Watch children dancing along with plants here (press “view video”): link.

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Image, “Reach,” by Brian Kokernak.

Children love mice — cartoon ones and real ones — and the first time I discovered one in the house, the children, then ages 4, 8, and 11 and home on a summer day, begged me to catch it and drive it to the nearby farm to let it go. I did. Picture me, in jeans, t-shirt, and Black Dog baseball cap, in the family minivan with two little girls and a mouse in a metal waste basket with a piece of cardboard on top, driving to Allandale Farm and down one of the dirt roads marked with a No Trespassing sign, pulling over, getting out with a metal waste basket with a mouse in it, and gently sending that mouse on its way.

a mouse in an overturned glass, not wastebasket, but same concept

We had mice in the living room one Thanksgiving weekend when we also had guests. I waited until they were upstairs asleep before enlisting Jimmy’s help to catch the mice with my upside-down-metal-waste-basket-and-a-piece-of-cardboard trick. Stealthily I caught two, walked across the street with them in the basket in the middle of the night, and released them near the bushes around the temple, where I suspect they originated because of all the intense catering activity for events at the temple. (The regular appearance of a truck marked Waltham Chemical in the temple driveway was another clue.) I stuffed the holes around the radiator pipes with steel wool, and the incursion at the time was addressed.

For the past few months, we’ve had signs that the mice have returned and this time to the kitchen, most notably under the sink and in the silverware drawer. Their droppings, which resemble flax or black sesame seeds, are the evidence. To deal with the problem, we’ve ignored it. All that we keep under the sink is dishwasher detergent and our plastic recyclables. We moved the silverware in its caddy to the counter.

Weekly, I have been vacuuming the turds and hoping the problem would disappear. Apparently, the mice were not getting the mental messages I was sending them because the turds would inevitably blossom again. “Oh, well, so we have mice,” I would think.

I can tolerate mice more than I can clutter, however, and last week the constant presence of the silverware and all the knives on the kitchen counter pushed me to the limit. Visually and mentally I needed space: a long, horizontal, counter-length stretch of it. I had to confront the mice and take back a sliver of my domestic equilibrium.

On Sunday, with Lydia at a rehearsal and Jimmy and Eli on their way to Vermont and only Grace and her pal Jessie around, I mustered up my determination and gathered some old-fashioned mouse-busting supplies: flashlight, screwdriver, and steel wool. I took everything out from under the sink, vacuumed, sanitized, and I went in.

glamour shot of that netherworld beneath the sink

Half in and half out of the cabinet, I used the flashlight to peer behind the half-height* cabinet backing. (*There are lots of little oddities in our house left by previous owners, one of whom I suspect was a Weekend Warrior with unorthodox ways of ‘improving’ the home.) I had anticipated a dime-sized hole or two, perfect sized entryways for mice. I spotted those, plus wide cracks several inches long where the floor met the house wall.

I sat on the floor, deflated. I fantasized about giving up and letting this be someone else’s problem, like an exterminator’s. Then I imagined paying that exterminator $200 to do a job that is really all manual labor. (I mean, he’d earn the money, but it’s also very basic stuff I can do myself.) Deep breaths, and a voice inside that says c’mon, you can do it, really help in times like these.

I went back in, this time armed with screwdriver and wads of steel wool. The holes at eye level were easy to fill. The holes down at the seam between wall and floor were a challenge and the screwdriver too short. In a pinch, a long s’more stick (unused and leftover from summer) worked. I attacked the cracks from two angles: (1) looking down on the cracks from inside the cabinet and (2) looking horizontally at the cracks as I lay on the floor, having taken the toe kick off from under the cabinet.

steel wool is wadded and stuffed into hole around drain pipe

As I blustered my way through, I had this thought: there’s got to be a better way. Once, as I rolled up a wad of the steel wool and put it on the s’more stick, I wondered if there was a better tool or material for what I was doing. What if, for example, there were some kind of foam, marshmallow-like, that could go on the end of a stick, be inserted into a hole or crack, and then expand to fit?

