Books

My sixth birthday
Yay, a book! Cowboys!

I've been a reader since I can remember. One of my earliest memories is sitting with my brother with him teaching me to read. I was skipped a grade because in kindergarten I was reading at second grade level. Now, I'm probably not tops in comprehension, but I am quick. Books I read along the way have had a profound influence on my life. Even the light entertainments I consume have had a positive influence on my vocabulary.

Despite having been employed at a library for four years, and having family members and many friends who became professional librarians, I was not a good library user. I loved going and checking out books. I would read them, and then let them sit around the house for weeks on end. I decided it would be cheaper to hang out at bookstores than to pay fines. The decade I spent in Ann Arbor at college coincided with the founding there of Border's Books - I've met Tom Border many times. During my first years post-grad school, going to the bookstore was one of the biggest pleasures of many weekends. It remained a constant pleasure for decades.

Around about the turn of the century, I realized I needed to either stop buying books or else get more bookshelves. My small house was bursting at the seams. I opted to line my entire basement with Billy bookcases from Ikea. When I found an author I liked, I went all in, usually buying an entire series of mystery or science fiction and often re-reading them. I loved looking at a series all lined up together on the shelf.

Then came e-readers and the possibility of not only not having so many books lying around but instant gratification when I wanted a new book. I was not a first-wave adopter, but I got a kindle in the second or third generation. I made a decision to never buy a mystery or science fiction any other way. For me, it's seamless to read on the device - it doesn't get in my way at all. But I have learned that actual physical reference books, and coffee table books, and cookbooks, have big advantages over something accessed on a small black-and-white kindle or an only slightly bigger (though colorful) tablet. Three or four years ago a friend showed me how to get library e-books onto the kindle, saving me literally thousands of dollars on novels since then.

When I'm into something, I can be really into it. I like to learn about them. Often that means buying books on the topic. My remaining shelf of "how-to" books can serve as a little chronology of hobbies I've had over the years. Backgammon, sewing and specifically quilting, knitting, cross-country skiing, kayaking, motorcycling, all make an appearance here. I still have these books because I'm not necessarily done with these activities.

All the basement books left after culling

When it came time to renovate the basement, all the stuff down there was an obstacle to getting started. It took me about three years to get through all the crap (with some left at the end to be disposed of only when I was moving back in). I got rid of an incredible number of books. Our county library has a very active "Friends" group that run two retail used-book stores. One of them was located just a mile from my house for several years (it's since moved much farther away). After my first ambitious culling into boxes, and subsequent struggle to get them out of the basement and into the car, I realized I couldn't carry a full box of books, and so brown paper grocery bags became my favored method of disposal. Each weekend I would drop off 3-4 bags, not wanting to carry more than that at one time and also trying not to overwhelm the volunteers at the library.

I had to hide my books behind a fence
to keep Rocky from indulging his literary taste

I worked in a library for quite a while. I have to organize my books. Currently I have them roughly sorted by topic into different physical locations, but not actually alphabetized. I still have bookcases in the two upstairs bedrooms, my office, and in the room formerly known as The Dog's Room, just renovated. I took advantage of the reno to get rid of ten brown bags of books from the Dog's Room (and a shelf of DVDs), most to the library bookstore. The books remaining in the room now are travel books and garden books. This includes travel writing, even fiction set in destination locales, and nature writing and field identification guides. All of these books have value to me in hard copy with the ability to look at pictures and flip back and forth between pages.

Travel books

Taking the time to dust, clean, and sort the books as I moved back into the Dog's Room this week has sparked a real interest in looking at them again. I kept old travel books for places I still hope to go to, though I'll probably buy an ipad version of a new travel guide for any place I go.  I haven't really looked at some of the garden books for a few years, because I had to keep them locked away from Rocky and it just wasn't convenient to get them out. So I have some of my winter reading set! 

In my bedroom, I have an entire six-shelf bookcase of books on aviation. Not how-to books, I got rid of those to some eager takers in the neighborhood in the basement culling. These are mostly memoirs and biographies of early women fliers, and some fiction also starring mostly women. When I got bit by the flying bug, it was an extreme situation. For a couple of years, I read little else. I was traveling a lot for work and I would drop into bookshops in whatever country I was in, searching for books about women fliers. So it's really a good collection. I think I could part with it, but I want to part with it as a collection to a home that will appreciate it. Any ideas?

Garden books

Room Reveal

I decided to act on updating my room variously known as Rocky's Room, Abbey's Room, The Dog's Room, the TV Room, the Sun Room, and The Porch. In a big stroke of luck, I contacted my contractor just as he had a room-sized hole in his schedule. As a result, from deciding to act to having it done was less than a month total. This almost never happens! Here is a link to the post from a month ago when I was poised to move forward. When I spoke to the contractor who did my basement, we worked out a reasonable scope of work for a reasonable price, and I just went ahead without getting any other bids. I had to leap into action going through my piled up stuff and especially books. I took ten brown grocery bags of books to the library bookstore, yay! And now I'm sitting in this updated room, all cozy with new heat and clean walls and books I can actually access and my plants, and I'm thrilled!

