minimalism, writing, and life

Monday Morning Coffee: Breakfast

The first of what I hope to be weekly extemporaneous posts. It’s a style of writing that is conversational and personal, but is also a good way to start off the writing workweek, to get in the flow again.

Good Morning, Bloglandia! It’s sunny and 47F here at Chez MW, where the peanut butter is natural and the rice cakes are lightly salted. That’s what I’m scarfing down at the moment, and in fact it’s my usual breakfast. It used to be oatmeal, but by the time I added the fun stuff to make it tasty, the caloric count was nearly half my daily allowance. Even when fairly plain, it disagreed with me, likely some gluteny trigger. Recently we tried some gluten-free steel-cut oats (twelve times as expensive as the regular stuff), and it was, um, interesting, sorta barley-like, and bearing little resemblance to the old comfort standby. I think I’ll stick to PB on rice cakes, and Steve has expressed preference for the regular stuff for himself.

Rice cakes are my personal staple, and I only eat the plain, lightly salted ones. I’ve noticed that they are salted on only one side, and I do a quick taste test to confirm which side it is and make sure it’s the side that touches my tongue when I eat, otherwise the resemblance to styrofoam is distracting. I like to top them with hummus and sliced black olives when I have it for lunch, and with a spoonful of low-sugar raspberry jam to make a “cookie” to enjoy with afternoon tea.

But, damn it all, I miss bread, I really, really miss bread. I miss bagels, toast, Read more »

Strands Become Sweaters–Eventually

Okay, so you know I knit. Last summer I started a top-down raglan cardigan using CotLin from KnitPicks. It took a while to figure out what size I was, get the gauge right, etc. The first attempt was all one color, in what I thought was going to be “natural,” but turned out to be a deep beige very close to my skin color. It was awful. So I purchased half again as much white in order to make a striped sweater and started over again. It was too tight. I started over yet again and the sleeves came out too tight and the neckline too droopy. Sigh.

It’s now on version 4.3, and I think that maybe, just maybe, this time I’ll win (cue Liza Minnelli in Cabaret soundtrack). I gave up on the top-down raglan pattern and went with my very own rectangle with skinny sleeves and V-neck pullover. Of course, knitting something striped–then ripping it apart and doing it again and again–meant a lot of splicing, and I was left with 173 yarn tails to weave in. This is not an exaggeration–I counted ‘em.

On the bright side, I have learned a ton about bringing in a new strand of yarn in the middle of a row, how to work with DK weight yarn (this was the first time I ever used thinner yarn), and how to sew together the resulting lightweight pieces to make something I’d actually wear out of the house. As of this post, there’s a few more weave-ins to go, sewing one more seam, and knitting an edge to the neckline. And blocking, of course. I just hope I’ll be able to stand the sight of it after I’m done, let alone wear it.

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The blog reno proceeds on course. I’ve changed the categories to three: Minimalism, Writing, and Life. Every post will fit into at least one of those categories. If you hover over the category names in the sidebar, you’ll likely see a description. Minimalism, for instance, covers uncluttering, simple living, shopping reduction, etc. Writing covers working as a writer as well as the craft and anything connected to publishing. Life covers anything lifestyle, from food to relationships–and knitting, too.

Categories are a practical way to express what a blog is all about, and they can change over time, just like a blog’s focus. Minimalism has become a second-nature way of living over the past two years. During the same time frame, I’ve built a life as a writer. The two things are part of one another, and part of my life as a whole. Thus, it makes sense to make this as much an author’s personal blog as a Minimalism one. I’ve got some ideas about where I’m going with this, but want to let it work up into something new in a natural, heartfelt way. There will probably be more grab-a-cuppa-something chatty posts between the more serious and introspective ones, which I suspect won’t be a problem for most of my readers.

That being said, if you have preferences about the kinds of posts I do, this is a good time to let me know in the comments

 

Time for Some Changes

It’s time for a bit of spring cleaning and redecorating on the blog, and some changes will be appearing over the next few days. No worries–it will still be the same blog with sundry writing by yours truly, but I wanted to step things up and expand my range of topics to include more lifestyle posts along with the essays. Many changes will be made live, so if something changes while you’re reading a post, that’s what is going on. Feel free to let me know what you think

Update, 18 April:

The new header with logo and tagline is up, and we’re working on shaking up the categories and rewriting my About page. Still waiting for my new glasses to arrive, and hope they make for a fresh new author’s photo, too. I think my life as a writer is at one with my life as a Minimalist, and I want to convey more of that in my blog.

