fauxklore

In the course of some living room archaeology, I found what I hope was the last of a bunch of notebooks I’d used during my working years and shredded all of the pages of it. But I did want to make a note of a few things from it. (Last in terms of finding it, not last chronologically, by the way.)

First, there is this picture. It captures a couple of types of my usual doodles. I never understood how people could sit in a meeting and not have a writing implement in constant motion. I did sometimes take copious notes, but there were plenty of margins - and, sometimes, complete pages - filled with either branching lines or what amount to glorified stick figures. My other common doodles involved elaborate interlocking boxes.

I also captured a few quotes:

"We are out of money, so now we must think." - Winston Churchill

I won’t identify the sources for these three, because the names won’t mean anything to you and might embarrass the people involved.

"You’re in the business of creating lies we believe."

"When you talk money, I’m awake."

"I would say I’m a theoretician, but really I’m just inept."

The last one is right up there with the most self-aware thing I ever heard anyone say. To wit, "I know I’m right, but nobody will listen to me because I’m a jerk."

Finally, my boss used to ask me to cover his boss’s staff meetings sometimes. This was over the phone since those meetings were in Los Angeles, while I was in the D.C. area. People were not always good about identifying themselves and I didn’t recognize all of the voices. Which led to my writing notes that say things like "an unknown Asian woman said something went well over the weekend." Somehow, I doubt that my boss found that particularly useful information.

Oh, yes, I love being retired.

I do actually do things when I’m home sometimes.

Whoops: Stories About Mistakes: I was part of this Better Said Than Done storytelling show at Clare and Don’s Beach Shack in Falls Church. The show was sold out, but that is mostly because it’s a tiny place. The show was wonderful. I was telling a new story about my terrible sense of direction. And, given the theme, it was appropriate that I left out two prime examples of this. The more notorious example among many of my friends has to do with the time I couldn’t find the rental car return at La Guardia Airport, so I drove to the airport terminal and followed an Avis bus. The other one involves why GPS does not actually help. Still, I got plenty of laughs with what I did remember to include. (By the way, I told the story again at the Voices in the Glen story swap this weekend and did better with it, though it still needs more refinement.)

I also got a photo of myself that I don't actually hate.

The Usual Stuff: Knitting Group. A Grimm Keepers discussion of The White Bride and the Black Bride, which Tim informed us is based partly on a story about Bertha Broadfoot, the mother of Charlemagne. My Litvak (Lithuanian Jewish) mentoring session, in which I was able to help a couple of people with South African records. My on-line needles and crafts group. Two nights of playing board games. The afore mentioned Voices in the Glen story swap. The Crones and Tomes book club discussion of Lessons in Chemistry which the group was strongly divided about. (For the record, I loved it.)

Lots of Yarn: Last Monday, I went over to my friend, Kim’s, house to help her go through her yarn stash, which proved to be much larger than she thought it was. I explained to her how to calculate if she had enough of a given yarn for a pattern, which needs to be based on yardage of a skein, not weight. And I ended up taking four huge bags home, some of which I will use, but much of which I will give away.

By the way, going over to other people’s houses makes me feel better about my level of clutter at home.

Mindplay: Sunday night, Cindy and I went to see Mindplay at Arena Stage. This is a very weird one man show by Vinny DePonto that is a mixture of mentalism and his personal story about dealing with his grandfather’s dementia, which got him interested in how memory work. Much of the show involves audience participation. Before the show, everyone is asked to fill out a slip of paper with a question on it and put it into an envelope on which they write their first name, last initial, and seat number. We verified that we did not have the same question, though I don’t know how many different questions there are. The show opens with a phone ringing on the stage and a person coming up to answer it and relay things to the audience. When I saw a review of a previous production (in Los Angeles), it suggested that the person who did this was randomly chosen from the audience, but a slip in the program we got suggested it was the stage manager and gave her biography. She seemed to be unprepared for things that happened, but maybe she’s just a good actress. Anyway, much of the show consisted of DePonto’s interactions with random people in the audience and I was definitely in the “please don’t call on me” mode. He started with throwing balloons into the audience - and his first attempt at choosing someone that way was a failure since the person who caught the marked balloon clearly didn’t speak English well and he had to ask them to throw the balloon to someone else. He asked some questions and then had that person pop the balloon and reveal a paper inside that had exactly the answers they’d given. I found that to be a definite “how did he do that? moment.

There were other audience interactions that were along the same lines, where he asked someone a question and appeared to have predicted their answer. He also talked about memory and introduced the concept of a memory palace, which I was familiar with from the excellent book Moonwalking With Einstein by Joshua Foer. Incidentally, I have some issues with that technique because visual memory is much weaker for me than other sensory modes. For example, I am sitting in my living room right now and I cannot tell you what color my carpet is without looking. At any rate, he demonstrated his memory techniques by having a few audience members lead him to mnemonics for state capitals - and, apparently, couldn’t remember one of them, though I suspect (partly based on something at the end of the show) that this failure may have been contrived. It was more impressive that he could recite a random section from the complete works of Shakespeare verbatim. Incidentally, I was mildly annoyed that he mispronounced the word “mnemonic” as if it were “pneumonic.”

That was entertaining enough, but some of his other audience interactions made me uncomfortable. He said up front that he would not make any of the people he invited up on the stage uncomfortable or embarrassed, but I cringed at some of the things he elicited from them. He brought one woman to tears by getting her to talk about her deceased godmother. And, cringiest of all, had another woman talk about peeing her pants in public when she was small.

There were also a lot of complicated interactions with the set, which I don’t feel capable of describing. Overall, I was mostly entertained, but I hesitate to recommend this because of the cringe factor. And, of course, you can’t really know what to expect because so much depends on the audience members who get pulled on stage at any given performance.

WTF, Facebook: I was attempting to comment on a post about Samoa to note that, according to T-Mobil’s website, they do offer unlimited texting and data at 256 kbps in Samoa with many of their plans, but that American Samoa is not one of the 215 countries they include. And Facebook took down that comment as being against their community standards on spam because “it looks like you tried to get likes, follows, shares or video views in a misleading way.” Huh?

Nielsen: I might not have opened this envelope, but I could see two dollar bills through the window in it. It turned out to be asking for an adult resident to fill out a brief survey in exchange for a $5 gift card. It’s not a lot of money, obviously, but it only took a few minutes and I got paid right away. I chose an Amazon gift card, on the grounds that there is always something I could use there.

I think this will get me caught up on everything up until this month.

I’ve been using the same format for my year in review entries for several years now. It seems to work. Note that I took off the Volksmarch category this time since it’s been a couple of years since I managed to actually do anything there.

2023 started out stressful with mail being stolen, including a check which was washed and used fraudulently and a credit card which had to be replaced. It all got resolved, but I could have lived without the stress. There was a lot of stress later in the year, with the incompetence of the person at the local Social Security office who sat on my Medicare application for over two months without doing anything. That took way too many phone calls to get resolved. And, of course, there was the whole Middle East situation to make 2023 the Age of Anxiety.

Fortunately, things were otherwise good during the year.

Books: I read 53 books over the year. 39 of those were fiction, 3 were poetry, and the rest were nonfiction. Only 3 were rereads.

Favorites included Our Ancestors Did Not Breathe This Air (a poetry collection by Muslim women at MIT), Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozu Adichie, The Ghostwriter by Alessandra Torre, and The Caxton Private Lending Library and Book Depository by John Connolly. I also read 6 novels by Dick Francis, whose books provide a reliable antidote to ones in which not enough happens to keep me satisfied. Favorite non-fiction was The Best Strangers in the World by Ari Shapiro. Least favorite book was Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen.

I got rid of 39 books and have at least another 33 ready to go out.

In addition to my longstanding book club (called READ for Read, Enjoy, And Discuss), I joined another book club, Crones and Tomes, which was started by a friend from the puzzle world.

Other book events included the Moby Dick Marathon in New Bedford, Massachusetts, which was an amazing experience, and a talk by Ari Shapiro at Sixth and I.

Ghoul Pool: I finished 4th out of 14 players, with 220 points. People I scored on were Naomi Replanski, Steve Harrell, Bob Barker, Tony Bennett, Al Jaffee, John Goodenough, Robert Solow, Daniel Ellsberg, Sandra Day O’Connor, James L. Buckley, W. Nicholas Hitchon, and David Oreck.

