Even in Kyoto

Do you ever have one of those holidays where you have ten minutes of quiet time at home after doing a bunch of boring chores at home, and then you open up social media and see the inundation of photos of people doing all sorts of cool, interesting things, and start to wonder what you're doing with your life?

I still don't entirely understand some of these human tendencies. I mean, I share them, too: scrottie and I had a fun mini-adventure on Sunday morning, and I took a whole bunch of photos (okay, 35 total), and I want to blog about the adventure and share my photos with you. I suppose it's just some level of classic FOMO ("Fear of Missing Out"), and the general remedy is to close social media and go outside into the garden.

And I was utterly delighted not too long ago when my father shared a couple of photos on Facebook, which is something he rarely does. [But that was because he created his own version of the Project Worm Bin photos to demonstrate that his freshly constructed worm bin was adequate for the job, and his photo was equally hilarious].

So maybe it also has to do with the balance between one's own personal narrative and listening to the narratives of others.

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So. Sunday morning, scrottie and I got up early so we could try and make it over to Cal Sailing and off the dock in time for a special event, Breakfast on the Shoal. By way of background story: before the Bayside Freeway was constructed (I-580), the whole south sailing basin was much larger, and Berkeley Aquatic Park didn't exist. The substrate in that portion of the Bay is all silty, mucky mud, as one would expect at the end of a river outflow. Mud isn't a very stable foundation for building freeways, so according to the story one of the sailors told us, the freeway construction crew built a large pipeline to cart sand over from Treasure Island and fill in the land for the freeway. Apparently, at some point they discovered that they were putting a lot more sand into the pipe than they were getting out at the other end because there was a big leak in the pipe. And thus the Shoal was born.

It's only exposed during very low low tide, so the Breakfast on the Shoal was carefully timed to coincide with a morning low tide. During those same low low tides, the area near the launching docks for Cal Sailing is very shallow and muddy, so there's an added challenge of getting the timing right in order to get the sailboats out without having them get stuck in the mud.

Prior to the Breakfast, scrottie fretted a bit about the boating logistics: we would need to arrive early if we wanted to get out in a sailboat. Otherwise, in theory there are a couple of kayaks at Cal Sailing, but reservations and priorities hadn't been declared.

Fortunately, we managed to get up early enough to get our own dinghy launched in time, and managed to scoot out of the shallow mud with the centerboard up and the rudder barely in the water. From there, it was a bit of a slog out to the shoal because we were up against a headwind, but we managed to be the first to land.

The rest of the story is best told through the photo album.

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In other weekend news, on Saturday slydevil and sytharin acquired two new chickens, Matilda and Bianca. They formerly belonged to a bike shop mechanic who accidentally wound up with too many backyard chickens (~30). From the looks of things, it's going to take a little while for all of the chickens to get adjusted to the new arrangement, but that's to be expected with chickens. Matilda and Carlotta are working on establishing a new pecking order, and meanwhile Bianca is trying to show up Patricia with respect to chicken Houdini skills. Yesterday morning, Bianca managed to get up onto the workshop roof, and then flew over into the neighbor's yard. Fortunately, the neighbor's dogs weren't out. After Bianca pulled a second escape maneuver, I helped L clip her primary flight feathers on one wing. It will be nice to be back to four birds.

I also finished a second bike spat, so now all I need is a rainstorm to test out my handiwork. If I wind up revisiting the design, I think I am going to model the shape more closely after the shape of the 'quarter' on laced shoes. In the meantime, the next sewing projects in the hopper are a new lunchbox, and pants.

In the garden: it's going to be a good year for rhubarb, which makes it even sadder that the rats are eating ALL the strawberries. Jerks. I did finally find strawberries at Monterey Market that are good, thankfully. They aren't cheap but they're worth the price. I appreciate that Monterey Market seeks out some smaller-scale farm operations to bring in really good and fresh produce for the masses.

I think I am now finished, for the time being, with acquiring new plants. The other day, coinneachf blogged about that familiar experience where one gets a Thing (in his case, motorcycle), gets it all fitted out and nice, and then is suddenly back in the realm of looking at more, shiny, newer Thing. It's a familiar sensation: bicyclists call it the "n plus one" problem, and for a little while there I was smugly thinking I'd managed to manage that impulse. Silly me. But yesterday, I found myself back at the twee, expensive plant shop (Flowerland), staring at ferns and plant pots, and realized I'd just transferred over to a different category of Thing. Ha!

