I don’t know how you can guard your heart against a title like that one.

Today’s task: finish listening to last week’s The 451 podcast while cleaning out a drawer that no longer closed: my sock and underwear drawer. Here it is at the beginning of this project, and I am sorry to say I had to look HARD at the before and after pictures to tell which one was which, so visually-speaking this is not going to be one of those giant catharsis projects:

My socks and underwear used to fit easily in two of the smaller drawers above. Let’s not waste time discussing WHO should have fewer socks/underwear, let’s just say that as I began this project, the much larger drawer I had moved them into could no longer open or close beyond what you see there, unless it was getting toward Laundry Day.

I took out the drawer and dumped everything out on the bed:

This left a nearly-empty drawer, containing only a back-up bottle of perfume I bought when it was discontinued (L’Artisan Tea for Two):

Here is the underwear sorted into “pairs I will wear” (left) and “pairs I hate” (right):

Here are the socks sorted into seven piles. Starting at the top left and going down the left hand side, it’s ankle socks, trouser/dressy socks, novelty socks, and knee socks. Starting at the top right and going down the right hand side, it’s crew/boot socks, singleton socks I needed to think about, and singleton socks that could go right into the trash :

 

I should not have shifted the point of view so often in this series, nor should I have put the underwear I like back in the drawer before taking this picture, nor should I have put the things I got rid of further away so that they looked smaller—but I did do all those things, so here we are. Farthest from the viewer are the things I got rid of: the underwear I hate, almost all of the novelty socks I like but never wear, almost all of the trouser/dressy socks, two pairs of ankle socks I don’t like, and the crew/boot socks I don’t like or don’t wear. Nearer the viewer is the unfortunately-still-large quantity of things I’m keeping; the largest piles are ankle socks, crew/boot socks, and white crew socks. Then some little piles: three pairs of trouser/dressy socks for the rare occasions I need them; two pairs of novelty socks for the rare occasions I wear them; and I put the two pairs of knee socks in a big plastic baggie with the ankle brace I wear them with, and put that back in the bathroom closet.

Here is the trash can, afterward, though it was half-full when I started this project:

Here is the drawer, afterward, and brace yourself for a disappointing picture of a still-quite-full drawer:

I do wish I could TELL that I had half-filled a trash can. But look, it closes:

And even though it doesn’t LOOK a lot emptier, I can now rummage around in there, which I could not do before. And sometimes I need to do a first pass before I can get rid of more stuff. It would also help if I would rotate my clothes seasonally: I wear the ankle socks in warm weather and the crew/boot socks in cold weather. But I do not rotate my clothes seasonally, so.

Hi Swistle!

I’ve been reading you sort of obsessively for many years, have five kids (including surprise boy/girl twins!), and finally have a question I don’t think you’ve addressed yet in the blog:

Where do your upper-elementary, middle- and high-school kids do their homework? We’re a year or so away from needing to use real beds for the toddler twins (our youngest), and when we do that we’ll reconfigure the two shared bedrooms to make them single-sex. We’ve been mulling a loft bed with a desk underneath for our first-grader, but if having five babies in five years taught me anything, it’s that the purchases that seem *so* useful at point of sale are often the ones we’re reselling on Craigslist three years later because…well, by then, everything has changed.

So do your kids have designated workspaces? Personal or shared desks? Are they in their bedrooms, or elsewhere? Do any of them work on their beds or at the kitchen table? I went to high school in the era of AOL dial-up and beige desktops, but while I used my computer a fair amount, I never sat at the desk for anything I didn’t have to type.

Of course, by the time my oldest (now in second grade) goes to high school, they might be stepping into algebraic equations via hologram, but I like doing the research regardless. Thanks for any and all insights.

 

Oh, this IS an interesting question!

My original plan, back before any of the kids were doing homework, was to have desks in the rooms. That’s what I had when I was growing up. Though, did I use my homework desk for homework? Heck, no: I used it to hold my frosty eye shadows, my frosty lipsticks, my curling iron, my assortment of hair sprays, and my Charlie and Chantilly perfumes. To do my homework, I sat on my bed. But I still had it in my mind that bedrooms should have homework desks.