Travel: In January, I went to New Bedford, Massachusetts for the Moby Dick Marathon. In February, I went to Tucson, which included going to Saguaro National Park and Biosphere 2, as well as winning some money at a casino. March included a trip to New York City to go to the symphony and the theatre and visit with a high school friend. April’s travel was to Connecticut for the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.

In May I took a river cruise, which included going to the Kentucky Derby. The Derby arrangements were kind of a fiasco, but the stops at various small towns were a lot more interesting than I expected.

June took me to Svalbard, which featured amazing scenery, though the wildlife (or, more accurately, lack thereof) was disappointing. This was somewhere I’d wanted to go to forever, so I am glad to have had the opportunity.

In July, I went to Montreal for the NPL con. That also included eating a lot of Montreal Jewish food and following in the footsteps of Leonard Cohen. Later in the month, I leveraged off a genealogy conference in London to take a trip to Ireland (including a day trip to Belfast) and the Isle of Man. That included fulfilling a life list item by having a beer at the South Pole Inn in Anascaul. After the conference, I did a few more things in London, including side trips to Canterbury and to Ipswich and Sutton Hoo. Soon after I got back, I took a quick trip to New York City for Lollapuzzoola and theatre going.

LoserFest was in Philadelphia in September. Highlights included the Masonic Temple and the Magic Gardens.

In October, I took a quick trip to San Antonio for the annular solar eclipse, which was awesome. While I was there, I also did a day trip to the Hill Country, where I saw several sites associated with Lyndon B. Johnson, as well as visiting the town of Fredericksburg. Later in the month I went to Boston, mostly to go to a concert by Jonathan Richman.

I’m not sure if taking a day trip to Harrisonburg, Virginia in November counts as travel. But my trip to French Polynesia (Austral Islands and Aranui cruise to the Marquesas) definitely does.

Virtual travel talks I went to included one on Jewish Barbados and a few Travelers’ Century Club zoom sessions. There were also a few in-person TCC meetings.

Puzzles: I participated once again in the MIT Mystery Hunt as part of Halibut That Bass. I think the team worked particularly well together, but we had some issues with the way the hunt was structured, which resulted in our seeing only about half of the puzzles.

I was disappointed in my performance in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. I finished solidly in the middle of the pack and I wasn’t surprised to have trouble with Puzzle 5, but I left a blank square in Puzzle 3, which was sheer carelessness. I did worse at Lollapuzzoola 16 in August, because I failed to completely read parts of some clues in Puzzle 5 there. I blame jet lag from my trip just before that event.

As I mentioned above, I went to the National Puzzlers’ League Con in Montreal. Highlights included a couple of games by Cute Mage, as well as Rasa’s over the weekend cryptic.

Genealogy: I continued to volunteer as the Subject Matter Expert for a Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Washington Litvak Special Interest Group. I also went to several JGSGW virtual meetings. And, of course, I went to the IAJGS conference in London at the end of July / beginning of August. Aside from several interesting talks, the highlight of that was meeting a distant cousin.

Baseball: I went to a little bit of a Nationals game in May, but it got rained out. In September I went to the new Texas Rangers stadium (Globe Life Field), putting me back at having been to a game at every Major League Ballpark. I also went to two minor league ballparks to see the Aberdeen Ironbirds and the Fredericksburg Nationals.

Culture: I’m not a big television watcher but I kept Apple TV+ long enough to watch Schmigadoon and Schmicago, both of which were tremendous fun for musical theatre geeks like me.

In terms of movies, I saw 18 overall, 4 of which were in theaters, with the rest on airplanes. Favorites were A Man Called Otto, In the Heights, Blackberry, Cocaine Bear, Searching for Sugar Man, Barbie, and Remembering Gene Wilder. Most disappointing was Weird: The Al Yancovic Story.

I went to 5 Gilbert and Sullivan operettas at the G&S International Festival in England, with the best production being of Ruddigore. I went to two other operas, both by Jeanine Tesori (Blue and Grounded). I also saw two ballets and one modern dance performance, with the ballet of The Crucible being the most satisfying. As far as classical music goes, I saw the National Symphony Orchestra twice and was privileged to see Michael Tilson Thomas conduct the New York Philharmonic. The only popular music concert I went to was one by Jonathan Richman, who is always wonderful.

I saw 14 plays and 9 musicals, assuming I counted correctly. Favorite plays were All Things Equal (about Ruth Bader Ginsburg), The Lifespan of a Fact at Keegan Theatre, Selling Kabul at Signature Theatre, and The Pillowman, which is a Martin McDonagh play I saw in London. I also loved The Enigmatist, which is a mixture of comedy. magic, and puzzles and, hence, I consider sui generis. Top musicals were In the Heights at Next Stop Theatre Company, Signature Theatre’s production of Pacific Overtures. and Shucked and Kimberly Akimbo on Broadway.

Storytelling: I went to several storytelling shows, including one by my Grimmkeepers group. I performed in two shows for Artists Standing Strong Together, and also told at the C&O Canal Visitor Center with Voices in the Glen, at the Washington Folk Festival, and in a Better Said Than Done show at the Stagecoach Theatre. Some other shows I particularly enjoyed were Ingrid Nixon’s show about Shackleton and several of the performances at the National Storytelling Festival. And, of course, the Women’s Storytelling Festival (which I also emceed at) os always a highlight of the year.

On a rather different note, the Grimmkeepers discussions about the Grimm fairy tales continue to be enlightening and enriching.

Museums and Art: I went to 32 museums over the year. Highlights included the New Bedford Glass Museum, the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, two exhibitions of miniatures (the Mini Time Machine Museum in Tucson and the Small is Beautiful exhibit in New York), the MIT Museum, the Virginia Quilt Museum, and the Museum of Failure. I also really enjoyed seeing the Book of Kells, the Manx Museum, and Sutton Hoo during my travels in July. My absolute favorite for the year was the Museum of Broadway.

Other Stuff: On New Year’s Day, my friend, Cindy, and I went to the Winter Lantern Festival at Tyson’s, which was impressive.

I went to various Loser events, including the post-Post Loser Party, the Flushes, LoserFest. I should probably count Poetry and Punchlines (a poetry reading associated with Light, which is a magazine of light verse) as a Loser event, too.

My crafting group changed to meeting on-line every other Thursday and in person at one members house on the weeks in between. I make it when I can. Similarly, I occasionally managed to get to my other (mostly) knitting group, which meets at the police station twice a month.

I went to a virtual organizing conference in September, which was moderately useful.

I played board games a few times a week, when I was home. Yes, sometimes I was home.

Goals: So how did I do on my 2023 goals? I went through maybe 10% of the photos from my parents and realized I have no idea where I put the slides, so I’ll give myself a 10% there. I did go to some sort of lecture or other formal educational event, either in person or on-line, every month, so I get 100% there. I get full credit (i.e. 100%) for taking 4 international trips. I finished only 1 craft project, so only get 33% there, though I did make progress on two others. I read 53 books, out of a goal of 75, so get 71% there. I get 100% credit for going to three new (to me) ballparks. I made it to at least one museum each month so get 100% on that goal. I only went to one national park, so get 33% on that goal. And I averaged significantly less than a half hour every day on housework, so I’ll give myself 10% there. Averaging things out, I’ll give myself a 62% on the year, which is not great but not terrible either.

Which brings me to goals for 2024:

Circumnavigate the globe going westward. The backstory is that way back in 2000, I did an eastward circumnavigation, from Los Angeles to Russia via Germany by plane, overland through Siberia to Mongolia and to China, and back to Los Angeles by plane. I’ve got ideas for how I want to do the westward circle.
Go to at least 3 national parks.
Clean out my saved files of genealogy related emails.
Read 80 books with a stretch goal of 125.
Finish organizing my bedroom.
Finish 3 afghans.
Find and sort through my parents’ slides.
Go to games at at least 4 AAA ballparks.
Exercise for at least 20 minutes at least 3 times a week, with a stretch goal of at least 30 minutes at least 4 times a week.

Español: Estoy estudiando español con Duolingo para mas de 365 días. Yo lo disfruto mucho. Pero todavía no sabe muchas palabras. Porque mi vocabulario es tan poco, no entiendo todas las conversaciones que oi en el tren, por example. Leo mejor que yo escucho, y entiendo la mayoría de los avisos veo. Me parece que es una buena idea para viajar a Guatemala y practicar allí.

