Pull Up a (Fantastic) Chair

Over the summer, John and I made a push to get in the things we wouldn't be able to do for a while, since we'll be in Idaho for the next year and a half. And no East Coast blitz would be complete without a trip to New York City. While we were there, we visited the MOMA, where we saw all these fantastic chairs that I wish I had to seat people in at dinner parties.

Stake Conference-themed dinner party

Dinner party in the park

Dinner party where you don't lose your purse

Modernist dinner party

Europa!

The first time I ever celebrated John's birthday with him, back in 2008, he didn't want a party. So instead, we had a little dinner, and I tried to make up for a lack of decorations by going for broke on the cake. I hadn't known John very long at that point, but I knew that when people would ask his name, he would often reply, "John Paul, like the pope." So a pope theme it was. Unfortunately, in my attempt to recreate Bernini's Piazza San Pietro out of marshmellows, graham crackers, and army figures, things kind of just turned into a mess.

Don't judge me.

So this year for John's birthday, we decided to go see the real thing. And to help us celebrate, we took along some party lambs.

Our first stop was in Spain, where the party lambs were often lost, didn't always know what was going on around them, and sometimes worried that they had ended up in a bad part of town.

Next, we went to Rome...

and to the Vatican City, where everyone got to see the real version of the Piazza.

From there we went to Florence...

 and made a quick stop in Pisa, on our way to...

Venice!

Where the party lambs had a bad run in with some pigeons.

As did John. (That was so gross.)

We then took an all-night train to Germany, where even the utility vans are made by Mercedes-Benz.

We may or may not have gotten stuck in Germany for five days trying to get onto a military flight back to the U.S., during which time we decided we're never leaving the country again.

But it was all worth it because if we had never gone, we never would have stumbled across this amazing impromptu dinner party some Venetians were throwing with just a table, some chairs, and a string of lights between two lamp posts. Magic.

Catching Up

So here's the thing. I'm really sorry this blog has been in hibernation. We had kind of a busy summer between a trip to Europe, John finishing his commitment to the Navy, and us packing up and moving across the country to Idaho for John to go back to school. And since then, things have been a little crazy at work; the design editor for the magazine I work for left the company (for a fabulous new job as the editor-in-chief of Arlington magazine--more on that when the first issue comes out), so I've been filling in for her. While that's been great because I've been able to write fun design articles and see them in print (like this one and this one and this one and a few more), it has also meant lots of late nights to fill in plus do my regular job as the magazine's web editor, and that has meant no time for blogging. But we have a new design editor, John and I are settling into our new mountain home here, and it's time to wake this blog up again. So let's start with some catching up.

Farmer's Market, Episode 1

Right after we first got married in October, John and I were walking back to our new apartment when we happened upon a farmer's market two blocks from where we had just moved. It looked fantastic (and we got a great Ethan Allen bedside table for $45! I've secretly never taken the price tag off because I'm so proud of what a good deal we got. Don't judge me.)

As we were walking through, John started talking about how fun it would be to have a farmer's market stand. The only trouble was, we didn't know what we would sell. But then, all that changed. We needed a dinning room table, so John decided to build one himself. Then, when I started working at home, he decided I'd better have a desk to work at, so he built this little beauty:

So woodwork it was. He decided to focus primarily on end-grain cutting boards, but he also thought it would be fun to build an old fashioned foot treadle lathe, so that he could turn wood as a demonstration at our market stand.

The lathe took him about a month. He finished it about a week and a half ago and then started making cutting boards like crazy--just in time for last Saturday, our first day at the Fenton Street Market.

 We found these great prints at an estate sale in Alexandria we went to when we were shopping for old wood-working tools for John. So we made some frames for them and set them up at the market, too.

Little kids loved the lathe. Little kids and these three old men, who would stand around talking shop with John about it.

Elderly man: Did you design it yourself?

John: Yeah, well I looked at some other plans and then made my own. The others had this really big pedal like the old sewing machine pedals, and I didn't want that, so I made adjustments.

Elderly man: You know, sometimes these machines have bigger pedals--like the old sewing machines.

John: ...Yeah, I've heard that.

It was really fun.

Check It!

My friend Sheryl is not only really awesome, but is also now famous on the internet!

Learning How to Learn

We're back. Sorry it's been a little while, but Conversation Topic Tuesday is up and running again. This week, in honor of John going back to school in the fall, I thought we could read up a little on how our brains learn. Turns out it's really interesting.

Sleep affects learning. According to the Society for Neuroscience, sleeps helps to secure procedural memories, which are important for learning skills. In one study, a group was trained to type a sequence on a keyboard. They were then tested 12 hours later with no significant improvement in performance. They then got a full night's sleep, and the next morning their performance was nearly 20 percent better. A second group was taught the sequence in the evening. The next morning, after getting enough rest, they also showed about a 20% improvement in skill. They were then tested 12 hours later that day and showed no significant progress.

When learning physical movements, like playing a piano piece or a dance or a sport, imagining is almost as good as going through the motions physically. Dr. Norman Doidge wrote about the phenomenon in his book The Brain That Changes Itself (which is definitely worth reading, if you have the chance). In the experiment he references, two groups of people who did not play the piano were taught a sequence of notes to play. They were shown how their fingers should move and were played the notes that should result. Then one group practiced the music for two hours a day, playing it on a keyboard. The other group spent the same amount of time practicing every day, but instead of playing the music physically, they sat in front of a keyboard and imagined playing and hearing the notes in the sequence.

