Almostgotit.com

Before NASA engineers could use duct tape and a sock to improvise an emergency air filter for the crew of Apollo 13, they had to have a goal in mind.

But they also had first to know the basic properties of both duct tape and socks.  E.G:

Today’s Problem: tiny bathroom, two messy cats, lack of child’s interest in litter box clean-up. Cat litter all over the floor.  GROSS.

Solution using what we have on hand: one unused bathtub and one rubber door mat.  

Final verdict: Not at all elegant, but it works.

Yesterday I suggested that playing around with stuff won’t solve any specific problems, but that’s not what babies or toddlers are concerned about when they bang and suck on things, carry them around, or drop them off the edge of their high chairs. They aren’t solving any specific problems, but they are conducting valid scientific research all the same.

Sometimes problem-solving is the way to go, and sometimes playing is.

I’ve been playing. In the past few weeks, I’ve rearranged nearly every room in our house. I’ve been cleaning and getting rid of as many things as I can, and everything else I’ve either turned around, turned over, or turned into something else.

Yesterday’s problem: tiny bedroom without enough wall space

Solution: turn bed diagonally and fill corner with thrift-store screen that has been taking up space elsewhere.  And can you find the cat in this picture?

I’ve been thinking of it as an intensive audit, a re-nesting, a way of getting traction.  It’s very weird, and I don’t know where I’m going with any of this, but it seems important so I’ve decided to stick with it for the time being.

Interesting and possibly pointless things to do with excess firewood and old Christmas lights…

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In Apollo 13, the crew navigated successfully through so many disasters that flight 1549’s recent landing in the Hudson River looks tame in comparison.

The movie version of Apollo 13 is gorgeous. Mission Control’s Gene Kranz demonstrates dazzling leadership when nothing goes as planned. At one point he effectively silences his crew’s many objections: I don’t care what anything was designed to do. I care about what it can do. So let’s get to work. Let’s lay it out, okay?”

Mission Control has to come up with a new plan, using only what the Apollo 13 crew has available. Some of the world’s best engineers must figure out, for instance, how the crew can improvise a much-needed carbon dioxide filter. They come up with something that will work using duct tape, the flight plan cover, and a sock.

The best college course I ever took was an art class with a former NASA designer. We spent an entire semester doing impossible things, like building catapults with fail-proof perfect aim, and suspending gallon milk jugs (full!) between two tables using nothing more than a pack of toothpicks and some glue.

The class changed my life.

What amazed me most was that each time I would come up with what I firmly believed was the ONLY solution to the problem he’d give us, I’d go to class the next day to find that several other solutions had been found, as well. Some of our solutions were more or less elegant than the others, but it didn’t matter so long as they WORKED.

Our professor taught us always to start with our goal in mind, never with how we were going to get there.

Sometimes it’s fun to play with stuff and ideas, to see what you’ll come up with.  But to solve a problem, you must approach it from the other direction. 

Don’t think of what’s possible.

Don’t even think too much about what you have to work with. NASA’s engineers never would have built a CO2 filter had they started by asking what can we possibly make out of duct tape, a flight plan cover, and a sock?

Start, instead, with where you want to end up. Then figure out what you need to get there.

Genuine Rhodesian FridgeSnack, age 2 yrs. Excellent time management tool: esp. adept at waking family at Good-God-O’clock on freezing Feb. Monday mornings with loud vomiting sounds, forcing prompt action as well as hurried making of fires and coffee. 

Effective: collects & contains all fleas within 5 mile radius, 12 mos/yr, further assuring early am wakefulness as family has been kept alert all night due to great deal of loud scratching.

Helpful: Will clean out your litter boxes, sort through your garbage, and assist in controlling your caloric intake by stealing and eating the egg breakfast you didn’t need this morning, anyway. 

Efficient: once family is thoroughly activated at Good-God-O’Thirty, will then rest up for the rest of the day to better serve again the next morning.

Creative Commons Image: Wally G

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

- John Donne

Many of us are now learning, the hard way, that we need to save more and spend less.

Many businesses are closing because we no longer bring them enough patronage.

This is the enormous dilemma at the heart of the current recession: the more careful consumers become, the deeper the recession grows.

If I stop buying books or groceries from my favorite shops, my favorite shops may go out of business, which diminishes me too. If I stop going to restaurants, they may not be able to offer entry-level jobs to my children.

If I stop supporting my local charities, they may not be there when someone I love – or even I myself – may need them, too.

No man is an island. When working out your own recession budget, don’t forget those businesses, services, and even charities that you hold most dear.

Many thanks to Emily Anderson for the suggestion.

Because I only have a very boring To Do List today, I thought I’d borrow a more interesting one from my daughter who tends to write and post such things on her bedroom door. 

Ten Useless Things To Do

1.  Paint your room black.  Say that this is so you can hide from Them more easily.  Refuse to further discuss the matter.

