Praise

I wanted to share some of the really, really nice positive reinforcement I received from neighbors before and after the sale. After all my concerns while I was handing out the flyers at the beginning, and wondering if it was a dumb idea to organize a neighborhood sale, it turned out very well. My favorite part is how happy people were to connect with their neighbors and how much fun they had. (The weird thing, though, is that many of these people still have not signed up to be part of the neighborhood group. But that will probably be the subject of another post...)
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I just want to compliment you on the fantastic organizational job you have done on this multiple garage sale!!  We are looking forward to a fun and busy Saturday!   Thanks so much.

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...let me say you have garage sale sign swag. I have NEVER seen such kick A__ signs. Indestructable. [This compliment I passed on to the sign team.]

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I'm delighted that somebody is doing this: I'd never get it together to do a garage sale on my own.  I also think that the idea of a neighborhood association is terrific. 

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Thanks for doing all of this—amazing!  With appreciation!

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Thank you [Mrs. Aitch]!!! for the great idea and all the organization!
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Thanks so much for organizing this event.  My family had so much fun,  An added benefit was meeting neighbors we had never met.
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Thank you for all your hard work and thanks to the committee!  The garage sale was a huge success!
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Thanks for coordinating this!  Nice job.
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I would like to ditto all the kudos, this event would not have taken place if not for your initiative.  It was great to see such a buzz in the neighborhood and I had neighbors who did not sell, tell me how much fun they had walking to all the houses.

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We had a ball at the garage sale!  Thank you very, very much for your enthusiasm, for getting this group going and for all labor to organize and get out flyers!  You guys rock!  I can't wait for the next fun event!
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Thanks to everyone who were involved and participated in this HUGE garage sale. Special thanks to [Mrs. Aitch] and the planning committee.

Other than getting some extra money by selling some of our used and never-opened stuff, we met all kinds of "customers". It was fun talking to them and learning from them what they were looking for and that might help what we should put out for garage sale next time. 

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Thanks to all the planners...It was fun - and nice to meet all the new neighbors.

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The customers that I spoke with were so impressed with the sale, the maps, & all the stuff we had to offer. I was so busy, I never sat in my chair until 1p.m.! Thanks so much!

P.S. Many were already asking about next years sale:)
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Thanks to whoever made the maps! people were thrilled when we handed them to them!

The Garage Sale

The big garage sale was Saturday, and it was HUGE. We gave out maps with 26 homes marked on them, and other people were joining those sales, or putting stuff out to sell at their own houses. One street became jammed with traffic a couple of times. People made hundreds of dollars. Kids had lemonade stands, sold muffins and brownies, and played music to entertain customers. And, best of all, people got out of their houses and met their neighbors and had a lot of fun!

The day of the sale, I wanted to go shop at other people's sales, see how busy it was, and meet some of the people I'd been emailing with. So Dr. J agreed to man our sale while I ventured out.

My dad describes himself as "not a hale fellow well met," and that, you will not be surprised to hear, is a good description of me, too. First I went to a couple of sales of people I know a little, and they were so full of enthusiasm and so full of thanks and compliments, that I started to feel bolder about meeting some new people. So I would walk up to someone, and start off with "Hi, I'm [Mrs. Aitch]," and expect to segue into a mumbled explanation of who I am and why I was imposing on them by introducing myself, and they would break in to tell me how great it was to meet me, and how great the sale was, and how great the maps I made were, and how many customers they had had, etc. I felt like a rock star! And I would modestly imply that the weather was responsible for the turnout, and maybe tell them about how my kids were selling lemonade and then spending the money they earned buying the neighbors' toys, a story I found to be a real hit.

My confidence soared. By the end, I was encouraging people I'd never met to plan neighborhood events and offering to make web pages and flyers for them. And then I would say, "Well, I want to try to get to some more houses, so I'd better go." And we would say goodbye, and off I'd walk.

How I am NOT like Rabbit

It was a Captainish sort of day, when everybody said, "Yes, Rabbit " and "No, Rabbit," and waited until he had told them. 

                                                          --From The House at Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne

I didn't delegate enough with the 27+-family-garage sale, it turns out, now that I know what's involved. But I did delegate sign-making, and that was was extremely helpful, but also very hard for me. My friend L, who runs her own business and has a very different personality than me, told me, "People like to be told what to do." Which is think is probably true, but, still, I had some concerns.

I asked three people via email to take charge of the signs. One, whom I had never met, had said when she signed up for the sale that she had some signs from a friend's sale we could use. We had a productive exchange about signs in which I tried to subtly suggest she might be a good person to help work on signs. The other two I had met, but one, when volunteering to help with the signs, made it clear that although she wanted to help, she lacked all confidence in her artistic ability, and so might be best at putting them up. The third is a working mom who spends a ton of time and energy on her kids and her local extended family. She offered to help, though, and she is just the kind of clear, direct, and just person you want to work with, so I took her up on it.

I finally decided to ask them if they would form a team and take over the sign project, even though I didn't know if any of them knew each other. So I sent the email, and then left town for a few days. And this is what I did while I was away:

• I worried that they were mad that I was being so bossy.
• I worried that they were thinking I should have just done the signs myself.
• I worried that they had not all gotten in contact with each other. 
• I worried that they had gotten in contact with each other, but were all angry at each other and not getting along.
• I worried there would be no signs/few signs/small signs/etc. when I got back.
• I wondered if I should email to check up on them and how I would do that without sounding even bossier.

I should say that none of these concerns had anything to do with the particular people involved. My concerns came entirely from my own fear of putting myself out there.

Of course, you know what happened. I came back from my trip to find lovely, giant, clear, durable signs at key points around the neighborhood, and immediately I started receiving compliments on them, which I happily passed on to the awesome sign team. As much as I hated asking them to do it, I was thrilled to be able to tell them what a great job everyone thought they were doing.

How I am Like Piglet

"But Piglet wasn't listening, he was so agog at the thought of seeing Christopher Robin's blue braces [suspenders] again. He had only seen them once before, when he was much younger, and being a little over-excited by them, had had to go to bed half an hour earlier than usual; and he had always wondered since if they were really as blue and as bracing as he had thought them. "          -- from The House at Pooh Corner, by A.A. Milne

The neighborhood garage sale is Saturday (I have been spending a lot of time on organizing this event; that and the fact that school ended has left me with little time to blog).  About a month ago, I sent out my first email to all the people who had signed up--seventeen people at that point. I sent it one night right before bed, and the next morning checked my email eagerly and a little apprehensively to see if anyone had responded. No one had, but I discovered that a) I had gotten someone's email wrong; and b) I sent everyone a PDF of a blank sheet rather than the flyer I was trying to send.

I quickly re-sent the email with an apology and actual flyer, and by the time I had sent it, I had gotten this response to my original email:

Awesome organization!  Thanks for making this so easy :).

A few minutes later, my husband got out of the bathroom, where he had been checking his email (come on, you know you do it, too!) and came looking for me. He found me laying on the bed, staring at the ceiling. He asked me if I had seen the nice response. "Yes." I said, "That's why I had to lay down. I'm having a Piglet moment."

