How to Change a Habit

When someone is sending electric shocks to the hair follicles on your face, you’re apt to listen more than talk. I listened and learned about The Charge – Activating the 10 Human Drives that Make you Feel Alive.

Bev had good things to say about this latest recipe for success and while it made me cringe with its nauseatingly pat tagline, I bought a copy, taking cover under the notion that it would give us something to talk about. While it’s fair that a definitive list of life’s secrets might induce involuntary eye-rolling (I always wonder, “Why ten?”), there is no call for anyone’s tiresome skepticism here.

Upon finishing the book, I gave my copy to a friend who was in need of some insight as she navigated an unbearably dysfunctional job situation that was undermining the confidence of this otherwise competent and fabulous young woman. I thought about JoAnne a lot as I turned the pages.

It had something for me too. While The Charge is the reason why I took on some scary projects instead of lesser undertakings and while it reinvigorated – at least temporarily – the blind courage of my 20-something self who somehow ventured off to Brussels with little money, a copy of Let’s Go Europe and a plan that went as far as “Take the train to ‘Le Gare du Nord'” – I mostly liked it for its solid practical tips more than for its fleeting inspirational passages. For example, “When this, then that” can help you develop lasting good habits. The idea is to add an action onto a well-established routine, as opposed to trying to change a behavior without the benefit of context. It’s the difference between saying, “This year I’m going to eat better!” and saying, “From now on, when I finish dinner every day, then I am going to eat an apple.”

It’s not sexy, but we use the rule to keep the litter box clean. Since it’s in the basement, it could easily be out-of-sight-out-of-mind until there was a revolt. But we have forstalled an uprising by saying: “When we feed the cat in the morning, we then clean the litter box.”

The Charge is loaded with other – probably better examples of – tips that made it worth it to replace the copy that I gave to my friend. While my enthusiasm for it might have been a case of my being particularly receptive to its insights for whatever reason when I first picked it up, I suspect that the book will hold up nicely as a reference.

Avoid these hangers

HangerHangerSprucing up for spring means having a good way to put stuff away. If you do, you’re more likely to stick with a system to keep things organized. So, I’m a fan of hangers that are designed specifically for pants and bought a stash of them a few years ago when I reorganized my closet.

HangerDon’t make the same mistake I made. Avoid these wooden slack hangers that are plastic around the neck of the hook. As much as I have tried, I can’t find a use for these headless wooden slats, which is an almost certain end to the last of my premium-priced hangers with their seductive velvet padding.

Hanger
The hangers that come with garments in the store have lasted.
Hanger
Slack hangers can also be used for boots! This hanger is all metal and has been around forever. I’m not sure where it came from or where to get more.

Spicy Lentils and Noodles

This is what happens when you screw up the Soba Noodle & Lentils Salad. I started knowing that I didn’t have all of the ingredients for that recipe, which shouldn’t have been a problem. But then I overcooked the lentils, which was starting to look less appetizing. So, I shifted gears to make a soup, but ended up with a spicy sauce  instead. I stand by it even though Brian didn’t appear to be a huge fan.

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Spicy Lentils & Noodles
Author: 
Prep time: 
Cook time: 
Total time: 
Serves: 6
 
Ingredients
  • ¾ Cup Lentils - I used red.
  • Olive Oil
  • Onion
  • Carrots
  • Garlic
  • 1 TBS Flour
  • Red Pepper Flakes
  • Black Pepper
  • Salt
  • Plain Yogurt
  • Milk
  • Egg Noodles
Instructions
  1. Cook the lentils. Normally, you would boil them for 5-7 minutes. I overdid it, so mine were mushy, hence the adaptation. Set aside.
  2. Sauté chopped onions, carrots and garlic in light olive oil.
  3. Add lentils and continue to cook. Stir in flour. Once a brown crusty goodness has formed on the bottom of the pan (not to be confused with burning), turn up the heat and cool down with water. Scrape the pan and blend. Add spices. I should have measured this, as my dish turned out too spicy. It wasn't ruined, but it took away from an otherwise flavorful dish. Let bubble.
  4. Blend in a dollop of yogurt.
  5. Stir in milk. Cook down to the consistency that you want.
  6. At the end you could add some frozen peas. I didn't.
  7. Serve over egg noodles or whatever you like.

