Behold the bodkin

January 5, 2015

...OED on it, and it is a very English word, but its origins are obscure. It used to refer to several things: a dagger (he himself might his quietus make / With a bare bodkin), a long hair pin, an awl, and the meaning it has retained through today: a needle-like instrument with a blunt knobbed point, having a large (as well as a small) eye, for drawing tape or cord through a hem, loops, etc. It also had another meaning, which is totally fun: transf....

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Everything Must Go: Tidying Up at the Root Simple Compound

Mrs. Homegrown

January 9, 2015

Cleaning, Domesticus, Tidying up

36 Comments

...g so much as playing with those seriously un-fun tile games which children used to get in goodie bags–I dearly hope they’ve become obsolete by now–those little plastic grids of moveable tiles with only one open space which needed to be arranged into some sort of order. At our house, books which could not fit on shelves stood in towers on the floor.The kitchen table had become some sort of horizontal storage depot for everything from bags of whole...

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Everything Must Go Part 3: Clothing

Mrs. Homegrown

January 13, 2015

Cleaning, Domesticus, Tidying up

30 Comments

...attached but just are not you anymore. They relate more to the person you used to be, and we are always changing, after all. Better to let them go free, and find someone else who can love them now, than to doom them to sit in the back of your closet. (This was the most difficult one for me. This round, I finally gave away some of my more fanciful clothing, stuff which related more to my younger self. I gave away my silly hats and opera gloves and...

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Everything Must Go Part 4: How to Fold Your Clothes

Mrs. Homegrown

January 15, 2015

Cleaning, Domesticus, Tidying up

24 Comments

...d arranged in two shoe boxes. It works amazingly well. My underwear drawer used to be the most chaotic of all drawers, and now everything exists in sushi-like tidyness. I am not sharing an image of this with the Internet. You will just have to imagine it. It’s pretty simple. Two shoe boxes, one holding socks, the other holding bras, panties and hankies. Two rows in each box. Let me stop here and talk about the folding itself. When I first read abo...

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More Thoughts on Thinning the Library

Mr. Homegrown

January 16, 2015

Domesticus, Tidying up

16 Comments

...hat sit around until someone buys them. And just because a book has a high used price on Amazon doesn’t mean that anyone wants to buy it (weirdly high prices are often, in fact, indicate a book nobody wants). To avoid having stack of books sitting around waiting for a buyer, one commenter in Portland noted how easy it is to go down to Powells and sell and purge all at once. Alas, that doesn’t fly in Los Angeles (note to locals: please correct me i...

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