But now for ornamentals I have four types of ferns and a spider plant, and a string of pearls succulent to go with the other succulents I've been accumulating in the lab. It's all more than enough to make up for all of the houseplants that froze to death when I moved from Texas to Nebraska. So it is time to say Enough and focus on cultivating what I have.

So last weekend, scrottie and I took the train up to Seattle. Our visit had two three main goals ("fear, surprise, and a ruthless efficiency!...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope!"):

-Go skiing
-Visit annikusrex and enjoy some primo baby-viewing
-Haul the rest of my belongings and a couple of sytharin's things back to California

Oh, also visiting my parents. I keep getting confused about the proper terminology for this, but during our visit my dad was at the low point following his second 5-FU infusion during this set of chemotherapy treatments for his now-chronic liver cancer. Even though he was tired, he managed to share a story with us about a childhood experience with the Madison River ice gorge, and even managed to finish his Saturday chore routine (albeit on Sunday). A short but sweet chance to check in with him and my mom.

Anyway, skiing was successful, to judge by S's grin here:


And also I did not die and I might even consider going downhill skiing again sometime in the future.

Baby-viewing was also successful, and especially satisfying given that F just now fits into the chicken hat that had arrived when I visited last October, 2 days before he got ejected from the womb.

(of course, my smart-o-phone photography still leaves much to be desired. sigh)

Stuff-hauling was mostly* successful. I only had around 6-7 boxes of things left at my parents' house, which isn't a huge amount, and yet on our last visit it was clear that my parents would appreciate the extra free space and peace of mind. My mom has been one of the ringleaders for clearing out stuff from both my great-grandma's house and my grandpa's house and barn, so she's no stranger to dealing with other people's stuff. But to me that also suggests that she's extra appreciative when other people take the initiative to tackle stuff management.

Some items went straight to the Goodwill pile, after a brief farewell:

I don't know if anyone really wants ratty old stuffed animals or the velvety shawl, but at least Goodwill knows what to do with them?

Including three t-shirts kept for purely sentimental reasons:

Size XXL from my Freshman year of high school, yeesh


A favorite shirt from my trip to El Salvador in high school


Shirt for the main political party leading the resistance to the Salvadoran government during the Salvadoran Civil War - Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front

I dispatched some old, bad art from college as well. This painting was the least-worst item:


...And then we loaded the rest into the back of a rental car and drove it back to California.

So, now what? I think that, for the next phase of things, Project-Land will have two fronts. One front will involve continuing to go through those six or so boxes and deciding what to keep and what to move along. I suspect that, for instance, I will get rid of the Girl Scout manuals, because I didn't quite like Girl Scouts anyway and mostly kept the manuals as evidence for why. I also discovered that the worst object out of the lot, a neon light shaped like an abstract rowing shell, has burned out, and so now I'm free to dispose of it according to local disposal guidelines. Hallelujah and whew. I am still scratching my head over what I will do with the fine china from my grandma that was rarely/never used. We will potentially take it out for an Extreme Picnic.

The second front for Project-Land is the acquisition and creation of new objects. At the moment, I have slightly too many ideas and ambitions, but really that's my default mode. I need to read and learn more about quilting options other than hand-quilting. I'm also getting ready to start knitting something again (a hat, specifically). And there are a half-dozen things I want to make/sew. It has been helpful to look back on all of the older objects, while thinking about future ones, for the sake of deciding to put time and care into planning for the future items.


*Unsuccessful part: sytharin had asked us to bring down two of her sculptures, plus her scythe. I remembered the scythe, but didn't remember the sculptures until we had already driven all the way to Portland. Sigh.

General miscellanea:

I am making progress on the leafcutter manuscript. I go through these terrible emotional cycles, where one day I am ready to just quit in disgust, but the next day I revisit what I was working on and think, "Ehh, there's some good material here" and manage to keep moving forward.

Of course, there are two other looming agenda items this week, so we'll see how far I can get...one item is job applications. For some context, I've applied for four jobs so far. I have 14 more job ads that I need to look through and decide on. That doesn't include another 10 ads where I have already decided not to apply for various reasons. This *is* a full-time job.

