Miser Family update (lost-and-found edition)

Life continues to be rich and full in the Miser Mom household. 

We try to have a "Family Fun Night" about once a week, and this week was one of those wonderful gatherings where everything accidentally fell together perfectly.  I-daughter and K-daughter came over for dinner, and after dinner little Baby-A had us all in stitches while she ran circles around J-son and N-son.  Like, literally, she ran around her uncles in circles about 100 times, all three of them full of lots of energy.  There was lots of giggling and fun.   

My husband has ratcheted up his riding in anticipation of his long summer ride across Russia; on Saturday he rode to New Jersey (75 miles). 

N-son has been grooving to his culinary arts program, and he's also snagged a few babysitting jobs, watching Baby-A while K-daughter is at her wedding planner job.

J-son got to spend the weekend with his birth dad --- this is the first time that they've gotten to meet face to face in well over a dozen years.  It's good to see J-son forging these connections.  He's also been working harder than ever at boxing (if that's even possible), and his coach is talking about maybe taking him pro someday.

As for me, I had an experience this week that I haven't had since 1996:  I almost lost my planner (my calendar/to-do list/external memory).  The last time this happened, I had been out to a restaurant with my then-boyfriend and another friend, and when we got in the car to go home, I realized I didn't have my planner with me.  Fortunately, my friend called to say I'd left it at his home . . . but until I got the phone call, I was in an awful emotional state (and the fact that my then-boyfriend thought it was funny is probably a big part of the reason he's no longer my boyfriend).

At any rate, this week I gave a talk at a nearby college and accidentally left my planner behind in the room where I spoke.  I spent an anxious 90 minutes driving around and trying to find it again (the organizers had picked it up and taken it to the dean's office), but eventually I was happily reunited with my planner,  . . . and so all is good with the world again.

Wading ankle deep

Sometimes, when you start seeing something it's hard to un-see it again.

On the one hand, back in the days that I was house hunting, I became super-sensitive to the "For Sale" signs in front of houses, but once I bought a house, I quickly learned to ignore those signs again.  So there are things I've learned to un-see after seeing them.

But somehow, this spring, as the snow melts and the sun begins to shine, I see trash everywhere.  I want to see the crocuses, and the daffodils, and the amazing blue skies, and the buds on trees.  But instead I see plastic bags and bottles, candy wrappers, stray paper.  I drove my students to a math conference last weekend, and the whole long drive through our region's rolling farmland, I saw litter lining the roadway.  I can't un-see it anymore.

plastic bag in the grass

The first time I remember being sort of rocked back by roadside trash was in Haiti, which my husband and I visited back in 2011.  The environmental trash there is really astounding; it's everywhere.  People sell drinks and food along the roadways, propping their tables along sidewalks next to gutters full of piles of trash.  The garbage there is like music and advertisements at the mall -- it's so ubiquitous people don't even seem to notice it unless (like me) they're strangers to the experience.  In fact, the mall drives me bonkers in the same way the streets of Haiti did (or maybe even worse, actually, because I really detest the mall).

Styrofoam block in the bushes

In the same way, I remember being somewhat amused and impressed by Bea Johnson (writer of the Zero Waste Home blog) and her excursions to pick up trash at her nearby beach. Surely this is a Sisyphean task because the giant ocean keeps bringing in new waves of plastic and other detritus.  It was probably shortly after reading that post that I ran a marathon with one of my running buddies, slogging our way through miles and miles of nearby Amish farmland.  And it was on that long run that I realized that it's not just beaches that have garbage washing up on its shores -- it's, like, everywhere.  There's trash washing up on the shores of Amish farms, just like it washes up on the shores of our beaches.  

white plastic rings and black plastic lids in another yard

How did this trash just pile up all around me without me ever noticing it?  Am I like the frog in that gradually warming pot that never realized the ever-increasing danger around me?  Or has my world always been like this, and I've just become so garbage-obsessed that I never noticed it before?  Is it the world, or is it just me?

This plastic ring is not a crocus.

