Un-boxing

How to take things out of cardboard boxes, that is the question.  Or rather, where to put things as I take them out of boxes.

Drawers with labels.

I've been fairly deeply influenced by Julie Morgenstern's book "Organize yourself from the Inside Out".  She's an advocate of thinking in terms of zones of activity, and also in terms of labeling.

As a consequence, my kitchen things have gone from sitting inside labeled cardboard boxes to finding new homes inside labeled kitchen drawers and cabinets.  The cabinet labels, they're for helping family members figure out the new system.   The labels are temporary, until we all get used to this.   I made the labels on card stock, using a font I like, so they're not too ugly.  And they're held in place with minimal amounts of water-soluble Elmer's glue.   I'm hoping this means it'll be easy to remove them and clean the cabinets up in a month or so.

On the one hand, the cabinets in my kitchen are amazing in a good way.  They're custom built, and carefully designed.  They're beautiful.

But also, the cabinets are amazing in a what-the-heck way.  It's like, they were designed for someone who wanted a beautiful kitchen for people who cook by ordering pizza or Thai.   Because it's not a person-centric kitchen.  

The kitchen itself is kind of question-mark-shaped, so a surprisingly large number of cabinets are triangular, to accommodate the twists and turns.  The ceilings are 9 feet up, and the cabinets go all the way up, and of course the top cabinets are largely unreachable until we get a 3-step step stool.  On one side, the cabinets are a mere 11 inches deep, with hardly enough room to store large objects.   On the other wall, they're 25 inches deep, so anything that gets shoved to the back is likely to get lost behind other objects, especially on those higher shelves.  The counter space is broken up into four tiny pieces -- two of which are barely wide enough to hold a toaster; the longest stretch of counter space is 36".  

From the back door, you can see the kitchen curves around the stove
and then past the sink the other way, into the dining room.

From the dining room, looking at this odd space from the opposite direction.

I love the challenge of using this space.  It's such a great puzzle!

And because of Julie Morgenstern, I'm thinking of this puzzle not as a jigsaw puzzle, where I have to find spaces to hold the things I own, but as logic puzzle:  what do I want to do in the kitchen?  Where am I going to do it?  How can I make sure the thing I want to use is where I'll need it?  Then, I can think:  how do I pull things out of boxes?  Zones.  Labeling.  

Can opener pretending to be
a bat in a cave.

Take the can opener, for example.   In the past, my can opener has gone in a kind of "miscellaneous food prep" drawer, with scissors and markers that I use to label frozen food and such.  But this kitchen is skimpy on drawers, and so I had to get creative.  Where do I actually use my can opener?  When I'm opening cans, of course.  Where are the cans?  In the giant, 25-inch-deep cabinets near the refrigerator (food zone).  So the can opener goes with the cans, on a hook.  Voila!   I love this. 

In fact, I love hooks so much I hung a few other things, at least for now:

Ice cream scoops hang on the side of the fridge,
right where the ice cream is.

Canning jar ring hang on bent hangars in the canning jar zone.
Everyone has a canning jar zone in their kitchen, right?

In terms of zones, (keeping things near where we'd naturally use them), I've got

• the cooking zone near the stove and oven:  cast iron pans down low, cooking pots up higher, a dedicated cabinet for electric appliances.  
• a food zone near the fridge, with baking supplies on two sets of shelves, another skinny shelf for "sauces and snacks", and then deep deep cabinets for "food that needs prep" (like pasta and canned goods).    
• a food storage container zone, with an odd triangular cabinet for pyrex containers, a different odd L-shaped cabinet for canning jars, and a drawer for "canning jar bling" (lids, funnels, grabbers, etc). 

This label says "Canning Jar Bling". 
This is what it looks like when
I'm not wearing my reading glasses,
so now you see what I see.

So far, things seem to be working well, cross fingers.  I'm zoning the rest of the house, too (but of course), and doing my best to get those cardboard boxes out of our living spaces and into the homes of other people who are packing.    The place is looking more and more like a messy house, and less and less like a warehouse.   With any luck we can push through the messy phase into the "inviting" phase.