2.  Decide to speak in German all day.  Extra points if you don’t actually know German.

3.  Call a real estate agent and see if you can have a house delivered to you that evening.  When he/she refuses, complain that if you can do it with pizza, you should be able to get houses that way too.

4.  Sign your name as “Pooh Bear IV” on your homework from now on.

5.  Tell your teacher that you are going to be a caveman when you grow up and therefore do not need to learn math.

6.  Declare a new holiday.  Name it after yourself.

7.  Turn the thermostat down low and pour a few gallons of water on the floor.  Attach metal blades to your sneakers with duct tape.  See if you can ice-skate.

8.  Say your bed sprained its ankle.  Sleep on the floor for a couple of weeks.

9.  Read all the cookbooks you can find.  See if any of them have a recipe for a knuckle sandwich.

10.  Call 911.  Explain that you are bored, and ask if you could go for a ride in one of the fire trucks.

My First Pair.  12-year-old helped me pick them out.  I don’t actually need them for reading yet, but just to see very tiny things at very close range: like microscopic splinters, and tiny registration codes on computer towers which you have to climb under tables and hang upside-down to see in the first place. 

Are they not badass and bodacious?

Ephesian Artemis: the multi-breasted woman (image:metahistory.org)

Last summer, a friend of mine agreed to do some professional work for the church where she is also a member. At that time, she told the church that she would also need to be paid for that work, and to her best understanding, the church agreed.

Her first check was late, and didn’t come until my friend asked for it. Her second check never came at all.

While last on the premises because of the work she was doing for the church, my friend was confronted in front of several other people by the church’s (salaried) budget director. “What’s this about your needing a check from us?” he demanded. “We don’t have that kind of money!”

My friend was both surprised and embarrassed by this encounter. Later, she was also angry.

So am I.

Why do churches and other non-profits so seldom understand that their business matters still need to be handled in a business-like fashion? Why should professionals be expected to work for free, especially those who have already entered into an agreement that they would be paid? The business manager himself is a full-time, paid employee of the church. Why did he fail to see any irony here, himself?

One wonders at the unexamined assumptions going on here. What additional rights do we all presume nonprofit organizations to have, including the organizations themselves? Is it relevant that my friend is a member of the church (as is the business manager?) Is it relevant that my friend is a woman, or that she used to be married to a fairly wealthy man?

My friend is also a highly-trained professional, is currently a full-time student who must carefully choose her commitments, had already negotiated terms with the church, had already heavily discounted her fee for them, and even had generated income for the church, through her work for them, which was more than adequate to cover her own fees.

What would you do, in her situation?

When I found my 2006 Christmas cards in my current “to do” pile recently, something inside me finally snapped. 

In a good way though, I think. 

So the other day, while still too stuffed up and blech to do anything else, I made 100,000 Valentines and sent them all out. 

Happy Valentine’s Day, أعياد سعيدة , Joyeuses Fêtes, Merry Christmas, Chag Sameach, and Happy Solstice to you and yours from Almostgotit.com!!

I am so glad January is over.

First I was sick, then my daughter was sick, then my husband was sick, then I got sick AGAIN.  Our house was like a giant TB ward with hacking, miserable bodies laying around everywhere, including the floor. 

In the midst of which I had two enormous deadlines.  I never have deadlines.  Why would I? Unemployed people don’t have deadlines!

Except when they are on their death beds, apparently.

I also had these terrible dreams, like the one where I had two hours to pack my entire house into a few suitcases and NO ONE would help me.  Or the other one where I was late for work but I had NO IDEA where my job was or what I was supposed to do once I got there–even if I COULD ever get my house packed into those suitcases.

I was so glad when my husband finally got sick.  Not because he was sick, but because (if you follow me here) it meant I’d really been sick, too.  

Fortunately though, I was a great comfort to him in his time of trial.  For instance, I looked at him one day when he was coughing his lungs out and clearly dying, and said brightly:  ”Wow, I really feel validated now.  You are really SICK.  I guess I was not just a MALINGERER last week after all!!” 

Overcome by my great sensitivity and understanding, he was immediately healed.  He then jumped up and made me a cup of tea, rubbed my back for several hours, brought me chocolate and made reservations for the two of us to have a romantic recuperation in Hawaii.   

Ha.

Hey. You blog for your reasons.  I’ll blog for mine.

… Of posting two times in a row about writing, and how writers write, and blah blah blah, and then not blogging for a whole week.  I’ve been sick and messed up, okay?  I haven’t even turned on my computer for days.  But I did rearrange every book shelf in our house.  And take a lot of naps.  And finally got to the store so my family wouldn’t have to eat cereal for dinner, plus also to get that kind of kleenex that has the lotion in it so your nose doesn’t get so red and chapped that it almost falls off your face…