In other words: I feel like I’ve made a fair amount of progress on understanding Spanish, but my vocabulary is limited and my grammar is weak. I don’t really understand when one should use which form of the past tense and I am completely mystified by the subjunctive. The main thing I try to bear in mind is that my goal is to be able to make myself understood and that doesn’t really require proper good grammar. I can certainly manage to read ads in Spanish reasonably well and I can understand about 1/3 to 1/2 of the conversations I overhear (on the train, for example).

Pantry Archaeology: I was looking for where my baking powder had gotten to this morning, since I want to do some baking today. It turned out to be exactly where it was supposed to be. But the idea of looking for it triggered a pantry clean-out and I found five items which I’ve listed on buy nothing. Two of those are things that I bought for one recipe which I later decided not to make. Two were things I tried but didn’t care for. The last one is the funniest one. It’s a small jar of sour salt (citric acid) that I brought home from my mother’s house when we were cleaning it out after she died just about 9 years ago. It had never been opened and, in fact, it may have actually been bought by my grandmother or one of my great-aunts and never opened by them. I was once explaining this to a fellow storyteller, which led to a discussion of family relics and their possible folkloric significance.

I’m giving the Buy Nothing folks until the weekend, after which I’ll toss anything that isn’t claimed.

By the way, I am keeping a list of things I give away, to encourage further dishoarderly conduct.

Medicare: Still waiting. I called the Social Security office on Friday and, after waiting on hold nearly an hour, the person I spoke to said, “oh, it normally takes two months and I don’t see any issues so you should get your medicare card any day now.” In other words, the guy at the office who made the copies of my birth certificate and passport over a month lied to me when he told me it should take just about a week. Aargh.

Speaking of Customer Service Failures: I have a trip coming up in December for which I have been working with a travel agent in Canada for complicated reasons, related to the person I am traveling with. Anyway, she was supposed to send the rest of the vouchers in late October, so I sent her an email the other day asking when I would get them. And I got back an email that she is out of her office indefinitely. I did contact the colleague who that email referred me to, who basically told me that she’ll talk to her about it. This has reminded me of why I normally prefer making my own travel arrangements.

Ah, good, I just got an email from her that told me it would be a month before the trip, Which is not for a few days. She is checking.

Favorite Next Door Poat of the Week: “Is this fox carrying a soccer ball? Why?”

Other Stuff I Did in the Past Week: I only made it to the first half hour or so of the READ Book Club, because it conflicted with the Litvak Genealogy group that I’m the subject matter expert for. My life is a schedule conflict.

I played code names on line with friends three times. It's good for practicing my bickering skills. How can I possibly have friends who think "The Cask of Amontillado" is a Sherlock Holmes story? (And one of those friends saw me drink a glass of amontillado just a couple of weeks ago!)

I went to both of my crafting groups. One was virtual on Thursday and the other was in person yesterday. I am making progress on my Tunisian crochet afghan but need to put in a lot more time if I really want to finish it this year.

The group I didn’t go with to see the annular eclipse had a briefing on their observing results. It would have been a great trip, but it didn’t work out. And my San Antonio trip worked out fine, as well as being much less expensive.

I've had a pretty sociable week.

Storytelling Show: Saturday night’s storytelling show went well. We had a good and responsive audience. The venue was easier to get to than I expected it to be. And they had an excellent sound system. My story went okay, but I left out a couple of things I had planned to say, but so it goes.

Medicare: I had my appointment on Monday to go down to the Social Security office to show them my proof of age. I am sure that I clicked the “I have an appointment” button on their check-in kiosk, but somehow it gave me a number for a drop-in, instead of an appointment. Which meant that I ended up waiting much longer than I should have. But I got everything sorted and should have my Medicare card any day now. I still need to get my Social Security account on-line sorted. They could reset my password, but not my cell phone number for two-factor authentication. So I had to fill in the stuff on-line that has them send me something to fix that. (Last night, I stumbled upon the piece of paper on which I’d written down my password, but the old cell phone number would still have been a problem.) What is particularly annoying is that, if I hadn’t set up the account a long time ago, I could have circumvented all of that, because I could have logged in using my login.gov account, which I set up to get global entry.

Knitting Group: We normally meet at the police station, but the community room gets used for early voting, so we were at Wegman’s instead. We had a good group, with two new people. I’m making progress on my Tunisian crochet afghan, but it may not be completely done by the end of the year. It’s still a good project for social crafting as it is pretty brainless. Also, I brought some knitting pattern books from the 1950’s to give away and Tom took two of them.

Needles and Crafts: My other crafting group, which meets on line, had been on hiatus over the summer and just started up again yesterday afternoon It was great seeing everyone and I got some more done on the afghan. We’ll actually be meeting at a member’s house on alternate weeks, which is, of course, less convenient, especially because she lives in darkest Maryland.

Buy Nothing: I got rid of three things last week. So far this week, I got rid of one item (two furnace filters that were the wrong size) and am waiting for someone to pick up another thing (a trivet made of wine corks.)

Baseball: I had been rooting for the Marlins, primarily because I think Kim Ng is cool, but, oh well. (She is being talked about for the BoSox GM job.) I find the Dodgers the most tolerable of the teams who are left. The Twins are okay, I suppose. I wouldn’t mind the Phillies so much (I do like their GM, Sam Fuld), but I hate mascots in general and the Phanatic is the worst of the worst of them. I detest the Orioles because of all the effort their leadership put into trying to keep Washington from getting a team, as well as their failure to sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” during the 7th inning stretch.

Genealogy: Wednesday night was the Litvak genealogy group I am the subject matter expert for. One of the good discussion topics had to do with what resources are worth paying for. My opinion is that it is perfectly fine not to renew relatively expensive sites like Ancestry and My Heritage until you need to use them. They don’t delete your account, so you can start up again when it makes sense to.

I saw a Facebook ad for a Get Organized conference, held on-line from 11-15 September. While there was an option to pay for unlimited access, I thought that the free access to the sessions (which was only good for 24 hours for each one) would be good enough for me. I didn’t make it to all the sessions I wanted to because I had important things to do (errand running, reading, napping), but I did make it to several. As one might expect, some were not really helpful, but there were some excellent tidbits mixed in. By the way, most of the sessions were on the order of 20 minutes or so, which was certainly more tractable than a full hour would have been.

Monday

On Monday I started by going to Decluttering for Beginners by Donna K. White. I don’t really consider myself a beginner seeing as I’ve been attempting to declutter for years, but I certainly haven’t made huge amounts of progress. My key takeaway was that organizing and decluttering are not the same thing. Organizing is problem solving, while decluttering is just getting things out of the house. She defined clutter as anything that consistently gets out of control in your house. You need to declutter first in order to get organized. The key is to just jump in.

She had what she said was a 5 step decluttering process. I’m not sure I actually captured her five things, there. But here’s what I caught:

Start with visible places, not hidden spaces. In my case, this means that I am free to ignore the filing cabinets.
The goal isn’t to store things but to give everything a real place to live. You should ask, “if I needed this item, where’s the first place I’d look for it.” This should be based on instinct, instead of analysis.
Give yourself permission to ignore emotional associations that things have.
Take things to where they belong now.
The goal should be to make the space better. Removing anything from the space counts as decluttering.

Overall, as a person who tends toward the perfect as the enemy of good enough, this was reasonably useful advice.

After that, I went to the Kickoff, which had been presented earlier in the day by Laura Smith and Tasha Lorentz, who ran the whole conference. They said some similar things. Namely, being organized requires everything to have a home. They advised beginning with the end in mind and focusing on what makes you smile. They also advised focusing on a few small things. Finally, they suggested that the way not to get overwhelmed by the conference was to prioritize watching the live events, instead of the prerecorded ones.

Next I went to How to Assess Your Routine to Avoid Overhauling Your Entire Life by Ashley Brown. I think part of my issues are that years of school and work imposed routines on me and I haven’t really established routines since I retired. She claimed that everyone does have routines, but I think I would say it would be more accurate that everybody has areas of life that should have routines, e.g. self-care, cleaning, planning, cooking, etc. Some of my takeaways were:

Identify what routines will be most supportive for you to focus on and focus on one at a time.
The goal is to solve consistent problems using consistent solutions.
Use feeling vs. fact to decide where to start. Identify which areas of life feel chaotic and out of control and which make you feel anxious or stressed.
Lead with curiosity. Pay attention to how routines make you feel.

