365 Words Beginning with P

It’s the Fourth of July and for the past three days the eager locals have been making loud test explosions to make sure that tonight their fireworks will detonate properly.

Pop Pop Pop whiiiiine  BLAM.  Now that it’s finally getting dark on the actual holiday, all young at heart are lighting their incendiary devices.  Already I have heard two fire engine sirens…

My dog used to freak out on the Fourth, but she’s 14 and deaf now, so it’s of little interest any more. I hate to think what it would be like for someone with PTSD.

The last time we bought fireworks was probably ten years ago - still with a teenage boy at home. I couldn’t believe how much the coolest ones cost.  I think we spent about a hundred bucks.

My ex spent it; I never would have…  I remember watching fireworks being made when I visited China in 1981.  Families sat on the floor in their huts assembling the sticks and explosive materials, wrapping them in colorful papers.  KIds as young as six or seven helping out.  That pretty much cured me.

Astro, a 9-year-old dalmation waits for his owner to fuel up in Eugene, OR.

I fueled up today too. At Costco. $70.37 - first time ever over $70/tank. I swear it was just a month ago that I first topped $60/tank. Costco is at least 20 cents cheaper than the Shell station. However, the lines were ridiculously long and if my time were MONEY, which it is, I might more productively spent the $2.80 I saved doing something else.

There’s no question it’s past time for me to downsize my car. OK. It’s a 1998 Toyota Sienna. Truly the best vehicle I’ve ever owned. 118k miles and NO problems besides a dead battery. Fully paid for. A known and trusty quantity.

To buy another smaller car -even if it were used, and I was able to trade straight across price-wise (unlikely), I’d be paying at least $800 in sales tax for the other car. Plus mini-vans are not exactly hot sellers these days, and decent small or hybrid cars are scarce and/or spendy.

What I really should do is get a horse. He can eat my weeds, and I can ride him for short-haul errands, only using the Sienna for longer trips.

That or a motor scooter. (I live at the bottom of a long steep hill… daunting on a bicycle).

It’s been a week since I pulled a pec doing too many pushups. (In yoga a sun salute involves half of the pushup - from plank to cobra position, so it’s more like a slow drop down…).

The doc had said no pushups or plank for six weeks (!). I had said, no way!

But then I allowed myself to stay home every morning this week, to not rush off to strength training or yoga classes at 7:30am and it has been LOVELY.

I miss the exercise, but not the rushing. Which tells me something I don’t want to hear: that if I don’t want to rush I’d better be getting up a lot earlier (and going to bed a lot earlier too, because I need at least 8 hours of sleep).

This morning I really really was going to go to yoga, and just chill in the back of the room in a restorative pose whenever we were supposed to do a planky sort of position. But here I am at my desk writing, hoisting a cup of coffee instead. Happy.

I’m one of those people who is slothful enough at heart that if I don’t routinize my life with specific commitments to be at a certain place at a certain time to exercise it won’t happen. ANd I’ve discovered that if it doesn’t happen first thing in the morning, it generally doesn’t happen at all, because the day takes over.

On normal weeks I go to a strength training class 2x a week, yoga 2x a week and I walk with a good friend the other 3 days. My pulled muscle did not prevent me from walking except for the first couple of days when I could scarcely breathe, but my friend was out of town, so I didn’t even do that.

Little vacations from routine are a good thing. I hope by Monday I’m eager to get back with the program.

I love to prune. To clip away the extraneous in order to reveal the essence. It’s my favorite part of gardening - partly because you don’t have to do it on your knees as when you remove weeds… but mostly because done well it’s an art form. More about that in another post.

Once a month I practice my pruning skills on my standard poodle Molly. Again, my pleasure is partly due to my natural state of parsimony (the quality of being careful with money or resources, AKA thrifty, stingy), but more to the opportunity to spend quality time, face to face with my dog.

She does not like being pruned. Especially her feet. You would think that after fourteen years (her birthday was two days ago) she would be used to it, but no.

She knows when the pruning is coming because it’s the only time I use my shower (I’m a bath person but the shower has a moveable nozzle, which is perfect for washing doggies). She slinks into the bathroom - drawn by the prospect of the warm water and physical attention, but repelled by the clipping that will follow.

I use the standard Oster clippers which make a loud buzzing sound. She tolerates her face being shaved, but she goes nuts when I work on her feet. Perhaps the buzz and vibration tickles? Because of her age, she has a few skin bumps that I have to be careful not to trim off…

Here she is: lovely face revealed again…

Of course, MY idea of dog pruning and the dog show idea of dog pruning are like night and day. This is a miniature (mid-sized) guy named Minimoto - a winner in his category at Westminster. Holy moly - that is some serious hair-styling!

I bought myself a projector last week in order to more effectively give talks that benefit from illustration - most specifically, about feng shui.

My family gave me a hard time about this expenditure but I told them (not sure if I was just blowing smoke out my butt) that it would pay for itself in new business in no time!

