Do you remember awhile back we talked about things we don’t want but can’t get rid of because otherwise we will keep buying them? For example, I need to keep two headbands (one wide, one narrow) among my possessions forever, because otherwise I will think a headband will be cute on me and I will buy another one. I need to keep a couple of tank tops for the same reason: they are just never going to look right on me, but if I get rid of them, I will forget that they don’t look right on me and buy more.

I thought of another example: hair-removal lotion.

(image from Amazon.com)

If I don’t keep a container of Veet or Nair in the bathroom closet for ALL ETERNITY, I will keep purchasing it. Because for some reason, I periodically think, “Hey, instead of spending 30 seconds shaving my underarms, which is no big deal, why don’t I cover them with NASTY-smelling lotion and sit there in the bathroom with my elbows sticking out for 10 minutes, then try to get the stuff off in the shower, then find that not all the hair is removed, but then not be able to shave or use deodorant for a couple of days because the skin feels weird and irritated and sort of unpleasantly, stickily smooth? All for the huge, huge benefit of ‘lasting up to twice as long as shaving’? How about THAT great idea?” –Swistle, who is spending the day discreetly sniffing down the neckline of her shirt.

I liked the song Locked Away so much better when I thought the lyrics were “If I showed you my floors, would you still love me the same” instead of “If I showed you my flaws.” I laughed out loud with delight the first time I (mis)heard the song, thinking, “Now THIS is a love song I can identify with!” (If I were dating again, I would be very anxious about my dates meeting my floors.)

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It took me awhile to do this, but it’s working great: putting MOST of the beans for a batch of chili into the blender. I love chili, and the children don’t mind it but they don’t like the beans. So now I put about a can and a half of beans into the blender with some water (you can instead use the tomato base of the chili, if you want to), and then putting the remaining half-can of beans into the chili as themselves. The children pick around the intact beans, but they’re still eating the ground-up beans.

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I have recently been experimenting with fabric paint, and I heartily recommend it, especially if your child has an obsessive interest in something hard to find on t-shirts. (I’d wanted to try one of those kits where you can make an iron-on patch with your printer, but those are for inkjet printers and ours is a laser printer.) Multi-packs of boys’ white undershirts are on good back-to-school sales this time of year, so it’s a great time for low-cost experimentation; if a shirt totally fails, use the rest of it to practice painting or try out paint colors, or cut it up and use it as cleaning rags.

I laundered the shirts first, with no fabric softener (fabric softener can make the fabric more resistant to paint). I looked online for simple images, then printed them out and traced over them with a fat black Sharpie marker, to make them easier to see; then I put the paper inside the t-shirt. It doesn’t show through a LOT, but it shows through enough for rough tracing purposes. I printed out a second copy so I also had something to glance over at for reference.

Speaking of paper, put paper inside the shirt even if you’re NOT tracing: otherwise, the paint can seep through the front layer and right through to the back.

I’m using the Tulip fabric paints, basically by random chance (I found a couple in a clearance section, and then later sought out the same brand); I don’t know if they’re the best or not, but I’m happy with them so far. I bought the individual colors I wanted, but they also come in multi-packs like this one if you’re not sure where the creative muse will lead. I buy the “Slick” ones for outlines and lettering: it’s very similar to piping frosting onto a cake. I have the “Soft” ones for filling in the outlines (after the outlines dry): this is the kind of paint you squeeze out onto a piece of tinfoil or something, and then use with a paintbrush. I’ve also used the Slick ones for filling in outlines (using the tip to spread the color around) if what I want is a shiny look, like for eyes or sunglasses. One time I wanted to make a color lighter, so I mixed a Soft color with a Slick white, and that worked just fine and came out looking soft/matte, not slick/shiny.

It helps if you can make yourself feel shruggy about the whole thing. Things will happen: like, when I’m carefully piping an outline, sometimes there will be a sudden bubble of fabric paint, or my hand will shake a little. These things feel like they matter a LOT during the MAKING of the shirt—but once it’s made, and you’re looking at it from a distance, they matter little or none. Some mistakes can be covered over: hey, let’s put a flower here! Some mistakes are only obvious if someone knows what the original picture looked like. I recommend persevering: if it IS ruined, there’s little to lose by continuing, and you’re getting good practice, and maybe it’ll turn out not to be ruined after all.