Then we had our third and fourth and fifth children, and there was no longer space in any of the bedrooms for desks. The one desk I’d already bought (back when we had two kids and they each had their own room) now lives in our computer/office room, holding up a computer.

So! Now we have a 12th grader, a 10th grader, two 6th graders, and a 4th grader, and where the kids do their homework is “all over the house.” There’s no set place for it, though there are favorite/usual places. NOBODY likes to be in their rooms, they ALL have to be right smack up in the grills of everybody else, but a kid will SOMETIMES do homework in a bedroom if they are sent there by a parent (“No, you CANNOT insist that everyone else be absolutely silent so that you can concentrate in the middle of the living room!”) or if it’s after bedtime.

The two older boys often do their homework at the dining room table, which has become their office: their computers live there and their textbooks live there, so that’s pretty much where they live too. (We eat at our dining room table once a year, on Thanksgiving.)

The three younger kids tend to do theirs at the coffee table in the living room. It’s a nice big wide coffee table with short stools around it. (The kids also eat meals there.)

Sometimes a kid will perch on a stool at the kitchen counter to do homework.

 

This seems like the kind of question where it’s interesting to hear how a bunch of different households handle it.

I finished a book last week that I am still thinking about a lot, and I think it may have changed/improved my ideas about marriage, and I felt like it was just a really good book to have read, and so I will recommend it to you as well:

The Course of Love, by Alain de Botton

It’s a novel, kind of, but it’s more a study of the concept of marriage using a fictional couple as illustration. And in fact, I think you might enjoy it more if you go into it thinking of it as a non-fiction book. It can get a little lofty/preachy, but not too often, and not to such an extent that I couldn’t overlook it; you can tell the author put a ton of thought into the topic and sometimes he just gets a little carried away, that’s all.

This excerpt is from a section about why the author thinks art (such as this book) should take more time to explore what ordinary married life is like:

The ordinary challenging relationship remains a strangely and unhelpfully neglected topic. It’s the extremes that repeatedly grab the spotlight…and so it is hard to know what we should make of, and how lonely we should feel about, such things as immature rages, late-night threats of divorce, sullen silences, slammed doors, and everyday acts of thoughtlessness and cruelty.

He goes on to say that ideally art should be showing this to us, but unfortunately it doesn’t do it often enough or well enough. And so:

We hence imagine that things are far worse for us than they are for other couples. Not only are we unhappy, we misunderstand how freakish and rare our particular form of unhappiness might be. We end up believing that our struggles are indications of having made some unusual and fundamental error, rather than evidence that our marriages are essentially going entirely according to plan.

And I think the book accomplishes its goal to show one such example of one such marriage. I didn’t while reading it identify with all or even most of the aspects of the marriage in question, but of course I wouldn’t: it’s only one example, and the argument is that we need LOTS of examples. And I didn’t necessarily find all the same insights remarkable, but of course I wouldn’t: the author is also only one example of what a person might go into marriage expecting, and what that person might have to learn the hard way. The book ends up being more of a template: here is an EXAMPLE of a marriage, here are some of the KINDS of things that can go wrong, here is the SORT of wrong expectation a person might have, here is the SORT of thing a person might have to learn. From the one example, the author brings up many broader topics that could apply to any marriage.

It can get a little bit depressing to think of one’s spouse feeling so desperately miserable and as if they made the wrong choice to be with us. I found I was happier if I concentrated mostly on the ways in which I myself identified with the story, and not on the ways Paul might identify.

I have forgotten what I came in here to write about. Oh! I remember! I chose two of our calendars for 2017: the one for my kitchen, which will be Smithsonian Seed Catalogues, and the one for next to my computer, which will be Cats in Color. I’d been hoping they’d go down in price after Christmas but they did not, and then I started getting anxious about wanting to have the kitchen one all set up before January 1st, and also I was worried they’d go out of stock, so even though I didn’t know which one would be for which room, I went ahead and ordered both. I made my final kitchen vs. office decision based on square size: the Smithsonian one has bigger squares with more writing room, which I need for the kitchen calendar; the one next to my computer only rarely needs anything written on it. I also impulse-bought this page-a-day calendar called It’s Different Every Day: A Non-Boring Calendar for 2017.

