I don’t wear jewelry very often. I have some pieces I really like but it’s not part of my daily dressing routine to put them on, so unless I’m dressing for a super-special occasion I tend to forget to wear them.

Part of the problem, I think, is that until yesterday all my jewelry was stored like this:

These boxes were in a drawer in the closet, and if I wanted to wear the contents of one of them I had to pull out the stuff that was stacked on top of them and then figure out which box contained the piece I wanted to wear. (Yes, there are a lot of boxes from Murmur! If you’re in Calgary you should check them out!)

I thought if the jewelry were more accessible and more visible, I’d be more inclined to put it on in the morning. But I don’t have dresser space for a jewelry box. So I came up with this:

I used a 3M Command Adhesive Hook to hang a 12-Pocket Hosiery Organizer from The Container Store on the empty side wall of our walk-in closet. The Container Store had other hanging organizers for jewelry, but the pockets and size of the hosier organizer appealed to me more.

Now most of my jewelry is right in my field of vision where I choose my clothes, and easily accessible (and — bonus — I freed up half a drawer). Let’s see if I can spruce up my image a little this year!

Things that you think are liberating can actually become extremely confining or restrictive or oppressive, and things that you think are controlling can actually give you a greater sense of security and liberation in the end.

Andrea Zittel
Art21: Consumption

My mom was a big Christmas baker when I was a kid: shortbread, sugar cookies, gingersnaps, Nanaimo bars, mincemeat tarts and chocolate-covered cherries (which had a crunchy nut layer between the maraschino cherry and the chocolate — I loved the nut layer and the chocolate but not the cherries, and years later we found a bunch of petrified cherry remains behind the piano). When I moved out of my parents home I continued that tradition for a while with my own specialties: miniature brownies, meringues, gingerbread.

I haven’t done much baking since I got married, since E. won’t (or can’t) eat most of it, and we were often at my parents’ place for Christmas anyway. Sometimes, though, we have a party or two to attend, and then I have an excuse to indulge my sweet tooth a bit. Yesterday was more about making candy than baking, but it was indulging nonetheless.

This peppermint bark recipe from the Food Network was super easy to make. I cut the recipe in half because I didn’t really need two pounds of candy(!), and I sprinkled a handful of leftover crushed candy canes on top for some sparkle. I melted the white chocolate in the microwave 30 seconds at a time at 50% power, stirring after each burst, until it was fully melted. Took maybe 15 minutes, including hammering the heck out of the candy cane.

I love fudge, but I don’t remember the last time I tried to make it — probably as a teenager, and I sort of remember it being a major fail. Perhaps because I didn’t have a candy thermometer at the time and was trying to cook to some “ball” stage that I had no reference point for. Candy thermometer and Alton Brown’s Chocolate Fudge recipe for the win! My one critical mistake was that I accidentally used semi-sweet chocolate instead of unsweetened, so it’s really, really sweet. But still edible!

This is Megabyte’s favorite toy ever. It’s called Hide-A-Squirrel and it has three little stuffed squirrels (each with a squeaker inside) that you place in the holes in the tree trunk, and the dog has to figure out how to get them out. I got it for her last Christmas and she plays with it all the time — my parents stick the squirrels back in several times a day, and next time they come into the room the squirrels are all on the floor again. Hours of enjoyment for the whole family!

The squirrels stopped squeaking pretty fast (Megabyte is hard on her toys) but the beautiful thing is that you can buy replacement squirrels! So last time I visited I brought several packages. (They also have a bird house, bee hive, gingerbread house, and several other options if your dog isn’t into squirrels.)

Since I mentioned some volunteer projects recently, I thought I’d talk about the one that launched last month.

I work for Salesforce. It’s a fairly large software company; as I write this it’s growing and for the last several years has been in Forbes magazine’s list of 100 Best Companies to Work For. One of the things that earns the company that ranking is Salesforce’s 1:1:1 model, which is this: 1% of Salesforce’s product is free to non-profits in the form of donated or discounted licenses; 1% of the founding stock was placed in a foundation to be used in grants; and 1% of each employee’s time is made available to volunteer with non-profits of their choice.

That last part means that each Salesforce employee receives 6 paid days off per year to volunteer. But during my first couple years at Salesforce I found it hard to make time for volunteering outside of the 2-3 corporate team-building events my team participated in. So this year I made it a goal to use all my hours.

Enter the Bay Area Association for Disabled Sailors (BAADS), a local non-profit that offers sailing programs to people with disabilities, fostering independence, confidence and a whole lot of fun.

Ironically, BAADS’ website wasn’t accessible to members with certain disabilities: the screen reader software used by blind and visually impaired users to read web pages couldn’t access some of the content. Additionally, the site was full of broken links, and the content was outdated: any time BAADS wanted to make a change they had to pay the consultant that had developed the site to do it, so they’d save up several changes and then there would be some delay before the changes were actually done.