Teaching Jan How to Drive

Just when it seems like the Wolves have turned a corner, they suffer a heartbreaking loss. It reminds me of teaching Jan how to drive.

When Ying asked me to teach her sister how to drive, I countered that her husband should do the honor. But putting a man in the uneasy position of critiquing his wife’s driving was ill-advised, as opposed to the much easier task of overcoming a language barrier while explaining the importance of checking your blind spot. I didn’t speak a word of Chinese and Jan was still learning body parts. “I have two feet. I have two hands. I have a head.”

We started in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn on the north end of Mt. Rushmore Road or Eighth Street depending on whether you are a tourist or a cruiser, generally high school kids mixed with the occasional GI who is too young for nightclubs. With the side mirror angled toward the road so she could see the stripes in relationship to the car (a trick borrowed from my dad who taught me how to drive and the extent of my bag of tricks as a driving instructor), for more than two hours Jan drove a rusty Volare Station Wagon from one end of the lot to the other. No one got hurt. It was a good day.

Jan steadily improved as we ditched her regular English workbooks for the South Dakota driver’s manual. Eventually we progressed to traffic while I gradually made my way out of Jan’s lap and firmly into the passenger’s seat where I could not reach the brakes. When it came time, Jan handled the freeway just fine and the practice runs to the DMV were becoming tedious; she had turned a corner and was ready for the road test. Great. Ying’s husband could stop with his daily harangues and I could stop imagining my bloody demise; it would have been an ironic fate after having survived my senior year of high school screwing off in that beloved heap.

The night before Jan was to take her test we took the wagon for a final run. What happened next is difficult to describe. Just as Jan’s driving was becoming effortless, she had suddenly and completely lost her sense of the car. She was clipping curbs and swinging into wild and overly broad turns that scared the hell out of me. In what I recognized to be a game of chicken, we hiccupped down the road in herky-jerky spurts, barely stopping in time to avoid collisions and pissing off everyone in our path, teenagers, GIs, old ladies. Everyone.

Jan would certainly face another berating from her brother-in-law who apparently learned how to drive on his lunch break while blindfolded and handcuffed to a monkey, and I was doomed to a career as a driving instructor, the end of which could only be marked by a license with Jan’s picture on it. Defeated and at a loss for what to do next, we had no words sitting in the parking lot of the Colonial House, the last restaurant heading south out of town before everything becomes a tourist attraction or a billboard for one. From a distance, I might have been ten playing Charlie’s Angels with my sister Amy. There we are in the driveway under the basketball hoop where we live in Shell housing that’s just inside the main gate at Ellsworth Air Force Base. The side-by-side duplexes of Shell have long been dozed. This time, this time a heated chase will not bring to the morning a blaring radio, the swishing of wipers nor blinking lights that will startle our dad as he sets off to work. This time it’s just Jan and me.

I’d look at Jan. She’d look at me. We’d both look straight ahead reaching eons beyond the windshield as if the answer might have wandered off into the ponderosa pines. I couldn’t figure it out. I’d look at Jan and she’d look at me. We’d both looked straight ahead… An eternity ticked by before a hint of inspiration rose up from deep inside her gut, filled her chest, and washed the residue of a bad day from Jan’s face.

“You change the seat?” She said.

The seat?

I don’t know why or how or why I didn’t notice it, but the seat was moved all the way back. Jan could barely reach the pedals! She could barely see over the dashboard!

The next day Jan took my car for her road test while I stayed behind to pray in the waiting room of the DMV. Jan returned a short while later to tell me that my prayers had been answered.

Coach Rambis, you change the seat?

Homemade Laundry Soap

When I was a young adult, I had friends who were devout Amway distributers. My former church youth counselors, Frank and Mary Ellen, took the vitamins, used the laundry soap and personal care products and they aspired to become Amway Diamonds, which meant a lifetime of financial security. They could retire early.

So it was Mary Ellen who first gave me an education on laundry detergent “filler”. Amway’s product didn’t have it. While somewhat ironic and perhaps true, Mary Ellen the Amway dealer considered commercial laundry soaps to be a total scam where a pound of sawdust was sold with every pound of soap. Since then I have watched boxes of Tide and other brand-name laundry detergents mysteriously shrink by about two thirds.