But! A further complication is that Elizabeth still has the option to choose the Cats in Color calendar for HER room, in which case I would order something else for next to my computer. …This story is less interesting now that I see it typed out. ONWARD ANYWAY.

I have seen a lot of talk about how awful 2016 was and how people can’t wait for it to be over, but I have been increasingly anxious as the final days run out. I’m returning to some of my inclinations to shop ahead and stock up. There are a few large purchases we’ve made recently, such as a new dryer to replace the one that had to run each load twice to dry it, which make me feel happy to have reset the timer on when we will next need to replace those items. I’m not likely to get rid of clothes right now, despite the usual New Year’s urge to clean things out. In general I’m making purchases now rather than delaying them, and keeping duplicate items rather than donating them.

My friend Miss Grace was asking on Twitter about solid life-skills for hard times. Like, her husband is a chef who can take a pig from alive to bacon, and her brother is a doctor, so both of them would have useful skills even if things suddenly got a lot more primitive. Blogging would not be so useful. Nor would Target end-cap clearance shopping. Those are my main skills. Can I build a shelter? No. Can I hunt? No. Can I garden? No. Can I even start a fire without matches? No. Am I quick-thinking in an emergency? No. I do know what to loot from a pharmacy, is that a skill?

Awhile back, after I’d quit my eldercare job, Paul suggested I might want to take the 6-week nursing assistant course ANYWAY. My first answer was of course I didn’t want to, what would be the point of that NOW? But then I was thinking more about it, and one of the main things I wanted from that job was EXPERIENCE and KNOWLEDGE, so in that context it makes sense to take the class: I’d still like to learn the correct way to do the things I struggled with (boy, I still resent my employer for not training me but putting me in those situations anyway), and now that I’ve tried them WITHOUT the education, I think the education would be much easier to understand/incorporate/apply. I’d anticipate a lot of “Oh, so THAT’S how I was supposed to do it!!” light bulb moments.

Also, that course would add to my Basic Life Skills—not a lot, but some. I’d learn the body mechanics of supporting/helping another person without hurting myself, and I’d learn to be a good assistant to a nurse. I may not be good at quick thinking, but if someone else is thinking quickly I’m good at taking orders from them. If a clinic were set up and needed help, I could be useful doing the bathing/changing/moving, to free the nurses to use their higher training on other things.

Well. The whole life-skills thing is interesting to think about. Long ago I used to make jam, and I believe I remember enough of the basics to do that again. I said above that I don’t know how to garden, but I did work in a plant nursery for a year so I know some basics about planting things and propagating from cuttings/seeds (but in an artificially sterile/controlled environment). I can take care of children from newborns on up. I’ve made some of my natural anxieties work for me by channeling them into the acquisition of useful books (survival manuals, edible plants, basic first-aid) and supplies (camp stove, matches, water purifiers). I can do basic haircuts. I can…sew a button back on.

Paul can work with metal and wood (and has a lathe and a bunch of other tools/equipment), and can weld, and is learning to be a ham radio operator, and has attempted a garden several years in a row and is learning from that (and one year we got a MIGHTY crop of butternut squash). He’s a computer guy, so if there are computers to be managed/fixed/networked/firewalled/secured, he can do that.

What basic life skills do you have? Were you a Scout? Do you have medical knowledge/experience? Can you manage livestock: milk cows, care for chickens, etc.? Are you good at gardening? Do you know how to preserve food by drying or canning? Can you sew and/or knit and/or patch and repair and alter? Are you good at finding ways to stretch supplies or make things work in creative ways? Are you good at building and/or repairing? Can you fix/maintain machines? Can you use weapons? Can you hunt/trap animals, and process the meat? Can you build/maintain a fire, and/or cook over one? Can you speak other languages? Can you teach? Can you think of other things that seem like useful life skills?