Pot Luck

After the bread challenge and trying to start this neighborhood group, I suddenly realized it was time to do something that I am so very comfortable doing: having a party.

Now, when I say I'm comfortable having a party, this might give you the wrong impression. Here is the kind of party I love to give, and have since forever. Invite a bunch of people over (one might even say...too many people), ask everyone to bring something to eat, stress the fact that it's very casual, and try to set everyone's expectations very low. The key is that everyone I invite is really nice, and I have to make a point to keep the preparations simple, simple, simple. 

Then people arrive, and the party has itself while I float around in a succession of half-finished interrupted conversations. And here's what always happens. It happened in Austin when I was single. And it happened the other day with neighborhood families: everyone is really pleased and friendly and wants to get to know each other, and they eat and chat and figure out who they know in common, and have  a great time. 

And I know everyone, at least a little, and like everyone, and don't really get to talk to anyone, but I just bask in the warm glow of a developing network of friends. 

Your Fearful Leader

I like to tell my kids the thing about how being brave doesn't mean that you're not afraid of something. Being brave is about being scared...but doing the thing anyway.

Things are progressing with the neighborhood group and the associated neighborhood garage sale. I and a few helpers put about 250 flyers into and onto and around mailboxes last week, telling everyone about both the group and the sale. The group is now up to almost 25 members (hey! that's, like, 10%!) and I think 16 people have signed up to participate in the sale, and it sounds like more are planning to, but haven't signed up yet. Which is all really exciting!

Passing out flyers was a little wonderful and a little horrible. The weather, most of the times we were out, was gorgeous. When I was with my gregarious friend, L, she talked to everyone who was out in their yards and met new people and got people excited about the group and the sale. When it was just me or me and Dr. Jay, we would nudge each other, "Hey, go talk to that person!" "No, you go talk to them."

I worried that the flyers would blow away and everyone would be mad at me for messing up the neighborhood. I worried that the mail carrier would give us a ticket for putting things in mailboxes. I worried that people would think I was selling something. I imagined that people would think I was a young hippie mom, dragging my kids around to get paid a few dollars by some stupid company  trying to sell them something they didn't want. I imagined that a lot. (Not that I have anything against young hippie moms. I just have a terror of being misunderstood or misread or misjudged. Which is a story for another post...maybe.)

But I got through, and at the end, I felt like I knew the neighborhood better, even the parts I never go to because they're not on my way anywhere. And the few people I talked to were very nice. And then people started signing up, little by little.

In A Short History of Nearly Everything, one of my absolute favorite books, which I keep listening to over and over on audiobook, Bill Bryson talks about Max Planck, and how he learned, after doing much work on entropy, that someone else had already done the same work but published it in an obscure source. After describing this, the next paragraph starts: "Undaunted--well, perhaps mildly daunted--Planck turned to other matters."

I have been daunted by this neighborhood group project. But I have to remember that many people eventually succeed with something, despite being daunted along the way. But they keep going, and then, someday, someone looks back and says they continued, undaunted.

Generosity of Spirit

I have been going on and on about how my skin is so thin, I take everything personally, wah, it's so hard for me to put myself out there, my feelings are hurt, yadda, yadda, yadda.

I am on a committee at the kids' school to put on a fundraiser that includes a silent auction, so we need to find donations, and encourage people to attend, etc. There's another mom on the committee, who, like me, is showing up and trying to be helpful, despite maybe not having fundraising so much in her blood. She is a professor at the university near here, and came up with an idea that all the profs who are parents at the school (about 20 of them) could go in together on an ad for the program. They could all meet to have their picture taken somewhere on campus, and it would only be about $10/family, and that would give a bunch of people a fairly easy way to contribute and maybe help faculty parents meet each other and feel some connection. Sounds like my kind of idea.

So she sends out an email to twenty faculty. Ten respond and say they are interested; one responds and says he or she is not. So she sends out another email, to coordinate the next step of scheduling the photo, and only four of the ten respond. So now she's in a position of a picture of 5 people in the program, not really representative of anything, and the price has now gone up from $10 per family to $40 per family, and so she's going to have to email those four people, tell them this, and see if the still want to do it. She was very surprised and disappointed, and, I think, pretty hurt that she was trying to do something thoughtful and helpful and got so little response, when what she was suggesting would have involved so little investment from the people involved.

As she was talking about this, I just kept thinking, "I know how you feel! That's just how I feel about the neighborhood group!" But before I could begin to commiserate, Madge spoke up.

Madge is the development person at the school. It is her job to ask for money and donations and to get other people to do the same. When Madge addresses a group, she tells jokes, she warms up the crowd, she never uses notes, she is funny and engaging and gets her point across at the same time. And this is what she said: "Aw, that's frustrating. But I really believe that people are well-intentioned. We all let things slide, but it's not because we mean to. Except for a few actual duds out there, people mean well and want to help, but sometimes they just don't. For whatever reason, it just doesn't happen. They'll probably come up to you at the event, holding the program, and ask you if it's too late to participate!"

Later, there was discussion of a particular parent who had volunteered to help with something, but was basically MIA. Madge said, absolutely good-naturedly, "Yeah, every year she says she wants to help, but she just doesn't end up doing anything. And some people are just like that. And you just ask every year, and, who knows? Maybe this year is the year they'll do something."

She didn't take it personally. She didn't get angry. She just keeps trying things, sees what works, tries to put her energy toward the things that have the greatest return, but she never stops casting the net, seeing who wants to help or give, who will actually come through. And when I said that I was happy to streamline spreadsheets of contacts and send out letters, but that I didn't want to call anyone on the phone or visit any businesses to ask for donations, she didn't bat an eye. She is infinitely generous in her evaluation of other people's comfort zones, abilities, self-perceived abilites and limitations, forgetfulness, and general failure to do what they said they wanted or were going to do.

And generosity, you know, is maybe the number one thing that I think creates abundance. I mean, isn't it interesting that the same people who are uncomfortable putting themselves out there are often the same people who are quick to judge other people's non-action or neutral suggestion to be criticism? If I were more generous in my reading of others' actions, would I be in an atmosphere of abundance of spirit, where I would be less likely to assume other people are judging me harshly? Is this paucity of spirit a vicious circle that feeds on itself? And would more generosity of spirit lead to an abundance of spirit in my life, where maybe I would not see well-intentioned suggestions as angry criticism?

"Constructive Criticism"

Hi. It's been a while since my last real post. Almost a month. For a couple of weeks that was because I was just busy with other things like a birthday party and an erupting volcano cake and visiting family. And then, for the last couple of weeks, it was because of a vacation to Canada, a child falling downstairs, and an associated stay at a very nice hospital in Toronto. But here I am again, and things have settled down a little.


In my last real post (that wasn't someone else's cartoon) I was talking about putting myself out there and how uncomfortable I am with it and with trying to lead something, and how trying to start a neighborhood group is really putting me in touch with that. 