I used to think that litter was caused by litterers: the jerks who threw their soda cans out the car window.  Litter, my teen-age self believed, was a deliberate act.  But now I see litter as a structural problem, caused by a society overrun by excess.   When we buy fast food, it comes with so many varied pieces of trash -- straws and their wrappers, condiment containers, the plastic bag containing napkins and plastic forks and bags of salt and pepper -- that it's all to easy too accidentally drop some of this trash as we walk from one place to another.  Trash overflows the cans that line the streets of my neighborhood, and because of that overflow, some of the trash escapes on the wind.  Trash haulers do the unenviable job of pouring garbage from one container to another, and --- like any of us --- they spill a fraction of this, which escapes yet again. It's no surprise, since we're surrounded by disposable objects, that we have a disposal problem.

I know there are other problems more urgent and pressing.  The impending famine that 20 million people across our globe will soon be facing is much more terrible, much more urgent, than roadside garbage on American highways and byways.  I also know that I can't do much on my own about either problem -- I can't feed people in war-torn countries, and I can't stem the tide of senseless plastic filth that permeates my landscape.

Still, it needs to be said.  We're living ankle-deep in our own trash.  Maybe we could try to change our society so that we focus on creating things of lasting value, and start to avoid creating things that get thrown in the trash, and on the roads, and in our oceans.  And if we can't change our society, at least maybe we could try to change ourselves.

Building a new house (for the birds)

For the past few years, our backyard birds have made nests in the lamp by our garage.  This is not very good for the lightbulbs, which keep burning out; I'm pretty sure it's not great for the birds either.  I had made a note to myself to make the birds a better house this year, but apparently I didn't get started early enough because on Sunday morning, the light fixture looked like this.

Fortunately, the weather was fabulously beautiful, and I had a spare bit of time.  So it was a great day for a bit of hacking and pounding!

In addition to a bunch of time, I had an old fence board (from the same fence that gave me Adirondack chairs and Solar dehydrators) -- this same versatile fence might as well also become a bird house.  Mark it up . . .

. . . go to town with the circular saw.  Then grab a canning jar full of old nails, rescued from previous projects . . .

. . . and whack things together.  Great therapy!


Once I finished the house and hung it up, I moved in the "furniture".  With any luck, the birds will agree to the ReLo.

And just in case, I bagged up their old home in plastic, to discourage illegal entry.

It's so much fun to bang things together, especially if I can use supplies I just happen to have lying around.  First garden project of the season -- accomplished!

Miser Family Update, the We-Gave-Up version

Life in the Miser Mom household continues to be rich and full.

On Sunday this week, the tomato seeds that I started (per my custom, in canning jars in a southern window) sprouted, just in time to celebrate my birthday with me.  

On Tuesday, I-daughter, K-daughter, and my granddaughter Baby-A came over for our usual weekly "Family Fun Night".  We celebrated our annual March "Zoo Dinner" with ham-Bear-gers and a "boa constrictor" (sort of like stromboli or calzones, but shaped like a snake).  

The elephant who came to the zoo dinner.

My husband wasn't around for either of the previous two activities; he was riding his bike and staffing booths in San Antonio, where the weather was a heck of a lot nicer than it was here.  He returned home on Thursday, and kept riding his bike in spite of the weather.

And the fun just kept coming:  I got to help a bunch of our college students do a Math & Art activity night for elementary school students at a local science museum, and I also "opened" our College's performance of Arcadia three nights this week, asking the audience to turn off their cell phones, and then doing a short spiel on the cool math that goes on in the play.  I really love getting the chance to talk about fun math!

N-son competed in a squash tournament, winning matches against his two different opponents.  Then he and I-daughter performed in a concert, with I-daughter having an awesome solo that my husband uploaded to you-tube.  (She's the one with blue hair).

J-son continues to get bigger and bigger muscles.  He sparred twice this week.  He's pumped in more ways than one.

Finally, the We-Gave-Up story:  We'd been warned when we got Brody that he chases cats.  Nobody knew until Tuesday night, when Baby-A came over, that he also chases granddaughters.  He spent much of the evening harassing her, which --- combined with his other health and behavior problems --- convinced me that our home is not the right one for him.  On Wednesday I took him back to the Humane League.  They were very, very understanding, and they gratefully accepted his several bottles of meds.   With their encouragement, we're going to try again with a smaller and somewhat more sedate dog in the summer, but at least for now, we're back to being animal-less in our home.   Sigh.