Un-boxing, man.  I love it.

Diderot love seats

A bunch of years back, there was a dude named Denis D. who wore an old  robe around the house a lot.  It wasn't elegant, but it was kind of comfy.  He wrote,

My old robe was one with the other rags that surrounded me. A straw chair, a wooden table, a rug from Bergamo, a wood plank that held up a few books, a few smoky prints without frames, hung by its corners on that tapestry. 

His robe was kind of beat up, but that meant he didn't mind using the corner of it to mop up minor spills or fix smudges he'd made.  

My homemade Adiriondack Love Seat with wheels.  Yes!

And analogously, a bunch of years back, I made an Adirondack love seat (with wheels!) out of old fence boards. It wasn't elegant (indeed, my uncle described it and the other chairs I built as "hav[ing] just a hint of medieval torture in their looks"), but it was a great place to lounge in, in my spacious back yard.

I'd sit on this chair and read the paper, while Prewash checked out rabbits.


But Denis got a new robe, and I moved to a house with a really nice porch. And for each of us, this started a cascade. For poor old Denis, he realized that nothing in his house matched the elegance of his new robe, and so he ended up replacing all sorts of his shabbier things with fancier things. As he put it,

I was the absolute master of my old robe. I have become the slave of the new one.

In fact, this idea that getting one nice new thing inspires us to extend ourselves to upgrade everything else around us -- that idea that Denis D. wrote about -- has been named in his honor the "Diderot Effect".

For Denis Diderot living in France in the late 1700's, social norms about what was "elegant" or not were much more tightly defined than in my own day and age, and for him the main way to ratchet up the elegance factor was to purchase expensive stuff.  As a result, he pinpointed the new robe as the beginning of a spiral that led him into debt.

 A hundred times along the way he calculated on his fingers the size of his fortune and had arranged for its use. And now all of his hopes have vanished; he has barely enough to cover his naked limbs.

For me, I'm fortunate to live in age where thrift shops and yard sales spew out fancy goods that are nearly free for the taking, and where a mixture of cultures and economic classes allow for a wider approach to decorative styles.   Still, the Adirondack Love Seat, up on my nice brick porch, did not belong.  (My new neighbor admitted that he'd been taken aback to see it there:  "It looked like it belongs on a beach or something", he charitably offered.   He's more tactful than my uncle).

Instead of getting a new porch seat, though (or even a "new to me" porch seat), I grabbed the jigsaw to trim the wild edges:  the planks of the love seat are now topped by initials, a candle, a flower, an eye, a mistake, a heart, an owl, and more initials.  And then, paint: bold, contrasting colors of paint, purple, orange, and green.  I'm going for the "sin boldly" form of  aesthetics.  Paint is an awesome invention, I tell you.

I am kind of in love with this chair.  I'm sitting on it right now, in fact, typing away while Prewash eats her breakfast and wags her tail at passing pedestrians. She likes to play "Titanic", putting her front feet on the porch wall, leaning out across the prow.  And I get to sit here, reading the paper and typing on my computer, watching her and my neighbors and taking in all the morning sounds, sitting on a chair that I made and painted all by myself.  Other people seem to appreciate the chair, too: I get a lot of compliments on the purple.  

The chair from the street. 
We still have a few cardboard boxes stacked up
there toward the left side of the picture.

I'm trying to be careful to not let this nice new house coerce me into a spiral of non-miserly spending.  And in spite of numerous recent trips to the hardware store and so-called-thrift shops, I feel like I've been mostly successful so far.   Thanks, Denis D., for providing cautionary (and eloquent) tales!   

Miser Family Update

Life continues to be rich and full in the Miser Family Household.  In particular, the "house" part of "household" has played a large role in our lives.