A Minimalist Tackles the Garden

 

“Simple living” often includes having a garden. Now, a garden can mean many things, from a substantial vegetable plot to a small sitting area with a few shrubs and a birdbath. No matter what kind or how large, gardens all too often go from simple to overwhelming, and what started as a pastoral dream can turn into a money and time pit. All joking aside, however, a minimalist approach doesn’t have to mean turning your yard over to asphalt or concrete.

I once had a landscape design company for about fifteen years, parlaying an art degree, remodeling experience, farmgirl knowledge, a bit of traveling and a whole lot of necessity into a way of earning a living. My typical client was upper middle class and totally besotted with the pictures of beautiful gardens in decorating and style magazines, and wondered if they, too could have the lush and airbrushed masses of perennials and flowering shrubs to give them “year-round interest” in an “easy-care” way.

It was the 1990′s and the economy was endlessly good, so they were going to have what they wanted to have, and they were going to have it now. Stratified rock gardens, Read more »

Book Review: Wake Up by Jenny McCutcheon

Wake Up by Jenny McCutcheon (non-affiliate link) lays out the intricacies of advertising and marketing in a clear and unmistakable way. It will help any reader snap out of the consumerist dream state and understand just what is going on, backed up by some startling data. It begins by comparing consumerism to an out of control merry-go-round, which is exactly what out of control shopping feels like. But the author points out that there’s a STOP button we can push to get ourselves off this mad ride; one such button is Wake Up itself.

McCutcheon, who holds a BA in eMarketing and is also the author of the blog Ex-Consumer, provides the reader with the “tools and information needed in order to wake up and break free” of all the ways that marketers devise to get us to buy their products.

Many of us think marketing and advertising are the same or interchangeable, but advertising is actually one element of the larger category of marketing. McCutcheon shows how marketing works, using the example of the Swiffer mop from conception to advertising, to show that “by the time a message gets to us it has already been through the marketing funnel.” That funnel includes extensive market research, to determine just what product features and consumer needs to combine to make an irresistable product.

In my own book, The Minimalist Woman’s Guide to Having it All, I go into the psychological vulnerabilities that are exploited by advertising, creating the sense that we are not good enough just as we are. McCutcheon takes this from philosophy to the hard facts, showing how consumer addicts are created. We might think we are immune to advertising ploys, but it is so pervasive and so effective, that “…if you’ve ever replaced an item even though it still worked or could be fixed, then you’ve likely been influenced by advertising messages that were successful in making you desire a product.”

Advertising is taken a step further by the media. A company knows how to advertise its product, but media know how to sell the market to the marketers. There’s a difference between an ad and ad space, which McCutcheon covers in depth. A variation on ad space in magazines and such is product placement, which is when you spot a can of Coke in a situation comedy. Is it there because the company bought the placement, or was it placed because the company was so successful in making the product an icon of a certain sensibility or status?

As McCutcheon takes us further into the world of marketing, we see it gets worse, much worse. She prepares us by giving us the same opportunity to understand our own motivations for the way we spend our time and money that the marketers have. She provides a series of Action Steps to help us help ourselves, to not only avoid media, but to be wise to more subtle tricks, such as changes in the amount of product in a package, and marketing that is aimed at our kids, from those big bright playgrounds at Mickey D’s to the stuff that the “cool kids” are wearing and using, known as peer-to-peer marketing.

I learned a lot about peer-to-peer and subliminal marketing from this book, things I’d never heard of when my son was in school, and things that make me wonder if I’d ever seen them in action. She also goes into strategies called Stealth Marketing, where actors with a product are placed in public spaces and using the product in a conspicuous way.

Neuromarketing is the future, where every manner of brain wave and neural responses are observed to create a marketing strategy so finely tuned that it plays to our individual wiring and personal history. A simpler form of this is interest-based advertising. I’ve recently encountered this after ordering glasses from Zenni Optical. Now ads for that company pop up when I use Google and Facebook. It’s not an accident.

Wake Up includes many links to helpful sites and videos to further educate yourself and your family. Buying and reading this book, however, is an excellent first step, and includes a money-back guarantee.

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