Using the web to stay safe on the internet

So, my family (in particular, my husband and I) have used two different web-based services this year, both of which we heard about from my campus InfoSec guru.

The first of these is LastPass, web-based app that helps us remember -- and even safely share -- a myriad of internet passwords.  I will be one of the first people to say I didn't think I needed a site like this.  I had a lovely (and highly mathematical) system for devising complicated, long (therefore more secure), hard-to-guess passwords that were unique to each site I went to.  I really got interested in LastPass because my husband used pretty much the same password for every site he used, and I wanted to try to help his side of our internet usage more secure.

But I very quickly got hooked on how much I like LastPass for myself.  For one thing, if you opt for the $12/year version, which I did, you can share passwords with other people of your choosing.  This not only meant that I could share certain passwords with my husband, but also (if I wanted) with my daughters.  I was thinking about how one of my daughters had the sad experience, a few years back, of dealing with her father's illness and subsequent death -- a list of passwords to his financial records was a big help to her and the executors.  Fortunately, I don't think I'm close to needing an executor.  But it is nice to be able to securely store information like social security numbers and credit card stuff, and have my husband be able to access that from his phone when he's at some government office trying to fill out paperwork for our sons.

Even more, I've come to love the fact that LastPass recognizes legitimate sites and does NOT recognize spam sites.  So if I get a phishing email and absent-mindedly click on a link, LastPass won't fill in my password there.  But on any legitimate site that I've signed up for, LastPass has me logged in in just a click or two of the mouse.  So even though I thought I didn't need it for myself, I've come to appreciate the convenience of it.

The other web application that we've started using is OpenDNS.  This is an application that helps to secure our home router.  (And it's free!)  According to our InfoSec guru, OpenDNS maintains a list (updated constantly) of spammy sites, and so it keeps anyone using your home's internet system from logging into those sites.  Signing up took us, I think, about 15 minutes, mostly because we had to remember our router info.

Even better, once you sign up, you can set your home's system to guard against various levels of questionable usage.  Because of various issues regarding our sons and their phones, we have our blocking set at "low" ("Protects against pornography") but we could have chosen even more filtering, all the way up to "high" ("protects against all adult-related sites, illegal activity, social networking sites, video sharing sites, and general time-wasters").

Nowadays, if we try to link to a site that OpenDNS deems as suspicious, we just get a page that looks like this:

Honestly, I wish I'd known about this site years ago, when my sons were first getting their phones.  It wouldn't have solved all of the problems they'd had with internet freedom, but it would have helped a LOT.  

Plus, we're not likely to compromise our home network by having someone click on a trojan virus link.  So I'm feeling pretty happy about that.  

Miser Family Update, the good fight version

Life continues to be rich and full in the Miser Mom household.

As I wrote last week, J-son kicked off the week with a great Saturday-night boxing match that went three rounds and ended in a standing TKO, something I didn't even know is possible.   J-son spent much of Sunday (heck, much of the rest of the week) sleeping.

N-son got to go on a cool field trip to the National Mall and Bolling Air Force Base with his ROTC.  He got to watch lots of cool competitive drill sequences.  He's been since pricing training bayonets on the internet.  

My husband got to go to a media event/rally in favor of Medicare, which he's still too young for.  Nonetheless, he spoke enthusiastically to an equally enthusiastic crowd about the benefits of widespread medical insurance/care.   Later in the week, after the non-vote by the House of Representatives, he got on a plane headed for San Antonio.  This next week, he'll be kicking up his heels (and riding a rental bike) in San Antonio, in between attending the oh-so-exciting meetings of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.  Don't be jealous, everyone. 

And me?  I did a push-up this week.  I've been doing fake push-ups (from my knees) for a while, trying to build up strength in my still-healing arm.  And I finally got to the point where I could do a real push up!  Woo hoo!