The final presentation I watched on Monday was Chaos to Calm: Uncovering the Roots of Clutter and Creating a Peaceful Home by Katy Joy Wells. She identified several common causes of clutter and suggested how to deal with them.

Procrastination is really about avoiding stress, not the thing itself. Identify what you’re really avoiding and implement a starting ritual countdown to begin the task.
How we perceive value is not necessarily the real value. Some examples are frequency with which we use something, how difficult it would be to replace, emotional attachment, monetary value, and potential usefulness. It helps to reference your core values as a person, e.g. simplicity.
Scarcity mindset vs. abundance mindset. The search for a good deal is associated with a scarcity mindset, as is keeping things in case we might need them later on. She suggested writing affirmations and keeping them where you see them and reading them out loud, which is the sort of thing I absolutely loathe. More usefully, she noted that it’s hard to get rid of things that represent who you used to be (e.g. college textbooks) and who you want to be.
Mainstream culture pushes acquiring things. To deal with this, focus on shopping more intentionally
Perfectionism, which leads to shame. Instead, remind yourself that your home should get messy and just because it’s not optimal doesn’t mean it isn’t beneficial.

By the way, there was a mid-day meet up every day, which included 10 minutes to focus on decluttering one type of thing. Monday’s was clothing. This is actually an area that isn’t a problem for me, so I used to time to try to clear out some email, which is a problem for me.

Tuesday

The first session I went to on Tuesday was Three Easy Things to Declutter in Each Room by The Carla Project. I had a significant issue with this presentation because she went room by room and asked people to find 25 things to declutter in each room. She did have some example suggestions which were, in some cases, just three categories of things (e.g. for the bathroom, she suggested packaging, anything expired, and anything you don’t like). But, overall, I thought this was misleading and not particularly useful.

Next up was Time Management Tips for Empty Nesters by Suzy Mighell. I’m not really an empty nester since I was never actually a nester per se, but I’m in the right age group. There were a few potentially useful takeaways:

Don’t make decisions when you are Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired = HALT. (Advice givers and self-help types love acronyms.)
Make lists every evening for the following day.
Only start things you know you can finish. Keep your schedule realistic and don’t compare yourself to other people.

Tracy Linn presented Organize Your Home With a Home Hub. She defined this as a a designated place for coordinating events. She showed some options for types of calendars. Things she included in planning are calendar, scheduler, chores, cleaning lists, and menus, and suggested identifying the top 5-8 areas you plan to streamline. Frankly, her presentation skills were not great, e.g. she didn’t know how to screen share, so I wasn’t impressed.

The Tuesday mid-day 10 minute decluttering challenge was a 10-minute tidy up. I spent a little time going through a backlog of unopened snail mail. Given how much I am away from home, that is an ongoing issue for me.

Wednesday

I started with watching Three Steps to a Sparkling Home by Becky Rapinchuk Her main point was that you should just start and do something. Then she did go on with her three steps.

Quick declutter. She suggested aiming for 5 bags of trash in 15 minutes, which seems like an awful lot to me.
Then clean the kitchen sink. Since I’m a “wash dishes as I go” type of person, this is about a one minute task.
Finally, catch-up on laundry. This is actually another non-issue for me. I do my laundry roughly every 1-2 weeks, depending on how much I’m home and I always put everything away right afterwards.

She went on to daily and weekly task lists. While there are many things I could definitely stand to do more often (e.g. nature abhors a vacuum and so do I), her issues were not the same as mine. I did like her statement that consistency is the key, but, overall, her talk wasn’t particularly relevant for me.

Organizing Your Photos by Casey von Stein (aka Miss Freddy) was definitely one of the best sessions of the conference. Her advice was the start with digital photos and write a list of everywhere your photos are. Ideally, you want your digital photo hub to be on an external hard drive. Then follow these 4 steps:

Centralize all your photos in one place (this is the digital photo hub). You can use copy and paste to do this.
Get rid of duplicates.
Sort. Note that software can do steps 2 and 3.
Back-up. Best practice is to have 3 copies. She suggested hard drive, one copy off site (the cloud counts), and services like Amazon photos or dropbox.

Then you can create albums, photo books, and custom videos. Note that albums reference photos but don’t create additional copies. After the digital photos are organized, scan printed photos. It’s also worth playing with facial recognition and keyword search. She also mentioned having a consistent naming scheme.

She also suggested doing a daily clean-up, which seems excessive to me. It’s a good idea to save screenshots to your notes app rather than keeping them in photos.

Next, I watched Surviving and Thriving with Chronic Illness by Sarah McDonald. I’m not dealing with chronic illness, but I thought she might have something to say about having limited time to deal with housework. Overall, this wasn’t particularly useful for me, but I did capture a few takeaways:

Not all chores are equal.
Sometimes, convenience is a matter of survival. I interpret that as not feeling guilty about things like buying pre-chopped vegetables.
Simplifying things is not inferior.

Justine Hovey’s talk, titled You Don’t Need a Craft Box was more relevant. Her focus is paper crafts, but I think her ideas are more broadly applicable.

One of the things she showed off as not being needed is a Brand Box. This is an absolutely gorgeous German product that I definitely don’t have room for. But, ooh, if only. Of course, her point was that you don’t need it, but then she has one.
What she did suggest was a bunch of 12 x 12 inch boxes, each of which has the supplies you need for a specific technique, e.g. embroidery.
Paper is tedious to organize, so limit buying a lot of it. Buy a multipack of cardstock and don’t buy more until you use up a given color. Buying a sampler lets you figure out what you will actually use.
Pieces of paper smaller than about 1/4 sheet get tossed. Er, not gonna happen. They’re useful for collaging.
She uses evernote to keep a digital inventory of supplies.
Instead of going overboard buying a bunch of organizers first, take out what you need to organize and then look for the right bin or box for it.
Avoid micro-organizing.

The Wednesday mid-day 10 minute challenge was a digital declutter. I spent the time working on deleting email.

Thursday

I started by watching a Wednesday presentation by Michelle Brooks titled Get Out of Your Own Head and Make Progress Towards Your Goals. She had a fairly obvious step by step approach:

Dream big. Acknowledge where you want to go and write it down.
Identify where you are. This will change over time.
Get to work. Do one thing every day. If you’re not moving forward you’re moving backwards.
Celebrate. Figure out what motivates you and make rewards fun.

This all sounds easy, but the devil is in the details.

Then came Folding 101 by Sophie Liard. I found it hard to believe that I actually watched a 17 minute video of someone folding clothes. Actually, it was somewhat reassuring. In short, my folding methods are generally pretty good. She is excessively fond of folding things in thirds and loves drawer dividers, but aside from that, most of what I do is similar to what she does. I was, however, disappointed that she didn’t demonstrate folding fitted sheets.

Crystal Paine presented 3 Simple Shirts to Radically Improve Your Productivity. This was mostly an attempt at motivational self-talk, most of which completely defeats the purpose as far as I’m concerned. Her three shirts were:

Change “I have to” to “I get to.”
Instead of saying “I don’t have time,” say “I am choosing to spend my time differently.”
Ask the question “what will it matter at the end of my life?”

I don’t know about you, but that’s the sort of thinking that got my place into such a mess.

The last talk I watched was Get a Game Plan: 3 Steps to Design Your Winning Week by Anna Deamon Koranick. This appealed to me because I tend to like planning things, sometimes more than I like actually doing them. At any rate, here are my notes from that session:

To decide what matters most, apply the Pareto principle (80/20 rule). Frame things to do in terms of roles.
Prioritize in three categories:
1. Boulders are immovable, important but not urgent, and routine
2. Big rocks are high priority, important and/or urgent
3. Pebbles are everything else
Watch out for productivity pitfalls and consistently underestimating how long tasks will take. To overcome these, batch tasks together. Block time by placing boulders first, then adding in standing meetings and routines for morning, evening, workday startup, workday shutdown, and weekly planning.
Building a weekly game plan is the most important thing you can do. You should decide what it will include, what tools you need, and when to make your plan. But you should also make it fun.

The mid-day challenge for Thursday was a 10 minute decluttering frenzy. I continued working on my inbox.

The conference continued on Friday, but Rosh Hashanah started that night, so I had other things to focus on. I still think I got a fair amount out of at least some of the presentations I watched, though I am glad I just went for the free option. As for immediate actions, I decided to focus on getting rid of things by listing 5 things a week on my local buy nothing group. I started that this week and so far have given away an alarm clock I never even opened and a digital thermometer that my former employer sent me at the beginning of the pandemic (which was never opened because I already had / have a perfectly good one). I have a taker for the plastic horse I was going to use as a hat decoration before I took a different direction and she plans to pick it up on Monday. If nobody wants them, a pair of shoes will go into the thrift shop donation box and a koozie will probably just get tossed.