Doidge writes that the study "found that both groups learned to play the sequence, and both showed similar brain map changes. Remarkably, mental practice alone produced the same physical changes in the motor system as actually playing the piece. By the end of the fifth day, the changes in motor signals to the muscles were the same in both groups, and the imagining players were as accurate as the actual  players were on their third day." So it's not exactly as good, but for not moving, it's pretty good. In Fundamentals of Human Neuropsychology, Bryan Kolb and Ian Whishaw drew the same conclusion.

And we know that exercising helps.

We learn different things at different times. This interactive graphic from The New York Times does a great job of illustrating the stages of learning in people between ages 4 and 21. Then as we move into middle age, our brains get better at understanding and recognizing big picture ideas, which helps identify the significance of thing and find solutions.

That's according to an article by Barbara Strauch in The New York Times. In the article, she quotes Dr. Kathleen Taylor, a professor at St. Mary's College. Dr. Taylor suggest that as a result of this different brain functioning in middle age, rather than focusing on learning facts during this stage of life, deeper levels of learning are fostered when we are exposed to people and ideas that are different from what's common to us and from what we already agree with.

"As adults we have these well-trodden paths in our synapses," Dr. Taylor says. "We have to crack the cognitive egg and scramble it up. And if you learn something this way, when you think of it again you'll have an overlay of complexity you didn't have before—and help your brain keep developing as well."

Mortgage Rates and Kissing Fannie and Freddie Goodbye

Lately for work I've been writing about the fiscal announcements Obama's been making, like the plan to wind down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the budget announcement. And maybe it's just from being in Washington, but I think it's kind of interesting to talk about, so I thought maybe this Conversation Topic Tuesday could cover what the president and Congress are doing with tax dollars. (I really don't mean for this to be taking political sides; really just a discussion of what happens to be going on.)

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac:

• These are names we hear a lot. In case you're looking for a little background on what they do, here's how it goes: Banks give people loans to buy houses. However, these loans are usually very long term (say, 30 years) and in the U.S. the way it works is you lock in an interest rate when you sign up for a mortgage loan. If the rates go down, you can refinance to get the lower rate. But if rates go up, there's not much banks can do to charge you more. So this makes banks not like these loans because it creates risk for them. However, the U.S. government steps in to encourage banks to make 30-year fixed-rate mortgage loans by having Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac come in and buy loans off of the banks. Fannie and Freddie then repackage those loans and sell them to investors, who make money on them when people pay off their mortgage and lose money if people don't. The thing about Fannie and Freddie is, they've been kind of guaranteed by the government, so when too many people were not paying their mortgages a couple years ago and Fannie and Freddie were about to go bankrupt, the government steeped in with a whole lot of money and kept them afloat.
• The fact that Fannie and Freddie currently back more than 90% of the mortgages that are being made right now makes it pretty obvious why the government stepped in; if they hadn't, the housing market would have come to a complete and utter standstill and no one would be able to get a loan and people would have lost even more money on their homes, which would have caused the economy to tank further and more people would have lost their jobs.
• However, the fact that Fannie and Freddie are backing more than 90% of mortgages also makes it really clear that the government needs to find a way out of this, because mortgage making is not the government's job. For once, both Democrats and Republicans have decided they can agree on this, but since if the president were to put out one plan for how to solve the problem, Republicans would just shoot it down, he proposed three plans and now people can talk about them until they find a consensus.
• No matter what happens, Fannie and Freddie are going to be history in ten years or less. The president's plan is to sell off their assets over the next ten years. Tim Geithner was saying five to seven years. The point is, they won't be around a decade from now.
• Obama has put forward three possibilities for what could replace them
• Under the first plan, the government would pretty much pull out of home financing, but would retain some presence, focusing only on low- to moderate-income level and very credit worthy borrowers. This sounds really great. The only trouble is that we would pretty much have to kiss the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage goodbye and mortgages would be more expensive. However, taxpayers wouldn't be on the hook if things headed south again.
• Under the second plan, the government would focus mostly on low- to moderate-income, credit worthy borrowers, but would also include a government backstop that could "scale up" (as the report to Congress put it) to provide more financing when the economy tanks and banks don't want to lend. However, 30-year fixed rates will still get more expensive.
• Under the third plan, the government would again offer mortgage-backed securities just fewer of them and there would be very tight oversight. Thirty-year fixed rates will be more expensive, but less so. However, tax payers will be more on the hook.
• The thing is, as much as people talk about getting the government out of financing mortgages, if push comes to shove, if the economy tanks as bad as it has recently, the government will step in. So realistic lawmakers kind of have to add that into the mix, too.
• To sort of sum things up, the government is going to be withdrawing from home financing. How dramatic that withdraw will be remains to be seen. Loan prices will go up, which may sound like a bad thing, but there are positives, too: As we've seen, when anyone and everyone can get a home loan, prices go up like crazy. So even though financing is going to get harder and a bit more expensive to come by, that will also mean that builders and home sellers won't be able to charge as much for their homes because people won't be able to get approved for as much, and that will hopefully help keep home prices tethered to earth. So there are pros and cons both ways.

Ok, it's bed time. I think this will have to be a two-part series and we'll cover Obama's budget tomorrow.