Last week, I spent much of the week moving just about all our earthly possessions out of the house-hold and into the garage-hold.  Any pretensions I had toward having minimalist tendencies were drilled out of me as I packed and carried box after box after box, and as I had friends help me lug multiple pieces of heavy furniture.

Meanwhile, as I was disassembling the dining room table, my husband celebrated the international year of the periodic table in the birthplace of Primo Levy.  On Thursday last, as I packed up the last few bits, took Prewash to a friend's house, and headed for a nearby hotel, my guy started his long (26-hour) journey home.  He had plane cancellations and rebookings, train break downs, and other adventures.  He made it to the hotel sometime around midnight.

On Friday the 19th, as temperatures climbed their way toward new highs for this year, we went to one title agency and sold our home.  Then we lived out of our car for an hour.  (Actually, we went to my air-conditioned office, because internet + comfort).   Then we went to a second title agency and bought our new home.  We went out for lunch, picked up a moving van with two hand trucks, and started carting the first load of stuff from Old House to New House. 

At 3 p.m., a group of friends and church mates showed up and started carting things from the garage into the truck.  Since it had taken me something like two months to get everything moved (wedged) in there, I knew it was going to take forEVER to move it over -- I'd organized things so urgent stuff was toward the street, and things we could wait a month or so to move were furthest back.   I was very glad that we'd arranged with the new owners to be able to leave stuff in the garage until August.

And yet, many hands really do make speedy work, and we ended up moving almost all of the boxes and shelves and such into the next load in the truck.  Unpacking was also easier than I'd thought; new neighbors showed up and lent a hand.  We sweated our way through moving things on a nearly-100-degree day.  The next load of the truck, which basically finished off the garage, was even faster.   We picked up Prewash at 9 p.m. and fell asleep in the heat and humidity of our new house soon after.

The next day, N-son came to visit, and he helped me use a pulley system to get the box spring upstairs (it wouldn't fit around the corner of our top stair case).  That pulley was probably the most intellectually satisfying part of the move!

Since then, I've spent my week happily bouncing back and forth between work (last round of page proofs, preparing for upcoming math meetings) and unpacking and setting up the house.  Almost everything is out of boxes now.  My husband's job in all this (which is to admire my progress and exclaim over how nice things look) is going well.   He also got to go to his every-five-year flavor of medical appointment, where the doctor said he's beautiful on the inside.  He would like me to say that he was pooped.

We know the mail works, because we got a lovely card from our daughter and from my sister.   I got to spend an evening playing a local version of Monopoly with I-daughter, who is psyched about spinning two skeins for the Tour de Fleece.  I admit I haven't been as good at staying in touch with K-daughter or J-son. 

And . . . HUGE kudos to L-daughter, who passed her thesis defense!  We've got a new doctor in the family!  I'm so proud.

And that's the news from our family, which continues to be wealthy in our adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous. 

Scenes from Cardboard Box Land

Sun rising over a living room full of boxes.

The more stuff I get out of my house, the messier my house becomes.  It's really kind of fascinating.

Getting rid of some of my stuff at a neighborhood yard sale.

I've been really enjoying this process of packing up: thinking about what I own, observing what happens as things in closets become de-closeted, etc.  I know that packing and moving can be really stressful, but I've decided to look at this as a way of learning about myself and my material culture.  I'm kind of Spock-ish, thinking all sorts of situations are fascinating.  And plus, I get to play a 3D tetris with the things I own.

One of the huge advantages I have is a giant garage; I can move packed-up boxes out there.   So you'd think that the house would become emptier and emptier as the garage fills up . . . and in a way, that's true.   The upstairs rooms and the basement are emptying out nicely.   But meanwhile, the rooms we use (on the first floor) are increasingly chaotic.   As I said: fascinating. 

We sold everything for 25¢ each,
or $1 per bagful/armful.  