Esther Krinitz: A guy I used to work with, Mark, went to my storytelling show for rubber ducky day. He sent me a very nice email afterwards and mentioned an upcoming lecture being livestreamed by the American Visionary Art Museum about The Art and Story of Esther Nisenthol Krinitz. Krinitz was a Holocaust survivor who created fiber art pictures (appliqué and embroidery) depicting her life in Poland before the War, her life in hiding during the war, and events afterwards. For example, she went to the Majdanek Concentration Camp and looked through piles of shoes there trying to find her mother’s. There’s a total of 36 pictures, which are on exhibit, along with other artwork telling stories about immigrants. The talk was by her daughter, who runs a foundation focused on using art to tell these stories. It was an interesting talk and nice to see the pictures, though seeing them in person is better. (I saw them several years ago at the Skirball Museum in Los Angeles.) I should try to find time to see it again when I have something to do in Baltimore.

Speaking of Mark: We also set up a time to talk on the phone a couple of days later. Mostly we discussed things about adjusting to retirement and he picked my brain a bit about travel. He was rather amused when, as soon as he mentioned that his wife had signed up for a crafts class in western North Carolina, I knew exactly what school it was at. Anyway, we had a nice conversation and I’m glad to be back in touch with him.

Trader Joe’s is Evil: I am easily amused, so I got a kick out of going to Staples because I needed staples. I also bought a Spanish dictionary there, since it was on the clearance table for two bucks.

Anyway, Trader Joe’s is in the same shopping center, so I stopped in there for a couple of things. There are certain things I buy whenever I go there, e.g. strawberry vanilla yogurt, almond milk (cheaper than anywhere else), and green chile and cheese tamales. I made the mistake of also going to the nuts and dried fruit section. They have chili spiced dried pineapple again, after a long time without it being available. But the reason I say they are evil is that I also bought sesame honey cashews and pecan pralines. Both of those are delicious - and thoroughly addictive. Very much in the category of things I should not buy because I will eat way more of them at a time than I should. Sigh.

Living Room Archaeology: I’ve been spending a lot of time recently on what I refer to as “living room archaeology.” My biggest barrier to clearing out all this junk is dealing with memorabilia. This goes back to my mother having had me save the program from the very first show I ever went to in what she referred to as “my memory box.” Well, 55+ years later, what had been a small box has turned into multiple file drawers and more stuff overflowing into stacks on the floor. Throw in the current trend of many theatres not giving out printed programs anymore and printing out the programs takes multiple pages, those end up particularly thick.

Now, I keep a journal in which I write about every show (play, musical, concert, etc.) that I go to. And I know that, when my mother died, nobody wanted any of what was in her memory box. I had hoped her playbills would be worth something, but it turned out she had actually torn them apart and just saved the front cover and the list of cast members.

So I am on the verge of deciding to get rid of this stuff, but it’s a hard decision to make. I am postponing it until after I get through filing and discarding a bunch of other things. For example, I really have no difficulty shredding old credit card receipts - especially when I find one from a car rental in, um, 2009. And, no, I don’t need a bus ticket from Rimini to San Marino from 2014.

Why is this so bloody hard?

I’ve barely been out of my house this week, partly because I felt rather sniffly for a couple of days, but mostly because I have been on a minor decluttering binge, primarily involving shredding a bunch of old credit card receipts, some dating back as far as, um, 2016. I’m still working on that project, though I also need to do some serious cleaning off of my dining room table, which tends to act as a staging ground for things I should do something about.

Also, I’ve been busy with trying to watch as many of the on-demand presentations from the IAJGS (Jewish Genealogy) conference from August. I have only a couple of days left to watch them. I’ll write details about that when that is over.

The one thing I did go out for was a field trip by the Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Washington to go to the special exhibit on Americans and the Holocaust at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. This was related to the recent Ken Burns series (which I have not yet watched) and was worth a couple of hours. I don’t think that there was a lot that I didn’t know about, but it brought some things into focus for me. In particular, they showed information about various public opinion polls, some specific to what Americans should do about Jewish refugees, some about immigration in general, and I found the overwhelming numbers of Americans opposed to helping anyone brutal and frightening. (And, of course, we see the same thing now.) I was interested to learn more about Peter Bergson (aka Hllel Kook), whose name I was only vaguely familiar with and who shares an exhibit section with Jan Karski, who I do know a fair amount about thanks to David Strathiirn’s portrayal of him. Anyway, it’s an interesting exhibit and was worth the time.

I have, as usual, been busy. I don’t really know how not to be.

Celebrity Death Watch: Howard Hesseman was an actor, most famous for playing Dr. Johnny Fever on WKRP in Cincinnati. Art Cooley co-founded the Environmental Defense Fund. Jeff Innes pitched for the New York Mets. Norma Waterson sang folk music with her family. Robin Herman was the first female sports journalist for The New York Times. Lani Forbes wrote young adult fiction. Mickey Bass was a jazz bassist - and that was his actual surname at birth. Jason Epstein was the editorial director of Random House for about 20 years and, more significantly, founded The New York Review of Books. Todd Gitlin was a sociologist, who wrote about (among other things) the Sixties. George Crumb was a Pulitzer Prize winning composer. Ian McDonald was a founding member of the bands King Crimson and Foreigner. Jeremy Giambi played baseball, primarily for the Oakland A’s, but was overshadowed by his brother, Jason. Betty Davis was a soul singer. Henry Danton was a ballet dancer. Ivan Reitman directed a number of movies, including Ghostbusters. Valerie Boyd wrote a biography of Zora Neale Hurston. Gail Halvorsen was an Air Force pilot, most famous for dropping candy to children during the Berlin airlift. Martin Tolchin was a cofounder of the D.C. newspapers The Hill and Politico. Stephanie Selby wrote A Very Young Dacer.

Lars Eighner wrote the book Travels with Lizbeth about his experiences being homeless. It’s an interesting work and made me more sympathetic towards street people, though I disagreed with his decision to prioritize staying with his dog over being housed. (Then again, I am a cat person.)

Herbert Benson was a cardiologist who studied the effects of meditation and prayer on the body. I heard him give a talk at MIT Hillel back in my undergraduate days. His book The Relaxation Response was a bestseller in the late 1970’s. While his research showed no significant beneficial effect of prayer on patients with coronary bypass surgery, there may be something to his ideas about the benefits of relaxation since he lived to 86.

Ashley Bryan was an author and illustrator of children’s books. I saw a wonderful exhibit of his work at the High Museum in Atlanta in 2017. He was, alas, on my backup list for the ghoul pool, so no points.

Nancy Berg was an actress who had a 5 minute a night TV show in New York in the 1950’s called Count Sheep with Nancy Berg. which, apparently involved her pretending to go to sleep as animated sheep jumped over a fence. There are, alas, apparently no recordings of this show available.

Carmen Herrera was an abstract painter. She wasn’t really discovered until she was nearly 90 years old, but enjoyed a fair amount of success in the next 16 years. (Yes, she lived to 106!) There is, in fact, an exhibit of her work coming up at the Lisson Gallery in New York in May. She earned me 30 ghoul point points - 18 for her position on my list and 12 for uniqueness.

P. J. O’Rourke was a humorist, probably best known for his books Parliament of Whores and Holidays in Hell and his libertarian politics. I had deeply mixed feelings about his work. I laughed, but felt bad about what I laughed at.

Institutional Death Watch: I realized the Capital Steps had stopped performing during the pandemic, but had not quite grasped that they actually folded and are not coming back. Their political satire was such a Washington institution that it's hard to imagine that they're really gone.

Bindaas: Before going to the Kennedy Center last Friday night, I tried Bindaas, a well-reviewed restaurant specializing in Indian street food, for an early dinner. Because it was Friday night, I had a cocktail - in this case, something called Fool’s Gold, that has rum, citrus soda, and various spices (cardamom, coriander, fennel seed, mac, and saffron). It was a bit too earthy for my taste, frankly, and I wouldn’t get it again.

As for food, I had samosas and vegetable korma, both of which were fine, but I can get better at half the price at a number of places closer to home. I would probably be willing to eat there again, but would order different things.