The other item is the circadian experiment is starting to pick back up again, although this week is slow because cricket-rearing logistics got away from me towards the end of August. I grasped the reigns firmly after that incident because we cannot afford to have these kinds of gaps.

Regardless, I got to spend most of the weekend doing productive stuff, which felt so, so good. M and I went rowing on Saturday morning, and had a good row. When we got off the water, S was there and we got caught up on various boat happenings and logistics. The blue Hudson is out of commission while a hole gets repaired, but that's good in the long run.

Then I went home and made more salsa fresca, and got a couple items packaged up and ready to ship. On Sunday, I swept all the floors, glued a chair back together, and got to catch up with my friend and Scrabble buddy, SK. Oh, and got most of the supplies I need to re-pot the vanilla bean orchid.

Things I still want to get to:

1. My pants situation is getting dire. Socks, too.
2. Update my finances.
3. Find a dentist and make a dentist appointment.
4. Try to go back to a more professional hairstyle.
5. Re-pot the orchid.
6. Make some biscotti.
7. Assemble and send another package to another person.

(I have got to get a better song stuck in my head!)

scrottie has returned! As he has put it, this is the third time that Princess TinyCar has gotten a ride in the back of a moving truck. He managed to avoid outbound traffic in Phoenix, and inbound traffic in the Bay Area, by driving in the middle of the night, but not traffic around Los Angeles. Also, what is up with the terrible freeway pavement quality in the Bay Area, anyway?

Regardless, now that he's here, it's time for another round of Fitting Too Much Stuff Into Small Spaces, wahoo! Most of his belongings are headed for a nearby storage unit, but of course a person needs some room for day-to-day personal possessions, too. So I am going to pull the sewing machine out of its cabinet and will stick it on my desk while I refinish the cabinet. I don't know where it will live after that.

Under certain conditions, I would embrace the mantra of "adding more storage space will just encourage the accumulation of more junk." However, under the present circumstances, I think we're justified in adding just a bit more storage space in order to try and make the existing space more functional. Once I've had a chance to save up some more funds, I'm eyeing a futon bed frame that has space underneath for a couple of drawers, kind of like the bed/trundle bed combo that my brother and sister used as kids. What we need is the ability to access and use stuff, which in the long run will actually contribute to ensuring we have a good "stuff" ratio going.

Meanwhile, I bit the bullet and got two more folding-stackable bookcases to upgrade the Gorm to something that will do a better job of holding books and related items.

I'm going to have to keep working on management of the stuff in the closet, too. Those boxes of academic papers in particular still need to be dealt with. That's probably going to call for a good scanner.

My stuff, it owns me.

A couple of nights ago, I reached a chapter in Thinking, Fast and Slow where Kahneman talks a bit about his involvement in the beginnings of the field of behavioral economics, which involved some work with Richard Thaler in addition to his ongoing collaboration with Amos Tversky. As Kahneman put it, Thaler had been collecting examples of instances where people's economic behavior was irrational, as a study of where neo-classical economic ideas failed.

The example listed in the book was about an economics professor in Thaler's department who collected nice bottles of wine. This professor would never pay more than $35 for a bottle, and then at the same time he would be extremely reluctant to part with a bottle for anything less than $100. What could explain this huge gap between his buying and selling prices? Long story short, after a series of experiments to try and puzzle out what's going on, this phenomenon got labeled the endowment effect. In short, humans tend to assign more value to objects when they own them.

So then, yesterday, I squandered spent a bunch of time reading articles from a special issue of the journal Nature about The Circular Economy. This is something that I tend to think about often, in an abstract sense, in relation to how I exist as a human being on this planet, because I find it more aesthetically pleasing to perceive myself as a participant in a series of cycles rather than as a consumption machine.

[I will point out that this is an idealized perspective, however, because there are a number of large-scale biological/biogeochemical/astronomical processes that we humans can't experience as cycles. The one that sticks out for me is phosphorus, which becomes available through weathering or mining, and gradually travels out to the oceans, where it eventually sinks to levels where it's basically inaccessible to living things. That said, there are many places where there are untapped opportunities to slow the rate of linear processes, and we humans need to keep working on them.]

