Three (or so) thoughts on . . . owning the morning

Six a.m.:  it belongs to me, this time does.  If you too are a morning person, then you probably know exactly what I mean. And if you're not a morning person, then thank you: it's people like you who make 6 a.m. into a time that I own, a time that's my own.

When I was a teenager, I discovered the magic of having the house to myself early in the morning. I would wake early, read the newspaper and wander the house in contented solitude, and then return to bed for a nap just as the other people in the house were waking. It drove my mom nuts; she was sure I was up to some devious scheme, no doubt, but I was really just relishing wide open spaces and familiar places, without having to share those with anyone.

We have cordless blinds, and opening them each morning
has become a part of my daily stretching routine.

Raising kids, I learned anew to rise and appreciate the quiet before the rowdy boys would get up.  Indeed, one of my most effective ways of convincing the boys to change their manic late-night behavior was to threaten to get them up with me in the morning: I probably did this once for each child, and after that, the mere threat of Morning-Mama time was enough to inspire change.

Reading in bed, with my coffee nearby.  
Hoy en día leo Isaías antes de encender la computadora. 

For more than a decade now, I've run three days per week in the morning with a similarly morning-minded friend.  On these days, I'm not so much wandering the house alone, but as I walk the kilometer from my home to hers, I have the streets to myself. There are almost no cars, and very few pedestrians. The streets are mine.  

This past fall, I rearranged my running and other morning moments to teach calculus at 6 AM to students in Shanghai, for whom it was 6 p.m.  I volunteered for this time slot because I knew I was one of the few people who would be willing to rise that early, but I do have to say that I missed my morning me-time.  There are people who retire who say what they love the most about it is never having to set an alarm again, but I think what I look forward to when I retire is to be able to own this precious morning time even more completely--- to have the house to myself, to be able to wander and read alone for a few hours without having to devote that time to preparing for something else like heading into the office, to own the morning all the more.

 

Two solutions in search of a problem

Solution number 1:  I have lots of cloth strips that I've cut and pressed with an iron, ready to be sewed into face masks.  They hang on my tool bag here, ready to be put to use . . . 

. . . even though (yay), we have more than enough face masks in the world now, and I'm not sewing them by the dozens any more.

Solution number 2:  Beautiful cloth napkins!  They came in the "watch kit" that we bought for our Pitch Party.  They're locally made, organic materials . . . yada yada yada . . . 

. . . even though (yay), we have more than enough napkins in my home now, and in my kids' homes, and . . . well, in the homes of anyone close enough to me to foist cloth napkins off on.   This particular set is also really pretty, but also made of incredibly sheer fabric, so I don't want to use them to replace our (already pretty, and much more sturdy) existing napkins. 

So, two solutions with no corresponding problems.  Kind of like Jeopardy: I've got answers; what's the question?  

Clearly, it's time to invent a new problem.   And . . . here it is!  We've got so many CSA vegetables coming our way, that I keep running out of mesh bags because our available ones are already in use.    Where ever can I find good fabric and long drawstrings to make myself a set of nice veggie storage bags?

 

I think I win this round.

Fixing my dryer with a circular saw, a cordless drill, and green paint.

Early in our marriage, I bought my husband a very large, Amish-made, wooden clothes drying rack.  He'd swooned when describing his memories of a similar one in his past, and not like I was jealous or anything, but I am darned competitive at times, and I didn't want to be beaten out by a former spouse on something as vital to a marriage as where he'd hang our undergarments.  So when I found this big and beautiful beast, I bought it.  It was pricey for a drying rack --- $40?  $60?  I don't exactly remember, but I love my husband that much, you know, so I was totally willing to shell out the big bucks to make him happy.  

My husband is the Lord of the Laundry, the kind of guy who jumps up mid-dinner to run down into the basement because the electric dryer is done and he doesn't want the clothes to wrinkle.  He uses the wooden rack mostly for delicates like bike clothes, and has mostly used the electric dryer for everything else, except when I can convince him to hang things (which he complains get "crunchy").  In the humid summer, we'll move the wooden rack outdoors to increase airflow and decrease drying time.  

MiserMom-themed comments, because I can't help myself.  When my husband is out of town for extended periods, our household electrical use drops by almost half.  The TV and the electric dryer use that much energy.  I myself don't use the electric dryer for anything besides killing bed bugs.  

At any rate, back to the main topic.   This drying rack has outlasted several electrical dryers and is older than some of my kids, so it's no surprise that it's started to break down just a tad here and there, not unlike its owners, I guess.   Fortunately, fixing a wooden drying rack is Heck-Way easier than fixing an electric dryer (although the latter is also frequently quite possible, thanks to the modern miracle of You-Tube videos).  

Last week, when I was supposed to be taking care of paperwork related to a jazillion committees I seem to be on, somehow I couldn't get my head into those.  So I headed into the basement, where I used my circular saw to trim down a pair of new dowel rods to the right length, and then use my cordless drill to attach them in place of the two broken rods, using the screws I'd rescued from disassembling a trash-picked dining room table (now a bookshelf).  

And then, since my head seemed to be happier playing with the drying rack than writing committee reports, I decided to paint the drying rack.  It used to be wood-colored, and then it was ugly-gray-wood-exposed-to-the-elements-colored, but now it's green.  

