Beach hair.

Swimming wrecks my hair. I need to find some cunning trick for salty water. Before I swim in a chlorine pool I've found that if I wet my hair in fresh water first, the chlorine doesn't soak in. So maybe that works for salt water too, or there's some other trick. Some have suggested putting conditioner in.

Anyway if I'm going to swim a couple of days in a row, there's no point washing my hair properly. I'll just give it a water rinse, because salt water doesn't dry at all. But it still keeps that salty stickiness which makes it hard to work with, and gets tangled very easily. I have found that once I do get it into a bun the salty tangles hold it together in a nice loose-looking casual bun. I'm treating it like a styling product rather than a problem.

Last burst of productivity.

I thought I blogged this last year but can't find it. Anyway I'm doing it again. Just as it seems the year is winding up and nothing more is going to get done, BAM BAM you sneak up on some bothersome job and tick it off the list!

This sounds like a stupid idea, because in a way we are already too busy at the end of the year. Carols are eating my life, for one thing. BUT! Because everyone is in a bit of a rush doing Christmas things in December, it's a great time to do other things without so much of a queue! Why not go to Medicare? Get your eyes checked? Or just do something at home, finish crocheting the thing you got bored of, or clean the windows, or shred some papers or something. Let me tell you it's a very empowering feeling to take a moment out from all the obligations of the season and shoot some random personal chore right in the head when it wasn't expecting you.

My Bathroom "Go Bag".

Yes. I am proud of this. I have organised my travel toiletries! It's fully set up independently of my normal bathroom supplies. If you're going away a lot, you ought to have a ready-to-go pre-packed bathroom bag. It's a lot quicker, you won't forget anything, and when you get home at night and you're tired, you just want to jump in the shower without realising halfway through that you haven't unpacked your shampoo yet. Also, if you do the little bottles thing it's lighter to carry, and OK for airport security when you go carry-on.

The frugal thing is to put in your almost-finished things***, and your little samples of things, and your second best things. Almost empty toothpaste tube or sunscreen. Hotel shampoos. The crappy nail clippers and tweezers. And then after you've collected as much of that stuff as you have, go out and buy anything you don't have, like little bottles to fill up from your big shampoo or whatever.

I've got one of those roll-up bags you can hang on a hook and see everything. I think it's called a valet. It's got 2 small pockets for things like bobby pins and tooth stuff, and one biggish section for bottles of things. I used to fit just 2 x 200ml shampoo bottles plus bodywash but now with smaller shampoo bottles I fit the whole kit and kaboodle, sunscreen and deodorant and hairbrush etc.

*** How can such little bottles last so long? And especially at the nearly empty stage, when they no longer squirt and you have to stick your finger up the neck or cut them open? And I'm so BORED of them and I've got a newer, better sunscreen/moisturiser/hand cream and I don't want to spend 2 months finishing the old things, but I'm frugal! I feel like letting everyone know whenever I finish a product. It's a triumph worthy of a facebook status at least.

Messies and Cleanies.

One of the books in my parents bookshelf is The Messies Manual. It says that people naturally fall on a spectrum, 0 being a total chaotic Messy and 10 being an insufferable Cleanie. Messies and Cleanies. My mum admits to being a Messy. I'm a moderate Cleanie. If you're anywhere in the middle, it doesn't matter whether you're an M or a C, it's a basically a liveable land. If you are a 10C, you won't let people in your house because they'll mess it up. If you're a 0M, people can't get into your house because the mess covers all surfaces and probably blocks the front door. The 0M people get TV shows made about them. There aren't any TV shows for the 10C people, cos they are probably beyond help. But there are plenty of helpful books for the low M people or middle people who want to improve organisationally. Mum found the Messies Manual quite a relief actually, cos being born a Messie doesn't make you a failure, it's just the outworking of your personality*, and she's moved up a couple of notches on the scale over the years.