I am trying to start this neighborhood group because I want to feel a sense of community. Because I want my kids to have friends to play with in the neighborhood. Because they say knowing your neighbors is one of the biggest things you can do to increase neighborhood safety. Because twenty years ago, everyone in the neighborhood knew each other, and I think it can be that kind of neighborhood again, despite that fact that it's now a mix of empty-nesters who are on the verge of retiring and younger families with little kids, with others thrown in here and there.


We moved here almost four years ago, and I have been waiting for someone else to start some kind of group. An email list serve, maybe, or a Facebook group. Where we can share information about the Verizon VOIP conversion, or the repaving of a road, or robberies in the area. 


So finally, in February, heartened by getting to know a neighbor who seems like someone who can get things done, I suggested we start a group ourselves. She is very busy, runs her own company and takes care of her little kid, but she cheered me on, and I decided to go ahead and do it.


Now, the first part of the project was totally challenging me within my comfort zone. I tried out GoogleGroups, GoogleDocs, GoogleMaps, and GoogleSites. I made a website with a picture and a survey and a map, and a sign-up form that would automatically populate a spreadsheet that could later be available as the group directory. I got advice about neighborhood boundaries from a realtor friend, and advice about community building from another friend. It was a lot of work that I really didn't have time for, but it was fun, and Dr. J worked on it with me some, and it was the kind of thing I used to enjoy doing before I had kids. It was great.


And then it was time to "go live". And you may have read what happened over the first few days. 


Now, I like to think that I am someone who knows how to benefit from constructive criticism. But as I have said before, I have the thinnest of skin, and once I am out of my comfort zone, putting myself out there, it does not get any thicker. 


So over the first few weeks, in addition to two people leaving the day they joined because it was "not what I expected" and "I have a family to take care of," I got other feedback.

"The area is too big."

"These (waves hand, standing in front of her house) are my neighbors. I don't need to know all those other people."


"I think the area is just right."


"People are squeamish about putting information online these days." Yes, but the only required information is name and address, which are freely available on the county tax site!


"People don't want to get so many emails." This, for a group that so far has probably averaged less than 2 messages per week. I mentioned the digest option where you can get all of each day's emails, if any, combined into a single email. "One email per day is too many. I mean, from my friends, yes. But not from every Tom, Dick, and Harry." 

"I only want to get messages about topics that interest me. Can you change it so that I only get emails I'm interested in?" Uh, no. Actually, I can't. Google didn't design their Groups that way, and it turns out that hacking GoogleGroups is beyond my area of expertise. She then went on to suggest that I talk to a neighbor who is a professor of IT, who has expressed not a shred of interest in the group, because maybe he could fix it.

"I personally thought that the boundary of the neighborhood is too wide to start the group. Why don't we just start with [four streets] then expand it in the future? Actually, the apartment buildings over behind the shopping center may need this kind of connection also." So...it should be smaller, and not include the whole official neighborhood, but we should then add all the people in the apartment buildings on the next block who aren't technically in our neighborhood and who are bound to have different concerns, since they are not homeowners anyway?

"I think the boundary of the group is just fine."


I suddenly had great sympathy for people who go into public office. I'm sure most of them do it because they want to do good and help people (whatever their political views). And then, everyone is mad at you because you aren't doing things the way people think you should be and/or acting like you are purposely trying to ruin their lives by trying to do right by everyone.


To be fair, those quotes above came from just a small handful of well-meaning friends, none of them mad at me. But every single not 100% approving comment or suggestion gets under my (as I have admitted, very, very thin) skin and tortures me. I feel as if the person is mad at me. As if EVERYONE is mad at me. 


And then I just want to hide.

Optimizers in the age of the Internet

This is and XKCD comic related to some posts a while back about Optimizers vs. Satisficers. Thanks to Dr. Jay for passing it on!

Showing Up vs. Getting Out There

I have lived in a number of places. And, sooner or later, I always make friends. It goes along with my belief that no matter where you live, you can find the great things, the great people, the great foods, the great festivals, that make that place special and that you can love.


This is how I make friends: I show up. 


It doesn't always work. I showed up every week to ballroom dance class in Austin, TX: no friends. I showed up every week to story time at the library in Cleveland, OH: no friends. I showed up every week to Playgroup for Kids Born in 2006 in Syracuse, NY: no friends. 


But usually it works. I show up to school. I show up to work. I show up to class. I show up to Prenatal Pilates. I show up to Baby and Me. I show up to preschool birthday parties. I show up to school volunteer meetings. I show up. I show up. I show up. And, eventually, I make some really, really, really awesome friends. 


This, to me, is "getting out there." 


Now, I am not a leader. I am much better sitting to the side, watching, helping, doing whatever is asked. Going above and beyond as much as possible, but never being the place where the buck stops. 


Another thing about me is that I often have these ideas. Some are big ideas. Some are ideas for other people. But I think about them for a few days, sometimes intensely, at 4 am, then all day, too. And then, 93% of the time, I get over them; 5% of the time, I try to convince someone else to try them; and maybe 2% of the time, I try them. You know. If they're small. And not too ambitious.  


Taking care of little kids, which, for hours at a time can involve 90% of your hands but only about 10% of your brain, is an atmosphere where I can spend lots of time thinking up ideas I never get to try out. 


One part of The Happiness Project book is about pursuing the Big Ideas and also not being afraid to fail. Finding the fun in failure, she says. So this year, I have been trying to try these ideas that I get excited about, to see if they're any good or not. 


That's where this blog came in. And the February Bread Challenge. And my glass etching hobby. And the neighborhood group I'm trying to start. Trying these ideas are ways of pushing myself. I talked in another post about different kinds of pushing yourself. The blog and the glass etching challenge me within my comfort zone, while giving away bread and starting a neighborhood group throw me WAY out of my comfort zone. Way out. 


This is a new kind of getting out there. It goes beyond showing up. It is putting yourself right out there. In the street. With a sign around your neck. Naked. And yelling. At least, that's how it feels to me. 


And what I've learned so far is that 1) not all my ideas are good ones; and 2) putting myself out there makes me very, very, very uncomfortable.

The Bunny Poop Trilogy: The Final Chapter

The other night my husband was away, so my friend J invited the kids and me over for dinner. It was a lovely, unseasonably warm evening. We ate out on the porch, and several times, out the window, I saw my friend L ride by on her bike, doing laps around the block, training for a race. It was beautiful: nice weather, and the feeling of being (almost) surrounded by friends in a neighborhood. I was feeling like maybe everything (i.e., living in this city; raising my kids in this neighborhood) was going to be all right. After dinner we were going to go finally get the long-awaited and much-discussed bunny poop. 


So we drove over in L's truck, J, L, and I. The bunny lady met us in the garage. She introduced us to a foster bunny she was taking care of because he had the sniffles and couldn't be in the shelter. His name was, I think, Jupiter. She told us about a funny trip to Rite Aid to get him medicine, and how that was the first time anyone at Rite Aid had filled a prescription for a bunny.