a woolly treat to roast over the fire (not really)

into a crack it goes

Well, er, apparently such a cool product does exist, as I learned the next day from my very handy and do-it-yourself parents, who came for Lydia’s performance and an early dinner. I boasted about my animal control efforts, and they told me about Great Stuff™, which is not unlike my marshmallow idea. Yet, better than my marshmallow idea, it already exists.

under the sink, featuring a flashlight and my nostrils

There is still much to be said for old-fashioned remedies and elbow grease, though. As of Friday, five days after the intervention, the kitchen was 100% free of mouse turd.

I’m not naive or inexperienced in rodent encounters. It’s cold outside, and I know those mice are somewhere in here, perhaps keeping themselves warm and hydrated under the washer and dryer in the basement.

With that I can abide.

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Image of mouse by ap. on Flickr via a Creative Commons license. Image of me under the sink by Grace Guterman. Title borrowed from a novel by then child author Ally Sheedy, She Was Nice to Mice (1975), about Elizabeth I, a book I enjoyed as a kid.

This morning, 20 minutes before he had to leave for work, Eli presented me with a post-retail frustration: the security tag still attached to the seam of his Gap jeans.

Why drive back to the store when you can remove these tags yourself? I’ve done it before. I got a flat head screwdriver, hammer, and hacksaw from the toolbox, although in the end I only needed the screwdriver and saw and a few minutes.

It is just so typically me to come up with a moderately hard way to do something and only later find the simpler way. Go here and here to see how to do this in seconds with two sets of pliers. The second video even shows the mechanism inside these hard tags and why the two-pliers method works.

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Credit for images 4, 5, 6, and 7 goes to Eli Guterman.

I left them up a week too long, because last weekend felt like too soon.The tree only went up a week before Christmas. I wonder if it should go up earlier in December and then come down shortly after the holiday, so we can mourn it and wish it lasted longer.

Is there a perfect ratio between anticipation and pleasure? Or, are experiences made more enjoyable by their ending before they are actually over?

Many years ago, a colleague of mine, a practiced dinner-party giver, told me that the perfect dinner party is three hours long. You want your guests to leave “in the middle,” while they’re still having fun. And if you’re at a party, try to tear yourself away at the three-hour mark.

He pointed out, too, that there is a natural lull at around three hours — I’ve tracked this over the years, and he’s right — and neither host nor guest should try to push beyond it, to whip a party up into a second burst. Eventually, the fun dies out, and people leave during a period of awkward deflation.

In writing, one is always advised to begin a story in the middle, after the action has begun. Perhaps endings — in writing, in experience — should be imposed on the action even when the revelers are still holding on.

This, of course, has nothing to do with human life or relationships, which I hope are extended satisfyingly as long as possible. The longevity of life and love: I’m down with that.

But dinner parties, stories, and holidays? Perhaps we must — for everyone’s enjoyment — end them right at the point our guests still wish for them to continue.

This may take firmness and grace.

I had been thinking about my plans for 2012, although I was not sure at that point if they had firmed up enough to be classified as resolutions. But, what the heck — why not put them out there into the universe, starting with my audience of one, and see if making a declaration has an effect?

I went looking for birds to photograph, but found dried hydrangea, tap tap tapping against the porch windows, instead. Jan 3 @ 2pm

“The first one is inspired by yours,” I said to Lydia, who aims for better time management in the new year. Both of us manage to get a lot done, and yet can fritter away our free time mindlessly. “I’m going to waste time in more meaningful ways. Instead of checking up on my friends’ and siblings’ status messages several times a day, for example, I’ll skip that and take a nap or watch a tv show with my family.

“Number two: write fiction. I told Eli about an idea I have for a young adult novel, and he liked it. Also, I want to do more than nonfiction is allowing me to do.” I described my start-up plan, which Eli and I worked out as we sat in the Publick House one night having dinner. During my January break and before classes begin, I’m going to write two pages a day and explore this novel idea. It’s an experiment, and yet I’m totally serious about it.

