Stephanie Booth's online ramblings
Beside write up my Christmas list (and I have desires for Christmas this year, for a change), I need to:
Avec comme d’habitude mes félicitations à la rédaction, j’ai le plaisir de vous annoncer la sortie du Pompage de décembre: Clarence le poney.
Cessez de tourner en rond, et filez lire cet excellent article!
La bataille fut dure, mais je l’ai gagnée. SpiroLattic et PIM sont de nouveau sur pied. Les liens fonctionnent, allez vous régaler.
Par contre, la fonctionnalité d’édition est toujours cassée; c’est la prochaine bataille.
L’essentiel reste cependant que les pages soient accessibles!
Once upon a time there was a camel, who lived in the dry, scorching desert. Long ago, he had drunk poisonous water out of an oasis, and it had made him very, very sick. What a bitter experience! He had very nearly died.
So this camel had become a very cautious camel: he avoided water so that he wouldn’t be sick again. He was thirsty, of course, but he preferred that to risking death again. He would wander around and go past the oases without so much as touching their water. He was a very thirsty camel.
Once in a while, however, he would reach an oasis where other camels were drinking. When that happened, he would start drinking there too, as the water was obviously safe. But this camel was so thirsty that once he started, he would drink up the whole oasis, leaving nothing behind him but a dry patch of mud.
But, will you ask, how did we get to know about this camel and his strange behaviour? Actually, the answer is pretty simple (aside from the dried-up oases, of course). You see, as this camel drank only so very rarely, and so much at a time, he had developed no less than twenty-seven humps on his back, attracting the attention of all the camel-watchers in the desert.
Parable told by J.-F. H.
Back from seeing Elephant with a knot in my stomach and a sick feeling inside.
The cat is asleep in my clean laundry. I pick him up and hold him close. He presses his head against my neck and purrs right through my chest.
Just a note to let you know that if you haven’t looked through my dumped photographs in a while, you should go and have a peek. I often add photos over there but don’t necessarily announce it here.
Start at the top of the list and work your way downwards. You’ll find photos of this week-end in Spiez, of my holidays touring the UK and Ireland, and Barcelona. Of course, expect the occasional cat picture and underexposed shot.
This afternoon, I cleared out my bathroom completely and filled it up again, discarding over half its contents in the process. I actually have free storage space now in my bathroom cupboards. I rewarded myself with a candle-lit bubble-bath from Lush.
I briefly encountered Lush in Birmingham, and explored it more seriously in Dublin. If you like baths and/or nice smells, don’t miss this shop. The smells might make you a bit dizzy after some time, though. Prepare a credit card and treat yourself.
I recently discovered that Lush was present in Switzerland! And of course, you can buy online… The product catalog is really very well done (try the Lush site nearest to you).
Le sexe c’est de temps en temps, mais les genoux c’est à chaque pas!
Brian Booth, sur les mérites respectifs du Viagra et de la cortisone
How I applied what I have understood about designing user interfaces to organising my flat so that it too is ‘usable’ and remains clean.
One of my ongoing post-study projects is reorganising my flat from top to bottom, hopefully throwing out half my stuff in the process. I have been thinking a bit about the way I store things.
First of all, I tend to try to minimise waste of space. I will organise things into cupboards and drawers so that they occupy the less space possible. Second, I tend to organise things with taxonomy rather than function in mind. I will try to store objects of the same type together, regardless of their respective frequency of use.
The result is a perpetually messy flat, with whole areas that I never use (places I do not go, cupboards I never open).
I have therefore been rethinking my whole living environment in terms of function and process. What do I use this thing for, and when? How do I deal with common tasks like washing up or doing my mail? And most important, how does clutter arise? An environment where each thing has a place is not sufficient to prevent clutter. If clutter arises, it is not due to “laziness”. It is because the storage system is not usable enough. It was not designed with the user in mind.
I have switched to considering my living space as a user interface rather than as a library of categorised items.
