Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

Random and sundry

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In no particular order:

  • Super what? No, I’m not going to be all self-congratulatory. I hate it when people are all “Modern culture’s got nothin’ on me, man.” I honestly have zero interest in professional football and it really wouldn’t occur to me to spend 4 hours watching a commercial fest interspersed with bits of a football game. I used to watch baseball, but that ended in 1993.
  • I ran on Thursday. I ran this morning. I didn’t run far, but given that I think I may have run twice in all of January, I’m feeling pretty good about it. You don’t have to plan out your exercise regime for the rest of your life. Just for today.
  • I’m starting BJ Fogg’s Tiny Little Habits program tomorrow. When he sent out the materials on how it works, I said, “Ohhhh.” Yeah, duh. Anyhow, I picked a few things to work on. I’ll report back later this week as to the program’s effectiveness.
  • Man, if you want to get a lot of hits on your blog, just talk about ebooks versus physical books. Also: the curly hair method.
  • I drove to Union Square yesterday to have lunch with a friend. Getting into San Francisco is a pain in the ass. Getting out of San Francisco requires wiliness and stealth and maybe rocket launchers. If you’re leaving from Union Square garage, what in the best way to get out of the city? It took me about 25 minutes to get to the freeway on-ramp on 4th Street and I was a nervous wreck by the time I got there.
  • Turns out everyone else in town decided this Starbucks was a good place to spend time during the game as well.
  • This Nissan travel mug is basically the greatest travel mug ever.
  • I didn’t have my phone with me today. It’s amazing how naked and out of touch I feel now without it. My phone, my self.

The best thing in my laundry room

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There were lots of things I wanted to add to the house when we did the remodel. Some of them I got (the mixer lift, which has been a lot of trouble — I expected my yuppie forebears to have figured this out already!) and some of them I didn’t (the kitchen sink pedal, which I really wanted so I didn’t have to touch the faucet handles while fixing dinner, but it wasn’t planned for correctly, so…).

One thing I really needed to figure out was what to do about my laundry room.

Pre-remodel, all I’d had was a hallway for the washer and dryer, which meant I usually ended up doing the laundry in the dining room. Which we therefore rarely used because there was always a huge pile of laundry on the table. I also had a gigantic clothes rack installed in the corner of the dining room for all of the air-dry stuff: my workout clothes, my unmentionables, my sweaters… Basically, our dining room was the laundry.

After the remodel, enough space was added to make the laundry room an actual room, with cabinets and things.

Retracted

My new laundry room, complete with laundry

And the best part is the one that most people don’t even notice.

Go ahead, look for it….

No, not the Amazon box. That needs to go out the side door to the recycling bin. Ignore the box.

No, not the huge quantity of cabinets that I haven’t even filled up yet. I know, right? How is that possible? I have no idea. I’m not trying especially hard to fill them; I figure that will just come with time.

Oh, all right, here it is:

Retracted with arrow

The clothes rack

I did lots of research, trying to find a)an indoor clothes drying rack that b)could handle lots of laundry and c)would get the hell out of the way when not being used. Lots of people have walked through my laundry room only to have me point out the rack and then they say, “Whoa! I noticed your piles of laundry and your empty Amazon boxes, but I did not notice that.”

I eventually ended up on a Swiss site, because I couldn’t find anything domestically made that fit my requirements. I almost went for a British kitchen rack, but I decided the sleeker Swiss German model fit our needs better. I can’t find the exact model we got online, but I’m pretty sure it was a Stewi.

This thing is awesome, particularly as 92% of my clothing now requires air-drying.

It works like this: you lower the rack from the ceiling using a very high-tech “twine” system.

Downandclosed

The rack, lowered

Then you open the wings.

Downandopen

Prepared for flight

Then you load it up, however you like, either with things hanging on one of the rungs, or laying flat out over several, and retract the whole thing up to the ceiling.

Fullyloaded

I will have clean clothes again soon

I am very fond of my Miele washer and dryer, and the long counter over there on the left-hand side, currently loaded with many baskets’ worth of laundry is quite nice too. But this drying rack is DA BOMB.

Things I am grateful for

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When Darin bought his car, 16 or whatever years ago, one of the things the dealer threw in with the package was training at driving school in order to become a better driver. It was a great class, and if I could remember the name of it, I’d include a link. I think we can all use refresher courses on how to be a better driver.

One of the important soundbites I took away from that day was to forget the old mantra, “Look where you’re going.” That’s stupid. That’s how people drive off of cliffs. They see the cliff, they drive off of it. No, the thing they said was “Look where you want to go.” If you want to stay on the road, focus on the road. After you’ve driven for a while, you don’t have to instruct your hands on how to turn the wheel (remember how tiring that part of driving was?) and you’ve got a relationship with your feet on how heavy to ride the pedals. No, your job is to point the car correctly. Your autonomic functioning takes over after that.

Doing those “gratitude journals” and stuff sounded so hokey to me when I first heard of them. Let me rephrase: I absolutely love hokey stuff, but not when it substitutes for, y’know, actual work. So often things like gratitude journals are described as being modern versions of magic spells: do this and this and this, and you get X, Y, and Z in return. Suh-weet deal.

But, when I thought about it, I decided that a gratitude journal wasn’t supposed to take the place of anything else. Focusing on things I was grateful for — whether inside or outside of myself — is always good. I force myself to look at the good things in life, because like so many other people if I don’t work hard at it, I ruminate over the bad things that happen.

You know, the old hokey saying “Energy flows where attention goes.”

Note the similarity there to “Look where you want to go.”

I’ve mentioned in an entry a while back that I like the Happy Tapper’s Gratitude Journal for iPhone app. (There’s an iPad version too.) These apps are good-looking, they’re cute, they’re fun. They make it Not Hard to write down your 5 things every day.

After a while of doing this, your brain gets very good at picking out the good things about the day. You focus not on what makes you upset or angry, but what makes you happy, what gives you energy or peace or joy.

And doing this is especially good during the times you’re angry and you want to knock someone’s block off.

Which happens to be where I am right now. Seriously. I’ve been seriously rethinking my values and what kind of person I want to be, because someone I know seems to have done something bad to me, and I’m wondering how to respond.

While I was thinking about this situation, I saw the following quote (while I’m putting up quotes and epigrams) from Abraham Lincoln: “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”

I don’t want to be that person.

I want to be the kind of person who looks forward, who doesn’t let the turkeys get her down, and who doesn’t use her blog to really hurt someone back. Because I know full well that I could. I have a very high Google ranking. I could really do some damage, simply by putting something here, even if no one ever reads it.

It was kind of scary to realize that I was the kind of person who’d ever consider doing that.

I’m not going to focus on bad things. I’m going to go find ten things in my life today that I’m grateful for, that make me happy, that make me feel alive, and reset my brain.

The cool thing is, I can even think of one thing I’m grateful about in regards to this situation (that I’m being deliberately oblique about), and I’m not being snarky at all. You really can retrain your brain.