So we all stood outside in the twilights and talked about the weather and birds and chickens and farms and stars, and then we each went home with a bag or two of manure to put on our gardens. I was really looking forward to adding it to my garden the next day. After the whole long bunny poop saga, with the bread, and the celiac disease, and the emails to the neighborhood group, and the neighbors with families to take care of, I thought I was finally reaching a happy ending. 


There I was. I dumped it out, spread it around and then quickly emailed L and J:

Just threw the contents of the bags on the garden. It's a little different than last year. Lots of hay and lots of bunny food and very little poop. After all the trouble this poop has caused me, I can't imagine why I would be surprised about this. Honestly. There were also a few other things like tootsie roll wrappers and cardboard tubes and twist ties. Then, just at the end, after I had spread it all over my beds, I found, I swear to god, a syringe. A syringe. Seriously?! SER-I-OUS-LY!!?? I mean, there was no needle on it. And it must have been from the bunny's meds, right? RIGHT?! But I just stood here starting at it. I mean, come on! A syringe has got to be one of the very last things, short of maybe a human hand, that you want to find in your garden. Please tell me you think this is from Jupiter's meds, and not, you know, anything else. 

Wtf! I give up.

The Curse of the Bunnies

So last week I started recruiting people to join the neighborhood group I am trying to start. I had originally started out with my husband and my two friends, L and J, on the Google Group for a couple weeks while I sent emails, letting them know about things I had changed on the website and what did they think; and lots of emails called "test" because I was trying to work out how the whole thing was going to work. I wanted to really get as many ducks in a row as possible before we "went live," because I didn't want to bug people with a bunch of emails they didn't need.

Finally, around Monday or so, I sent an email to the other 3 people in the group saying I thought we really were actually ready, and letting them know that they were welcome to start inviting people. On Tuesday, I invited 3 people. One joined. On Wednesday, I invited 5 people. Two joined. Plus, another one, who for some reason did not join, told me on Thursday that she had invited 12 other people to join! I was on top of the world, brimming with optimism. So I thought it was a good time to email the bunny lady and clear the air. (See previous post for more on why the air needed to be cleared.)

So I emailed her, and apologized for not having emailed before I showed up to accost her with baked goods last month. I told her that if she had poop to give away, I knew a couple of other people who were also interested, so to let me know. Whenever it was good for her. I went out of my way to not be pushy or to inconvenience her in any way.

And she emailed back, and said that on the morning I showed up, she had been working on a novel, and my visit had moved her from thinking to actually writing, so it was a good thing I had come by. This seemed like a very nice thing to say, and she told me she had 6 bags of poop and we could coordinate a time to come get however much we wanted.

AWESOME! I was starting a neighborhood group AND fixed things with the bunny lady. I felt like a million bucks. Then I had a great idea. I sent an email to the neighborhood group saying that if anyone was interested in rabbit manure for their garden, to let me know.

The next day, Friday, 2 people joined the group THAT I HAD NEVER EVEN MET BEFORE! We were up to 12 members, and I was making new friends! I decided I would have a potluck in a couple of weeks so everyone could meet all the new friends they were going to be making. It was awesome.

And then. And then, my two pals, who had so patiently suffered through email after email as they helped me work out the kinks of the new group, endured "test" emails out the wazoo, cheered me on, etc., sent a few emails back and forth, planning the details of a trip to get poop.

Let me say here that I am very concerned, always, with not sending the wrong email to the wrong people. You might even say I am mortally terrified of accidentally "replying all" when it's not appropriate. I double check--I triple check!--the "to" field before I send any email. But when I saw this exchange, I realized that L and J didn't know other people had joined the group! I quickly emailed from my phone to try to end the public planning, since I needed to coordinate with the bunny lady before we planned anything, anyway. And the only way I knew to be certain L and J got my email was to email the group, since I wasn't sure which email addresses they were checking. So, as I waited for my kids' parent teacher conferences to start, I dashed off an email saying it was great they were interested and I would contact the bunny lady and get back to them.

An hour later, when the conferences were over, I checked my email, and I felt like I'd been slapped. One of the two new members I'd never met before was apparently fed up with the 5 emails she had received on the subject and wanted off the list. It wasn't what she expected, she said. And, as she pointed out, she didn't have time for this, as she had a family to take care of. OUCH! Within a short time, the other new person had sent a brief but clear email to the group: "Unsubscribe Please!"

I was beside myself with embarrassment. Were all 7 other people on the list angry that I had tricked them into joining a group just so I could have an audience for planning 4-block car trips with my friends? Did everyone think I had no sense of Netiquette? Plus, I was confused. How many emails had she gotten?! Was everyone getting all kinds of stuff they weren't supposed to be getting?

So I got very upset, but composed what I think was a gracious response. I apologized to the group for the emails that should have been private, but pointed out that L and J, who had been helping me, were blameless. I took all the responsibility for the emails myself, explained that there was also a digest option to cut down on the number of emails received from the group in a day, and supplied the requested  information about unsubscribing (which, I did NOT point out, if the requestor had bothered to read the helpful Welcome Email I had sent her a few hours before, she would have already known). And I thanked everyone for their patience while we were still working out the kinks. "Since," I did NOT say, "you know, I created the group to be nice and to try to help everyone in the neighborhood, even though I don't really have time for this and I have a family to take care of."

As L pointed out later, the bunny poop is my downfall every time.

Why I think you should take a break from Facebook, and what I think you should do instead

I think Facebook lessens feelings of abundance. You compare yourself to all the stuff people post that gives a totally skewed view of how awesome their lives are. Plus, it's addictive. You actually get a little tiny burst of dopamine when someone comments on your post or likes your link. So you find yourself constantly checking, looking for the hit. It distracts you when you should be driving. Or working. Or cooking dinner. "I just need to look real quick..."

At least, that's how it is for me. Plus, there are certain political topics that I like to assume everyone agrees with me about, and it is possible to learn on FB that some very lovely people do not agree with you. But I have the thinnest of skin and would go so far as to call myself a Highly Sensitive Person, so the very absolute last thing I ever want to do is engage in any kind of political debate. I wish I were someone who wants to be informed and engage in a mind-enhancing back-and-forth of lofty ideas. But I don't. I want to preach to the choir, and only the choir.

So I have taken a break from FaceBook.

...and started a Neighborhood Group instead. I used Google Groups and Google Sites and Google Docs and Google Maps, and made a list serve and a website, and I'm trying, along with a friend, to get people to join. We started spreading the word last week, and we are up to a whopping, uh, 13 members. Including me and her and my husband.

Anyway, so now instead of getting the dopamine hit from FB, I am getting it from checking to see if anyone has asked to join the group or filled out the "neighborhood activity survey" or left comments on the site. But my hope is that the formation of this group may result in some actual face-to-face interactions. Meeting new people who live around the corner. A sense of non-virtual community. And I think that would really increase the feeling of abundance in my life.

I'll let you know how it goes, but I can tell you this: we will be trying very hard to avoid any political topics.

February Bread Challenge: Day 29

Boy. Am I glad that's over. I baked 2 loaves this morning, gave one to the school receptionist, and I was done!

