Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up

February 26, 2016

...he illustrations are Japanese-cute line drawings. It doesn’t look like any cleaning or organization book I’ve ever seen, and that is what makes it special. Kondo understands that tidying is a spiritual activity, not an organizational activity. The same week we got this book, we also had a library book out about home organization. Erik had grabbed it off the new book shelf at the library without looking at it until we got home. It shall remain name...

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Preparing For El Niño Storms

Mr. Homegrown

January 5, 2016

Preparedness

16 Comments

We begin this post with a gutter cleaning selfie showing the precipitous drop from the front of our house as well as a view of the “flipper fence” handrail I built for the in-laws. The much promised El Niño rainstorms are on our doorstep this week. For those of you in the rest of the world who might be unfamiliar with the phenomenon, every decade or so weather conditions in the Northern Pacific conspire to heat up the ocean which, in turn, causes...

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How to Remove Bees from a Wall

Mr. Homegrown

October 5, 2015

Animals, Bees

4 Comments

...p made with a 50/50 mix of water and white sugar. This keeps the bees busy cleaning themselves so that you can gently brush them into a dust pan and transfer them into their new bee box. Some people use specially adapted vacuums to suck the bees off the comb and out of cavities. You have to be careful if you do this as it’s easy to injure the bees. Once the comb and as many stray worker bees as you can coax out of the wall cavity were in the box,...

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Kitchen KonMari Session, Illustrated

Mr. Homegrown

March 9, 2017

Domesticus, Tidying up

20 Comments

...frequently used items on more accessible shelves. Ironically, the kitchen cleaning session overlapped with the lunch hour preventing meal preparation. We decamped to a local Mexican restaurant for a meeting with a friend and Kelly finished this KonMari session on her own later. I’d call it a victory but we’ve still got to tackle the pantry. [An editorial note from Mrs. Homegrown: First, I cannot believe he has shared this cat hair business with t...

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Everything Must Go Part II: Books

Mr. Homegrown

January 12, 2015

Cleaning, Domesticus, Tidying up

41 Comments

...of I came to much the same conclusion as Nassim Taleb does in this tweet: Cleaning my library facing Lindy effect. Lit, philosophy & mathematics don’t age/ age slowly. Nonfiction, “science” books died.~All of them. — Nassim NicholنTaleb (@nntaleb) January 5, 2015 If time passes and a book get more relevant it’s likely to stay relevant (this is the Lindy effect Taleb is referring to). Just like Taleb, the books on philosophy and theology stayed in...

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