We're not only using the garage, of course.  We're also storing a bunch of our stuff "in the cloud":  taking it to thrift shops, or even selling it at a neighborhood yard sale.  I know enough about yard sales to know that things disappear best if there's a small cost -- so we charged 25¢ per item.  I also know that once people have decided to take one thing, the barrier is broken: so beyond the initial fee, we offered a bulk-buyer's discount:  $1 per bagful/armful.   We ended up making $32.67, plus a pair of boots for me and an iPhone radio for K-daughter.

A friend who came to the yard sale wrote me a few days later, kind of in awe.  She said,

I will always remember the public teacher who cleaned you out of water bottles, including the one in your hand, all for $1. I have told this story a few times already. Most folks don't know that many of [our city] schools are without air conditioning. What a sorry state of affairs.

 There were a few things we offered for free.  My favorite was A-child's playhouse, the sign for which made lots and lots of people smile.

The sign reads, "Awesome Kid Playhouse.   Pre-tested!  It works!!"
Plus, "Free!  Free!  Free!"
People really loved the sign.

 And, of course, even more importantly we cleared out a lot of space:  we started with a bunch of full boxes, and ended up with mostly empty boxes to take back home and fill up (including one box that looked suspiciously like a playhouse).



I have kind of fallen in love with "paper tape":  the brown tape with fibers in it that I have to wet down myself.   One thing I love about it is that it isn't plastic.  In addition, I've learned to love the tactile feel of it: pressing it against the cardboard and feeling it latch on and nestle up to the box.   I like to smooth it out with my fingers and feel it almost melt into the box. 

It feels odd to live in a space this messy.
I'm savoring the unusual experience.

In addition to the garage storage and the brown tape, another aspect of moving that I am grateful for is that my husband is spending the last week before we move in Italy.  I tend to be a tad bit (okay, extremely) opinionated about exactly how things work, and this trip of his therefore is likely to preserve our marriage.  All of the picky last-minute decisions: they're going exactly as I want them to.  He's happy galavanting about Europe and hobnobbing with friends.  I'm guessing I'm even happier finding just-the-right-sized box for a set of pyrex storage dishes (stored with lids on, of course), and making a helpful label, and smoothing the paper tape onto things, and then playing tetris with the box out in the garage.  Ahhhhh.

The thing about packing like this is: there's always one thing more.  Or eight things more.  So much stuff to do just screaming out at me.  For someone like me, who savors the moment of finishing things -- snapping shut the book when I get to the last page, filling in the last square of the crossword puzzle, putting the QED box at the end of a proof -- this house is a constant screaming horde of tasks begging me to pay attention to them.  Just box up this one more shelf.  Just unscrew this one thing from the wall.  I am addicted.  I'm ignoring so much other work I'm supposed to do.  How this calls to me:  fascinating.

The only thing left to pack up from this room is a dog.

I only get to play like this for a few more days.  We move on Friday.  So this game ends, and a new game will begin, as objects emerge from their boxes and find new places in the new home.  I'm so excited.

Solar Cabbage

My mom was a solar astrophysicist who worked for NASA.  She studied solar flares and solar gamma rays; she led a team that designed equipment that floated on giant hot air balloons, looking at the edge of the sun, hoping to see flares and gamma ray bursts.   Very late in her life, she actually got to put one of her instruments on a rocket payload.   

So my mom was a rocket scientist, back in the day when being a rocket scientist was even more brainy than being a brain surgeon.  And when people say things like, "Explain this [technical material] so that your mother could understand", well, they didn't know my mother.

As the kid of an astrophysicist, I knew only bits and pieces of actual physics.  I knew that every 11 years, we'd have super busy times (because apparently that's how often those sun spots and gamma rays become super active).  I knew that when my mom talked about "proposals", she meant grant proposals and not marriage proposals.  I knew how to count up to 31 on one hand, by counting in binary (although that might have been the influence of my dad, who was a nuclear physicist).