What did I learn? Well, the whole project was meant to push my limits in terms of bread baking and in terms of connecting with people. It sort of pushed my limits in terms of bread baking. I found a REALLY EASY system to pump out bread with little effort that completely fit into my schedule and reliably produced two loaves of sandwich bread per day. Not the best bread, maybe, but pretty darn good when it was hot out of the oven. The requirement to give away bread each day, however, did not promote the experimentation and recipe innovation I had thought would be part of the project. I just wanted to make something that people would want to eat, so I played it pretty safe much of the time.

Another thing I found is that there are two kinds of pushing limits. One is pushing limits with something you are comfortable with, but upping the intensity. Baking bread every single day for one month. It took some work, and, I have to say, I feel giddy with not having to mix up any dough tonight. I feel good that I did it, and I now know that if the need arises, I can bake a lot of bread.

The other is pushing limits with something you aren't comfortable with. Throwing yourself into the deep end of the pool and making yourself swim to the side. Giving bread away to people I don't see on a daily basis was a continuing source of stress, concern, and confusion. But it was also a bigger source of satisfaction on some days than the baking was.

Giving bread to neighbors and friends whom I don't see all the time really did make me feel like I strengthened a bond with them, even though I did not magically become a master of the social interaction.

Then there is the category, maybe my favorite, that included the pediatrician, the OB/GYN, the banker who helped the kids open accounts, and the physical therapist. They seemed genuinely touched that someone took the time to express their appreciation for what they do. As my OB said, "Nobody EVER give me ANYTHING!"

Then there is the "going out on a limb category" that included the Ronald McDonald House, the Fire Station, and the bunny lady. At the first it went great, at the second they seemed unsure what to make of someone bringing them a giant boule, and at the third, well, you can read about that here. Those I was glad I did because I had set a goal and then I tried, but they were not really at all fun.

The project got a little old over the past week. In retrospect, my husband identified the 22nd as the day the project "jumped the shark."You may remember that Sunday the 18th I tried making bread with milk and honey and found it to be delicious. You may also remember that on Wednesday the 22nd I was hit with a mild but very queasy stomach bug that resulted in a feeling of disgust being associated with bread dough. Well, in between there I went a little crazy, so taken with the milk-honey mixture that I couldn't believe I hadn't done it sooner. This experimentation reached a fever pitch on Wednesday, when, egged on by my husband, I made a loaf with not only milk, but sugar, cocoa, mashed banana, and vanilla. This not-especially-chocolatey attempt at a chocolate bread is what I ate right before I got sick. I don't think it was actually bad-tasting, but bread dough made with milk started turning my stomach as it sat there in the bowl rising.

So that's it. I have pictures. I timed myself a few of the days. I have insights about the mechanics of bread making. And, of course, I have recipes that I hope to share in the coming days. But now I'm off to enjoy not making any bread.

Bread giveaway FAIL

We're getting down to the end of the month! I am behind by a couple of loaves to give away, so this morning I took two loaves of piping hot bread with me in the car when I dropped off the kids at school. On the way, I knocked on our neighbors' door. They are runners, up early, and I thought they'd appreciate some whole-grain bread. Well, I guess they had already gone to work. Oh, well.

So I dropped off the kids, and then headed over to the house of the woman who fosters bunnies and who gave me bunny poop for my garden last year. I have been torn about this all month. She was someone I wanted to thank, but only met once for a few minutes while we shoveled poop into a bucket and the kids met the bunnies she was fostering at the time. I decided not to email her, because I didn't want it to turn into a weird, complicated scheduling thing that would inconvenience her. So I stopped by a couple of weeks ago at about 9 am on a weekday and no one was home, so I decided that she must get up and go to work on weekdays before that time, based on, really, no information at all. So at around 8:30 this morning I pull up, and there's a car in the driveway, so I go to the door and knock timidly on the storm door. Nothing. So I try the bell, but my finger sort of slips off, and I don't hear anything, so I have no idea if it rang. So I wait. But I don't give up. I decide to just knock decisively on the door. I do, then immediately decide I'll leave, when she opens the door.

I don't know if I woke her up, forcing her to get dressed and answer the door, but I am afraid that on this day I had arrived, unannounced, a little too early. Or maybe she was just wondering what the heck I was doing at her door. I re-introduced myself and told her I had made her bread, whereupon she told me that she can't eat bread.

"No gluten?" I asked. Oh, no. I told her that I know how to make peanut butter cookies without gluten, and I could bring her some of those sometime. She insisted that it wasn't necessary, and asked if I wanted some poop, which made me afraid she thought I had just come over to get poop, rather than to strengthen neighborly bonds. I was determined to turn my gesture into something less weird. Apparently, I decided the best course of action would be to refuse to give up. "Are peanuts ok?"

"Yeah...but it's really not necessary."

"Well, I can bring them sometime when I come to get some poop."

"And no eggs."

"Oh."

I was beaten. She insisted that she really didn't need any baked goods from me, and that what she really needed was someone to take away poop. I don't really remember how we ended it. I'm sure I apologized, but, typically, I didn't think to find out when would be a convenient time for me to come and get the bunny poop.

A neighbor just came by

The first one we gave bread to the other day. He said the bread was delicious, and brought a bottle of honey for us to put on our bread. I am so pleased!

Stomach bug

You know how when you get sick, sometimes the last thing you ate before it hit you just makes your stomach turn to think about it? Well, I have a stomach bug. And you guessed it: I can't stand the thought of homemade bread, and I can't stand the sight of the big bowl of rising dough I mixed up before bed last night. *shudder*

Cha. Ching.

Our street has about 15 houses on it that were all built in the second half of the 80s by the same builder. At one time, there were 17 kids on the street and, it sounds like, everyone knew everyone. There was a block party every fall, and occasional progressive dinners. A lot of the same people still live here and haven't retired yet, but they have empty nests and not a ton of motivation to get out and make new friends. Pretty much everyone is pleasant, but we don't hang out or anything.

I haven't given away any bread since Friday, so today, as part of February Bread Challenge, I managed to give away 2 loaves. One was to a friend around the corner, who was delighted, and the other was to our next door neighbor, who we sort of know, but don't see much.

She held the warm bread, which was wrapped in a kitchen towel and smelled it. After initially seeming like she maybe was in the middle of something when she first answered the door, she seemed really excited about the bread. Then she said, "Have you talked to [the neighbor who knows everyone]?"

Me: No, not recently.

Neighbor: Well, we've been talking about doing a progressive dinner, like we used to...

Me (interrupting): Oh, that would be great!

N: ...and if you'd like to be included...

Me: We would definitely love to be included!

N: We will probably get together  sometime to plan it, I can let you know when that will be. It should be really fun...

I got back in the car so excited. That was just what I hoped would happen if I gave bread to the neighbors! A chance to socialize. Priceless.

The Big Rocks, Part IV: the Point!

I wrote this in my first post, where it was already 9 am and I "hadn't even gotten anything done," but I decided to reframe:

It's not even 9 am, and I helped the kids get up, get dressed, eat a healthy breakfast, brush teeth, wash faces, and get to school on time, all with a largely positive attitude, little nagging, etc. Then I took a short walk...I would say that those are some REALLY IMPORTANT things that you have done already today.