One of the articles, in the Books and Arts section, talks about the history of the circular economy concept and recent revivals in things like the cradle-to-cradle design movement. Frankly, I've always found this notion a little too high-level and abstract. The historical piece also points out some problems with this perspective. Here's the paragraph of interest:

There are problems, too, with the circular model itself. Martin Charter, director of the Centre for Sustainable Design at the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham, UK, notes a “lack of overall clarity over the concept. Perhaps just 100 companies worldwide have adopted a true circularity mindset as a core strategy.” As for the circular mantra of switching to the digital, data centres waste an average of 90% of the energy that they consume (30 billion watts, equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants) and account for 17% of technology's carbon footprint. Although the circular 'business case' looks remarkable (global management consultants McKinsey and Company estimate that it could add US$2.6 trillion to the European economy by 2030), the fact that business remains central to the vision is a vulnerability. The growth economy impedes sustainability. In 2014, for instance, Chevron and a number of other big oil companies retreated from investments in renewables because of poor returns. Business competitiveness and 'disruption' can hinder the collaboration that is central to eco-design. UK design engineer Chris Wise has noted that the practice of using 'least materials' is at odds with the construction industry's prime aim of selling more materials (C. Wise et al. Nature 494, 172–175; 2013). The 'rebound effect', in which designed efficiency leads to greater use or consumption, is a related conundrum.

Another article, however, takes a different angle on things. Entitled "Make recycled goods covetable," it comes back to some key points about ownership and materialism, and the aspects of human psychology that humans have to grapple with if we are to do a better job of managing the rate and nature of flow of material goods. It begins, "Humans are unique in the animal kingdom in their capacity for materialism. We make, use and trade objects for their symbolic value as much as their functionality," and carries on from there. The crux of the argument is that human biases towards valuing exclusivity and authenticity undermine principles of recycling and reuse. I think you can probably see how this whole line of reasoning might also be related to the endowment effect, described at the beginning.

But for me, these lines of thinking caused a big flashback to the Alien She exhibit at the Portland Museum of Contemporary Craft, in particular to the display of handbags from the Counterfeit Crochet Project. The Nature feature also includes a piece on a related phenomenon, the growing popularity of Repair Cafes.

I bring these things up because I have to wonder about how humans value and relate to handmade items compared to designed/manufactured goods. Contemporary life calls for a mixture of the two types, but I have this feeling that general aesthetic satisfaction would be higher and waste production would be lower if peoples' priorities shifted towards the handmade. This is one way of achieving the "exclusivity and authenticity" outlined in the article on making recycled goods covetable.

The other way is hinted at in the Japanese art of Kintsugi, a thing which keeps popping up for me as an "Oh, that's clever!" thing on social media. The act of working to repair an object, whether the repair involves gold dust or otherwise, changes one's relationship with that object.

I have this sense that I might be wired to respond more strongly to these things than many people, just based on my creative impulses (and most definitely my upbringing! Especially my mother's wonderful influence). But I also think these are aesthetic qualities that can be drawn out of other people, too, under the right circumstances. There is great satisfaction to be derived from creation and repair, as well as from ownership of well-made and unique items.

Interestingly, the article on reuse notes that the endowment effect appears to be stronger in individualistic societies where there are more rather than fewer possessions, suggesting that possessiveness may be driven by gaps between those who have and those who have-not. Thus the endowment effect is enhanced when there's hightened awareness of inequality in individualistic societies. The author thus suggests that, for economic harmony, ignorance and/or greater equality are important factors to consider.

While I find some of the extremes of minimalism to be unrealistic and silly (Guy Who Owns Five Things!!), I do find reasons for hope in the movement, as in the DIY movement in the US and the raging popularity of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. They are signs of cultural changes in how people relate to their stuff and what's important in this whole experience of life.

Saturday morning, I got up, had breakfast, and, just as the rain started to lift, rode over to the boathouse to meet up with another rower and go for a row. He showed up just to let me know that he'd come down with a chest cold that week, but didn't have my phone number to cancel. I've been swapping phone numbers with other rowers left and right.