The paint needs to dry for four hours. We have cats who like to walk on things, so I put cooling racks over the designs. Our cats don’t like the feeling of cooling racks on their paw-pads, and this also reminded other members of the household that they should NOT TOUCH the tempting, tempting paint. A cooling rack can also keep your hand up off the shirt if you accidentally paint it in such a way that you run out of places to rest your hand, not that I know this from doing it multiple times.

I’m getting bored with painting on white shirts, so I’m going to be keeping an EAGLE EYE on end-of-summer clearance sales. I remember in other years seeing solid-colored shirts for a dollar or two. I’m going to check Goodwill, too; a lot of times they have well-worn shirts for $3.00, but sometimes it’s shirts in really good shape for $1.50. I’m especially interested in finding some girl-cut t-shirts for Elizabeth.

Here is something I hate: when someone makes a mocking remark about how people complaining about the summer heat are the same ones who will be complaining about the winter cold—as if that’s a ridiculous, contradictory thing to do. No, I reject that attempted mockery: I feel absolutely non-ridiculous when I complain about BOTH of two different types of discomfort. It is in fact possible and reasonable to dislike being too hot AND to dislike being too cold, and to prefer to be somewhere in the middle where it is not “too” anything.

What is it the mockers think is so clever here? “Oh, you’re TOO COLD when the wind is blowing icily and the snow is halfway up the door? That’s not what you said when it was blisteringly hot and humid out! You irrational idiot! Snork, snork!” “Oh, you felt self-conscious when you turned out to be overdressed for that party? Well, then, you’re never happy, because I remember on another occasion you felt self-conscious when you were UNDERdressed for another event! I mean, make up your mind!” “Are you wishing it would stop raining because it’s been doing it for days and your basement is flooding? That’s not how you felt about rain when we had a drought last summer! Some people are just impossible to please!” “What? You’re too full? Just half an hour ago you were complaining about being hungry! What IS it with you and your irrational changeability?”

This is something I had already noticed, but working with elderly clients has made me notice EVEN HARDER that most pop music is for young people. I think this is part of why the music at a grocery store can be so depressing: hearing those yearning passionate lyrics (“I can be your hero, baby”) while looking around at all of us very ordinary people living very ordinary lives and no one really following us around begging us to please please baby please be theirs…well, it’s a poor fit, and a painful contrast.

I noticed it particularly while driving home from a visit with a client, hearing Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud.” Is my 86-year-old client going to identify with “And darling, I will be loving you until we’re 70”? Will that seem romantic to her? Will she sing it sentimentally to her 88-year-old husband? No. In fact, the song suddenly seems ridiculous. Wow, ALL THE WAY until SEVENTY??? And THEN what? Divorce, I assume, or death. Gosh, when you’re THAT old, does it even matter? This song is for people who can’t even IMAGINE an age like 70, people who were born when some of my clients were ALREADY 70.

I’ve heard that most music is written for young people because young people are the ones who buy music. But this seems like a bit of a CYCLE, doesn’t it? Music is written for young people because they’re the ones spending most of the money, but then pop music appeals less and less to older people, so then older people buy even less music and younger people buy even more, and there’s yet another set of data explaining why we might as well market only to younger people.

Besides, surely we do not market ALL the products for just the group who buys the MOST? Surely there is also money to be reaped from the groups who buy less, even if it’s LESS money. After all, you can still buy Prell and bluing and horehound candy and housedresses and bay rum aftershave and perm kits and handkerchiefs, even though The Young People don’t want to buy them. Let’s EXPLOIT those little pockets of money, marketers! I would love to hear more lyrics like Taylor Swift’s “I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling 22” or Paramore’s “‘Cause after all this time, I’m still into you”—and I’d love them even more if they were written/sung by, respectively, someone who was older than 23 and someone who had been in a long marriage. I would like to hear more songs by/for people who have CHILDREN or GRANDCHILDREN who are 22.

My friend Surely has pointed out that COUNTRY music is helping to market to this niche. I have actively tried to like country music, but I just DON’T. I like pop music, and some pop-alternative. Maybe the occasional country cross-over: I do love Florida Georgia Line’s “Cruise,” though I liked it even better when Nelly got involved. And that’s not the type of lyrics that I’m talking about anyway. How many of us are going around in bikini tops lookin’ for the fast life in some guy’s truck? I need something with more of an “Old Navy crewneck”/minivan feel. “Yeah when I first saw her with that comfy tee on her / She was walking right down that grocery store aisle.”