If I catch myself dumping something on the table instead of putting it away, I’ll try to identify what is preventing me from putting it where it belongs. I’ll try to bring this “where it belongs” closer to where I am naturally tempted to put it. (Instead of thinking “ooh I’m a bad girl, I’m not putting things away as I should,” which we all agree does not help in the least.)
Here are a couple of examples of what I have been doing.
First, I identified the main sources of clutter in my flat: dirty kitchen things, clothes, papers and books. Then I tried to analyse how these things ended up lying about my whole flat. I know that I can clean my flat spotless, and that within a couple of weeks it will be messy again. So obviously, there are things I do mechanically which create clutter. Something which breaks the natural “keeping clean” flow.
Let’s take the dirty dishes to start with. (Not the most glamorous example, but I’m sure there are many of you out there who can relate.) Why do I leave cups, glasses, or even plates lying around in various places? A first reason for this, obviously, is that I do not only eat in my kitchen. That’s a fact we will just have to live with. But why don’t I bring things back to the kitchen? Well, more often than not, the kitchen is in such a state that there wouldn’t really be any place to put them. The sink, of course, is already full of dirty dishes. We have here are perfect example of how disorganisation in one area leads to clutter elsewhere.
One factor which helps stuff pile up in my sink (despite my “fool-proof” method for taming dirty dishes) is that I usually have to make space on the drainer before I start washing up. (I’m one of these people who don’t dry dishes but leave them on the drainer to put them away “later”.) And putting the dishes away is a pain because my cupboard is so crammed with stuff that I have to empty half of it before being able to put my plates were they belong. That is where the bottleneck is. Or the limiting factor, if you prefer.
I realised that out of my four kitchen cupboards, there are only two that I regularly open. I proceeded to empty all the junk out of the others and get rid of the most of it (if I never open the cupboards, then I can’t really need what’s inside them, can I?) I then reorganised the things I use on a regular basis in all the available cupboards, focusing on “how easy will it be to put it back there?” rather than “could I use less space for this?”
One significant result concerns plates. (Don’t worry, we’ll soon be done with the kitchen things.) I have big plates and small plates, four of each. I used to keep the small plates piled up on the big ones, which meant that each time I wanted to put a big plate back in the cupboard, I had to lift up all the small plates first (see what I mean?) That didn’t help prevent things from accumulating on the drainer. Now I have the small plates on one shelf, and big ones on another. I use up more storage space, but it’s easier to put things away. I have rearranged all my kitchen cupboards along the same principle, and the kitchen is now much more usable.
This post is getting much longer than what I expected. However, I don’t want to leave you without letting you know what I have come up with for dealing with my incoming mail. I have been using a tray-based system for sorting paperwork for a long time, but it has shown its limitations regularly over the past years. The new system still uses trays, that groups papers according to what I have to do with them instead of what they are. So now, this is what my trays look like; I’ll see as I use it if it needs any modifications:
In conclusion, here is my line of conduct:
The last point is important: there will always be clean washing waiting to be ironed, because no matter how hard I try, I’ll never get around to ironing and putting it away as soon as it’s dry. I therefore need to take this into account and explicitly plan a space for my huge pile of Clothes Waiting To Be Ironed, even if in an ideal world, Clothes Waiting To Be Ironed should not be around.
From The thoughts and opinions of a homeless girl: some insight into the financials of homelessness.
Crystal’s bio page will give you more information about her and how she came to be homeless. She doesn’t really fit the stereotype, does she?
To look at me, you wouldn’t expect me to be homeless. I’m clean. I dress nice. I’m educated. I’ve graduated high school and have 2 1/2 years of college education. I’m intelligent. I have 5 years of experience working in the medical field. But I am homeless. if you saw me walking down the street in the morning, you might wonder why I’m carrying a back pack and/or a duffle bag with me. But homeless? That’s probably not the first thing that would come to your mind if you saw me in a crowd of people. Homeless people are often stereotyped. I want to break society’s view of that. Being homeless doesn’t make one ‘less human’ than another. We are all equal.