“The third one I already told you about. This year I’m going to compete in a skating event.” A week before Christmas, Fred (skating coach) had raised the question, and I said I’d do it. I want to. Performing or competing makes you better in a way that skating (or writing or singing or painting) only for yourself does not. It’ll be an entry-level competition for, er, seniors, and a powerful motivator.

Dried ornamental grass, roots in shade and seed heads in sun. Jan 3 @ 2pm

That was it for resolutions articulated between huffs and puffs around Brookline Reservoir. Shortly after, I had dinner with my friends, and Sue told us about her last year’s resolution, which she managed to keep 9 times out of 12: to see her mother, who lives beyond Albany, once a month.  Yesterday I told my mother my fourth resolution: to see my parents once a month this year, alone or with the whole clan, for a long visit for just the afternoon. That’s at most 1/30th of a month. Surely I have the time. We all do.

I drove up Vassar Street around 5:50 pm and past the garage I typically park in. I approached the intersection, thinking of course about the accident and the student Phyo, who had been in the communications module of a chemical engineering class I’m involved in every fall. I thought about the last time I saw him, shortly after his graduation in early June ’10. He was still on campus, raising money for Camp Kesem by selling popcorn and doughnuts in the Stata Center. He had a warm, sparkling smile, and we enthusiastically talked about other grassroots ways of raising money — like selling popsicles on hot days –  and about his new job, which was about to begin.

“I wanted to tell you and Lisa and Professor Hamel that my presentation for the class helped me get the job!” Lisa was my fellow communications lecturer on the course, and Professor Hamel the engineering professor. That fall, we had a small and closely-knit group.

“Great! How so?” I asked.

“In my interview, they asked if I had any presentation experience, and I told them about my final presentation for the class, and they asked me to come back and do it for them. I did, and they liked it, and they offered me the job.” He looked happy and eager. Admittedly, he always did, and this was one of Phyo’s gifts.

I had the green light at the intersection, so I couldn’t stop and sit in the car for a few seconds and contemplate the accident. On the corner, I glimpsed a memorial: a white bicycle and some candles. I parked my car nearby so that after dinner I could walk back to the corner and stand closer to it.

From across Vassar Street, Dec 30, 9:30 pm

After a long dinner and dessert and walk with my dear friends, we embraced and parted. Over dinner, I had told them about the accident. As the three of them got in one car, parked on Mass Ave closer to Miracle, I said I was headed to the memorial. Brandi asked, “Should we go with you? Are you safe?” I smiled inwardly, not afraid of the neighborhood, and thinking it was ironic to be worried about strangers when trucks were a proven hazard.

Honestly, my feelings about Phyo’s death were almost dream-like as I walked back toward the Institute, and I was motivated more by curiorisity: What does the memorial look like? Who made it? How was it personalized?

I got to the corner, and, though there was little traffic, I waited for the pedestrian light to turn. Even from across the street, the novelty and beauty of the memorial made me smile. I thought, “How MIT!” It would not be enough for students there to leave some bunches of supermarket flowers on the sidewalk, which I see occasionally on the Boston parkways near where I live after a local teen dies in a car accident. It looked like Phyo’s friends had spray-painted a bicycle white, wrapped and taped its seat carefully in a white t-shirt, and lit several of those perpetual candles you see in church memorials.

I crossed the street. It was around 9:30 pm. In the quiet cold, I stood there in front of the white-painted bike, the flowers in their plastic sleeves, the lit candles, and the placard: “in loving memory // Phyo N. Kyaw // you are dearly missed // 1988 – 2011″  Not you “will be” missed, but you are missed.

It’s hard to know what to feel, or how to describe what you do feel, when someone you cared for has died, even though you knew that person not well, not for long, and not in an intimate or family way. The thing about being a teacher, though, is how much the act of teaching is endowed with love — a certain kind of schoolish love. And it may only be a one-way love, and it has its boundaries and limitations, for sure.