One of the things I do at Salesforce is participate in a workgroup that works to make our web-based software accessible to users with disabilities. I’m also a bit of a WordPress geek (the content management software I use for this blog). And one of BAADS’ board members happens to be my neighbor. So I devoted my volunteer hours to setting BAADS up on WordPress so they could update their own content, and creating a WordPress theme (the wrapper that handles layout and style for a website) that would be accessible to all of BAADS members.

Last month, after many hours of work, the new BAADS site went live. (Yay!) The visual design was provided by one of Salesforce’s visual designers, Grant Anderson. There are many things that I could explain about why the new design is more accessible than the old one, but I’m saving those for a post on my other blog, where I usually geek out over such things.

I’m pleased with the way everything turned out. Between this and another volunteer project this year, I turned in more than 100 volunteer hours — well over the paid 1%, but totally worth what I learned through the process and the satisfaction of helping a great group of people. And BAADS is thrilled. Everybody wins.

Last night I was watching the animé series Honey and Clover and was struck by this soliloquy from Hagumi Hanamoto, the (somewhat disturbingly) child-like painting student, as she ponders a Rodin sculpture in an art history book:

There are so many things I want to try to do. There is an endless amount of things I want to try to make scattered inside of me. I chase after each of the images that fly by, catch them, wrestle with them, verify the taste and drink them down, name them, and return it to the appropriate place…. I want to open all of these boxes, but a human’s life is too short to open them all. There is a limit to the number of boxes that one human can open in a lifetime.

There are a lot of things I would like to do, and many of them revolve around making things. I’d like to be better at some things I already do, and I’d like to try new things. It’s very easy to close the door on these things and ignore them, to lie down with my iPad and read whatever comes up on Twitter, Reeder, Zite or Pinterest — or to watch lengthy animé series, for that matter. And I think that sometimes that’s okay; sometimes work and other commitments take up all my energy and all I want is to be distracted for a little while. But these kinds of distractions tend not to be very satisfying, so I want more — I subscribe to more feeds, follow more people, install more apps, keep hitting the refresh button to see what’s next, and then it’s more of a habit than anything else. And then I’m not opening boxes.

My friend Dinah emailed me after the On Simplifying post and congratulated me on my positive Discardian shift. Dinah came up with the concept of Discardia — a holiday that celebrates letting go of things that are getting in your way — about 10 years ago, and she recently wrote a book about it. I wasn’t thinking about Discardia when I wrote my post, though I’ve known about it for years and have sometimes even deliberately celebrated it. But when I read Dinah’s book there were parts that echoed some of the things I’ve been thinking about lately, and she gave me some ideas for moving forward. So if I’ve touched a nerve with you at all, you might want to check her book out for yourself.

You may recall that back in January I laid out a few goals aimed at, among other things, not overcommitting myself and acting more consciously. Before the month was out I’d blown both, somewhat impulsively agreeing to take on two volunteer projects for a local non-profit.

I’m glad I did it. I learned so much from both projects, it was completely worth it. I learned about managing projects with volunteer-run teams. I learned more about working with my company’s software than a year of research taught me. I learned new technical skills. Somewhere in there I also decided to change jobs, taking on a role with more responsibility and different skills, and that’s also involving a lot of new learning.

I love learning, but it’s a lot of work. It takes focus. It means that I have less energy to devote to creative projects. It doesn’t stop me from producing — I’ve been making things almost feverishly, but it’s more to calm my mind than to enjoy the process of creating something. Which is how I end up with entire stacks of long stitch books.

Today my volunteer team handed off the second project to the NPO. The first project launched a month ago.  I still have a lot going on with work, but it’s manageable. For the first time in years, I don’t have any external commitments; I’m saying no to all requests. Focusing on my own projects.

I’ve been culling all my streams of incoming information, like Twitter and RSS feeds and other aggregates, getting them down to the people I care about or who inspire me. Cutting out those things I use to fill the gaps with, those motor-memory checks for updates. It’s kind of disconcerting to realize how I rely on some of these distractions — the habits I’ve created around them.

Not sure yet what’s going to fall out of all of this.

I have not given up on my plans to try one new recipe a week. It hasn’t quite been every week, but it’s been more than usual. Unfortunately, it hasn’t always worked out.

After my moderate success with the gnocchi, I decided to try some real baking: pretzels. That attempt ended in tears: the dough completely failed to rise and refused to be rolled (much less shaped into anything pretzel-like) and pretty much looked like anemic dog poop on the baking pan, and I binned it without even trying to cook it. That dampened my enthusiasm for the whole try-cooking-new-things thing quite a bit.