I promise if someone tries to exploit this market, I will buy the songs. Well, some of the songs. Well, if they’re on SALE; will they be on SALE? *rummages through coin purse for exact change*

Two things:

One is that the new(ish) EBay dispute-resolution system is so rad. Long ago, in the early days of EBay, if you bought something and it arrived in crummy condition, you had to hash it out with the seller—and most EBay sellers do not have training in customer service. You could leave negative feedback if they didn’t do the right thing, but then they could leave YOU completely unfair negative feedback in retaliation. Even if they took a return on the item, many wouldn’t refund shipping either direction, so you could end up losing a chunk of money and not even ending up with an item, even though you were completely blameless. It was a poor system.

NOW, if you contact the seller, it has to be through EBay’s communication system, and EBay keeps a record of the whole conversation. If things don’t go well, you can call EBay in on it: they examine the conversation, see you being incredibly polite and reasonable and showing the issue clearly with photos, and they see the seller not responding, or being unreasonable, and they take your money back from the seller and give it to you, including shipping. It is the best thing ever.

Two is that I had it out with my supervisor about all the schedule changes and extra-shift requests. I said that I was not a flexible employee at this stage of my life, and that I considered this job my second/extra job—a way to fill a few extra hours. I said that after working for the company for a couple months, I could see what a juggling act the scheduling was, and I could understand that employee flexibility would be a huge asset for that. I said I understood if my relative lack of ability to work more/different hours meant she couldn’t use me in the schedule, but hoped she would be able to.

She answered back very gratifyingly, thanking me for telling her and saying she would try not to change my schedule anymore. Since that discussion less than a week ago, she’s asked three times if I can work extra shifts—including one text at 10:30 at night concerning 8:00 the next morning. And this is after I answered the first request by saying no, I already had too many hours this week, and didn’t want any more.

This may not work out. In the meantime, I am getting lots of practice at the valuable life skill of saying no. Pretty soon I might start getting practice at the valuable life skill of saying “Are you KIDDING me??”

I really would hate to give up the job because of this issue. It’s not as if it’s a problem with the WORK. But this may be a problem with The Way the Company Is Run, and that can affect EVERYTHING. I’m fearing that it may be the way ALL such companies are run, but it’s too early to panic about that.

This feels so silly to blog about, but seriously it has changed my life and I think about it with satisfaction multiple times a week, so I’m just going to go with it.

Nearly a year ago, I mentioned that I was finally using reusable bags at Target as well as at the grocery store, but that I didn’t then know what to use for scooping the cat box. Rhia wrote: “We use bread bags for litter box scooping! Just the right size!” NonSoccerMom said she did the same. And MY LIFE WAS TRANSFORMED.

It’s a little embarrassing, but it had seriously and literally never occurred to me to reuse the bags our food comes in. I was BUYING PLASTIC BAGS. AT THE STORE. WITH MONEY. And I still DO buy bags, because there are some things I still want them for. But when Paul makes a double batch of muffins every week, and we divide them into one bag for now and two bags for the freezer for later in the week, I used to use gallon-sized Ziploc bags. (We did reuse them, but still.) Now we use empty bread bags, or empty soft-taco-shell bags, or empty hamburger-bun bags. They’re durable (they have to be, to survive shipping and stocking and shopping), they’re fine to put food in because THEY DID HAVE FOOD IN THEM, and we have a generous supply: we go through about five loaves of bread, two bags of soft taco shells, and one to two packs of hot dog or hamburger buns per week.

Now when I finish a bag of bread, or buns, or soft taco shells, or English muffins, or WHATEVER, I roll it up and put it in the freezer door. If it came with a twisty-tie, I twist that around the rolled-up bag so I’ll have it when I reuse the bag. (If it doesn’t have a twisty-tie, we have a supply of clothespins already on hand, for chip-bags and the like.) When we have leftover pizza, and I want a bag to put it in, I take one out of the freezer door—and then feel perfectly comfortable throwing the greasy thing away after we eat the pizza, because the bag was trash-bound ANYWAY when I saved it.

Pizza is a particularly good example, in fact, because a lot of other leftovers can skip the bag situation entirely by going in a reusable container. But I don’t have (and don’t want to acquire/store) a container big enough for leftover pizza, or for a dozen muffins.

The only downside is that the exterior of the bag is then misleading. I don’t know how many times I’ve been rummaging with frustration through the freezer, thinking, “WHERE are those MUFFINS??”—only to realize I’ve been overlooking them because I thought they were a bag of bread.

