We’ve just returned to Wellington after two months in the United Kingdom spending time with family and friends. One of the many blessings of a long trip away from home is the space for planning and reflecting, while still distant. I spent some time while in the UK thinking about how I want to spend […]
Books. It’s all very well to limit other things to the useful and the beautiful, but how does a reader throw out books? I discovered I had more to say about this than would sensibly stay in the comment thread, so here are some scattered thoughts on the owning of books. I grew up in […]
Some of us just don’t get around to clearing out our junk. But most hoarders are shackled to mountains of stuff because of one of two sentences. #1 ‘But it’s bound to come in handy one day!’ #2 ‘But it has a lot of sentimental value…’ If you’ve got the headspace and storage space, I […]
A million years or several months ago I started a ‘series’ (of one item so far…) on Magic Words, the brilliant and amazing phrases we use with kids that are particularly excellent at getting something or other across. I have notes of a dozen Magic Words I want to write up, but to get the […]
This handy rule for when to complain and to whom has buzzed around my Facebook feed this week, with lots of passionate commendations: When Susan had breast cancer, we heard a lot of lame remarks, but our favorite came from one of Susan’s colleagues. She wanted, she needed, to visit Susan after the surgery, but […]
Over Christmas, my Dad discovered Alex Archer. Following our family tradition of combing each other’s bookshelves for treasures to steal (in my case) or borrow (in his), he came across the first two books of the Alex Quartet. He chomped through them in a day or two and had to search out the next couple […]
Sadness and little children are a funny mix. Literally, I guess. You can’t spend a day with a toddler without cracking a few smiles, so even on a hard day, having a small comedian in the house means the black cloud sits alongside some sunbursts. Or maybe it’s like a two-lane road, where you can […]
The wonderful Joy Cowley has a lot to say on how to find the sacred in the mundane tasks of housework. Here is her contemporary psalm on the subject, from her collection Psalms Down Under: God of washing, God of unmade beds, God of dented saucepans and worn-out brooms, your presence in the most ordinary […]
In a pleasingly familiar story, Debbie Sterling, a Stanford engineer, wants to introduce girls to the world of engineering. She’s created GoldieBlox, a set of adventure books, where the reader helps Goldie solve problems using mechanical tools that come with the books. Debbie funded GoldieBlox through Kickstarter, reaching her goal in five days. Yay, Debbie! […]
What if Barbie dolls had the same proportions as normal women? This: Nickolay Lamm has recreated a typical blonde Barbie, but at the average proportions of a 19-year-old American woman (he took the measurements from the Centre for Disease Control). And you know what? Real-girl Barbie looks amazing. The project was at first an experiment […]