Still, as I stood on the corner, my toes just inches away from the flowers and the candles, I studied the bicycle, and I touched it, and at last I noticed the bicycle lock securing the bicycle to the post — and this bike lock really, really made me smile, although I was sniffling too — and this is when I finally and deeply felt sad, a real piercing of the heart, and I also remembered Phyo vividly, as though he were still a person and I had seen him only yesterday. “Oh, Phyo,” I said out loud to no one.

Bicycle memorial, corner Mass Ave and Vassar St, Dec 30 @ 9:30 pm

Perhaps the second-to-last time I had seen him was a few months before the time I caught him selling popcorn. He and I and his classmate Emily were rehearsing their final presentations (including the one that helped Phyo get his job), and we kept talking beyond the allotted hour, loitering in the hallway for a long time.

We talked about Emily’s habit of filling her pauses with “ums.” I suggested that she fill her pauses with silences. “It takes practice and some self-control, but it’s doable.”

The two of them — friends and conspirators — laughed.  “Yeah, like you?” They had noticed that my pauses, in speaking, were a shade too long, which I knew; they also told me that I sometimes touched my forehead when pausing, which I did not know. Emily impersonated me. I laughed. You know your students like you when they have studied your gestures, and you know they trust you when they can tease you openly.

We talked also about Phyo’s habit of turning all his declarative sentences into questions of sorts, with a rise in tone at the end. “To an audience, this might seem as though you’re tentative about your work,” I explained. “Unsure.”

“Not at all,” said Phyo, smiling. “Where I’m from, it’s a sign of the speaker’s respect for the audience to raise his tone like that, to show you care what they think about your work. I am confident of my work.”

I did not try to change this. As a teacher, I am always learning things from my students. Here was a different way to think about tone in public speaking. If we truly are a diverse community, then perhaps as audiences we should be as open to diverse tone, body language, and nonverbal cues as we are to other spoken languages and accented English.

Really, I only get to know my students so well and for such a short time. What they leave me with sometimes counts as Knowledge — transkingdom RNAi as a potential therapy for cancer, for example, which is one of the topics in that chemE class — and sometimes as insight, and insights so modest that they may affect only me. Whenever I hear an instructor comment on a speaker’s “up-talk,” however, since that conversation with Phyo, I think to myself: There is another way to view this. Perhaps up-talk is a signal of the speaker’s esteem for us, a kind of generosity. Not at all a flaw.

The thing about memorials, which rarely evoke the body of the deceased person, is how paradoxically present they make that person. Phyo, I thought to myself last night, your friends already miss you tremendously. Your parents, I grieve for their loss. How terrible.

And me? As teachers, we are privileged to be a part of our students’ lives at what we perceive to be the beginning. We optimistically picture a long, bountiful middle and shining conclusion. The end, if we even consider it, we imagine to be very far away and beyond our own endings. The story — the one I believe in — has been prematurely interrupted, and closed.

Dearly missed, corner of Mass Ave and Vassar St, Dec 30 @ 9:30 pm

Update Jan 2: Found this story about the memorial, which apparently went up the afternoon of the evening I first saw it. Link.

I have envied these refrigerators, their emptiness, and the uncluttered personal lives they represent.

Today, I cleaned out our refrigerator. (Warning: this may be the most prosaic thing you read all week. I may be writing this more for me than anyone else.) I discarded a tall-sized garbage bag full of expired or unwanted food. I analyzed the garbage, in order to learn something about our habits and how we might avoid this clutter and waste in the future.