Well. Our final fish died. We’ve had this aquarium since TWO THOUSAND TEN, which is quite a bit longer than I’d thought. For awhile, we bought fish with life expectancies of 1-2 years, and periodically freshened the supply. Then I decided I was tired of cleaning the tank, and no one else was enjoying the fish anymore, not even the cats, so I decided I would let the fish Naturally Decrease Over Time and then we’d be done with fish.

I wish we’d made a note of when we bought the last batch, because it seems to all of us as if the last few fish lived WAY LONGER than they were supposed to. Finally we were down to two fish, and then to one, and it started seeming sad to have one single fish in a big tank, so I was glad when he started having balance/floating issues and we knew the time was near. Today was the day we said, “…Wait. Where is the fish?,” and soon found that he was No Longer With Us.

Now I find I am having second thoughts. Are we REALLY done with fish? Maybe getting rid of the aquarium will just mean there will be more room on that cabinet for clutter piles. Maybe if we got new, fresher fish, the cats would be interested in watching Fish TV again. And it was so difficult getting that tank from a fish-killing tank of water to a place where fish not only live but live TOO LONG; it seems a pity to waste that progress.

I would say it took about 2 months to stop FREAKING OUT about the new job. (In fact, maybe I already DID say this. It’s ringing a bell.) I can still get panicky when I have a new client, but a lot of it is just inherent (NEW THINGS AAAAAAAGGHHH!!), and in general things have settled down. I’m getting used to working, and I’m getting used to the work, and I’ve gotten used to the paperwork that is pretty much the same with every client. It helps enormously that I’m starting to have regular clients at regular times.

I still hate being called so much. I keep saying no, cringing/suffering every single time, and they keep calling anyway. I’ve started not answering my phone when I see it’s them. Then I can hear the message and have time to think about it. The problem: they’re PHONE PEOPLE, so to them it often makes sense to leave a message asking me to call them back, instead of leaving a message saying why they’re calling and what they want. Or else they’ve learned it’s harder to say no when you don’t have time to prepare, and they’re exploiting that. But let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. Also, if they ARE doing that, in my case it’s backfiring: if I have time to think, I might say YES. Whereas if I’m on the spot, I panic and tend to say no. Also, it makes me reluctant to call them back because by doing so I feel like I’m asking to be put in a very uncomfortable situation.

For dealing with work anxiety, I’ve gotten considerable use out of two quotes. I paraphrased each one so heavily, I no longer even know how to find the originals; the wording of the originals made me flinch. One quote, boiled down: “All I can do is go there, and be there, and do what I can to help.” If I remember correctly, the original included going there and being there “in love,” which, gag—and yet, I admit that concept lingers (in a good way) in the FEEL of the quote for me, even though I took out those words.

I use that quote when I feel like I am over my head and/or I don’t feel like I’m doing a good job, or when I’m going somewhere new and I’m not sure I’ll be able to handle it, or when I’m going back somewhere where things didn’t go so well the first time. “All I can do,” I say to myself firmly, trying to stop the swirl of anxious thoughts, “is go there, and be there, and do what I can to help.” It gives me a chin-up/shoulders-back feeling, and also a helpful “Well, probably I am better than NOTHING” mindset, and also reminds me that going there with kind/helpful motivations and solidly good intentions is a BIG PART of doing a good job, and also lets me think of this as my employer’s issue: if they are sending me there, they think I can do it at an acceptable level—and so probably the job I am doing IS acceptable. I don’t have to be AMAZING at EVERYTHING right AWAY; sometimes all I have to be is a warm body filling a shift while a more competent warm body is on vacation.

The other quote is one I think has great potential for misuse. It reminds me of other things I say to myself which I would ONLY say to myself and NEVER to another person—because they’re USEFUL to say to ONESELF, but HORRIBLE if someone says them to someone else. (For example, the whole category of “It could be worse”: I use this to reset my OWN perspective when I’m freaking out about something and want to calm myself by thinking how much better it is than other possibilities, but if someone ELSE said it to ME, I would feel like hurting them in the neck region.)

The second quote (again, highly paraphrased): “The point is not to be happy. The point is to make good use of our time here.” You see what I mean about the potential for misuse? Just for starters, it sounds EXACTLY like the kind of thing someone would say to SOMEONE ELSE, and not in a nice tone of voice, either. But when I am at a client’s house, feeling like I’d rather be home playing Candy Crush and so probably this job is all wrong for me, the quote (said in a nice tone: gentle, understanding) shifts me away from the idea that Having Fun, or BEING ELECTRIFIED WITH PREDESTINED PURPOSE, are the only ways to measure whether doing something is valuable. And this quote ties so beautifully into one of my main reasons for getting a job, which is that I felt I was not making good use of my time.