Time once again for one of my favorite posts of the entire year. I need one calendar for the kitchen, one for next to my computer, one for Elizabeth’s room, one for each of the two boy bedrooms, and possibly one for Paul’s office. One thing that’s interesting this year is that we switched the boys’ rooms around: last year we had a big and a little in each room, leading to difficult calendar-choosing; this year the bigs are in one room and the littles in another, which I hope will make things easier. Another thing to consider is that if all goes according to plan, partway through the year Rob will be leaving his room and going somewhere he may not even WANT a wall calendar.

Every Day’s a Holiday. This one was a finalist last year for one of the boy rooms. I am torn about whether or not I can stand to have a child tell me every day that it is National Moose Day, or National Handkerchief Day, or whatever.

 

Do It All, Secret Garden. For the kitchen calendar, I definitely want a good picture: I don’t want one of those calendars that sacrifices the picture for more writing room. But…..I also like lots of writing room, so. This one has a small strip of picture, plus extra writing room, plus a pocket at the bottom for things like party invitations.

 

Masha D’yans. Pretty and sweet. I consider it each year, and have not yet chosen it.

 

Lang Around the World. I dig the moody, rainy, international vibe. I dig less the smaller writing squares.

 

Farmer’s Market. I had this one year and liked it so much that Paul bought me two prints by the artist.

 

Rigel Stuhmiller’s Farmer’s Market. Another farmer’s-market-based calendar, but in bolder colors.

 

Surrealscapes. I don’t like surrealism, but the older boys do and might want this for their room.

 

Master of Illusion. We had this in one of the boy rooms one year and it was popular.

 

Goats in Trees. Immediate reaction: YES. Second reaction: But for twelve months?

 

Trees. Maybe I want just the trees, sans goats. There is something enduring and above-it-all about a tree.

 

Wolf Kahn. I like the look of this, and also the description of it as tranquility in violent colors. But so many of the pages look basically the same: whole bunch of thin trunks.

 

Fractal Cosmos. Contender for bigger boys’ room.

 

Tiny Houses. I would not want to LIVE-live in a tiny house, but I would like one just for me in my back yard.

 

Fantastic Cities: A Coloring Calendar. As of posting, this is only $2.42, perhaps because so many people thought what I thought, which was “Oooo, I would LOVE this, if someone ELSE would color it for me!” Then I thought, maybe I could put a keyrack next to it, with colored pencils tied (or super-glued) to strings attached to each hook, and we could all work on coloring it throughout each month? That might be fun.

 

A Colorful Year. This one isn’t as cheap, but has the advantage of variety: I’m not sure I’d want to color cities all year long.

 

Feathered Friends. Jess thought I would like this one and she is very correct. Top contender.

 

Hamilton. I suspect a TON of people will have this calendar next year.

 

Super Mario Bros. Contender for the littler boys’ room.

 

Pusheen. We had this one in the kitchen just a couple of years ago, but I think I’d be ready to see it again. We all liked it so much. Or maybe it would be a good one for Elizabeth’s room.

 

Hot Dudes Reading. Well…OKAY!

 

Unlikely Friendships. In the right mood, this kind of thing can fill me with teary hope for all of humankind.

 

The Art of Brushstrokes. Looking at the back of this one gave me a pleasantly doped feeling, so this is definitely a contender.

 

On This Day in History. This is one both older boys wanted last year, but neither younger boy wanted it. I might want it for the kitchen this year, for the perspective. But perhaps that would be grim.

 

Fat Cats. Contender for Elizabeth’s room. She appreciates a nice fat cat.

 

A Walk in Paris. This is so charming. And you know, I think fully half of the appeal is the title. If they’d just called it Paris, I would have scrolled (strolled) right past. But A WALK in Paris is lovely.

 

New York in Art. I love this idea. Frequently I will like an artist but not enough to have that same artist up all year. This is all different artists. I wish I felt more of a connection to New York.

 

Steal Like an Artist. I think Rob would like this one. Each month has a drawing/saying for anyone working on a project—it doesn’t have to be art.