Fran Leibowitz: The reason I was at the Kennedy Center was to go to a talk by Fran Leibowitz. This started with her being interviewed by Ari Shapiro, who is still my biggest celebrity crush. (I mean the man looks like the groom doll on a wedding cake. And, yeah, he is young enough to be my son and is married to another man, so it’s entirely fantasy.) Anyway, the most memorable part of that was what he called Celebrity Lightning Round, in which he named various people and asked her for a brief anecdote about each of them. The most interesting tidbit there was that Toni Morrison didn’t eat pizza. The interview segment was followed by questions from the audience. There was a major failure there, in that they didn’t have microphones for the audience members to use. Fran did try to repeat the questions, but there were several she couldn’t hear all or part of. And some of the questions were truly inane. Still, she lived up to her witty and curmudgeonly brand. I thought she was spot on regarding New York, since the main thing I love about it (and other major cities) is that I can always find something there that I didn’t know existed. I do, however, disagree with her about algebra. Not learning mathematics cuts you out from a huge number of professions. But, beyond that, math provides discipline in thinking. Still, overall, I enjoyed her talk and was glad I went.

By the way, in an odd coincidence, someone I know was sitting right in front of me. I run into people I know at the KenCen all the time, but they are usually not sitting quite so close.

Don’t Analyze This Dream: I don’t remember much of this dream, but the key detail was that I was wearing non-matching shoes. I thought I was wearing a pair of sloggers (open toed garden clogs, which is what I put on to go take out the trash or bring in the mail). I didn’t understand why the one on my right foot kept slipping until someone else pointed out that I was wearing a sandal with the back strap unfastened,

Anthony Mordecai Tsvi Russell I went to Anthony Mordecai Tsvi Russell’s virtual talk on what he learned from Paul Robeson. I first encountered Russell as part of a concert I’d gone to because one of the other performers was Mark Glanville. He completely blew me away and I’ve been interested in his mix of African-American and Jewish material since. (Russell is a gay African-American Jew by choice, who is married to a Reform rabbi and specializes in singing Yiddish music.) It’s not surprising for Paul Robeson, whose voice his is somewhat similar to, to attract his attention. Anyway, he talked about moving from the Bay Area to Norfolk, Virginia as a child and being exposed to racist low expectations in school. He’s obviously a very smart (and well-spoken) man and used Robeson’s words to highlight the need to end white superiority and to talk about the role of performance. I particularly liked some of the Robeson quotes he used to emphasize those points:

In America, the most absurd results can be produced, not merely by prejudice itself, but by respect for prejudice.

and

It is not enough for one to be able to do it. I want everyone to have the chance.

and, especially,

I perform what I want to see in the world.

All in all, it was a good presentation, though I’d have liked to hear more of Russell’s singing.

Jewish Dublin: This talk, by Alexander Joseph Vard, was part of a series on various Jewish communities and was broader than just Dublin, also touching on Jews in Cork and Belfast. It was mostly historical and emphasized Jewish support for Irish nationalism. However, Ireland was not always quite so kind to Jews, with incidents including the cover-up of the murders of Jews by two members of the Irish Army and Ireland’s failure to take in Jewish refugees during World War II. The talk was worth an hour of my time.

Science Through Story: This talk by Sara J. ElShafie was part of an MIT Alumni Forum series focused on climate change. I have some issues with people who seek out storytellers by approaching film studios but we live in corrupt times and the use of the term “storytelling” to refer to all narrative (instead of oral presentation) is common enough that fighting it is probably a lost cause. Despite that annoyance, and allowing for the limitations of an hour-long talk over zoom,I thought her ideas about communication were mostly valid. I did wish she had an example that was deeper than a few versions of a single slide. I may get in touch with her later on to bring up some of these issues.

Living Room Archaeology: I have been engaging in a lot of sorting and shredding and so on. I think it is safe to get rid of things like a couple of Italian train tickets from 2014, for example. I cannot, however, figure out why I wrote “Burn Before ..” at the bottom of a to-do list from some time late last year.

Today seems to have completely gotten away from me. The only actual commitment I had was for a talk about travel to festivals. (Which was quite interesting, discussing Timkat in Ethiopia, the Pushkar camel fair in India, and Dia de los Muertos in Oaxaca.) And I had an hour or so phone conversation with a friend.

But that leaves at least 13 waking hours unaccounted for. I did spend some of them finishing reading newspapers and magazines and some sorting out various papers in my bedroom to file or toss. Er no, I don't really need a bus ticket from Rimini to San Marino from 2014, for example. I did not, however, accomplish any of the things on my multiple to do lists.

Maybe tomorrow.

Crossposts: https://fauxklore.livejournal.com/505173.html

Last week I spent an hour or so searching for a pair of blue pants I was sure I had taken out of the dryer and thrown on the back of the sofa to fold and put away later. It turned out to be in the mending pile, where it’s been for weeks, because I haven’t felt like trying to find the right color thread to fix a torn seam.

This week, I’ve been making a dent in the stacks of paper around my house. I threw out coupons that expired as far back as 1990. (To be fair, the expiration date was in really small print.) And today, I tossed a copy of the Monaco Times from 2010. I can only wonder what is hidden in the other three boxes of stuff. I would not be surprised to find Jimmy Hoffa's body.

Crossposts: https://fauxklore.livejournal.com/503009.html

I got through more than half of my to-do list for the day. It helps to be unambitious.

Suddenly, over the past few days, both my local Chinese restaurant (which was within walking distance, at least as I define walking distance) and a good Asian fusion restaurant reasonably nearby have closed. I rarely eat out when I’m home, but it is convenient to take out from somewhere every now and then. I may have to explore other reasonably close options. (There are two places I already know that I don’t much care for. There is a Thai place I like a lot, but it is not super close.)

I have been trying to do some decluttering, in the course of which I have stumbled upon various mysterious notes to myself. I just figured out that one of them was the names of two movies I was interested in watching. A few of them are probably hints to passwords for various sites, but don’t identify what those sites are. I just deciphered what a list of dates with an abbreviation at the top was for. (It has to do with a series of webinars.)

There are also innumerable old to-do lists, each with at least a few items I have not yet done. The smart thing would be to copy those items onto a nice fresh to-do list to ignore. Er, I mean to work on.

Finally, I copied a quote from what must have been a book review, though I have no idea what book it was describing. Whatever it was, it was described as “…meticulously researched, but still readable.” I am not convinced that most meticulously researched books are unreadable.

Crossposts: https://fauxklore.livejournal.com/501746.html

I am still thinking about goals for 2021, but had a reasonably productive day in the meantime. I got my ghoul pool list for the year in. I managed to get out for a walk in the morning, getting home just before it started raining. I shredded a bunch of papers, though there is plenty more to do. I did a load of laundry, though haven't quite finished putting everything away. And I got started on a project to declutter my music library, which resulted in tossing a mix CD that was completely unlabeled and not particularly interesting when I listened to it.

And, oh yeah, I did manage to write every day of Holidailies, even though some of those posts were pathetic whining about being too tired to write.

Crossposts: https://fauxklore.livejournal.com/485799.html

This is late, because I took a short nap that turned into over 4 hours. Oh, well.

I made a new master list of chores, which is always both satisfying and scary. And I even did a couple of items on it, but then fell into a rabbit hole of one which I had not listed. Namely, I began a sorely needed file cabinet clean-out. I keep 10 years of records in one drawer, mostly because that is what fits in that drawer. In better times, I spent the first couple of days of the year shredding the 10-year-old files and setting up new files from the previous year out of the file drawer in my desk.

I fell behind when I was dealing with my mother's stuff. Today I tackled the drawer, pulled out the folders to shred, and shredded the 2007 files (which get replaced with 2017). I have a stack still to shred, as my goal is to fill the shredder bin once a day until I am done. The harder part will be filing all the stuff that is in boxes (and in a pile on the sofa) to be filed. But I feel like I made actual progress.

Crossposts: https://fauxklore.livejournal.com/478741.html

Don’t Analyze This Dream: I don’t remember a lot of details, but I dreamed I was on a ship, in a cabin with two bunk beds. I was in an upper bunk and was surprised at how comfortable it was. There was something about worrying how long the trip would take.

Hogwart’s Vacation Bible School: I am not making this up. An Episcopal church in Vienna, Virginia is offering one week morning and afternoon summer camp sessions for children ages 5 through 11, based on Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. I am sure this will be very successful, but I can imagine what some other denominations would be saying.