Tonight I earned half the cost by giving a feng shui talk at a local home furnishings shop. 34 folks showed up at $10 each (twice what I expected). That’s $340! and at least two of them want home consultations which should pretty much cover the rest of the cost of the projector.

I didn’t USE the projector because I don’t yet have my pictures assembled for an illustrated feng shui talk. Instead I blathered on for an hour, which most folks seem to enjoy. They especially like stories of people whose homes are in worse shape than theirs. Especially homes with a clutter problem.

Like my client who complained of being stressed. When I came to her house, she could not sit down to talk to me because she was so busy watering her potted plants - of which she had HUNDREDS - dozens in every room. And she wasn’t even a collector. Whenever a plant got too crowded in its pot she divided it - but couldn’t bear to throw away the subdivisions. She was like a cat-lady who never learned about spaying.

Or the guy who worked on the kitchen table because he didn’t like going into his office. When you looked in the office door the first thing you saw was a floor-to-ceiling bookcase crammed higgledy piggledy with books and boxes - if there had been a magnitude 1.5 earthquake he’d have been buried alive. His desk was overflowing with papers and fixit projects. No wonder he didn’t want to go in there!

All the ch’i ruffling I’ve done around my own home this past week has really paid off! Three writing assignments, 2 unsolicited job offers, and all those folks tonight. Wow.

Why would you want to purge your excess possessions? Let me count the ways…

No, actually I’m not going to enumerate them right now; it’s too depressing. I’ll just say that we Americans have a serious Possessions Problem, and it’s choking our ch’i.

So if you’re looking around your place feeling stuck, stagnant, stale and stupefied, consider purging. Here are the four most basic steps.

1. Stop clutter at the front door. Prevention is always the best strategy! Only buy what you need and have a predestined place for. Stop going to garage sales. Throw out junk mail before it settles on the kitchen table. As catalogs arrive, call their 800 number and ask to be removed from their lists. Accept other people’s stuff only if you really need it. If you acquire a new piece of furniture, let go of a piece of furniture that someone else can use. Ditto with clothing. Recycle or compost early and often.
2. Tackle small chunks at a time. Avoid feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of the task ahead by biting off manageable chunks. Set a timer for fifteen minutes and choose one drawer, one shelf or one category of clothing. Do this for fifteen minutes every day and you’ll see remarkable progress in no time.
3. As you approach each item, ask yourself these questions:
   • Do I love it?
   • Do I need it?
   • Do I use it?
   • Does it enhance my life? (or does my heart sink when I see it?)

Then sort your things into 4 piles or boxes for dealing with. Mark the boxes Yes YES!; Yes, but…; No, but…; and No NO!

• Yes yes! I love it and I need it, it works and it’s useful
• Yes, but… I love, need, use it - but it needs fixing or is in the wrong location
• No, but… Someone else should have it (Goodwill, relative, friend, Ebay)
• No no! Toss it out (or recycle)

If you get stuck, enlist a dispassionate friend to help. Trade time. Or pay if you must. Their job is to keep you focused, to cheer you on, to help you realistically assess value (or lack therof), and to ask you the hard questions: “Do you honestly think you’ll be a size 8 again?” “Do you really believe your children will want that?”

You CAN do this. And you’ll feel sooooo much better. (I just finished de-cluttering my bedroom and home office and I feel like a new woman.)

Lather, rinse, repeat. (This is an ongoing process, not a state of perfection. Sorry)

I’m scheduled to give another talk on feng shui this week.

I love these assignments because as I review my feng shui books and notebooks for fresh ideas I quickly realize that my own house has once again fallen out of order. If I’m going to pontificate about creating positive energy with feng shui, keeping the ch’I moving, getting rid of clutter, and all that, I’m going to have to do some serious purging myself.

Again.

That’s the trouble with feng shui. Once you understand the psychic costs of living in an environment with stuck ch’I, you must do something to free it up again. So you go on a feng shui rampage — purging and purifying, plumping and primping.

Then time passes. Piles accumulate. Crap attracts more crap (a law of thermodynamics I just invented). The season changes but Christmas decorations linger and a certain winter heaviness prevails in the color scheme. Symbols that you placed in your wealth corner (a pair of lovely lead crystal goblets) to usher in the big bucks are dusty and forgotten. Ditto the lovebirds in the love and marriage corner which were supposed to bring in a new romance.

Every few months I awaken, as if from a dream, to realize that the house has gone unconscious again and it’s time another round of purging, purifying, plumping and primping.

That’s what I’ve been doing the past few days. I cleared a nearly composted mound of paper off my desk and another one off the kitchen counter, moved about a dozen paintings into new locations, and reorganized the books on my bookshelves to reflect my current projects (and have a boxful ready for the library’s book sale). I bought a couple of light bright throw pillows to wake up the couch, put a summery bed ruffle, bedspread and cheery sheets on the bed. I got some paint samples to test colors for a bedroom makeover.