 

Codex Seraphinianus. You have got to look at the back of this calendar. I think I should get this for the older boys’ room, or for Paul’s office: they all really liked the book.

 

Modern Art. A nice assortment, but it seems as if there are always a couple of pages I actively don’t want.

 

A Zesty Year of Boynton.

 

World Travel Classic Posters. I love this style, and I’m in the mood for something international. Scroll down to the “Customers who bought this also bought…” section for a lot more options with this same look.

 

Pets Rock. Guinea. Pig. Pope.

 

Brady Bunch. So first of all: no. But I find I am happy it exists.

 

Bloom County. Oh, I am SO pleased to see this. I had a Bloom County calendar in high school. I think this might be the winner for next to my computer.

 

Art of the Heart. I am usually take-it-or-leave-it about Heartsy McLoveLove stuff, but this year I’m into it.

 

Smithsonian Seed Catalogue.

 

Blue and White. I love this idea. I would love to see more calendars in other color combinations.

 

Cats in Color. Strong contender for the kitchen (everyone would like it) or Elizabeth’s room.

 

Albino Deer. This is so surprisingly specialized.

 

Embroidered Nature. These pictures are of things made with EMBROIDERY.

 

Plastic Classics. Artworks recreated with found plastic objects. It seems to me there are more than the usual number of interesting ideas for calendars this year.

 

Mid-Century Modern Wallpaper. I’ve twice had a vintage-wallpaper calendar, and both times found it very satisfying.

 

Prints and Patterns. This is similarly appealing, but less vintage.

 

********

As usual, I long for you to tell me about the calendars you have purchased, or will purchase.

I have a movie from 2013 to recommend, if you want to get a feel for how long my Netflix queue is: Now You See Me (Netflix, Amazon). It’s an action movie but with MAGIC. In fact, I would say it’s a MAGIC movie with some action, including one overly-long-to-the-point-of-dull car chase. I would like to say ahead of time that I found the romance plotline unpleasant: there is no way she should ever consider that disrespectful, dismissive pinehole. But I liked everything else, and the romance didn’t ruin the rest of the movie for me.

I have a book to recommend, but with caution:

The Wonder, by Emma Donoghue

The recommendation is because it fell into that category of books I look forward to getting back to. The caution is because the plotline has a strong religious element that is not flattering to religion. My guess is that most people who were religious would think, “Well, but MY religion isn’t like that” and still enjoy the story, but I don’t know. I’d also like to say that I found it repetitive and tiresome how often the main character asked herself cynical questions. But it didn’t last forever, and it was not enough to ruin the book.

 

Paul has put up the tree, and the lights. Now it is my turn to supervise the putting up of the ornaments, and I realized I really, really didn’t want to. The whole idea made me tired. I am trying not to let current events drown the holiday season, but there is a spectrum of Doable/Undoable, and the ornaments were falling way on the joyless side—even considering that all I would need to do is supervise the children doing it. It was more like I didn’t want to see the ornaments.

I wondered if this might be the right year to do something I’ve thought in the past might be fun, which is to decorate the whole tree with only homemade ornaments. As soon as I thought of that idea, it opened up a little pocket of Doable. I broached the idea lightly to the children and they were ON BOARD, so that’s what we’re doing this year. I like the feeling this gives me of looking for ideas. I’m making dinner and wondering if I can find that gold paint we used to have and if it would work on dry pasta noodles; I’m emptying the trash and wondering if I could do something with the egg carton; I remember making paper chains as a child, and wonder if I’d have to make one for the entire tree or if I could just make one until I felt like not making it anymore; etc. But I don’t feel PRESSURE to do anything: with five children, the tree will get plenty of decoration whether or not I make any ornaments.

I’m making a couple of exceptions to the only-homemade rule. One is the chocolate ornaments I’d already bought. This is my third year buying those, and they were another little pocket of Doable, so I’m not changing that. The second is candy canes. Sure, I know people can make those. Not me—or at least, not this year.