But if you said to me, “I’m not happy in my job,” or if you mentioned how much fun you had with your job, you would not have to worry that I would tighten my mouth and say preachily that the point was to be USEFUL. I don’t even really like my own paraphrase, if I examine it too closely: who says there IS “a point,” let alone “THE point”? So this is only a quote I use to refocus my own anxious feelings, not a quote I’d print on a t-shirt and make into a life philosophy. It wouldn’t work for someone who has trouble with guilt if they do anything fun or if they love a job that doesn’t seem Meaningful Enough; someone like that would need a quote of a very different sort, to compensate for THEIR type of anxious feelings.

I love having a whole rich list of lunch ideas! Already I am keen on the idea of bringing a snack lunch. Yesterday I tried it out with cottage cheese, baby carrots, parmesan pita chips, and a hard boiled egg. So yum.

I also bought a small Pyrex dish set (I’m annoyed to see it’s cheaper at Amazon than the sale price I paid at Target), three round lidded glass bowls in three sizes. That seems like the perfect way to carry, heat, and eat, all in the same container, without using the client’s pans/dishes.

I loved the idea several of you mentioned, which was to take a lunch-sized serving out of a meal BEFORE the family descends upon it like locusts. This also solves the problem of leftovers that are mostly noodles and hardly any chicken, or whatever.

I have a book to recommend:

(image from Amazon.com)

Astonish Me, by Maggie Shipstead. I’d read another book by this author, Seating Arrangements, and found it an interesting mix of exactly what I want (so much inside-view into a family and their thoughts and feelings and why they do what they do)—and also the sort of book that made me question why anyone ever anythings, when we’re all so flawed, and all so oblivious to our flaws. It also turned out I was confusing Seating Arrangements with ANOTHER book I read about a WASPy wedding, and THAT book took a bad turn right at the END, so even on page 245 out of 257 of Astonish Me I was thinking, “Well, I love it SO far, but let’s not get too confident.”

Astonish Me is set in the world of ballet, which is a place I find interesting for behind-the-scenes: it’s so dainty and beautiful and quiet and cooperative on the outside, so sweaty and painful and demanding and competitive where we can’t see it. One of the main characters is someone who deliberately leaves ballet after realizing she’ll never be good enough; we follow her life afterward, and also the life of her former roommate who stays with ballet. The timeline jumps around a little, pursuing an answer to the question of why several things happened the way they did; I found the eventual resolutions satisfying enough, without feeling as if they were TOO tidy/explained.

I have been at my new job for nearly two months now. I’m still not sure I’m not going to quit—but I AM glad I didn’t ALREADY quit, which is good progress.

For nearly two months I have been enjoying the novelty of sandwiches: peanut butter and jelly, tuna, egg salad, lunch meat. I started working with side dishes a little: blueberries, a small simple salad, various granola bars (have you tried the one made with quinoa? I think it’s pretty yummy), a banana.

But although I do still enjoy sandwiches, I have one weekly shift where I have to bring lunch AND dinner, and I admit on that day I get a little tired of sandwiches. So I am looking for ideas for portable meals. My job is probably similar to an office job, in that I am able to heat things up, but (1) it should not take a long time, and (2) it should not stink up the place. Eating the food should also not take a long time.

Leftovers are good, of course, but we don’t usually have leftovers. I will probably gradually tweak my cooking style to CREATE more leftovers.

I thought about some sort of cup-of-soup product, but there seem to be two kinds: (1) extremely cheap cup-of-soup, like 3/$1, which smells strongly and is messy to eat and I don’t particularly like it, or (2) surprisingly expensive cup-of-soup, where it costs more for a small microwavable bowl of soup than for a whole can. My older children mocked me: “Oh, TWO WHOLE DOLLARS for soup! Why, in MY day, you could get a cup of soup for TWO BEES!” But I could make a batch of soup and put it into little containers in the freezer.

Salads, but those are a little fussy. I made a small side salad (just spinach, carrot shreds, sunflower seeds, and dressing), and that was a little fussy to make and took a little too long to eat.

What else? What do you bring for your work lunches?