I've been slowly listening my way through another book, Unstuff Your Life, I got it on special from Audible. I don't really need the room-by-room decluttering guide but I've found the simple rules helpful, like A Place For Everything, or noticing the feeling of guilt and failure when you throw something useless away and remembering it when you are tempted to buy something useless.

Organisation is it's own reward. I'm really proud of that saying! I made it up. It motivates me to see organisation as a self-care thing, rather than a boring thing. I have gradually got more organised. It's taken years since I moved out of home to work out how much to own, and how to store it. I have regular declutter binges and improve a bit each time. I still have messy areas, the kitchen table and dresser are dumping grounds, and the bathroom is only ever passable, but I can sit on chairs, access books, cook conveniently, store all my clothes, find sewing stuff when I need it. It's like "this is the messy stationery drawer" (applied A Place For Everything), rather than "I'll put these sticky tapes in this handy drawer with some bank paperwork from last year and some iTunes cards and a gift bag I can reuse and my passport." All just things floating around randomly. Entropy is not a good system. (I made that up too!)

* I'm looking up different Myers Briggs types and how they relate to messiness. It might be to do with P/J. Ps would be more likely Messies and Js would be more likely Cleanies.

The easy habit.

The most important thing about setting up a good habit isn't how wonderful the activity is, the wonderful exercise machine you're going to use for an hour a day. It is how easy it is. So the ideal exercise to do every day might be a 10km jog or something hardcore. The realistic exercise to do every day is probably something heaps less. You really want the bare minimum as your new habit, like 15 minutes of yoga before you have a shower (plug for the yoga studio app). Or 15 minutes walk around the block after dinner. Cos you can probably manage that, whereas 45 minutes of hard sweat is something you'll find an excuse to avoid, and the habit will die.

The other thing you might notice I've done there is ATTACH the habit you WANT to the habit you ALREADY have. So you don't have a shower until you've done yoga. The shower habit is already strong, you're just adding a step. It's only 15 minutes of yoga so it's not that hard to manage, and it isn't so much exercise as "prelude to a shower".

Habit's I've got are, whenever I need to wash my hair, I do Jillian first. Hair is half dirty so I might as well get a sweaty workout done and get value out of the hair-washing, and then be all clean for a couple of days. Also, with bible reading, I now use the Daily Reading Bible, which takes about 10 minutes so it's not hard, I find the questions really good, and I do it at lunch time because I need a break from screens and noise anyway. I used to scoff a bit at the idea of short devotionals when I could just read a chunk from the bible, but there is psychologically an advantage in having a short convenient reading.

The important thing is, sustaining it. When you start doing something, imagine yourself doing it for the rest of your life. Yeah, that's hard. So 10-15 minutes every day for the rest of your life works out heaps better than 45 minutes for two weeks.

Subject: Dishwasher announcement!

(This is an email I sent to some of my colleagues today. I feel so much better after making this decision. So many annoyances are now outside of my area of responsibility!)


Hello! Relax, this is not a rant, you can all go on using the dishwasher as you were before.

I am no longer going to use the dishwasher. I will not

1) put things in the dishwasher,
2) turn the dishwasher on,
3) empty the dishwasher, or
4) handwash everything the dishwasher didn't clean (which is now happening every day).

I am going to go back to the pre-dishwasher days and I will wash and dry my own cup and plate and put them away.

Just letting you all know. Dishwasher Club no longer includes me. As you were.

Jess


(I really don't like the dishwasher. I don't like any part of it. Grovelling inside it amongst the stinky old coffee cups, unpacking it, trying to solve the mystery of why things come out completely dirty. It constantly undermines my tranquility and godliness. And then I realised that I don't HAVE to use it. Why is the obvious solution sometimes the hardest to see?)

Frugal tip: rag bag.

When something cotton wears out, ie a towel, a piece of clothing, or a sheet, don't throw it in the bin. Chop or tear it up into hanky-sized squares and keep them in a bag or box. Obviously, then, you can use them for cleaning. We haven't bought paper towels for the kitchen for ages, because we just use these scraps of cotton for cleaning the sandwich press and everything. They're disposable single-use cleaning cloths, for free!