Friday I took another shot at it, this time with pizza crust. E. had been hiking all week and I wanted to surprise him. I used the Gluten Free on a Shoestring recipe (as I had with the pretzels), and again, epic fail. The dough failed to rise at all, and was pretty much a dense, heavy brick. I don’t know if it’s the flour (Bob’s Red Mill All-Purpose), or if the yeast was bad, or if it’s because I clobbered it in the food processor, or perhaps didn’t clobber it enough. Fail, fail, fail.

When I was at the grocery buying flour for the pizza, I also picked up a box of Arrowhead Mills Gluten Free Pizza Crust Mix, figuring (apparently wisely) that if the scratch version went the way the pretzels had, I could try the mix and see how that went. So yesterday I tried it.

It wasn’t perfect. I followed the directions carefully, first dissolving the yeast in water (which the Shoestring recipe doesn’t say to do), then stirring in the dry ingredients by hand until it came into a ball, and turning it out on a board to (try to) knead it for 10 minutes. But it was so sticky I had to keep dumping more flour on the board to keep it from sticking. After about 10 minutes of swearing and punching at the dough (occasionally managing to knead it properly) and scraping it off my fingers, I put it in a bowl with a damp towel over it, and put it in the oven to rise (along with a bowl of hot water that I had placed in a few minutes previously, on a tip I’d found on the ‘web).

And… it didn’t. When I took it out 1/2 hour later it looked the same as when I’d put it in. It was, however, significantly less hockey-puck like than my previous attempt, so E. convinced me to bake it anyway. I think by this point I’d so tortured him with the idea of pizza–which he once loved but has not able to eat since long before before we discovered his wheat allergy–that he would have eaten it regardless of how it turned out.

Well, this is how it turned out:

It wasn’t bad! The crust was slightly spongy (not dense and cracker-like, as I’d feared), and had sufficient structural integrity to pick up a piece to eat. We topped it with a can of pizza sauce, ground turkey, minced onions, half of a leftover tomato that was nearing the end of its useful life, and a mixture of grated reduced-fat mozzarella and fat-free cheddar (which we added after about 10 minutes of baking).

I had two slices and E. ate the rest, and was so pleased with it that he wants to make the second one (the mix makes two crusts, so we put one in the fridge) tonight.

And so I am emboldened to try again.

We drove an hour north of San Francisco for a couple of days of hiking at Point Reyes National Seashore. And while we were there, we got live action pictures of the pack!

Side view:

Back view:

That’s my seating pad in the back there — the sleeping pad is tucked inside the frame of the pack. It’s the same kind of accordion fold foam pad, 20″ wide by 51″ long. The pack probably wouldn’t fit a full-sized (72″) pad — there are 7 folds in this one and it was tight.

After two days, I will say that so far it’s pretty comfortable — we weren’t carrying much weight, but aside from needing to rethread the shoulder straps properly so they can be easily adjusted, there weren’t any major issues. I will probably put in a couple more pockets on the sides for the next one. And, I need to make some kind of wrapper or case for my water bladder — it’s sandwiched between the dry bag and the sleeping pad, and it squeaks as it rubs against the foam pad.

Another iPhone photo. But when your fingers are all sticky with dough, it’s hard to handle a camera! Side note: don’t try to handle an iPhone when your fingers are all sticky with dough.

So… remember back in January when I said I wanted to eat a higher variety of foods? Not doing too well with that. We are creatures of convenience and habit in this household. So in an effort to shake things up a bit I’m going to attempt one new recipe a week.

When E. discovered he was allergic to gluten, it didn’t change our dinner routine much. We replaced our standard staples (pasta and burrito shells) with gluten-free brands and went on more or less as before (albeit with a higher grocery bill). But one thing we did have to drop that we’d grown fond of was the potato gnocchi from Trader Joe’s. So this weekend I thought I’d try that.

I used the recipe from the book Gluten-Free on a Shoestring, which is also available on the blog. I doubled it, thinking I’d freeze it. That was my first mistake: one batch makes a lot for two people. Two batches made too much to fit in any bowl we owned. So I ended up mixing each separately.

My second mistake was trying to blend potatoes with a hand mixer. It may be because I don’t have a lot of strength in my hands right now, or because I don’t have large enough bowls, but… well, it didn’t work, and I ended up wearing potatoes. Fortunately I had the food processor as a backup.

Mistake number three (I’m not blaming the recipe for any of these — this is all me, baby!): in a rush to actually cook something, I only let Batch One’s mashed potatoes chill for about a half hour, and they were not chilled through. They are very sticky until they are very well chilled. I left Batch Two’s potatoes in the fridge for two days, and they firmed up quite a bit. It was considerably easier and less messy to knead in the flour.

Mistakes aside — and I made one more, and overcooked the first lot — they didn’t turn out badly. They didn’t disintegrate, in spite of the overcooking. E. said he could taste the potato in them more than in the TJ’s brand. I froze half of each batch for future dinners. We’ll see tonight how the second batch cooks up.