This shows the cluttered corner
with books wedged into the shelves

As often happens, I don't have good "before" pictures. I was pretty good about taking the "during" photos. As soon as I was well moved back in I quickly took the "after" pix, before I start messing and cluttering up the place.

   

 

 

 

 

 

Just started - air conditioner out of the wall,
electric baseboard heaters next

Drywall going up. See the hole where the a/c used to be.
Drywall going on top of the paneling. 

Ready for paint!

Painted! I'm shampooing the rug before moving back in.

EEEK! A hole in my wall!

The outdoor component of the mini-split

This was funny - when they pulled the baseboard and heating unit off this wall, what seemed to be an entire bag of dog food fell out! There have often been mice in this room, but it seems a little excessive to think they stored all of this. Maybe it just came from Rocky throwing it around accidentally - I did used to feed him in this room.

Done! I mostly sit in the chair here, so this is my view,
and Bixby mostly stays on patrol looking out the front window.

Done! The furniture will be adjusted some more,
but all the components are in place.

Done! This is the view no-one gets from this corner.
I used the phone's wide-angle lens, and you can see the
mini-split near the ceiling.

Weighty Numbers

I've been tracking my weight more or less daily since 1998. I used to weigh myself every day on an analog scale (where you leaned left or right to make the apparent reading change) and write the number down on a calendar nearby. Every now and then I would transcribe the numbers into an excel spreadsheet. I still use that very same spreadsheet today, but now I have a wifi scale that transmits the number automatically to the cloud, where I can access it from two different websites connected to the scale.

My routine is to weigh first thing in the morning without clothes, as I'm getting dressed. Some times "first thing" is postponed, especially these days where the motivation to bother to get dressed can be delayed until after several cups of coffee. Never-the-less, it's always before I eat anything. If I haven't weighed before I eat, I skip weighing that day entirely.

One of the things I learned from daily tracking of my weight is that the number the scale renders is quite volatile. It can vary by as much as four pounds in 24 hours. It's very common for it to vary by two pounds in a day. This variation actually creates a greater motivation to track daily versus weekly or monthly, as some weight-loss folks recommend. Since my weight doesn't seem to have a predictable fluctuation - not driven by weekly or monthly schedules, but instead by some complex equation based on what I've taken in (food, salt, liquids), what I've eliminated, and how much I've exercised and slept - I instead use an average or trend to decide if I'm gaining or losing weight. My excel spreadsheet relies on a simple weekly average, while one of my websites uses an engineering equation which looks at a greater period of history, but weights the most recent numbers more heavily than older ones.

Another thing I've learned is that my memory of what I used to weigh is extremely unreliable, from week to week or month to month. Having the record keeps my memory true, prevents me from either rationalizing ("oh well, I guess I'm stuck" when I'm really gaining) or despairing ("I can't ever lose weight"). 

With all of that, I don't want to lose my daily extensive record. But it's right now part of my daily routine to look at the website every single day. I think it's time to take a break from that, because I'm trying to manage what and I how much I eat mindfully. It's an experiment, and I want to focus on planning and executing that without regard to what I see on the scale. The point is to plan my food daily, try to execute mindfully, really tuning in to whether I'm hungry or not, and sensing when I've eaten enough. I want to be more in touch with my body, regardless of what the scale says.

But of course, I want to lose weight - I'm almost as heavy as I was when I started this blog back in 2010! Memory check with data: I've recently hit a single peak day that is eight pounds below where I was when I started the blog, and 18 pounds below my highest recorded weight. And that recent peak is about 20 pounds above where I settled for several years after starting the blog, which is where I'd like to get back to now. See why I like having the data!  

I'm trying a simple fix to try to meet these two points: maintain the data, but don't look at it. I put a little post-it over the numbers which is all it takes. Thanks to my wifi scale, I can step on it every day, have the number sync to the cloud without seeing it, and access it later. We'll see how it goes, how long I can stand to not look at it often!

Social Media

I'm posting less and less on Facebook, in a trend that started quite a while ago, though I check it usually twice a day. The bulk of my posts are re-posts of someone else's stuff. Some friends are on Facebook often, some more distant friends are there often enough for me to want to scan and see what's up. I belong to many interest groups and I am entertained and informed by what I see there. For example, I've got some Aerogarden hydroponic systems for growing lettuce and herbs, and I've found helpful tips and always someone to answer questions in a dedicated group there.