Array of discarded food, 'toon version

The Things We Wasted:

• Cooked pasta. From now on, let’s cook only what we’ll eat at one sitting.
• BBQ sauce and salad dressing, variety. I think we see these in the store, want a taste, and must commit to the whole bottle. And then we revert to using the sauces and dressings we make or favor. No more sampling.
• Vegetables and fruits. We overbuy, with the intention to eat the Food Pyramid every day. We rarely hit that mark. I miss the old Food Pyramid, in fact, with only 5 to 6 servings of veg & fruit daily. (Who can eat 11?)
• Hard cheeses. Longing for a cheese-and-cracker plate, we buy a selection, eat our cheese and crackers, and then lose these in the back of the refrigerator. The remnants expire. We should only buy the amount needed for one cheese-and-cracker binge at a time.
• Sandwich meat. Okay, Jimmy, this is yours. We do not need two pounds of sandwich meat per week to make 5 sandwiches for Grace, the only sandwich meat eater. Buy a little. If we run out, she can eat tuna fish.
• Onion halves. Buy smaller onions.
• Sour cream, ricotta, plain yogurt. We buy these in 16 oz. containers when we only need a half cup, intending probably to make something in addition to the recipe we have in mind. And then we don’t make that second recipe.
• Fresh herbs and ginger root. This I’ll blame on the grocery store — it’s impossible to buy just one branch of rosemary or a tiny knob of ginger. And so we collect these, they sink to the bottom of the vegetable bin, and eventually we find them and throw them out. I could try harder to use the ginger; there’s always ginger tea, if I think of it.

I typically clean out the refrigerator at the end of every semester, and I’ve seen this same pattern of items go into the trash before. It’s time to turn these misguided grocery purchases around.

What’s left? Mustard, pickles, mayo. Lots of 6-8 oz. containers of flavored yogurt. Carrots. Oranges. Romaine lettuce. Celery. One lime, and one jalapeño pepper. Eggs. A bottle of Prosecco. Maple syrup. Butter. Goat cheese. Brie. Laughing Cow cheese. Shredded mozzarella. Apricot preserves. Fig jam. Hummus. Four cans of diet coke. Lots of Asian sauces in bottles, plus soy sauce. Worcestershire sauce. Sesame oil. Milk. Lemonade. Insulin.

Tomorrow, I tackle the freezer. I’ve had a peek, and I wonder: Why do we have only half a box of Trader Joe’s mini cheese soufflé, and how old is that piece of salmon?

Same array of discarded food, real (unpretty) version

Update, Saturday 12/30: Cleaned the freezer. Not as much waste as in the refrigerator. We do seem to buy more Morningstar vegetarian “meat” products than we end up eating; I threw some opened packages out due to a surplus of ice crystals on the bare fakin’ bacon etc. We also have three pounds of ground meat (two of turkey, one of beef) that are still viable, as well as bags of frozen corn and frozen steak fries. I can see at least two snow day meals right there.

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Note: This post features one of the last ToonCamera images I’ll use. My daughter Lydia says “they’re ugly,” and, acknowledging that she may be right, I won’t use them in 2012, and I’ll try to simply take or find interesting, real photos.

My life is always about a day behind my plans. When I die, I’ll have a To Do list of 24 hours’ worth of outstanding tasks that someone else will have to tackle.

Even though I intended to have all my gifts wrapped by Friday night, on Saturday at midnight I was still sitting on the floor with brown paper — some unfurled from an Amazon box, some repurposed from shopping bags — and tape and a black Sharpie and gifts around me. I did follow through on my plan to wrap with used paper and yarn remnants. I hadn’t thought to buy gift tags, though, and so I had to improvise those at the last minute, using some snowman paper that Jimmy and Grace had on hand.

Beyonce DVD

snowshoes

iHome console and Fossil watch

kitchen gadget

On Christmas morning, as the Gutermans unwrapped their gifts from me, I requested that they preserve the wrap instead of tearing it off. They did. Later, before heading to Sally’s house for Christmas dinner with the Kokernaks, I reused all that paper and yarn to wrap my nieces’ gifts.

No one seemed to mind.

2. Because I do not want anyone to experience food poisoning

On Saturday night, my brother Brian and my sister Sally and her family came over for a celebration of one-pot dishes: chili and baked ziti and sides. Why is it that, as people are eating, they want to discuss other meals, past and future? (The talk of food while eating usually makes me gag. I’d rather discuss surgery.)