Well, when I look back at my day at the end of each day, I tend to see Important Things from the To Do List that I didn't do, like organize the office or update my will. And then I see lots of sand and pebbles that I used to fill up my jar. Little, urgent things, like cleaning the kitchen and doing the laundry and making dinner, that couldn't possibly count as Big Rocks. And I feel like once again, I have failed. I have let the big rocks slide and have only wet sand to show for it. 

So I am taking a stab at reframing this. Taking Gretchen Rubin's idea of a chart where I can compare how I did today, but replace resolutions with, I don't know what to call them. Goals? Big rocks?

Is this possible? Can I stop to reframe at the end of each day, and maybe see that all this sand really builds up into these hugely important rocks?

I made a draft of a list of Big Rocks so that at the end of the day, or maybe even throughout the day,  I can go over my day and say, this thing that I did that seemed like an inconvenience and a distraction? This was part of a huge rock. Instead to going down a list of resolutions and checking off things I did, and seeing where I've failed, I'll go through my day and see how the little things were actually part of bigger things.

The list needs work. But here are a few Big Rocks that I think may help me see things differently:

• Look for opportunities to create a network of local friends. Example: The phone rang just before I was about to start my exercises, and I answered it, even though I had just enough time to exercise before preschool pickup. Mistake? No! I was able to talk to my neighbor about keeping an eye on her house while she's out of town, and she also asked me over for coffee another day. I took an opportunity to create a network of local friends, and that is very important!
• Take care of my physical, mental, and emotional needs. Example: I was feeling like I was catching a cold, so I didn't do all my exercises, and I didn't walk. Giant failure? No! I was taking care of my physical needs.
• Help the kids learn how to take care of their toys and books/themselves/their home. Example: I spent 10 minutes working with the boys to clean up a plant they knocked over. Waste of time? Inconvenience? No! I was helping them learn how to take care of their home, and that's very important!

I tried this last night, and it sort of worked, but I think my list of Big Rocks needs work. I'll let you know how it goes. Feel free to comment and let me know what you think. And, boy, am I relieved to finally finish this train of thought!

Oh, the bread.

Yes, I am still making bread. And still not telling you a thing about it. Sorry about that. It's really not my intention to keep you in the dark.

The hard parts of the project remain, in ascending order of difficulty:
1) make bread every day = easy
2) give bread away every day = medium to hard
3) blog about the bread project = apparently impossible

Every day so far this month until yesterday, I have given away bread. Twice it was eating some part of a loaf with a guest here at my house, so those are maybe a little lame, and once I had to freeze a loaf and give it to my target the next day, but yesterday was the first day I just did not manage to give away any bread. Ridiculously, we spent quite a while baking cookies to bring to a friend's house for dinner, but did not bring any bread with us. It was the house of my friend Jennifer, who is the one who got me baking bread in the first place, so I was sure she would have made some fresh bread for the occasion and thought it would be silly to bring bread. Well, she hadn't, and they had some store-bought artisanal bread that was delicious, but very similar to my boule, so I totally could have brought some, but missed my chance. I still have some of yesterday's bread in the freezer, so maybe I can still give some away sometime.

But. Every day so far this month until yesterday, I mixed up dough at night and baked it the next day. Until last night, when we got back from Jennifer's, and I was tired, and I figured, it's Sunday tomorrow, I'll just make some pita bread or something. Well, I never got around to deciding what to do, and we were trying to get a few things done around the house, and finally, at 2:30 I decided to just mix something up, just so I could say I had made bread.

Now, when you are planning to give away the bread you make, you don't have a lot of incentive to really try new things. But today I guess I was liberated by having failed to give away bread yesterday. Plus, I was already cutting the rising time down by about half, so I didn't know how it would come out anyway. So I tried a couple of things I had never done before: used milk instead of water to add some fat, and added honey, thinking that the sugar from the honey might get the yeast going faster than normal. The dough started to rise and smell yeasty, and I thought about leaving it overnight to really do its thing, but then, I thought, No, then I won't have baked bread today. So it's due out of the oven in 2 minutes. I'll tell you at the end of the post how it came out.

I will tell you now, though, that I mixed up a similar mixture tonight, to let it rise overnight and see how that is. And then I licked some dough off my finger. It. was. horrible. So bitter and terrible and punishing. I have no idea why it would taste like that, and I can't really remember if I've ever tasted the dough before, so I don't know if it always tastes like that, or what.

Timer's going off; I'll report back in a minute about the bread coming out of the oven now...

Here it is.

It's kind of short.

Came right out of the pan, though. Sounds hollow when I thump the bottom, that's a good sign.

Seems to be cooked...oh, yum. Not bitter.

Definitely kind of different. Hmmmmm. Better have another piece with butter and honey to really evaluate it properly.

The Big Rocks, Part III

I think I'm really going to get to the point this time. I have a good feeling about it.

Part of Gretchen Rubin's Happiness Project is/was keeping a resolutions chart. Like Ben Franklin and his  famous resolutions, she makes a list of resolutions, and scores herself on them daily. She explains pretty succinctly at that link why they work so well for her. I read the Happiness Project over New Year's weekend, and, though I think a Resolutions Chart would probably be useful to me, I did not make one.  I've never believed in New Year's resolutions, particularly, because I have always felt that I tried my best to do what I thought I should be doing all year round (not that I succeeded, but that I was trying) so there was no reason to make New Year's resolutions that, like diets, seem to be made to be broken.

So I continued my policy of not making resolutions, but I was obviously very inspired by what I read in her book (she appears in probably 1/3 of my posts, and a lot of what I write about has resulted from trying her suggestions), and I did jot down a list of things I thought of while reading that I thought would make me happier in the new year. It said:

• plenty project
• * time--slow down
• create at will
• be open to earning $$
• find people to play music with
• call friends; spend time with local friends; look for opportunities to create a network
• call not email
• reframe

In one of my first posts, I talked about reframing so that I would feel good about the few important things I had gotten done in a morning rather than focusing on the things I wasn't getting done. So this is where I am about to tie in the big rocks, but I have to stop for now. I'll try again later.

The Big Rocks, Part II

So, back to First Things First...

I would say the book is geared toward people who not only work, but for whom their career is very important. My career as an archivist, which is what my career was at the time when I read this book (and still is, in theory, anyway) was important to me, but not in a way where it was in danger of interfering with my personal life beyond the fact that I had to go to my job 40 hours a week and I was often worried about things related to work when I wasn't at work. So some of the things he suggested didn't really resonate with me.

Here was a problem I had: keeping our tiny kitchen clean. I kept wanting to put cleaning the kitchen in the Important And Urgent category because if everything is dirty and piled on the counter, it makes cooking dinner difficult or impossible, particularly for someone like me who is a morning person and can barely muster the will to go on after about 4 pm. (Either Mr. Covey does not do his own dishes, or he is one of those people who has plenty of energy after dinner and he just does them in 10 minutes, because he did not address this in his book.) 