The other thing I've just discovered is that when you are sick, this giant supply of old cotton squares serves as free giant stash of disposable hankies, saving you from buying tissues or washing a pile of gross hankies.

DIY ugboot refurbish.

The sad thing about old ugboots is that the wool on the inner sole wears out but the top of the foot and ankle are still thick and fluffy. Your feet are no longer cushioned by delightful fleece, they are simply standing on a balding foam sole. But you still have warm ankles. It is really a waste to buy new ugboots just for the sole.

You can actually buy new sheepskin inner soles. I've seen them at that sheepskin shop on the side of the highway in the blue mountains. Which gave me an idea. I can be frugal, and cut up some old ugboots to make my own sets of inner soles for my newer ugboots!

I finally got to do that this week. I've been keeping my old ugboots for years, waiting for the moment of need. Their time has come!

I made a template by drawing around new ugboot sole. I then drew a line inside it a bit smaller so that it would fit inside. (I just fished a cereal box out of the recycling for my template material.)

Then I cut the sole off my old ugboot. Sheepskin is a bit hard to cut, I suggest doing little snips through just the skin, not through the wool as well. The wool pulls apart once you've snipped through the skin.

Drew around my template on one side of the boot, using a texta.

Then I flipped the template over and drew around it on the other side of the boot. You have to flip the template over so that you get a left and a right foot.

Here they are! They are a perfect fit and my feet are happy.

Not much left over from the old boot. I'll cut a spare pair from the other boot and put them away somewhere for when I need to replace again. If you have a family of ugboot wearers, you could do this all the time and share out new inner soles whenever a pair gets holes in it.

Next action: eat dessert first.

Joss Whedon on productivity.

http://www.fastcocreate.com/1683167/how-to-be-prolific-guidelines-for-getting-it-done-from-joss-whedon

Hanging, laundry bags.

Elsie has a hat-stand. I am a huge fan of hooks behind doors. Half the doors in my apartment have hooks on the back. Stick on hooks or hang over the top of the door hooks or suction hooks, I love them all. They store umbrellas, scarves, aprons, clothes I want to wear again before I wash them. And as of recently, my laundry bag for "delicates". I sewed a ribbon to the corner of my laundry bag, and when I have finished wearing stockings or something I put it straight in the bag. Then when I wash I just zip the bag shut and throw it in the laundry basket. Easier than rummaging and sorting.

Ladies maid.

Women are able to talk while they work. Today the office was pretty empty so the 3 girls in the corner barely shut up. Lots of jelssie inspiration. For instance, what I would like is a ladies maid. Who wouldn't want a ladies maid! We should bring them back. I want someone to do my hair, make my elaborate breakfast and lunch, and get my clothes ready for me in the morning—especially, to warm them up for me in winter by hanging them on a heater or in front of a fire, depending how rich I am. One of these days (in the real world) I'm going to get a heater, put it next to my bed, drape my clothes over it every night, and then in the morning do the Michael Scott thing (he does it with bacon) and wake up, turn on the heater, go back to sleep, and then wake up again and get dressed into toasty warm clothes.

My smart meter has arrived.

Yes, I am excited. I want to find out more about them but all I can find on the internet is that they are terrible things and the government is controlling us and the electricity company is rorting us. Oh well. I think it's fun. I turned it on, and it had trouble finding the network. When it finally found it, our usage was reading as $0.00475 an hour. We turned off the TV and some lights and it dropped to $0.002 something an hour. See how fun this is? I'm going to get a cost per hour of every appliance in the house. Also, I'm surprised how cheap that is.

Settling an awkward routine.