My mom's biggest direct impact on my career was probably the Xerox machine, which was brand new in her office.  (We still had mimeograph machines at school: the kind with purple ink).  I loved the magic of xeroxing things:  my sisters and I would draw things on our hands and copy them; we'd close our eyes and xerox our faces.   I also loved helping the cafeteria ladies in the basement of her building wipe down tables after lunch; they'd give me ice cream afterwards.  Maybe that's why I volunteer at the soup kitchen still.  

Indirectly, though, as a kid I was kind of fascinated by the possibilities of solar power.  I had the idea that when I grew up, I'd build a solar-powered 18-wheeler truck and drive around the country, giving presentations to school kids.  My mom had nothing to do with solar powered technology, so this fantasy was all me.  Clearly, my 18-wheeler never materialized.  But those early fantasies might explain part of why I keep building my own homemade solar ovens.  

The first solar oven I built about a decade ago was essentially two cardboard boxes with a storm window.  I'd found a small black pot at a yard sale (25 cents, of course), and built out from that:  a small foil-lined cardboard box that holds the pot, a bunch of newspaper insulation, and a larger cardboard box for the outside.  That worked really well, until the squirrels ate the box.  

A black pot baking in the sun.

By "really well", I mean it heated things up to about 200 degrees, as long as they fit in that small black pot.  It was a great system for low-heat projects: melting wax, slow-cooking.  Not so good for things like spaghetti that required actual boiling, or anything that needed crispness.  Oh, but it could cook eggs!  That was cool.

Last summer, I started "up-grading".  I have a larger black pot -- one that I use for our Thanksgiving turkey -- and I build a wooden box that can hold it.  I built the box so that it exactly holds a particular old storm window, and has a slightly slanted top.  That was last summer; this summer I added the reflective insulation (newspaper wrapped in aluminum foil), and then I spent *real money* and bought caster wheels that I screwed on underneath.  

This is before I screwed wheels on;
the solar oven is sitting on a wheeled toy so I can move it about.

Truth be told, I like the idea of the solar oven more than I like the food that comes out of it, at least so far.  I don't do a lot of slow-cooking in the summer.   But I did try a recipe of cabbage with cheese baked on it.  The recipe would probably be even better if it were in a very hot oven so things got crispy -- but the solar version was okay. 

Cheese-y solar cabbage

As a hobby, solar ovens are cheap and easy things to build.  Our next house has a back patio with a southern exposure, so I'm really looking forward to trying out a few more recipes and seeing how they come out. 

Maybe this blog post is my version of taking my truck "on the road".  My solar oven doesn't have 18 wheels, and it's not going to go around visiting school kids, but I'm kind of tickled by it anyway. 

Miser Family update: surprises and boxes edition

Life continues to be rich and full in the Miser Family household.   My life is particularly full of cardboard boxes right now . . . packing things up seems to be occupying all my time and thoughts, even though I'm kinda supposed to be writing a grant proposal and preparing a workshop for the upcoming math meetings.  But no, boxes.  Empty boxes.  Heavy boxes.  Boxes and boxes.  I'm having so much fun!

In other news, my guy discovered the hard way that if you get out of a fancy rental car while the engine is still on, and if  drop your keys out of your pocket, the car keeps running, and you can totally drive away with the keys on the ground.  But the next time you try to start the car, it doesn't.   So you have to walk back to where you dropped the keys, get them, and walk back to the car before the meter reader comes and gives you a fine for parking illegally.

Annnnd, I-daughter discovered that if you donate blood you can get a scary shirt.

"Kind of horror-movie... But I like it" she says

And J-son says that the best part of being a camp counsellor is "the kids".  And the worst part of being a camp counsellor is "the kids".  He tells me, "They're kind of starting to act up now."  Me, I think, heh heh heh.  I myself have never had kids that act up, but if I had, I'd think it was kind of poetic justice if they had to see what it was like from the other side.  I'm sure he'll be fine. 

K-daughter is traveling to the Poconos this weekend, but before she did, she and A-child stopped by to help me pack boxes.  (Did I mention I'm kind of surrounded by them right now?)  A-child helped carry empty boxes downstairs so we could pack them, and then she helped torment the dog, and so then I had her help me scrub a very dusty/musty cabinet.