And finally, updates on the dog.  First of all, he's resuming his maiden name of "Brody".   It turns out, he's truly pitiful at living up to our wishful name of "Prewash".  He'll do a half-hearted job of sniffing and licking plates, but he leaves even little bits of stew meat on the plates he passes over.  Pitiful!  I've never seen a dog who cares so little about food; we finally decided he doesn't deserve the honor of a title he can't live up to.

Second of all, he's still here.  I'm not going to sugar-coat it; it's probably every other night this past week that I went to sleep thinking, "tomorrow he's going back to the Humane League."  He's been a handful and a half, between barking and crazy energy and health issues.  But N-son has been amazingly devoted and helpful, and my step-daughter keeps sending good advice.  And slowly, slowly, Brody is making progress.  He can mostly walk slack leash now, for example.  We're working hard (and making slow, but incremental progress) on the "Look at me" command.  So he's still here.  His next vet appointment is Tuesday, and we're crossing fingers that this visit will be benign for once.  

Reading Rest

Last week, when I was on our college's spring break, I picked up and devoured the book "Rest (why you get more done when you work less)"  by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang.

I'm totally a fan of pop-psychology books, especially when they drift over toward the self-help genre, so this book was right up my alley. I was probably even more interested in the topic of the book because of (a) my academic schedule this year, which is a bit over the top, and (b) a new dog, who was severely stressing me out on my one week of break.  [Fortunately, the dog situation is getting more and more stable -- future updates coming down the pike.]

Pang's main point is that we shouldn't think of rest as the opposite of work, and that we shouldn't think that rest comes about when everything else is done.  Instead, he argues these main points:

1. Work and rest are partners.
2. Rest is active.
3. Rest is a skill.
4. Deliberate rest stimulates and sustains activity.

He gives about a gazillion examples of highly productive people who set up their lives to mix intense work with copious amounts of active rest: scientists, artists, writers, and Silicon Valley moguls.  He also brings in a bunch of scientific findings, both from neurology and also from social psychology.  The mix of topics he covers, and the mix of approaches to these topics, keeps the material very readable (although perhaps a bit repetitive toward the end).

In terms of practical, take-home advice, Pang has chapters on intense four hour work, on a morning routine, on walking, on napping, on stopping when you're ahead, and on sleeping.  These, he says, stimulate creativity in the first place.

I admit I'm not a napper, but the chapters on getting going early in the morning and on stopping while ahead really resonate with me.  For example, it's usually very hard for me to get any real math done during the semester; normally I do the bulk of my research during the summer or during sabbaticals.  But this year, I've deliberately tried to do 10 minutes of math every morning.  And (as Pang recommends), I try to stop not when I'm stuck, but when I know what the next step is and I'd be excited to go ahead and do that. It's just 10 minutes, but the fact that I do it (almost) every day, and that it's early in the day and that I end with the next step already calling to me means that I keep thinking about my math all the time.  And not just thinking, but producing:  I just sent a draft of a paper to my co-authors, asking them for feedback before I send it off to a journal.  So that's making me pretty happy.

If the first set of chapters describe how to stimulate creativity, there are also several chapters on sustaining creativity over a lifetime via recovery, exercise, deep play, and sabbaticals.   His "exercise" chapter isn't just about signing up for a pilates class.  He describes how successful people (nobel laureates, authors, etc) often have really intense attachments to a particular kind of exercise: mountain climbing, competitive soccer, and running (lots and lots of marathoners).  He points out over and over again that active people very deliberately plan these kinds of "rest" into their days and into their lives.

It's a good book, a quick read.  And it's made me think about the spaces in my day a bit differently.  In fact, yesterday I found that I'd finished my to-do list early and had an hour before my next meeting, so I thought about the book and went for a walk, which was lovely.  

The one thing Pang doesn't describe, which I would have thought would be an obvious component of rest for productive people, is reading.  Diving into this book was both a real mental escape for me and also a way to make my times of labor (with my math, with my committee work, and even with my dog) more focused and productive.  It's an odd omission, so I'll just suggest that reading this book might be a great way to take a break, if you're looking for one.