Household Blitz: I was hosting our monthly story swap on Saturday night, so I pushed on getting my living room halfway presentable. In the end, there was a bunch of stuff that got thrown into tote bags and put into the Black Hole of Vienna (aka my den). I did find a couple of things I had been looking for, of which the most significant was my check folio. I don’t write a lot of checks but I do need to put a new packet into my checkbook every once in a while.

I didn’t get as far along on vacuuming as I’d intended, as my back can handle only so much at a time. Also, why did I ever think a bagless vacuum was a good idea? The bin doesn’t hold nearly as much as a vacuum bag does, and emptying it is a pain. Admittedly, if I vacuumed more than every six months, there wouldn’t be so much dust.

The biggest household crisis was that the bulbs in the dining room track lighting blew when I turned the lights on about an hour and a half before the swap. And, of course, I never manage to have the bulbs I need to replace them on hand. I lit a couple of candles on the dining room table. When I did have a chance (on Sunday) to get bulbs, I found LED indoor floodlights. Those should be less susceptible to vibration from whatever it is that my upstairs neighbor does. And they are advertised to have a 13 year lifetime.

Story Swap: We had a small group, but a lively evening anyway. One of my non-storytelling friends came and seemed to have a reasonably good time. We had an interesting mix of stories, mostly traditional with a handful of literary and personal. Plus, lots of general conversation, which ended up with a lot of stories about cats and dogs. Overall, it was a nice evening and worth unshoveling the living room for.

Gun & Powder: I saw the world premiere of a new musical, Gun & Powder at Signature Theatre on Sunday. The story is based on family legends that Angelica Cheri, who wrote the book and lyrics, had heard about her great-great-aunts. (Her friend, Ross Baum, wrote the music.) The twins, Mary and Martha Clarke, set out to earn money to pay the rent for their sharecropper aunt. They decide they’ll get better jobs by passing for white. (Their mother is black; their father, who had abandoned her before the twins were even born, was white. So they are what used to be called "high yellow.") They end up as outlaws, until their attempt to rob a tavern owner in a town called Sweet Christine near Houston. Both sisters end up having to make decisions with the potential to separate them forever.

I’m not going to say more about the plot line because I think it is best experienced as a surprise. Ihe music was a variety of styles, from spirituals to romantic ballads. The performances were outstanding, especially by Solea Pfeiffer as Mary, Emmy Raver-Lampman as Martha, Marva Hicks as Tallulah, and Donald Webber, Jr. as Elijah. I would be remiss were I not to also mention the comic relief provided by Yvette Monique Clark as Sissy and Awa Sal Secka as Flo.

The bottom line is that this is an excellent new musical and I expect to see more work from Cheri and Baum in the future. It is precisely shows like this that keep me subscribing to Signature year after year.

Crossposts: https://fauxklore.livejournal.com/467566.html

Celebrity Death Watch: Bruno Nettl was an ethnomusicologist. Steve Martin Caro was the lead singer of The Left Banke, best known for their hit song “Walk Away, Renee.” David Olney was a singer-songwriter, who died in the middle of a concert. Lee Gelber was an urban historian and tour guide in New York City. Morgan Wootten was a basketball coach at DeMatha Catholic High School in Maryland, mentoring a number of students who went on to be pro players. John Karlen was an actor, best known for playing Willie Loomis in Dark Shadows. Sonny Grosso was a policeman who was immortalized for breaking up :the French connection.” Margo Lion was a theatre producer, best known for Hairspray. Michou was a French drag queen.

Christopher Tolkien edited The Silmarrilion and had, apparently, drawn the original maps for The Lord of the Rings. He was on my back-up list for my ghoul pool, which gets me nothing. Related to this (but completely independent), Barbara Remington drew the cover art for the first paperback editions of The Lord of the Rings. If those illustrations seem a bit off, she hadn't read the books first.

Frieda Caplan introduced a lot of exotic foods to the United States, including several varieties of mushrooms, kiwi fruit, jicama, and spaghetti squash. Her company was the first wholesale produce company to be founded, owned, and operated by a woman.

Terry Jones was one of the creators of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. He directed three of their movies. He was also a medieval historian and wrote children’s books. He was a very funny man and will be missed.

Jim Lehrer was a journalist, best known for his television partnership with Robert MacNeil, as well as for moderating Presidential debates.

Pete Stark was the first member of Congress to publicly identify as an atheist. He is also known for fighting for health care reform. Unfortunately, he was also notably anti-Semitic and sexist and, generally uncivil towards fellow representatives.

Kobe Bryant played basketball for the Los Angeles Lakers. He was also a noted philanthropist. That legacy is marred by a credible rape accusation in 2003, which was closed when the victim withdrew from testifying because of threats against her. On the plus side, Bryant did go on to be a strong supporter of his daughter (and women’s basketball, in general), who was also killed in the helicopter crash. It's all very complex.

TCC Luncheon: The only thing I went out of my house for this weekend was the Travelers’ Century Club luncheon. We were in the bar area at J. Gilbert’s this time, which didn’t work well for me. The acoustics were terrible, for one thing. For another, the service was even worse than usual and our table practically had to beg to get someone to take our orders. It was a little easier to mingle, but still crowded enough that it was hard to get around to talk to people. Still, there was lots of interesting conversation, so it was worth going. And, by the way, for those who think I am insanely intrepid, I would not be willing to go to some places some people go to. Syria? No thanks.

Retirement Planning: I realized that retiring on October 1st means I should be able to go to Jonesborough (for the National Storytelling Festival) and to an art retreat in Ocean City. However, even without work to consider, it appears that my life will continue to be a schedule conflict.

More Living Room Archaeology: I think I can safely get rid of a schedule for performances at Wolf Trap in 2016.

Grammy Awards: I am glad Angelique Kidjo won for world music album. Also, I realized I don’t understand what the definitions of the overwhelming majority of genres are.

Crossposts: https://fauxklore.livejournal.com/466896.html

Just a quick entry because I really should manage to write more than once a week.

I did a bit of office archaeology this week (well, the electronic equivalent thereof) and turned up a 40+ year old document that actually was exactly what someone needed to answer a technical question. I think that's hysterically funny.

My living room archaeology didn't turn up any relics quite that old (yet) but I did get rid of various things like coupons that expired a couple of years ago and brochures for the 2016 theatre season and the like. I'm proud of myself for not just throwing all of the crap in the living room into the box of shame to deal with later, but trying to actually put things where they belong. Which is often the trash or the shredder. I'm hoping to get through a lot more this weekend.

As for things that aren't old, I was on a career development panel at work yesterday, mostly because I am one of a very few people in my division who is on the East Coast. I was able to answer the questions I got about what it's like to work in my group and, hopefully, provide a few useful tidbits about career transitions. I think of this as warping young minds, but I am smart enough not to phrase it that way to my boss.

Crossposts: https://fauxklore.livejournal.com/466435.html

Ghoul Pool: Lists are now published so I can reveal mine. Note that the number next to each name reveals how many points that person is worth. There is also a 12 point bonus for a unique pick. When someone dies, you get to reload that slot. You also get two trades during the year, which is useful if you hear about somebody going into hospice or the like.

20. Kirk Douglas
19. Harry Reid
18. Sultan Qaboos
17. Olivia de Haviland
16. John "Sonny" Franzese
15. Alex Trebek
14. Beverly Cleary
13. Jean Erdman
12. Naomi Replansky
11. Freeman Dyson
10. Jimmy Carter
9. Ned Rorem
8, Al Jaffee
7, Rachel Robinson
6. Lee Adams
5. James L. Buckley
4. Neddy Smith
3. Lawrence Ferlinghetti
2. Jiro Ono
1. Stirling Moss

Note that Sultan Qaboos has died and I reloaded the number 18 slot with John Lewis. I am currently in 2nd place, as another player not only had Sultan Qaboos in the number 20 slot but scored on another person on his list.

MIT Mystery Hunt: I participated this year, remotely, as part of Halibut That Bass. I didn’t have a lot of time to devote to it and being remote poses a lot of limitations, especially as my power (and, hence, internet) went out for a while. I had a few contributions here and there. There was one puzzle (Old West Revue) that was right up my alley, but I didn’t have time to do more than get a start on. (It had to do with movie quotes transliterated into different scripts. Since I can read Cyrillic, Greek, and Hebrew fairly easily, I figured out what was going on. I really do need to learn to read Arabic someday. Indian languages, alas, I have no clue on.) There was another puzzle (Arts and Witchcraft) that involved crocheting a hat, which someone else did, but we failed miserably at figuring out how to extract the answer. And reading the solution, I doubt we’d have ever figured it out.