Altogether, I feel much lighter.

Tune in tomorrow for some purging tips.

My neighbor up the street has the most phenomenal oriental poppies. In full open mode a blossom is about nine inches across. Watching the phases of a blossom is like watching an egg hatch. Here’s part of the sequence:

Are you feeling stagnant? Stuck? Stale?

I just completed a feature article for a health magazine on losing the last ten pounds – and it’s all about how to get off that comfy plateau. Although weight loss is not my topic today, it does illustrate an important point with wider implications.

When we exercise, we tend to stick with a familiar routine. We walk a certain route in the neighborhood, we go to the gym and lift a regular set of weights, whatever. But the muscles get accustomed to that routine and get increasingly efficient at executing it – so the routine that a few months ago had the pounds peeling off is not doing much today.

The remedy is to wake up your muscles by giving them something different – if you swim, walk; if you walk, try a bike; if you run, try intervals.

The same thing goes with our minds. We are creatures of habit. We have carved out a set of daily rituals that make life simpler because we don’t have to think. What’s for breakfast: oatmeal. When to read the paper? As I eat my oatmeal. Which route to take to get to work? 78^th Street to I-5. Where should we go on our night out? the movies. But our minds go soft and stagnant, just like our bodies.

Turns out your brain needs novelty too. Brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, try new things or in new ways we create new synaptic pathways and increase our creative capacity.

The most important ingredients for stretching yourself are curiosity and wonder… when you look around yourself and ask: I wonder what would happen if?… I wonder how??? I have had the most delightful experiences when I’ve followed that instinct. It’s almost a physical sensation I call the brain tickle.

We live in three behavioral zones: comfort, stretch and stress.

• Comfort is the realm of existing habit
• Stress occurs when a challenge is so far beyond the comfort of our usual ways that we’re overwhelmed.
• Stretch is the sweet spot: where you’re doing things that are a bit awkward and unfamiliar but manageable. At first there is confusion – when you’re trying to fuse the old with the new. But then the brain sorts things out and gets stronger.

I know a guy who was bored with his life so he decided to spend a year doing one new thing every day. To keep himself honest, he started a blog where he writes about what he did that day and usually posts a photo as evidence. That’s one way!

Or you could take yourself on a weekly Artist’s Date as recommended in the creativity program, “The Artist’s Way.” You don’t have to spend money going to the theater or museum (although those are wonderfully inspiring), you can simply collect a bunch of leaves and make a collage, sit under a tree and listen to the birds, dance around the kitchen to an old rock and roll CD, take your camera on a walk around the neighborhood and take pictures of everything you see that is blue, try your hand at knitting or making something from modeling clay.

My favorite recommendation is to stretch yourself by joining Toastmasters. Simply getting over the fear of speaking to a group is the first major stretch – for some it’s life or death stress at first. The next stretch is coming up with a variety of speeches that will interest and inform your club members.

These skills are now in the realm of comfort for me, but delivering a speech without any notes is my stretch. My memory sucks and I don’t yet trust myself to just wing the general message.

Pander: to cater to or exploit somebody’s weaknesses or questionable wishes; to pimp.

If he were the last candidate on earth I would never vote for John McCain, but Hillary took a plunge down to his level when she joined him this week in suggesting that Congress give us a summer moratorium on the 18.4 cents a gallon gas tax.

Talk about pandering to the electorate!

This is wrong in so many ways I don’t know where to start. In no particular order:

• It is an insult to our intelligence that they would offer such an irresponsible idea and hope that the voters would buy it and vote for them.
• At a time when we absolutely must cut carbon emissions, they’re saying “Drive on, maties; we totally support your gasoline addiction.”
• At a time when we’re hemorrhaging money in the Middle East and our national debt is in the stratosphere, they’re saying, “No problem, we’ll just borrow more money from China.”
• At a time when the public is crying for a leader with big ideas to help pull us out of a recession and find new ways to develop clean energy, they’re throwing out a liver treat.
• At a time that could be a teachable moment for all of us, only Barack Obama has said, “Houston, we’ve got a problem. It’s time for us to tell the truth about conserving energy.”

Thomas Friedman wrote today:

This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country.

When the summer is over, we will have increased our debt to China, increased our transfer of wealth to Saudi Arabia and increased our contribution to global warming for our kids to inherit.

No, no, no, we’ll just get the money by taxing Big Oil, says Mrs. Clinton. Even if you could do that, what a terrible way to spend precious tax dollars — burning it up on the way to the beach rather than on innovation?

The McCain-Clinton gas holiday proposal is a perfect example of what energy expert Peter Schwartz of Global Business Network describes as the true American energy policy today: “Maximize demand, minimize supply and buy the rest from the people who hate us the most.”

Good for Barack Obama for resisting this shameful pandering.