#157 Give Yourself a Sick Day I spent much of my childhood engaged in long drawn-out games of make-believe. Some of these games featured bucolic scenarios of apple picking or making feasts of mud…
Survival Tip #156: Make it sized to fit. On Saturday night, we ate spaghetti. There were two big white bowls filled with pasta smothered in Marcella Hazan’s famous sauce, a smaller wooden one, filled with…
Survival Tip #155: Call yourself whatever you please. Over the weekend, a morning walk to the farmers’ market got us a basket full of fresh vegetables and a dusty wooden crate that a neighbor filling…
Tip #154: Spread a little cheer. This morning, the muscles on the underside of my forearms are aching. They’re tender from overuse this weekend, being put to work on tiny apartment improvements that didn’t…
Tip #153: Keep your fruit in plain sight. For every week of June there was a bowl of cherries on the table that we call my desk. It might be shocking to know that there are two desks…
Tip #152: Love thy neighbor. Come June, when the sun sets late and long days spent outside result in no nap for Faye and an early bedtime instead (thank goodness for small blessings), James and…
Embracing a bit of a commute several times a week for the relative peace of a studio corner has changed my daily work experience a bit. I’m doing my best to enjoy the extra…
Tip #150: Go with the flow. Growing up, my sisters and I had a plastic Little Tikes playhouse that we kept in our backyard. I adored it. You know the one? With the green roof and…
Tip #149 : Use What’s Useful“Bread with butter. And jam. Yes.” Faye repeats the phrase, smacking her lips in the identical way almost every morning of her life. Jam gets spread onto bread and…
Tip #148: Illusions of sparsity.I have a theory that each of us, depending on our tastes, or habits, or customs, is comfiest with a particular ratio of stuff to space in the place we call home. Whether we…