Non-Toxic Laundry Soap
A Sample of non-toxic laundry soap from a Community POWER recipient
Non-Toxic Laundry Soap
Recipe: Non-Toxic Laundry Soap

Flash forward to a presentation of the 2011 Community POWER grant recipients where I was giving a report on a residential composting initiative I coordinated. There I heard about one project that set out to debunk the more-toxic-more-suds-the-cleaner hoax and taught residents how to economize while reducing their environmental impact by – for one thing – making their own laundry detergent. I went home with a sample of the detergent and I tried it for the first time last week.

Non-Toxic Laundry Soap
This cheese grater did not work very well for cheese. But it worked great for soap.

In the load that I did using the sample, there were a few soap flakes that did not dissolve. It wasn’t the end of the world, but certainly not something you can expect the average person to accept. I’m wondering if this can be resolved when I make a new batch of detergent with more finely grated soap. As I recall from the presentation, any bar of soap will do. However, I’ve noticed that other recipes favor Fels-Naptha soap. I’m going to use what I have.

Here are other recipes for laundry detergent you could try:

Non-Toxic Laundry Soap
Less soap. Less Money. Less Space.
Non-Toxic Laundry Soap
3 TBLS is enough for a large load. Normally I would have used 1 scoop. Either way, if you’re not reading the directions and measuring the soap, you are most likely wasting money.

As a bonus, in addition to using less product (1-3 TBS), the powder fits in less space.

One blogger assures us that the lack of suds you’ll notice when using your homebrew is not a problem. She’s right. In the 1960’s marketers pushed suds as a way to tell that the soap was working. Today, we’re warned that too many suds indicate overuse. In addition, high efficiency washers have created a demand for low-suds products again. Marketing fads can be confusing.

Writer Michael Pollan says “Don’t eat what you see on television.” Given the detergent filler Mary Ellen warned me about 20+ years ago and a deceptive suds campaign that added no value but only aimed to distinguish one product from another one just like it, and given the overall advertising tactics that are turning us into neurotic Lysol junkies, I wonder if we shouldn’t apply that rule to all products advertised on television: Don’t buy them.

I think I’ll try it. 2014. Resolve to be Clean.

Links

The Soap Conflict, Thomas WhiteSide, The New Yorker, 1964.
“As the level of detergent suds in the American kitchen approached the stifling point a counter-movement set in. It started with a detergent called All; Procter & Gamble then put out Dash, with ‘low suds’ & ‘safe suds.’ Were suds good or bad?”

Vintage Commercials

Low Suds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1YTHr4mTQA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vl7V8DGfGpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWgIyywz4cg

Without Bleach or Bluing
With Bleach

The Wolf of Wall Street – Movie Review

BJH: I didn’t fall asleep. See It.

RJS: I didn’t wake up mad. Skip it.

RJS: While there are reasons to recommend this movie, I suspect I’m just hoping that the words of the coke-snorting Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey) might penetrate our collective psyche. Hanna deflowers Wall Street neophyte, Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), with the truth about legalized gambling, as he describes an unsustainable game of musical chairs where there are a few winners and a lot of losers, and where no goods are produced and trillions of dollars of wealth is “all on paper.” It sounded pretty accurate to me and it’s better entertainment than The Crash Course.

Another scene that should have been required viewing for Mr. Randall’s high school Family Economics class where I learned how to balance an imaginary checkbook is where Belfort sells four thousand dollars of penny stocks to some schmuck over the telephone. As he reels in fish bait, Belfort and his sleazy crew of rehabilitated losers pantomime their valued customer – a family man who’s finally asserting some independence from his more cautious ball and chain – literally taking it up the ass.

From the beginning, we know that we’re in for a stomach-turning, eye-averting ride when for $10,000 an employee at a brokerage firm entertains her co-workers by shaving her head. Apparently abusing midgets and lining up to gangbang skanky whores at the office in the middle of a workday didn’t cut it for these assholes. While she quickly loses her idolatrous audience to more seductive pleasures before the deed is done – imagine a toddler casually setting aside a shiny new toy as he wanders off for a television fix – the mangy woman is not humiliated in vain. Ten grand will pay for a boob job.

