and pepper
• garlic, minced
• a bit of paprika (or jalapeño peppers, or something tangy)
• parmesan cheese

I think it's the parmesan cheese that's the magic ingredient; it really makes the whole salad incredibly yummy.  

I still have more of the bok choy and fennel, and I still have half a jar of dressing . . . and this afternoon, we'll be picking up our next box of veggies.  So I think I'd better start looking around for a friend who needs a gift of a salad!

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.