When I mentioned that I was bringing my usual to Sal’s house for Christmas — a green bean niçoise salad and the pineapple salsa for ham — Brian asked me if I recalled that Mum had been sick the previous Christmas. “She thinks it may have been the pineapple salsa.”

He added, “I too felt sick, and I think it may have been the pineapple.”

“Are you and Mum allergic to cilantro? Some people are. Or at least it upsets them.”

“No,” Brian said and shook his head gravely.

Well, why cook something that people may be averse to, even if I think that — in this case — the self diagnosis might be a little, er, crazy? I made the green beans as planned, and I simply grilled the pineapple with honey, lime, and pepper.

no hidden badness here

As I set them on the counter to go out to the car, I noticed the themes of LINEAR and CITRUS in my offerings.

The food was eaten. No one got sick on Christmas this year.

3. The Kokernak News Channel

When we get together with Jimmy’s family, we discuss my inlaws’ extensive network of relatives and friends.

When we get together with the Kokernaks, we don’t discuss people we know or once knew, unless they had recently been maimed by fire, overtaken by an impulse to purchase a motorbike, mugged on vacation, or forced out of the family business. The topics we prefer usually have something to do with (a) bodily functions or (b) psychological dysfunctions. (Note: One of our wisdom touchstones, when I was growing up was — never mind Moses or Jesus — Sally Jessy Raphael.)

On Sunday afternoon, we talked for a while about our own individual hiking mishaps or accidents. This led to a series of anecdotes about unwanted ambulance rides. My favorite was told by my mother. Several years ago, she had been doing something around the house, fell, and pretty quickly realized she had broken her ankle. She couldn’t bear weight on it. My father came home from some errand, and they decided to go to the hospital. However, it was a long way from the house to the car for an injured person, and my parents were stumped as to how to get Mum to the car.

“We thought about the wheelbarrow,” said my mother.

If you were a Kokernak, you would understand what a perfectly rational solution this would have been. Break a leg? Someone, get the wheelbarrow! (For some reason, though, this time the wheelbarrow was ruled out.)

No neighbors were home to provide an extra shoulder. (Surely my father and another man could have helped my mother to the car.) So, my father called 911 and simply asked for that extra shoulder: could someone help him get my mother to the car, and then he would drive her to the hospital?

Of course, the ambulance showed up and followed through on bringing Mum to the hospital, as EMTs are wont to do. My parents still seem indignant about the unnecessary ambulance ride, all these years later.

We also discussed cosmetic procedures, the good ones and the ones gone wrong. I learned that in the last few intense weeks of the semester, when I shut off my attention to much of the stuff that goes on in the world outside of home and school, there was a big story about an unlicensed cosmetic surgery practitioner who was injecting customers in the face and bottom with some kind of chemical filler not meant for humans.

“Yeah, fill a flat,” said Michael.

“What?” I asked. This story confused me.

“Fill a Flat. It’s some adhesive that comes in a tube that, when you have your first car and it’s a junker and you have no money, you use it to fix flat tires. People are now using this for homemade plastic surgery,” Michael explained.

Then my father described the orthodox use for Fill a Flat and how, technically, it patches a tire.

Brian added, “A lot of transgendered people get work done this way. It’s cheaper.”

I had no idea that any of these practices existed: backroom cosmetic surgery or the easy patching of wounded tires.

No Kokernak faces, by the way, have been surgically altered, although we’ve all had our share of necessary dental work.

4. The fine line between leaving and quitting

My parents left Sally’s house first; they had the longest drive, 90 minutes back to their house on the Cape.

Kenlie replenished the fire, and the rest of us sunk deeper into the upholstery.  There were two rooms and two groups: Grace, Sara, and Elena in the heated sunroom, and the grownups, along with Eli and Lydia, in the living room.