Speaking of the dog, Prewash walked downtown with me last night to attend the Lights for Liberty rally in our city, protesting the way children being separated from their parents and placed in horrid conditions.  Prewash mostly entertained the small children at the rally, who loved that she let them rub her belly and touch her tail.  I signed petitions, but Prewash didn't.

What else?  Yesterday morning I thought I had a terrible splinter in my foot, making it really painful to walk.  After taking my shoe off to inspect my foot a couple of times, I finally realized there was a tack in my shoe, and taking that thumbtack out "cured" the splinter immediately.  Very satisfying!

As I pack up this week, I get to do it solo:  my husband is in Turin, Italy, celebrating the year of the Periodic Table.  He writes,

Turin is the city where Primo Levi lived and worked as a chemist before and after being deported to Auschwitz.  This year is the centennial of his birth, so the conference is a celebration of the Centennial of Levi and the Sesquicentennial of Mendeleev. 

And that's the news from our family, which continues to be wealthy in boxes and boxes of adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous. 

Miser Family Update: Accomplished edition

Life continues to be rich and full in the Miser Family household.  This week we've been particularly profuse with achievement and accomplishment.

Twenty dance dangles

For example, N-son passed his tractor driving test.  Isn't that cool? N-son can drive a tractor.

Also, K-daughter set up an IRA.  Herself!  Way to go, K-daughter!

And my husband, he's back to biking the training ride.  He's not super fast, but he can do the whole distance; I'm so impressed at his speedy knee-covery after his surgery.

Oooh, and I got the page proofs back to our publisher . . . this was a bigger job than I thought it would be, and I'm super glad it's done.

I-daughter has a plethora of accomplishments this week.  For example, you are probably already glued to the unfolding hoopla over the famous Tour de Fleece . . . well, she's entered the competitions, and is ready to begin spinning yarn on her new wheel.  (I don't know if the leader gets to wear the yellow jersey/scarf/shawl/socks, or what).

But she's also had a marvelous time at her 20th Square Dance National Convention.  She's flaunted her 20 dangles.  Still, the part of this weekend that I think was the cutest was her late-night card game of "spoons" . . . but with socks instead of spoons, because you make do with what you have, of course.  I'm hoping this 10-second video will load properly:

I-daughter with square dance friends, all holding socks.

In other accomplishment news, my eldest L-daughter tells me her dog had a first.  In her own words,

While I have lived with dogs and cats who have caught many things; rabbits, squirrels, birds, other rodents, and even killing a goose by biting its head off, I have never had a dog catch a fawn. While I was visiting my friend Sandra, in Pittsburgh, who recently had a baby, I received a call from Peter that Guinness had caught a fawn. Through some loud yelling of “no” and “drop it,” both commands Guinness responds to, he let the fawn go and it hopped over our fence, seemingly unharmed, and returned to a mom awaiting it in the woods, just beyond our fence line. Guinness proudly returned to peter with a tuft of deer hair in his mouth. But seriously, never have I had a dog catch a fawn!  

We are in upstate NY this week, so thankfully Guinness and Watson’s soul focus is swimming and fetching their respective toys in the water 

I haven't gotten to talk to J-son recently, but the news from his foster mom is that he's still working REALLY hard and REALLY loving his job at summer camp and that the kids REALLY love him.  Which is all good for a mom's soul.

In other minor random news, I joined in our neighborhood yard sale today, on the selling side.  For about 6 hours of work, I earned $32.67 (plus a pair of shoes and an iPhone radio).   More importantly, I managed to divert a whole bunch of stuff from Landfill Hell, so I'm pleased.  Moving is really playing havoc on our trash can count -- we've put out a can each of the last three weeks, bringing us up to 6 for the year.  Sigh.  Avoiding more trash is an accomplishment I'm glad to notch up.

And that's the news from our family, which continues to be wealthy in our adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous.