DIY Necklace Organizer

Home made birthday presents are quickly becoming my favorite thing.

At Christmas, when I mentioned to John that I'd like to take up a musical instrument, he designed and built the world's greatest music stand:

So awesome.












So for Birthday Week, John devoted a day to helping me build a jewelry organizer. The idea came from here, which is another one of my favorite place on the Internet. (Also just found out that she's related to Jordan of Oh Happy Day. Aesthetic perfection in the genes. Must be nice.) But I didn't have a cool vintage frame like she did, and since it's currently -20 degrees in the District of Columbia, chances of me finding a fabulous yard sale any time soon are not good. So we had to build our own.

We started with raw moulding board from a home improvement store:

John took it to a wood shop to cut it, but I think you could do the same thing at home with a hand saw and some careful measuring to make sure all the inside and outside lengths matched up.

Then we stapled it together on the back to make a frame:

(Sorry about the bad lighting. I got lazy and took all these pictures with an iPhone.)

Then we stained it blue with some easy rub-on wood stain. Then took a piece of pegboard and covered it with printed paper:

Then stuck some Anthro knobs through the paper:

And then cut said Anthro knobs short with a pair of bolt cutters.

We stapled it together and that was it!

(Note: The necklace on the far left was made for my wedding by the ever-fabulous Sola Biu: her site and blog. Everything she makes is beautiful and 15 percent goes to Invisible Children.)

So I know that doesn't have anything to do with dinner parties, but I thought a DIY project would be good at a time when so many people are snowed in. New dinner decorations coming soon.

Smart Jock

Happy Conversation Topic Tuesday!

Lately I've been thinking about exercise. Mostly I've been thinking about my love-hate-guilt relationship with it. Once I'm up and moving, I usually love it (except for P90X—that was horrible). But then why is it so hard to start? I put it off like crazy, which makes no sense for an activity I enjoy. So I've been looking around for things to motivate--substantial incentives that will hopefully help counter the ever-available excuses to stay seated. And while I don't want this blog to turn into a list of the random things I've been thinking about, fitness is something that affects us all, so I feel like it merits a conversation topic post. And more than that, I've actually really enjoyed reading about the research that's been going on:

• Researchers in Belgium conducted a study of 28 healthy, active young men. They fed them a terrible diet (50% fat and 30% more calories than what they had been consuming) and divided them into three groups. The first did not exercise at all. The second and third groups submitted themselves to a rigorous workout routine (running and cycling hard for 90- and 60-minute sessions four times each week). The workouts were monitored to ensure that everyone did the same amount of work. The difference between the two groups was when they exercised compared to when they ate breakfast. The second group ate breakfast before their workout. The third group ate after. At the end of six weeks, everybody jumped on the scale. The sedentary group gained six pounds, along with plenty of other horrors: insulin resistance and extra fat storage within and between muscle cells. Group two gained only half the weight, but still showed increases in insulin resistance and storing fat in their muscles. Meanwhile, group three gained almost no weight, showed no signs of insulin resistance, and burned stored fat more efficiently. (Upside: Since reading about this study, I've been far more motivated to get up early enough to exercise before work. Downside: When I don't exercise before work, nothing in heaven or earth can convince me that it's still worth it to try to break a sweat.)
• Both Newsweek and The New York Times have published really interesting articles on how exercise makes you smarter. They're still conducting studies, but so far it looks very promising that both aerobic activities like running as well as strength training do the trick to measurably improve brain performance. So awesome!
• In a randomized trial, Virginia Tech scientists conducted a study of people age 55+ and overweight wherein everyone was given a low-calorie diet, but only half the participants were told to drink two glasses of water before every meal. After about three months, the water-drinking group had lost an average of 15.5 pounds, while the other group averaged a loss of 11 pounds.
• If you've just finished training for a marathon or you're finishing up a sports season where you've trained hard, you can cut back your workouts by about 2/3rds and still retain much of your strength and aerobic ability, in contrast to losing most of it if you stop exercising completely. 

(Source: The New York Times)

Birthday!

It's Birthday Day—the highlight of Birthday Week, which was kicked off yesterday when John made a special dinner of fried zucchini (yum!), Julia Child's vegetable soup, and zucchini, basil, Parmesan pasta. After getting inspired by Jordan Ferney's Rainbow Party post (in case you're not already following her blog, please know that it's one of the best things to ever happen to the Internet), there was no other choice than to make this year's theme Color.

Color overhead:

Color to eat:

(This was the cake last night)

(This is the cake this morning—yikes!)

Color everywhere!

Happy Birthday Day!

Let's Help

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Finding Happiness the New Old Fashioned Way

When your own mother stops reading your blog, something needs to change.

I don't know why I expected my mom to keep checking my blog daily when I only posted once every couple weeks. I also don't know why I suddenly turned into one of those people that expects other people to use their time to read her blog, when those other people have their own lives to live and reading about your life is not their most important task. But I found myself floored that my mom hadn't read the post I'd put up the night before. Then she gave me a really good suggestion. She said that if I want people to actually read this blog, I need to post in it with some kind of regularity, and the more consistency the better. She's right. And I've been wanting to be better about posting conversation topics anyway, so in an effort of consistency I'm going to start Conversation Topic Tuesdays. Hopefully this way we'll all have something interesting to say by the time our weekend dinner parties roll around.

This week, as I was trying to figure out what to write on, an enormous gold brick of conversation fodder landed in my lap--or actually my mailbox--in the form of David Brooks' article "Social Animal" in this week's edition of The New Yorker. Brooks, of New York Times op-ed fame, has long been fascinated with social science research. And lucky for us, he has combined some of his favorite findings into an article on what geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, and the like have learned about what makes us tick.

The main thrust of his argument is something most of us have known or at least wanted to believe for a long time: that standard measures of achievement (intelligence, impressive grades, prestige) don't align very well with either fulfillment or great accomplishments. Rather, our happiness and even our seemingly logical decisions are far more steeped in emotion than we generally acknowledge. Happiness and even mental ability come from relationships, and it starts when we're babies.

Turns out our brains are wired by love. Perhaps most critical is the love from our mom. Science says so: the more a baby rat is licked and groomed by it's mama rat, the more synaptic connections are made in its rat brain. Children are listening to their mothers before they're even born. Babies that develop inside a French-speaking mother cry differently than those that develop inside a woman speaking German. Once born, a baby watches its mother, mimics her, and most importantly learns to feel confident in the world by learning to trust that when he or she sends out a signal, someone will respond. That confidence is key for a child, who will need it to go out into the world with a sense of security and the confidence to feel they are worthwhile and capable of making good choices. Brooks mentions a study at the University of Minnesota where researchers, looking at the attachment patterns of 42-month-old children could predict with 77 percent accuracy who would go on to graduate from high school. He goes on to say, "People who were securely attached as infants tend to have more friends at school and at summer camp. They tend to be more truthful through life, feeling less need to puff themselves up in others' eyes."

And it doesn't stop with infancy. As we get older, people learn from people they love, Brooks contends. And that's probably for the best, considering that if we love something about someone, that means they've taken a principle we think is valuable and internalized and developed it. That is far more reliable a source for wisdom than your standard expert in any field, since people generally grossly overestimate how right we are on a given topic. Brooks references a study done by Paul J. H. Schoemaker and J. Edward Russo, who questioned more than two thousand executives about their industries. Advertising managers gave answers that they reported they were 90 percent confident were right, and yet their answers were wrong 61 percent of the time. Computer industry executives gave answers they reported to be 95 percent confident of being correct, and 80 percent of the time they were wrong. Ninety-nine percent of those questioned overestimated their accuracy.

Research over the past thirty years has just reinforced what I think most of us have suspected all along (and yet what society continually fails to recognize the importance of): that what the inner mind wants most is connection. A person who joins a group that meets once a month will experience the same increase in happiness as would have been produced if they had doubled their income. And researchers Daniel Kahneman, Alan B. Krueger, and others have found that the activities most closely associated with happiness are social, extending a person out to connect with peers, rather than focusing laterally to move upward in a career.

So go on, get happy.

Birds on a Wire

We're on a bird kick. These were our "Christmas" decorations. And by that what I mean is we designed them for Christmas but didn't actually get them up until January 7th. Don't judge us. In keeping with the season, we decided to stick to shimmery winter tones and swooping forms, and this time used some simpler materials.

Ugly pictures first:

For the base, John formed wire into three tiered hoops (the tiers being held together at staggered heights with white thread) and covered them with cream ribbon, which we just tied off with a knot.

One 10 yard roll of ribbon covered all three hoops.












And voilà! I named them ballerina hoops.








My one regret is that we didn't use more bird forms. We ended up with just two: one big, one small.

We attached them using pins:

And we tied the top off with a knot:

It has worked pretty well as a casual decoration to just keep up for a couple weeks. They're nice to have breakfast under and not so intrusive that we're getting sick of them. The only painful part was all the time it took to cut out the birds. (If you're cutting them out by yourself, budget about two hours. Other than that, it only takes about an hour to put hoops together, wrap them, and hang the whole thing.)

Thanksgiving and Thanks Giving

WE HAVE INTERNET! Not only do we have Internet, but also—after several hours of repeat phone calls to Comcast and Netgear—we have a connection that works. So John and I can stop pilfering whatever signal happens to be floating around in the air, which invariably dies out before a post is complete. So, that being said, I'm sorry it's taken so long to get this thing going, but now that we're up and running, we couldn't be more excited about it. Here's the post that I've been dying to publish since November.
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I have a new theory on Thanksgiving.

Studies consistently show that grateful people are substantially happier and that practicing gratitude is one of the few things a person can do to increase their overall levels of happiness in a sustainable way. One study showed that people engaging in gratitude exorcises are 25 percent happier than those who do not. (Twenty-five percent!) Another study concluded that "daily gratitude exercises resulted in higher reported levels of alertness, enthusiasm, determination, optimism and energy. Additionally, the gratitude group experienced less depression and stress, was more likely to help others, exercised more regularly and made more progress toward personal goals." That's a lot of really great output for a surprisingly easy input.

So here's my theory: What if one of the main reasons the holidays are traditionally thought of as a happy time is that they are traditionally initiated with a whole day devoted to gratitude? What if we're doing ourselves more of an injustice than we realize by inching Black Friday sales into Thanksgiving Day, distracting us from one of our main sources of happiness with toys of momentary satisfaction? Just a thought.

Regardless, we had a great Thanksgiving. John got the table done just in time. And it's marvelous. (He designed it like a giant table puzzle; no screws necessary, so it can be disassembled easily to be moved or stored.)


So Thursday morning, before we started simmering a single thing, the decorating began.

A short expedition to Sligo Creek Trail had produced a birch branch that John trimmed up and got looking presentable. And with a few eye hooks drilled into the ceiling and some thin wire, it was up in no time.

Then we moved on to the birds. John found an amazing light-weight clay that doesn't get hard until you bake it (test: I left a half finished bird out on top of a heat-blowing radiator and ignored it for a week and a half until finally getting around to it Thursday morning—still soft.) It's fantastic stuff. So with that and a nature book on bird watching he picked up at the library, we made these:

We threw in a few candles left over from wedding decorations.

Fortunately, John had just pruned the lime tree in our living room, so after digging the cut branches out of the discard pile, we had some color.

I'm still no good at photography (as you see), so I apologize for the lousy pictures.

But now that we finally have (hopefully) reliable Internet, we'll be able to post more regularly.

Coming soon: Christmas.