Now that my children are well into their teen years, Michael likes to recall adventures from his own youth. Sometimes he drags his siblings down with him. Last night, he and Sally shared stories from their early years of employment, emphasizing more the leaving of a job than the keeping of it. And they really meant leaving when it came to voluntarily ending their own employment. Apparently, the way to quit a job is to “just stop going.”

This was the point in the evening, by the way, when I took out my notebook and started openly spying on my own family.

In high school, Sally and a friend “ran away” from their job at Tempo Fashions in the middle of their shift, and went to Friendly’s to fill out job applications.

Michael said his classic story of leaving a job was when he had a position at a fitness club that he abhorred. One day, at lunch, he told everyone he was running out to CVS to buy a soda, and did anyone want one? He collected a dollar per person and, on a scrap of paper, wrote down the soda they wanted. He got in his car, headed to CVS, and as he sat in the CVS parking lot, Michael realized he could not stand to go back to the job. So he didn’t. He didn’t mean to keep everyone’s money, but he never went back, and that’s simply what happened.

reconnaissance from the Kokernak Christmas

Emily hated giving her notice — it made her sick to her stomach just thinking about it — because she always felt so necessary to her boss. And yet she always did give her notice formally. (I feel exactly the same way, too. Maybe this is why, when I have been laid off, when Emily has been laid off, it has been so painful. How can they not need us?)

When he was in his early 20s, Brian had a temp job, making cold calls. He hated it. He could barely make the calls, and would get sick to his stomach just anticipating dialing the number and speaking. One day, he went out to lunch with Michael and told his tale of woe.

Michael said to Brian, “Just don’t go back.”

Brian said, “This was the best advice Michael ever gave me.” He did not go back.

Interestingly, when Michael owned his own company and was a boss, he said he could sense when an employee was disgruntled and about to walk out. Michael said he always tried to act before they did and get to them before they could go.

However we feel about our personal obligation to employers, we certainly don’t let each other go. Over and over again, we return. When we were young, they called us “the Kokernak kids,” and we can still be that — for better or worse or even better — when we’re together.

There’s something about the sibling thing. If you have them, you know what I mean.

Grocery bags, and other sources of discarded paper, make mighty nice gift wrap too. Last year, I wrapped some small gifts by turning the printed side in on two squares of paper from bags and sewing up three sides. Then I inserted the gift and sewed up the fourth side, with scrap paper appliqués. I tied them up with fancy string. This year, I might go totally green, and use bits of twigs instead of the colored paper scraps for embellishment.

Jodi Anderson, who keeps the blog Daybook, wrapped gifts this year with the brown packing paper she found in the box her husband’s new saw came in. She used long lengths of yarn in place of ribbon.

credit: Jodi Anderson, 2011

And if I had a lot of outdated sewing patterns, I might steal Lisa Brainerd’s method for wrapping the items she sells and ships through her Etsy store. In January, I received a plain brown box in the mail from her.  Opening my purchase was as satisfying as the item (a pin) itself.

first surprise: pattern paper

second surprise: a purchase, wrapped like a gift, and bonus acorn

third surprise: more pattern paper!

final surprise: the thing itself (alongside the bonus felt acorn with a real cap)

I have a notebook for ideas (small black lined Moleskine).

I start new notebooks for research on special projects (Field Notes).

Last April, when my mother gave me this blank beauty for my birthday, I wasn’t immediately sure how I would put it to use.

It has become my skating notebook (Jane Austen, skating — of course!): where I keep track of moves, lessons, dates skated, challenges observed, and stuff to practice. Little drawings help.

And although I don’t carry it in my pocket, it’s in my bag. When skating, I make mental notes and try to sit down immediately after to put them on paper.

Do I use it? Yes — the next time I go to the rink, I open it and look at the most recent entry, and this helps me be deliberate about what I want to do with my hour or two of ice time.

Now that classes are over, and I have more free time in the week, I plan to skate more. I wrote a resolution on a page: “practice 5x week.” I’ll keep track of that.

There’s something about writing it down, even more than saying it out loud, that enables the organization that is so necessary to commitment and follow through.