I’ve got lots to share with you this week!
Last week, Mike Donghia of The Art of Minimalism posted his Un-Productivity Manifesto. It starts:
Today I’m making a formal declaration (a manifesto, if you will) that productivity is for losers. If you’re interested in living a life that matters, productivity is possibly the biggest thing getting in the way of you achieving that dream.
And it just gets better from there. Not everyone agrees with his stance. If you have time to read through the comments, you’ll come away with lots to think about.
With the holiday season approaching (or already here, depending on where you live) many of us are starting to wonder about gifts of the original and possibly handmade variety. Love and Trash bills itself as “a DIY blog for people who do things differently” (my kinda people!) it’s divided into four categories: Art, DIY, Food and Revolution. With further subcategories like Radical Homemaking and Change Your Life there’s just all kinds of cool, helpful fun.
And, when you totally want to lose yourself for an hour or two (and who doesn’t on a Monday?), there’s Letters of Note, an archive of letters by famous people, with a photo of the letter and a transcript and translation where necessary. It’s set up blog style, which is fun to scroll through. But there’s also an archive that you can browse by date, type of correspondence, alphabetically, or a few other clever categories.
And you have no idea the amount of self-restraint I had to use not to put that last sentence in full caps.
Hope you enjoy these! And if you have any sites you’d like me to recommend, please drop me a line (barb dot alan at gmail dot com) or send me a message on Twitter.
Memories are made up of the things we didn’t notice at the time. I needed a break from — too long a story, it started about 25 years ago when I first stepped in front of a class full of students and just took a deeply weird turn with a note from one of our innumerable deans — anyway, he needed a break. We’ve established that.
So I’m bouncing around one of your links and come across a discussion of simmer pots.
And there I was, back in my grandmothers winter kitchen. Now, this woman was old school when it came to cooking: boil until grey and call it dinner. But….
Always always always on the back element of her stove she had a huge empty pork and beans tin simmering, with cloves and allspice and bay leaves and an orange, which I think lasted the entire winter.
Proust is right about taste, but my vote for the strongest memory switch is scent.
Now, I think I can handle that dean without popping too many gaskets.
Yay!
Alan will agree with you on the scent. He can smell things that don’t even register with me. And they take him back to places…
Certain qualities of light will do the same for me.