But, my husband argued, doing dishes couldn't possibly be considered an Important thing! It had to be one of the either Urgent (to me) or Non-Urgent (to him) But Not Important things. But, I countered, cooking healthy meals is an important and worthwhile goal, and having a clean kitchen enables this.

Now that I am, for the time being, a stay-at-home mom, the past 5 years have felt at times like one long string of Unimportant things. Would Mr. Covey label putting away laundry as Important? How about making lunch? Wiping off the table? Getting dressed? Brushing teeth? Putting on shoes? And to top it off, for many people, being a stay-at-home parent often feels like a long string of Unimportant But Urgent Things That I Am Failing To Do because, somehow, for some people, taking care of a baby makes getting anything at all done feel nearly impossible. What a horrible feeling to have no big rocks even in play, and to be not even getting the pebbles and water into the jar.

Now, as I have mentioned before, it is time to reframe.

...and I will do that another day.

The big rocks, Part I

I keep starting posts but not having time to finish them. My goal is to write a little on the blog every day, even if it doesn't result in something actually being posted every day. I'll just keep plugging away and hopefully more things will get posted soon.

Years ago, back before we had kids or were even married, when my husband, Dr. J, and I lived in temperate Northern California, we thought we were busy. Once you have kids, you just shake your head and laugh because you thought you had no time before. Hahaha! Anyway, we both read a book by Stephen Covey et al. called First Things First. In it, Covey suggests identifying what is important in your life and identifying specific goals and activities related to these important things. The idea is that these important activities are often of a non-urgent nature, so they are always getting pushed aside by urgent-but-not-really-important things. For example, you would like to take your kid to the zoo, which is important because spending time with your kid is important to you, but since it's not urgent,* you keep putting it off so you can deal with other, non-important tasks that are urgent. You may even feel, as I would, that SOON, I will catch up on all these little tasks, and THEN I will have all the time in the world to spend some real quality time with my kid. Exercise could be another example. You feel it's important, but it CAN be put off for a day. But if you put it off for one day every day, it never happens.

The idea that you should identify what is important and do those things before all the little things on the list are done? That's golden. I have talked about that before on here and elsewhere, but not in a Covey way. 

So what you do instead, Mr. Covey says, is when you are scheduling your week, you put in these important-but-not-urgent activities into your schedule first, and then squeeze in the little things around them. Because once your schedule is full of little things, you can't fit in the big ones. His analogy is filling a jar with rocks and sand: if you put in the sand first, then the little rocks, the big ones don't fit, but if you put in the big rocks first, all the little stuff will fit in around them. Here's a YouTube video demonstrating this with actual rocks and sand. There are a million videos of it, but this one was short, if not very neatly done.

Gotta move on to another big rock. I'll continue this soon, I hope...

*unless you have this guilt-inducing song running through your head all the time, as I often do

Boule-y boule-y

Challenge Update: I took this picture the other day and now can't remember what I was going to say about it. But I am still baking bread! And tomorrow is the middle of the month! The Challenge is not as challenging as I was afraid it would be. It is just the right amount of challenge. The challenge really has been having a chance to blog about it or anything else. 

The computer is back with a new hard drive, but the challenge with that is that we upgraded the OS, and so it also has a new personality to go with its new brain, and so everything I try to do (merge mailing labels for a school mailing, sync the phone, etc.) takes about 50 times longer than I think it should. 

Seems like pictures on other people's blogs always look better than this one that I took with my phone. Oh, well. At least you can see that's it's bread. 

Giving

So as I think I said before, baking bread everyday has turned out to be the easy part. The hard part is the giving away. I now realize that I'm always afraid that even something intended as a kind gesture will be seen as intrusive or inappropriate.

I have had to fight my tendency to scuttle up to my target, ashamedly hand them a loaf of bread while muttering something about having extra bread, and running off. Not exactly in line with my intention of making friends, strengthening ties, and learning about Syracuse. For example, my idea for bringing bread to the Ronald McDonald House came from friends who had brought strawberries there once after picking more than they could eat themselves. But I don't know anything about the RMH AT ALL, other than that it seems like the parents staying there might need all the homebaked bread and freshly picked strawberries they can get. The lady at the Ronald McDonald House seemed very happy to receive the bread, but my husband and I are both surprised that a place like that, which I assume is run by a large organization with lawyers, etc., would accept bread from a stranger showing up at the door. I mean, what if I had poisoned it, and then a guest there ate some! I can't imagine why anyone would do that to people staying at the RMH, but corporations don't like to take chances. But did I ask, while I was there, if they could accept these kinds of donations and if it was actually something they encouraged so I would know next time I wanted to bring them something? I did not.

I have decided that "I made you some bread" is probably a better opening, even if I feel that it's not strictly true since I usually don't know who is going to get it when I'm making it. I'm not really telling people about my Challenge or the blog; not taking pictures of people I'm giving bread to. Just keeping track every day of what kind I make and who gets it.

In another post I'll list who's been given bread as well as my recipe, because it's wicked easy, and you should totally try it.

Ronald McDonald House

I just brought a loaf of bread to the Ronald McDonald House! This was my first loaf delivered to strangers. I was scared, but they didn't look at me crosseyed or call the police. They thanked me heartily and cheerfully. And I went on my way, feeling heartened and cheerful myself.

FBC update and Intro to Treats

It is now Feburary 6, and I have so far made bread every day of February. Every day but yesterday, I have given a loaf away. Yesterday we had friends over and ate most of a loaf together, so I'm counting that.

Here are my thoughts so far:

• baking bread every day has not really been a hassle because I am doing it in a very stripped down way most days
• so far, I have not made any new friends by giving away bread
• since I often vary the variables (kinds of flour; amount of yeast, etc.) if I make one loaf in a day and give it away, I have no way to be certain if it's cooked through, if it's not as dense as a brick, etc.
• people seem very pleased to be given a fresh loaf of bread, even if you tell them you're not sure how it is because it comes out a little different every time: the pediatrician was so touched gave me a big hug
• I can overthink ANYTHING

Last winter when I first started making bread, fresh bread warm from the oven with plenty of butter was such a treat, that we would eat a bunch of it every time I made it. That, it turns out, is a really good way to get fat. Eventually, since I wasn't making every day, I got into the mindset that it would be good if we didn't run out of it right away, and so we got into the mindset of saving the bread, but not too long, because bread with no fat in it doesn't stay fresh forever. So it became a little bit of a rationing and controlling mindset about the bread. Not that I was denying anyone bread, but my approach changed from  "gobble it up (and get fat)" to "save it (and end up eating some pretty stale bread)."

I realized this the first couple of days of this month when I made 2 loaves each day, so we would have one to eat and one to give away. Knowing that there would be more bread the next day really put me  back in the "let's eat all the bread now!" mindset. Fresh bread became a treat again because I wasn't having a scarcity mindset about it.

But I wonder: does something you have every day really count as a treat?

