Organising the House
Posted by arjen on August 19th, 2009
It has been said that a person’s house tends to be a reflection of their mind… and I think it’s definitely the case that how a house looks/feels affects its occupants. If you have your house pretty much sorted, that is a feel-good factor and something less to potentially worry about.
Basic cleanliness is good of course, but I’m talking more about clutter and really just things that lie about somewhere because they don’t have their own proper spot. The latter may sound a tad anal, but essentially if you store stuff everything has a particular spot to go so by definition that’s how you organise things. Nothing new there. I’m not saying you’ll be labeling each drawer and box, but some people find that handy also. In any case, I think the key factor is storage, since if you don’t have a spot to put something, of course it’s going to end up just “somewhere”. Having storage for stuff makes it easy to not have clutter, so you’re more inclined to maintain it as well.
By the way, I’ve found this works well for kids also. Little smurfs at around age 2 generally love to be very organised, everything needs to have a spot and so on. If you have sufficient (and suitable) storage space for their toys, having them clean up their stuff becomes really easy and natural. In my house my daughter actually now has the master bedroom, simply because it has the most daylight and floor space of all the bedrooms. I don’t need daylight in my bedroom, so everybody is happy and better organised (I don’t mean to start a revolution in other households, you don’t have to tell yours kids about this ;-).
In Australia there’s a nice chain of stores called “Storage Space” which I sometimes visit for ideas. I tend to not buy much there since it’s quite costly. My personal favourite place for ideas about storage tricks is IKEA. For instance, I’ve always found shelves sucky for clothes, but it’s pretty easy to build something with storage trays that can be pulled out, as well as smart hanging options (for instance for pants).
In closing, a short story that was told to me at Linux.conf.au back in January: a group of friends got together (some travelling interstate) to help a friend clean up their house, sort things. Now that’s a very tricky thing, not everybody would appreciate such “interference”; but I understand they got it right and it really helped that person well beyond just having their house organised. I hope they’ll pop on here some time and tell the full story directly, as I think it’s a great example of how you can, very practically, help someone get back on track. I also think it’s a brilliant example of true friendship.
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Tea; Earl Grey; Hot
Posted by arjen on August 6th, 2009
I drank Earl Grey tea long before Picard ordered it from his replicator on Star Trek. That’s not quite what this story is about, but it is about tea, and how it caused me some major trouble.
Only a few years ago I worked out that I don’t deal well with caffeine. It’s fine at the time, but it causes a serious dip in how I feel the next morning. It’s nasty and not resolved by just ingesting more caffeine. You get the idea. I didn’t drink regular coffee anyway but I cut out mocha (milk based coffee/chocolate blend) and the occasional coca cola (travel, parties, conferences). Tea didn’t appear to cause any hassles, although I am aware that technically a cup of tea can have more caffeine than coffee. Problem solved, until a few weeks ago.
With the cold weather (ok so it’s winter in Australia right now) I’ve been having lots of nice warm tea while I work. For a while it was home-mixed chai which used naturally caffeine-low Daintree tee. It ran out, and because creating a new mix means quite a bit of work (including finely chopping and drying ginger) I temporarily shifted to Earl Grey tea, figuring it’d be ok anyway. Well, I was wrong. I was in a bad way for a number of weeks, until I thought of this angle only a few days ago and of course took immediate action. Much better already!
As we grow (older 
we all work out “manuals” for ourselves, but every once in a while a new pattern comes up that doesn’t quite fit what you’ve learnt to recognise and deal with automatically. We live and learn…
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