It's taken a few months, but I think I have figured out a new hair-washing calendar based on now having Bible study on Wednesday, and getting home too late to wash and dry my hair. I've switched to washing my hair on Tuesday and Thursday night, then Saturday morning after Jillian, then Sunday night to start the week again. The 7 day week is such a nuisance for every-second-day hair washing (my sister Julia suggests an 8 day week would be the best solution). And hair washing needs to factor in so many things, like just before I wash my hair is the ideal time to do Jillian or go for a swim—not while it's freshly clean. I was washing my hair on random days and exercising less, just because Bible study moved from Tuesday to Wednesday.

Passwords.

I've been thinking about passwords a lot. Strong passwords are important. They should be a long, random string of letters, numbers and special characters *?%. But forgetting said passwords is very annoying. Having a list is good, but what if you don't have the list with you when you forgot—that is a delay.

So what you need is a system. A good system.

One obvious system is to have one password you use for everything. Like Green123. Or supercalifrag. However, that means that once a password hacking machine has hacked that, everything falls open. So the one password system is only a good system for things that don't matter being hacked. A lot of things don't matter being hacked, so I would use the Green123 sort of password on chat forums and online clubs that don't even really need passwords at all.

The system I use for higher security sites is to tap my fingers around the keyboard in a certain pattern like a zig zag or Fur Elise (plplpnkjb) for example, and what comes out LOOKS random, and my brain could never remember it, but my fingers remember it because it is a spatial pattern. If you aren't a spatial person, you could take a line from your favourite book or song. Eg "I was in the middle before I knew I had begun" becomes the nicely enigmatic 1witmb1k1hb (with I swapped for 1 obviously). That was the trick in Doctor Who last week, "Run you clever boy, and remember". But I still wouldn't use that one 'random' password for everything, because again, it's safer to have different passwords for facebook and paypal and online banking. So then I put an extension on it (including special characters), so facebook might go plplpnkjb*f*b and paypal might go plplpnkjb*p*p. That's a bit lazy, I should probably have a completely different random pattern, not just an extension, but this system I can keep in my head—and in fact because the system doesn't take up much memory it's even possibly to have different patterns for different things, so social media gets one sort of system and banking stuff gets another.

Kitchen.

Cute, but lies. Damned lies. Image: twitgoo.com

I'm listening to Unstuff your Life. The first 2 chapters are a simple philosophy of why stuff is so clingy. I've done a bit of thinking about this. I'm a fairly tidy person, but it causes me emotional pain sometimes to get rid of things. I feel things like guilt, that I bought something I never wore or used, or sadness, that I am losing something from my childhood… My solution lately has been to cut back on the amount of stuff I bring into the house and collect around my life, because it's easier to resist adopting it than it is to let go of it later. So the author goes into that side of things a little bit, how we relate to stuff. And then there is a bit of visualising, imagining a perfect and efficient life. So that by making more space in your house you are making more space to live your life, rather than just losing all your special stuff. Nothing ground-breaking, this is a holding-your-hand help book for disorganised hoarders.

There are chapters on different areas of the house. First chapter is basically 'Keys, wallet, phone' about putting your housekeys in the same place always. His 2 big rules, which he now applies in every chapter, are: 1. Everything has a home, and 2. Like with like.

Last night I listened to the chapter on the kitchen, which was really good timing because I bought a set of 6 bowls. There was absolutely no room for them in the kitchen. We have approx 2 dozen wine glasses. And 20 odd glass tumblers. Almost that many coffee cups. It's funny how you don't notice that stuff for two and a half years, even though it's really annoying and inefficient and space is precious. But when some friends came over last week, I really did need bowls, not wine glasses. And trying to fit them into the kitchen made me actually SEE what we had. So I emptied out the cupboards (this is the worst, most terrifying thing to do), filled a box with unwanted glassware to donate (with my flatmate's permission), put back an adequate selection of glasses, swapped saucepans and plastic stuff around, and managed to fit a food processor and a fondue set in as well as the 6 new bowls. Really, if I was going to completely obey the book, I would be donating the fondue set, but small steps. FYI, I have an awesome fondue set, you are all welcome to borrow it. Also, help yourself any of the glassware.