The degradation of every single woman in this movie was very, very upsetting and leaves nothing about the lifestyle of the superrich – as it is depicted here – to be envied. And where I might suspect some movies of hiding behind “telling it like it is” as an excuse to flirt with gratuitous violence and misogynistic fantasies where a man can whack off to a bombshell at a party in front of his wife without the threat of consequences. I can’t make that case here no more than it’s justified to be upset with a war journalist for taking pictures of dead children.

With frame-by-frame disturbing images, I wondered if the movie could have been an effective art exhibit to be absorbed on the viewer’s own terms. As it is, I felt assaulted and maybe that’s the point. We would have missed out on some physically comical scenes, like when a paralyzed luded-up Belfort has to get himself behind the wheel of his car to stop the Feds from ruining his ill-gotten life. But there are other scenes that would have translated to paint quite well. For example, there’s the brief moment when we see The Wolf carrying a monkey through a sea of cubicles full of bottom feeders who will say anything to close a deal because they’ve bought into a system where they matter and you don’t.

On second thoughts, maybe The Wolf of Wall Street is worth seeing.

Decluttering for the New Year

It's All Too Much, Peter WalshWe went to Rapid City for Christmas and, motivated by a book I found while there, I returned ready to take a closer look at our home to see what might be encroaching on our corner of paradise.

Peter Walsh’s workbook, “It’s All Too Much”, begins with an assessment that would suggest that a family intervention isn’t imminent.

“Do you need to clear off the kitchen counter to prepare a meal?”

No.

“Do you regularly misplace your car keys or checkbook?”

No.

“Do you have to remove laundry… to get to your bed?”

Not usually.

Yet there’s a reason why I walked out of Books-A-Million with a receipt. We have kitchen gadgets that we do not use. I couldn’t do my taxes tomorrow without taking a day to gather the necessary papers and I feel daunted by a stash of plastic bags that is ever growing thanks to our newspaper subscription.

I was also drawn to some of the exercises in the book. The “I might need it one day” and the “It’s worth a lot of money” excuses for hanging on to stuff are quickly neutralized. Not being a huge hoarder myself, I was surprised to notice that I relied on some of them. It was liberating to be ready with a sensible response:

“If I can’t use it today, right now, for who I am in the life I am living, I don’t need it.”

As clutter piles up over time it becomes invisible. So, in the “What I see – What I’d like to see” exercise where you note in detail what is in each room, you learn to see again.

The “Room Function Chart” was another eye-opening exercise. Room by room you are to note the current and ideal function of a space. Based on that, you can determine what is needed and what must go. Doing this exercise, I discovered that our office was serving too many functions. I had been struggling to find a credenza/armoire/cabinet with very specific dimensions and features so that we could reduce the footprint of stereo cabinets and whatnot on the crowded floor. But then I realized that if we quit using the office/video-audio studio/guestroom for overflow clothing, there would be ample room to serve these other purposes. As a bonus, the search for furniture that doesn’t exist could finally stop.

We need to live within the space that we have. I have always believed in Rule #1 and for the most part we do okay. We certainly aren’t paying for storage, which was the subject of a sermon at my parents’ church back in Rapid. The preacher said, “We fill our houses to the brim, packing every closet until we can’t get into them anymore. We stuff the attic with things we will soon forget. When that’s full, we move boxes we never unpacked from our last move into the garage. Then we rent climate-controlled storage space. If it weren’t for the bill, we would forget about that too. Why do we need so much stuff?”

Rule #2 prioritizes the use of space. So, not only do we have to live within the space that we have, the space must make it possible to easily do what we want to do. Keeping this in mind, it is suddenly much easier to choose between a few jackets that I never wear and having easy access to my collection of taped interviews.

Shoes
I don’t wear them. They’re out.

While difficult to overcome the temptation to move clutter from one spot to another, I won’t be able to do that now without remembering Rule #3: “One room’s clutter is still another room’s clutter.” So, I have a nice little pile of stuff accumulating for the Goodwill, the used bookstore, and Craig’s List.

As I worked through some very tiring exercises, I thought of friends for whom clutter is a constant issue and considered whether this book might be a nice centerpiece to a support group. It might be. I thought of people who are relocating to warmer climates or with a job and who have no choice but to look at and handle absolutely everything they own. Whether they decide to pack it all up or dispose of certain things in one way or another before loading the truck and moving on to the next chapter, they’ll have to make a lot of decisions. I wonder what I would decide about the shoebox full of dried out pens that occupy prime real estate in my closet.