Long ago, back when we were at the financial level where it was WELL worth it to return a 99-cent bottle of shampoo if I didn’t like it, I found a whole bunch of Christmas cards on clearance at a bookstore for $1/box. They weren’t what I would have chosen (one was a scene with pagodas, another was an Andy Warhol red shoe, a third was a very plain light blue with a few white snowflakes on it), which as it turned out made them all the more fun to send.

Every year since then, even now that we can afford to just buy them at regular price, it’s been a ton of fun to go scouting for clearance cards in January. One year, when we had a new Target that didn’t yet know how much stock it would need, I bought three or four boxes each of half a dozen kinds, all at 90% off. Most years, I add more like half a dozen boxes: enough to replenish but not enough to oppress. Every year near Christmastime, I go down to the basement, pull out the two big cardboard boxes labeled “CARDS”, and pick which style I feel like sending this year.

This year, I went down and…no cards. It SEEMED like I had a lot of cards, because I had a dozen and a half boxes of leftovers from previous years; plus another half-dozen boxes of cards I bought just one box of; plus a bunch of things purchased but not often used, such as decorative business-size envelopes. But NO sets of enough cards to send out to everyone. This is the first time this has happened in probably close to fifteen years.

Paul had the good idea of getting cards from the ACLU or something. I loved that idea, but ACLU doesn’t have holiday cards, and neither did the next two charities I tried, so maybe that is less of A Thing now; I’ve noticed most of my list sends photo cards instead. But in any case, I don’t think I’d want to order this late.

Then I thought, well, it’s a perfect year to need new cards, because I want something a little more…SOMBER this year, anyway. But I looked around and didn’t see anything that exactly communicated what I wanted to say, which was, “Sure hope this isn’t our final year living in the world as we know it” or “Who’s really in the mood for this right now anyway?” or whatever.

So! New plan: this is The Year of Using Up All the Scraps from Previous Years. I have three of this card, two of that card, half a dozen of this other card, a nearly-full box of this card, etc., and I am going to clear them out to make space for all the cards I will buy THIS January on clearance.

I am on Day Three of waiting for a package to be delivered so I can sign for it. If I’m being fair, I can’t really count Day One because on Day One I was not aware I was waiting, but I am counting it anyway because by chance I WAS IN FACT AT HOME ALL DAY. Furthermore, it was raining on and off so I was on FULL ALERT for UPS/USPS trucks: a few days earlier we’d had some things delivered while it was raining and they got SOAKED. So I was (1) home and (2) alert for deliveries, and still somehow they missed me. That takes real ninja skill.

On Day Two, after I’d received an email saying they were sorry they had missed me, I waited at home all morning. At lunchtime one of the kids called and I had to go bring something over to the school; I stopped at the library on the way home, so I was gone 45 minutes total. There was a “Second Attempt” sign on my door when I returned, with a tone that went too far into reprimand for my liking, considering this is not an appointment I made or agreed to. Today I am NOT LEAVING THIS HOUSE UNTIL I SIGN FOR THAT PACKAGE.

And you know what’s extra dumb? This package I have to sign for is NOTHING SPECIAL. It is a $14 stuffed animal from Amazon, a totally normal, routine sort of purchase. I have NO IDEA why it requires that an adult over age 18 must be home to sign for it in person. Is it filled with CIGARS or something? I can’t even sign the little slip saying it’s okay to leave it on the steps or with a neighbor: that section is crossed out. I must be here ALL DAY LONG to sign for it—there isn’t even a delivery window to shoot for. I have been doing my best to work up a little holiday feeling and THIS IS NOT HELPING.

Speaking of cranky, if you have not yet seen The Lady in the Van (Netflix, Amazon), I highly recommend it. Did you like Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey and in Harry Potter? Her facial expressions, her way of moving, her way of talking? Imagine her very similar to those roles, but playing a homeless woman. She was an utter delight as always. And I liked how the movie was DONE. I don’t know what to call what I liked, but I thought it was cleverly and interestingly done. And it’s funny and heartwarming without being too cheery or optimistic, if you’re not really up to cheery/optimistic right now but also do not want to be shoved deeper down.