That was fine, though. I just took out the Maas 1x instead and had fun trying to work on the same technique items from Thursday, only this time on my own, in a crosswind. My ability to stay focused in the single is terrible, and so is my form. But I got out there and got in three laps (9 km). I think I will benefit from more strength training, which will be my focus for Monday morning.

I got off the water with enough time to ride home, shower, and then take the BART over to the Berkeley farmer's market to meet up with a couple of friends from Arizona that I haven't seen in 6 years. It was *so good* to see them - our visit brought back many, many fond memories. For instance, L helped me come up with a reason to start visiting Bike Saviours: we refurbished a Jazz Voltage together that she and A kept as a spare bike, back in the days when Bike Saviours was in someone's backyard and it was dark, hot, and full of mosquitoes. We also have a history of making delicious things together, like chocolates:



...or that one time we made a "fungus cake" based off of a leafcutter ant colony (can't find any photos at the moment, arg!). We've hatched a plan to continue with our ridiculous cake-baking soon. *evil cackles*

Then I spent some quality time with the Jolly Roger, trying to figure out why shifting has been dodgy. Replacing the shifter cable helped (note to self: need to get more shifter cables, again), but things still aren't quite right, even after playing around with limit screws. Then I bopped over to Monterey Market for a few groceries just as they were closing up for the evening, and the rest of Saturday evening was pretty quiet.

This morning, I enjoyed a few luxurious moments of just lying in bed, thinking, not in a rush to be up and at 'em. After some breakfast and coffee, though, it was time. Full Helga mode. I did a bunch of reorganizing in the workshop, largely to get my stuff as out of the way as possible, then swept the whole house and back porch. Then I finally finished the project of installing bike hooks in the bike garage*. With that complete, I baked muffins for the week, and then cooked both some peanut-topped greens and an underwhelming pasta dish with leeks and cauliflower.

I feel like I still have a ways to go in terms of getting things how I want them in my room. On Friday I ordered a folding bookshelf, which I am hoping will provide the right sort of space so I can finally unbox the boxes of books stacked on the Gorm (they will need either bookends or real bookshelf space). CDs still need to be organized, too. I am concluding that I just don't like the aesthetics of an all-digital music organizing system.


*I think we are all feeling lukewarm about the outcome of this project. Five bikes is just too many bikes for the space, and Syth had said as much from the get-go. She's probably right about hanging one from the ceiling in the workshop, but that's going to take a bit more time and planning.

I am finally facing down the boxes of academic papers. This is going to be an iterative project. The thing is, it's hard to visit those tactile memories and make decisions about them. I'd like to believe I can at least recall all of the journal articles I've read, but honestly, I can't. Far from it. In these early stages, I am simply getting rid of articles where I know I'll have a good chance of tracking them down again if they become relevant again, or where I just don't think they're going to be relevant again. This is taking care of about three-quarters of the papers, which should mean I can go from four boxes to approximately two, because at least two of the boxes consist of papers organized in stacks according to relevant subject matter. I am also keeping almost all papers that aren't easily digitally accessible. Eventually I hope to track down a fast pdf scanner to convert them. Academic libraries often have them. Also, in case you have ever wondered, don't get coroplast file boxes. They might seem better than cardboard, but they're terrible - flimsy and fall apart.

In the non-academic department, I need to think about how I want to handle financial paperwork, too. I still have every pay stub from graduate school, every credit card statement and bank statement and cell phone bill, all filed in file folders. I have a storage box (sweater-size) full of every single receipt for every single thing I've purchased over the last 5-6 years. Who is ever going to look at these things? An anthropologist, someday? I guess they're kind of like the story I heard on This American Life about a book some psychologist wrote that documented every single move made by a ten-year-old boy over the course of a week. A monumental wasted effort. The critical files all fit into one of those plastic file totes, so maybe the rest of the financial paperwork will go into a storage box and eventually get tossed when I tire of schlepping it from place to place.

A dream last night helped me partly understand why my mood has been pretty foul since last Friday. I dreamed I was attempting to walk a brevet. You know, because cycling one isn't a big enough challenge. The dream didn't end well because somehow it transformed into the recurring car-driving dream where the vehicle is really hard to control (usually my parents' old poo-brown Dodge Caravan). I think this means that I need to do a better job of consistently getting exercise. This morning is the last morning that I had to get to work by 7 am, so hopefully I can take advantage of this 5 am wake-up schedule in the name of exercise. This always feels like a "spirit's willing, flesh is weak" situation. I will report back to you tomorrow.