It was fun, but I think I’d have been happier had I been able to be there in person. Hopefully, next year.

Household Stuff: I did manage to get various household things done over the weekend. But I really need to unshovel the living room, given that I am hosting a story swap in three weeks.

Crossposts: https://fauxklore.livejournal.com/466417.html

Celebrity Death Watch: Charles Van Doren was a contestant on the quiz show Twenty-One in the 1950’s and was caught up in the cheating scandal, as he had been given answers by the producers. Earl Thomas Conley was a country music singer-songwriter. Scott Sanderson pitched for several baseball teams, including the Expos and the Cubs. Ian Cognito did standup comedy in Britain. Georgia Engel was an actress, best known for appearing as Georgette on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, but she also performed in several musicals, including Hello, Dolly and The Drowsy Chaperone. Tony Buzan wrote several books popularizing mind mapping. Gene Wolfe was a science fiction writer. Bibi Andersson was an actress who appeared in several Ingmar Bergman movies. Les Reed was a songwriter whose works included "It’s Not Unusual."

Whew!:I had a very busy week at work last week, accompanied by a busy week at home. The latter was largely due to taxes. Almost all of the effort of doing taxes is in finding all of the paperwork. Every year it seems that one or more pieces of paper (a 1099 interest statement or a receipt for a charitable donation, typically) goes missing, resulting in much scrambling to find it or search for a replacement source of the relevant info. And every year I swear I will do a better job of filing. At any rate, it did get done. Only to get into the other annual whirlwind known as cleaning for Passover. If it weren’t for that, I’d probably never discover that my pantry has a jar of marshmallow fluff and a can of water chestnuts, not to mention an absurd number of bottles of vinegar. (Presumably each of those was bought with a different recipe in mind.) I still have to clean the oven, vacuum, and achieve total world domination.

But that doesn’t mean I didn’t also have a busy weekend.

Grand Hotel: I went to see Grand Hotel at Signature Theatre on Saturday afternoon. I saw the movie long ago and, as far as I remember it, the musical is reasonably true to it. The plot revolves around several people staying in the hotel in Berlin during one day in the late 1920’s. Elizaveta Grushinskaya is an aging ballerina, accompanied by her companion, Raffaela, who secretly yearns for her. Flammchen is a secretary who wants to be a Hollywood actress. Otto Kringelein is a dying Jewish man who is trying to experience some of what has passed him by before the end. Baron Felix von Gaigern is an impoverished nobleman – and thief. The most passionate moment in the whole thing involves the romance that develops between Grushinskaya and the Baron. The Baron is easily the most appealing character in the ensemble, raising the hopes of several of the others, while ending up doomed himself.

The performers included a number of familiar faces. Natascia Diaz was excellent as Grushinskaya and Nkrumah Gatling, as the Baron, made a fine romantic foil for her. But the most striking performance was by Bobby Smith as Otto Klingelein.

Overall, this isn’t one of my favorite musicals, largely because I think it is rather shallow. Maury Yeston seems to have gotten involved with too many of these shows that try to follow too many characters at a superficial level. (I have the same issue with Titanic, for example.) Still, I liked it well enough to find it a diverting couple of hours.

Story Swap: Saturday night was a story swap. We had a small group, but it was still enjoyable. Eve had a long pourquoi story, which I think was from Guatemala. I told my father’s version of the crossing of the Red Sea. And there was a lot of general schmoozing.

One Day University: Sunday was One Day University. I was a bit annoyed that they did not include coffee this time out – unlike all the other times I’ve attended. I wasn’t going to pay four bucks just for a caffeine fix. (Instead, I went over to the nearby CVS and got a coke zero for 2 bucks.) Still, this really seemed pretty chintzy to me.

There were three lectures this time. The first talk was by William Burke-White of the University of Pennsylvania Law School on America and the World 2019: Where Are We Now (And where are we going?. His basic message was that, since World War II, the U.S. has led the global order with four pillars: 1) sovereignty (nation state as basic actor), 2) security (territorial integrity), 3) economic liberalization (currency convertibility, financial stability), and 4) open, rules-based system. What is changing now is the rise of China, leading to a trade war, along with a rise of populist nationalism, due partly to economic disparities. Information transparency and manipulation has led to a lack of secrecy in diplomacy. He also mentioned artificial intelligence and climate change as influencers, though he was less clear about their effects. I can’t say he really said anything I found startlingly new and original, but he was a reasonably interesting speaker.

The best lecture of the day was by Jennifer Keene of Chapman University on World War I: What Really Happened and Why It Matters. She emphasized the importance of the decision for conscription, which included public draft registration on particular days. Despite the public nature of registration, there was an almost 11% rate of draft evasion, which is higher than for Vietnam. While 95% of the men in the Civil War were combatants, only 40% were combatants in World War I. The work of those support troops was not as recognized and respected, which had a disproportionate impact on African Americans, who were overwhelmingly (89%) assigned to non-combatant roles like lading ships.

As for the importance of WWI, she noted that the German threat to the U.S. was real, including both the threat to shipping and sabotage within the U.S. But a more lasting impact was the rise of interest in Civil Rights, partly in response to the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act (which made it illegal to oppose the government and led to the founding of the ACLU). She had several stories related to issues like women suffrage, rights of African-Americans, rights of immigrants, and the peace movement that grew in the 1930’s, which made the U.S. reluctant to enter WWII. Overall, she was a dynamic speaker and held my interest.

I had expected to enjoy the final talk, by Mark Mazullo of Macalester College on Mozart and Beethoven: The Lives and Legacies of History’s Most Famous Composers. But I just didn’t buy his key premise that both composers were inherently tied to the revolutions of the era (both political and industrial) and to empathy as a road to democracy and human rights. Yes, they were entrepreneurial compared to, say, Haydn, who worked for Count Esterhazy, but I’d argue that gave them more freedom to write what they wanted, while also adding greater insecurity. Mazzullo brought up the point as the reason why Beethoven wrote only 9 symphonies while Mozart wrote 41 and Haydn wrote 104. But Haydn lived to 77 and Mozart died at 35, so you could argue they were roughly equally productive. (Beethoven is a bit more complicated – he never really composed quickly and modern scholarship suggests his lifelong poor health was due to chronic lead poisoning. But he also had plenty of patronage during his earlier years.) Overall, I don’t think I really learned anything new from this talk.

Notre Dame: I went to Notre Dame with Robert (the gentleman with whom I conducted the world’s longest running brief meaningless fling) during a weekend in Paris In 2009. It took some effort (and Berthillon ice cream) for me to persuade him to wait in line to get in, but we were both suitably impressed with its grandeur. I believe that grand works of art and architecture are proof of the value of divine inspiration. However, as I read about the large donations to restore the building, I can’t help wondering how much else could be accomplished with that money – education, job creation, etc.

Crossposts: https://fauxklore.livejournal.com/451689.html

It was my turn to host our monthly story swap. Which meant making at least a nominal attempt at making my condo presentable.

As usual, I started out with good intentions to put things where they belong ( which is often the trash). But there is never really enough time. So the boxes where I put things I intend to get to are overflowing. And there are stacks of things on half of my bed, which I need to sort out.

Also, why do I have a bag-less vacuum? It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it is a pain to empty. The bin has way too small a capacity. Four sweeps over the floor did not get all of the dust and shreddies that spilled from emptying the shredder. But that was all I could handle doing.

After all that, three of the 5 people who had RSVPed canceled. We had nice seasonal stories anyway.

Crossposts: https://fauxklore.livejournal.com/436891.html

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Entries tagged with decluttering

I Don't Miss Working

Back to Real Life

2023 - Year in Review

A Fairly Routine Week

Meetings, Meetings, Meetings

Get Organized Conference

Too Much Stuff

Americans and the Holocaust Exhibit

Oh, Lookie Here - a Catch-Up!

Where Does My Time Go?

Not So Good At Housework

The Search for Meaning (and/or Asian Food)

Fairly Productive

A Fairly Productive Day

Of Lightbulbs and Outlaws

Life Crawls Along

Old and New

Revelations

Grandeur

Shoveling Out the Living Room