Whatever happened to Tumblr? I know my girl still has a couple of blogs she occasionally will post on, but with no where near the tempo she used to. I set up several Tumblr blogs, because they were so easy to post from the phone. The usual format was always at least one picture, and not very many words. I had done one for Rocky, the Very Hungry Labrador. After he was gone this summer, I sent the whole blog into an actual book. It's an amazing account recorded as it happened of all he ate during the eight years I had him, and I'm glad to have it. Because I had a blog dedicated to him, it was very easy to get into book format. I was thinking I wanted something similar for Bixby, but decided to go with a dedicated Instagram account.

I love this moody photo! I think this is why
I decided Bixby needed his own account.

I actually post much more often on Instagram and fewer of them are cross-posted to Facebook. What I post on the 'gram are photos I have taken with a very short caption - re-posting someone else's stuff is actually difficult, not like Facebook. I follow mostly different people on Instagram than Facebook - including celebrities, which I don't follow or like on Facebook. I like fashion and lifestyle posts. The company recently have made it easier to set up multiple accounts. It used to be you needed a separate email for each Instagram account, but now it can be on one email, and switching between them is just a couple of taps on the phone. Commentary says Instagram has also redefined itself subtly as an app for content consumption rather than creation. The multiple accounts feature is pushed in app as a way to separate and organize who you follow, not how you post. For example, have one to follow your closest friends and another for celebrities. 

The way I have the 'gram set up right now is one account for me, and one for Bixby (@bixby.sato). I switched my account to "private" (I have to approve anyone who wants to follow) and blocked anyone I didn't actually know who had opted to follow me. Bixby's account is "public". I switched the many dogs I follow to Bixby's account, which has cleared my feed up a little. Most posts from Bixby get tagged with something like "rescuedogsofinstagram" so others may see those posts. I'm allowing anyone to follow - we're up to seven followers!  One of my main motivations for Bixby's separate account is because it will be possible to pull from a single Instagram account into the layout software to do an actual book someday. But I was amused, about a week after I set up Bixby's account and was really into the dog-related hashtags, to get a message telling me I could set up a deal to be an influencer. (Or for Bixby to be an influencer!) Not my cup of tea, not why I'm doing this, but amusing none-the-less.

Still not a daily twitter user. I go there when something is happening, and when I've exhausted other social media and for some reason need to keep scrolling. I follow different people there, and it's sometimes fun to see their take on things.

Streaks

Needs coffee
Pic just for cuteness factor

Hey, did you notice I blogged every day in the month of October? Either here or in the garden blog. It was one of my October goals, the main one I actually achieved. (I also kept this goal private, I think, so as not to set expectations for my fans.) It turns out I like daily blogging, and I may continue at an increased pace for a while, coasting on the momentum. But I'm no longer mentally fixed on "every day". I've found the psychology of a streak works for me for a little while, giving me increased motivation for what it is. But after a while, if I break the streak, then I get into the "why bother at all?" mindset and stop completely whatever it was. So "more often" is how I'm going to think about it, not "every day".

 

 

 

 

 

 A couple of things I noticed about daily blogging:

• I like posts with pictures, even if the picture is barely relevant. 
• Posts with mostly pictures are not cheating, especially if its a garden blog post. The visual record is an important part of the blog.
• As I went about my days, there was some increased mindfulness around, "I could write about this for the blog". It made me more self-conscious during the day, in what I think was a good way.
• I wanted a topic for each post, (versus just a general checkin) but it didn't have to be heavy or long. 
• It was ok to post about things that weren't entirely current, if the post had something worth saying (again, not profound, but at least mildly interesting or amusing).
  
• It's much easier to post using the laptop than the ipad (and almost impossible using the phone). And my current laptop boots up much more quickly than the ancient one I replaced this spring. That reduced a barrier to posting.
• With Blogger, posts can be written and then posted at a later scheduled time. A few times, when I was inspired, or I knew I would have a hard time finding the time in the next day or two, I stacked up posts in advance. I did this especially with garden blog posts.
• Sometimes I broke long posts up into multi-day posts, sometimes written together and then staged to go up once a day. That was based on my wanting to hit the "every day", and also not impose on my readers' attention spans.
  
• The self-consciousness, and maybe the writing, actually stimulated more private journalling rather than replacing it. This surprised me.
• I like writing. I've just finished another story-telling class, and it led me to think a bit more about the crafting of a story. This mostly hasn't bled over into the blogs, which are more stream-of-consciousness, but I'm thinking about it a lot. 
  
• For some time, I've organized my pictures I use in the blog into google albums, one for each blog and year. I chose google some time back as the cloud storage for all my photos, so iphone photos go there automatically and off-loaded camera pictures go there manually. But I take so many photos that it's helpful to have the blog pics in an album dedicated to this year's blog so I can find them again.