When you read this you will be able to tell immediately that the severe insanity of the week has passed, and now we're back to just normal levels of insanity. THANK GOODNESS. That sucked, but it was necessary.

Fall has announced its arrival. Nighttime temperatures got down to 33 degrees last night, and the radio is forecasting 30 degrees for tonight, so I took some time this morning to do some rearranging and bring most of the plants inside other than the tomato plant (sorry, tomato) and the kale, which likes a little frost. Emma is pleased with this development - more things for her to chew on.

Most of the plants are out of her reach on the newly relocated Gorm, though (wood IKEA shelf). In doing the rearranging I am also starting to think about what's going to be involved in moving to California. Time to do even more downsizing, going from a 2-bedroom apartment to just a bedroom. Hmm, reminds me of my friend AP's recent move. This time I know that in the very least I am going to get rid of two sets of terrible particle board shelves, a terrible and cheap IKEA coffee table, and the twin bed (in favor of the twin-size and queen-size roll-up futons). Farewell to the adequate but not great furniture. The cool furniture and housewares will mostly get put into storage somewhere, but I don't know just where, yet. Somewhere cheap and marginally accessible from Berkeley, hopefully.

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I bought a pair of sugar pie pumpkins last weekend because I will admit to enjoying some of the fall pumpkin mania. I've had a sufficient amount of pumpkin beer, so now it's time for other pumpkin things.

So, this morning, pumpkin scones (recipe listed in my recipe directory). But now I still have about 1.5 cups of pumpkin puree left, and am undecided on how I want to proceed. Maybe something savory?

The plant-rearranging and scone-making this morning came at the expense of working on the caterpillar drawing. BUT cricket work is WAY less insane today, so assuming that I gave myself enough of a break last night to avoid general crash-and-burnout, I should have more time and energy for these sorts of things.

The other day, a friend posted a link to a LifeHacker guide on how to let go of sentimental stuff, which is one of the layers of stuff I need to deal with. Well, that, and all of the academic papers.

I'm going to tell you a story about academic papers, and then come back to the stuff-matter.

When I started as a workstudy student in the Psychology Department at Tufts, I had two main jobs. One job was to keep the secretary company. The second job was to enter journal articles into a computer database for one of the professors in the department (my future undergrad advisor, as it turned out). After I or another student finished entering in a stack of journal articles, we would trudge down Boston Avenue to Bacon Hall to file away the articles in this professor's filing cabinets. That part of the project was a nightmare. The bank of 8 3-drawer filing cabinets was so full that it was almost physically impossible to shove more paper in the drawers. My fingertips would hurt after afternoons of trying to squeeze in more papers. We used to joke that one day, we'd come in to Bacon and we'd just see an explosion of papers coming forth from K's office.

Also, many of the articles we set out to enter into the database were duplicates anyway. But it was a job that paid money, so I did the job.

Anyway, back to the layers of stuff, including my own collection of journal articles. I think I've said this before, but it seems to me that a lot of the websites focused on helping people downsize help with a lot of the mechanics of downsizing, but without necessarily addressing all of the whys of downsizing. Probably because the whys are multifaceted. For me, the downsizing continues to come from a desire to be intentional. In the kitchen, I want to be able to cook and eat food, without getting too caught up in dealing with food waste or the mental overhead of dealing with the remainders of that collection of exotic ingredients (used the last of the rosewater today). With respect to projects, I want to be channeled and focused on creative projects so that I bring things to completion that I am happy with. I also want to give myself time to read books, and write letters, and think.

I might not wind up having a whole lot of time for a whole lot of the above in the upcoming months, because of two other large priorities: preparing myself to ride in the Paris-Brest-Paris again (going to be very hard both physically and emotionally), and my work life. It actually feels good to have research feel this all-consuming, a sensation that was rare in Texas. It's probably because of the rate at which I am learning new things here. I still also need to keep working on the more difficult aspects of work, however, such as the next leafcutter manuscript (which I think will be good and impactful work), analyzing and writing about the cricket research, and thinking ahead to the upcoming projects for my next postdoc adventure (details on that still forthcoming).