 Here's a dog's-eye view of the drying rack,
as seen from the balcony where Prewash and I like to hang out.

A drying rack has a lot of surface area to paint, let me tell you.  That's about 8 hours of committee work that I didn't do, right there.  But my husband likes the way the drying rack looks, and nobody reads my committee memos anyway, so I think I made a good choice.  

Three thoughts on NO PARKING signs

These aren't thoughts about whether or not to park; they're really just random thoughts about the design of the NO PARKING signs themselves.

One, color. 
I'm sure I learned this back-in-the-day when I was taking my driver's test, but for some reason I just noticed again the color scheme. Black lettering is information; red is prohibition. So a NO PARKING sign has a black P with a red circle and a red tilted slash through it, the same way the black-on-white ONE WAY sign sits above the white-on-red DO NOT ENTER sign.

Two, font.
I look at the aesthetic of traffic signs differently ever since I watched the documentary "Helvetica". As much as I know how weird it is to see my peers Geeking Out on nerdy math facts, it was a lot of fun to watch these graphic designers Geeking Out on fonts. In the documentary, there are some people who get teary-eyed about Helvetica helping to reunify Europe in the decade that followed the second world war; there were others who could barely contain their rage over the use of Helvetica as a tool of the corporate capitalist oppression of creativity and individuality. I seldom think of fonts as moral choices (oh, except that once I read that "Century Gothic" uses less ink than other kinds of fonts), . . . but I do now realize that the font of each NO PARKING sign comes with historic, sociological, economic, and political significance.  Go figure.

Three, the symbol itself.
The NO PARKING symbol has an interesting relationship to the math symbol plus (+).  It was in the 1500s that a mathematician and physician named Robert Recorde invented arithmetical symbols that you'd think would have been around for forever: he was the first to use the symbols =, +, —. 

He invented the now-familiar equals sign to replace the phrase "is equal to"; he invoked geometry and used two parallel line segments of the same length, because after all what could be more equal than those? 

For the other arithmetic symbols, he turned to shipping for inspiration. People used standard sizes of crates to box things up, with a number written on it to indicate how much it held. If the box wasn't all the way full, as was common, you'd write a long line and then write the missing amount. So "25 —— 3" would mean that the crate that could hold 25 pounds, but the crate was 3 pounds light. 

Occasionally, however, the crate would be overfull, In which case you'd put a small slanted slash through the long line (it's hard to type it, but it would kind of look like this: "25 —/— 3").  So the plus symbol really comes from meaning "not subtracted from" in the same way that the NO PARKING symbol means "parking, NOT!": that little slash through them has a common symbolic ancestry.  Neat, huh?!  

Three thoughts about . . . light, light fixtures, and light switches

Three thoughts about light, light figures, and light switches.

1.  It's a personality thing.
According to "Snoop: What your stuff says about you", people who value organization and conscientiousness have spaces with lots of light. I've seen that pairing in my own life --- I love doing my work sitting in a chair by the window with light streaming in.  In contrast, one of my friends who had her finances in a mess asked me to come over and help her with them. The table where she had all of her records was in one of the darkest corners of the room, and I had to beg her to bring more light over so that we could work there. I know that these two examples don't prove a theory, but they do illuminate it, so to speak.

2.  It's a habit quirk.
Turning off the lights when I'm not around. I'm kind of obsessive about that. I'm obsessive to the point that I sometimes imagine myself in the position of Lot's wife, making that fatal final mistake: that Jesus appears and says to me, "drop everything and follow me now," and I respond "yes, Lord; I'm ready. I just need to run back inside and turn off the lights first!"  The Lord of the Universe, or the living room lights? I fear for my immortal soul.

3.  It's an opportunity for fun projects.
For both of these reasons, I'm loving the increasing variety of LED lights, and I'm planning a bunch of household projects for the summer to switch out dim or misplaced light fixtures for cheerier, brighter versions that hang where we actually need illumination. I'm so glad my parents taught me how to do some basic wiring: changing over these fixtures ought to be a lot of fun.

2-ingredient dog toy

 Recipe for an awesome dog toy.

Ingredients

• tennis ball
• sock*

Directions

Put the ball in the sock.  (Optional: sew the end closed).  Throw.  

 * I actually used a sweater sleeve, from a torn/snagged sweater.  

Wow-and-golly, is this a great dog toy!  Fun to chew on!  Terrific for throwing inside a corridor of the house!  Easy for the human to grab hold of, even when the other end is clamped between dog teeth!  Fab for tug of war!  

We experimented briefly with a variation (two tennis balls sewn into the sock); Prewash nixed that alternate design style; she chewed out the extra tennis ball and returned the toy to its one-orb state.  The two-ingredient version is not only simpler, it's also optimized for canine/human interaction.

The delight my dog and I have had with this toy makes me think of wheels on luggage.  I look at movies of times past, and see people carrying suitcases in their hands instead of rolling the suitcases behind them, and think "wheels on luggage should have been an obvious idea!"   And yet, wheels existed, and luggage existed, but wheeled luggage wasn't an idea, until one day it was an idea, and then wheels on suitcases became the norm.

So, just sayin', tennis ball.  Sock.  Together.  We approve.