I'm so productive with this new TV diet. Speaking of which, Kevin McCloud was on TV later last night talking about how all bench-tops look like vomit. Now I can't see anything else, and I haven't even seen that much vomit in real life.

*edit: Em told me how to spell fondue.

Watches are still a thing.

 

I remember a lot of talk a couple of years ago about how people weren't going to wear watches any more. Tech gurus were boasting about the trend. "Everyone just checks their phone now." Well that is true, but I found that a phone is actually a pocket watch, like in the olden days, when you had to fish around in your waistcoat to check the time. That's annoying. So I went back to a wrist watch. And this morning I did a survey of the people on the bus whose wrists were visible, and out of 6 of us, 5 were wearing a watch. Possibly professionals are more likely to wear a watch as part of their corporate image, and possibly people who catch the bus want to be able to check the time more easily (that is a main reason for me). But I think that's enough to refute the death of the watch.

Speaking of telling the time, my uncle had an intriguing facebook status today.

I thought I'd worked out how to measure time in meters and was very happy for two days, til I realised my mistake. Does anybody else get this kind of problem?

That's the kind of facebook I like. I can't stop wondering what he means. Did he make a sundial? Or some kind of odometer clock? Or a giant pendulum? I am proud to be related to this man.

Vanilla essence.

A bottle of vanilla lasts a really long time. You buy it by the bottle but use only a few drops rarely. But it has to be there for those times. I feel like getting more use out of it, like making my own gourmet porridge, because fancy porridge always has vanilla in it. I googled some more ideas:

Wipe down the inside of the fridge with vanilla extract. To prolong the fresh vanilla scent, soak a cotton ball or a piece of sponge with vanilla extract and leave it in the refrigerator.

Microwave some vanilla to deodourise the microwave.

Put a drop of vanilla on a lightbulb and turn on a light: the house smells like cake.

Wear it as perfume. It will smell relaxing, or like cake.

Information.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/david-allen-on-how-to-fix-your-life/263883/#.UIns-Apttro.mailto


I like "your psyche is not your system". And I like how he prefers paper—I use my phone or iCal for automatic reminders, but day to day stuff goes on paper or in my diary, because I am more likely to see it. Hooray for lists!

Buying the physical thing.

You'll never guess what. I bought a CD today, Sigh No More was $10 at jb hifi so Christmas ahoy, brother. He doesn't read my blog, I bet. Anyway, I got myself one as well. (See, Spotify HASN'T killed MY music sales.) I can't remember when I last bought a CD. I had a little moment of nostalgia. I forgot how clear and shiny a new plastic jewel case is, it used to be as magical to me as new car smell or unbroken book spine. I forgot that you can see the album art bigger in a CD than you can on your iTunes screen. I forgot that they come with booklets with song lyrics in them and pictures of the band and stuff. It was a journey of rediscovery. I still will buy downloads mainly, because I think the CD experience is often clutter rather than nostalgia or excitement, but it was delightful to remember the excitement of my youth, except that this time it's not an *NSync album.

By the way, I trialed ordering online at JBhifi and collecting it in store. It saves looking around for ages in the shop (I had a few things to get) and it's quicker than postage as well. Order at my computer, get emailed a few hours later saying I can collect it, and pop out at lunch.

Life has too many bits.

I believe that there is a set limit on how efficient I can be. I have limited juggling abilities. Probably everybody does, but some people have super-abilities. Once I juggle some balls up in the air, others will drop to the floor and go under the bed. Currently, the balls I am succeeding with are reading the bible almost daily, exercising several times a week, not getting sick or run down, recording my spending, washing up when I run out of breakfast bowls or earlier, and regularly toothbrushing the grout in the bathroom to keep the mould down. The balls I've missed are less important anyway. It's just the housework and stuff. One day, maybe next month, I'll finish painting my chest of drawers so that I can put ALL my clothes away, I'll clean the kitchen and bathroom and mop the floors, I'll get stuck into my list of UFOs, I'll floss my teeth, I'll get a haircut, I'll take that pile of stuff to the op shop.