My First World Problems

Two days ago I was pumped up and primed to tell you all about Day 2 of the February Bread Challenge, and how hard it was for me because I was, as usual, overthinking everything and just couldn't figure out who would be best to give that day's bread to. But these tribulations are a story for another day. So there I am, logging onto my year-and-a-half-old iMac, and it keeps rejecting my password. A few restarts later, it became clear something was very wrong. Trying to get the computer working again has eaten up a bunch of time over the past couple of days and it still isn't working; even if it does start to work, there may be damage to the hard drive (the desk-ish thing we bought at IKEA to house the computer may not have allowed for enough ventilation, and we may have fried the hard drive). Plus, although we had backups of most of the stuff on it, there may be some very old things that weren't backed up, but we aren't really sure. You know, it's been a pain.

When you start a blog, (and when I say "you," of course, I mean, "I") you are putting yourself out there, open to criticism and distain from, well, anyone around the world who has access to the Internet. You start to imagine who might read what you say, and how someone in a different situation than yours might judge you, say, for writing about trivial matters while people are starving.

I don't know if it was this vulnerability to judgement that got me thinking about First World Problems --problems you have to live in a rich country to even imagine-- or if it was an article called "Half the world's richest 1% live in the United States" that my cousin-in-law, who works for the World Bank, posted on Facebook. Here is a quote that has been sticking with me:

In the grand scheme of things, even the poorest 5% of Americans are better off financially than two thirds of the entire world.

I do not post this to trivialize the very real problems of Americans living in poverty. But wow. That is really saying something almost incomprehensible about 2/3 of the people in the world.

As always, The Onion really gets to the crux of the matter in this Point/Counterpoint, although once you get to the second half the humor really drains away.

The problem of the IKEA desk with poor ventilation is, of course, a First World Problem. As my husband put it, I have it so hard because one of the 3 computers in the house may have died (here I  disclaim: "the other 2 computers are old and we don't really use them anymore; I don't want you to get the impression that we use 3 computers in our house! I mean, unless someone in visiting, and my husband brings his work laptop home...") and the iPhone and 2 iPods ("one of those we got free when we bought our iMac!" I protest; "good heavens, it's not like we BOUGHT 2 iPods!"), are so hard to type on, how will I ever post to my blog?

And pretty much all of the problems I have addressed on this blog are First World Problems. "Oh, I have SO MANY CLOTHES in my closet, it just makes me feel like I  have NOTHING!" "Oh, I own 2 houses (disclaimer: not outright; we have mortgages), if only I could just SELL one and be DONE with it!" "Oh, I have to CHOOSE which TV to buy but there are TOO MANY OPTIONS!" "Oh, I have SO MUCH BREAD! How will I EVER give it all away!" Please. It's disgraceful.

But is it really simply that I'm a selfish boor? I think it's maybe part of human nature. From the Wikipedia entry for hedonic treadmill:

The hedonic treadmill, also known as hedonic adaptation, is the supposed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes.^[1] According to this theory, as a person makes more money, expectations and desires rise in tandem, which results in no permanent gain in happiness. 

So maybe it's not our fault, per se, that we think Cracker Barrel running out of Chicken and Rice on a Saturday night is a major problem. Maybe we in the first world are no shallower than those in the world who have, literally, nothing. Just a whole lot luckier to live where we live.

And now, if you feel like you need to assuage some First World Guilt, here's a link to Heifer International.

February Bread Challenge, Day 1

I'm not going to post about this day-by-day, I don't think, because then I'd never post about anything else. But since it's the first day...

I mixed up dough for 2 loaves last night and figured out how I could come down at 5:50 when the alarm goes off, put the dough into pans and stick it in the oven. Then, using the "time bake" feature on our 1988 oven, not have to do anything else until taking it out of the oven at 7:30. This is a new routine, and that is one thing I hope to get out of this project: incentive to try new ways to bake bread--improvements, shortcuts, etc.--to see what works and what doesn't, thereby expanding my skills and knowledge. One thing I learned is that it can be hard to know if the oven's on when you're using "time bake", but if you start twiddling knobs in a panic, you are likely to turn off the oven and not realize it until later, at which point you will have no idea how long your bread has baked at what temperature. Another thing I learned is that you can turn the oven back on and guess about the time and the bread will still come out yummy.

Now, the other part of the challenge is what to do with all the bread. My lovely, generous, deserving friend Tina, whom I have mentioned before in regards to laundry, came over for tea and a visit this morning, and I thought giving her a loaf of bread would be the perfect start to this project, since the first time I met her and her partner and her daughter was when they signed up through the local mom's listserve and brought a meal to us after we had our baby after we moved here and knew no one. They are stunningly giving and ready to help other people in need. I am working on being more like them, but I have an awfully long way to go. Long story short: Tina's partner has celiac disease, and Tina thought it would take her forever to eat a loaf of bread, so we ate some together, and I'm going to give the other loaf to...someone else. 

Unresolved questions re: goals and procedures for FBC: is it that I'm making bread (loosely defined as either something with yeast OR a flatbread) every day? Or is it that I am giving away bread every day? Or both? I'm not sure. And I am thinking right now I will do it every day of the month, but we'll see how I feel on the weekend. Or tomorrow. I'm not making any promises here.

And, what the heck. I'll post a picture of the bread.

February Bread Challenge begins...

NOW

To paraphrase my favorite quote from The Matrix: We're gonna need flour. Lots of flour.

Choice Part IV

So to wrap up the choice thing, at least for now, here are some things that help me to feel a sense of abundance, happiness, and peace resulting from a purchase, rather than, say, guilt or anger.

1. feel good about my choice and not distracted by "missed opportunities"
2. feel like the amount I paid for it is in line with the need it fills or problem it solves AND how much I think it should cost; this last one pretty much always requires a coupon
3. use the item--not leave it sitting in the closet collecting dust because I either hate it or am trying to "save" it
4. feel like it serves me well and fulfills its expected purpose until my need of it runs out
5. use it up; wear it out: like my jeans that I've worn several days a week for 2 years now; I feel like I've gotten my money's worth vs. three different plastic pieces broke off our vaccuum in the first 2.5 years, so it doesn't really work like it's supposed to, but it sort of works, but it would cost more to fix than to get a new one; I have very uncharitable feelings toward the vacuum
6. if there's anything left of the item, I can pass it on to someone else who can use it

If I can use something up and get a lot of mileage out of something, I am actually excited to buy another (as long as they still make it, whatever it is!). No need to optimize a choice, and I have proven to myself that it won't sit unused.

Choice Part III

So. As I was saying.
Too many choices (in your closet, in your cabinet, at the store, on the playroom shelves) can result in

• second guessing
• focusing on missed opportunities 
• overlooking the positive aspects of the final decision
• less satisfaction with whatever we choose
• getting overwhelmed and making no choice at all (this can be good or bad, depending on the choice!)
• distraction from the goals behind the choice (and the pertinent criteria)
• stress
• overbuying (if I don't really know what I have and don't really feel like what I have is satisfying my needs)

And I feel that all these things really snuff out feelings of abundance. They make it difficult or impossible to appreciate and use what we have. To be satisfied with what we have, and to be grateful for what we have. To feel like we have what we need. To feel like we have enough.