Lift Up Your Hearts!

Check out Janet's great article at Power of Moms!

No Time for a Break:  The Art of Resting when Parenting is Non-Stop

I knew the importance of rest going into motherhood, but for some reason, my beautiful and demanding son didn’t know that Sunday was my day off.   He somehow missed the memo that on this “day of rest” he should sleep through the night, take long naps, not need to nurse on my bleeding breasts, and not cry so that I can be refreshed and a good mother for the remainder of the week

Often as mothers we are either working or feeling guilty that we’re not working (and sometimes both at once!) We need to learn to rest guilt-free because rest isn’t restful if we’re feeling guilty!

Trust me (the objective, unbiased proud, excited mother), you'll want to read it all.

Lost Women of the Bible:  Finding Strength and Significance through Their Stories by Carolyn Custis James (Zondervan, 2005)

The Gospel of Ruth:  Loving God Enough to Break the Rules by Carolyn Custis James (Zondervan, 2008)

In mid-September of 2001, a friend pulled me through one of the most tumultuous times of my life.  (No, we weren't in New York City on September 11, but I was home alone, with movers packing up my earthly possessions, and scheduled to fly—yes, fly—to Boston in few days.)  This friend also gave me Carolyn Custis James' newly-published book, When Life and Beliefs Collide.  I need to read it again:  I'm pretty sure it was a good book, but as I said, life was a bit unsettled for me and I don't remember it.  Moreover, I was put off by the same problem that prevented me for more than a decade from seeking out James' subsequent books:  what I perceived at the time as a falsely positive reference to some very negative events in the life of our church.

So I'm a slow learner.  Judgements made on small evidence are useless at best.  My only defense for avoiding James' books is that the list of good books to read is always heartbreakingly longer than the time available to read them, anyway.  Reading these two books is part of an effort to recover the locust-eaten years.

On the surface, these books would appear to be primarily for women; that judgement, also, would be a great mistake.  I can't say better than to quote J.I. Packer's comment about When Life and Beliefs Collide:  "Her book seems to me to be a must-read for Christian women and a you'd-better-read for Christian men, for it gets right so much that others have simply missed."  I would add, however, that the adjective "Christian" is neither necessary nor helpful in the case of these two books, as most non-Christians would also have their conceptions of women and the Bible blown away by James' analysis.

Although both of these books tell great stories, their purpose is less narrative than theological and exegetical.  Therefore it is necessary to know something of James' abilities in these areas.  Since I'm not qualified to judge, I'll quote a few endorsements by people who are:

I have not read (nor, I expect, have you) a more discerning, humbling, thought-provoking, God-honoring, life-enhancing treatment of Ruth than this one.  It makes outstandingly fruitful study for believers of all ages and both genders. (J.I. Packer, Professor of Theology, Regent College)

Men and women will benefit from reading Carolyn James's engagingly written book.  In Lost Women of the Bible, she brings new insight to the biblical text and rightly expands our idea of what makes a woman godly.  I enthusiastically recommend this book.  (Tremper Longman III, Professor of Biblical Studies, Westmont College)

Carolyn Custis James gives the church a precious spiritual gift:  How ten unsung heroines of the Bible shaped and expanded the kingdom of God and continue to bolster the faith of the church.  Her penetrating and unforgettable biographies of these risk-taking biblical heroines are built on solid exegesis and a deft use of rhetorical criticism—though she never uses the term, seeing truths in the text that only a woman can see.  Her engaging style with lightning bolt sentences demonstrates the valuable resource God has given the church in her gifted daughters to minister in words and deeds.  This book explicitly challenges women of every social stratum to become the culture makers God intended them to be.  (Bruce Waltke, Professor of Old Testament, Reformed Theological Seminary)

So what do you think of Eve?  Carolyn James compares her with her own grandmother at the end of her life:

The vibrant woman I remembered—the woman God created her to be—was lost somewhere in a fallen, aging body that was no longer hospitable to her marvelous spirit.

The last time anyone saw Eve, she was only a shell of her former self too, a broken-down version of the woman God created her to be.  The original Eve was lost in Paradise.  Sadly, instead of remembering her in those earlier glory days, the world's memory of her was frozen in time at the worst possible moment—back in the Garden of Eden just as she swallowed a piece of forbidden fruit and served some to her husband. ...  We wouldn't dream of doing to my grandmother what we persist in doing to Eve.  We forget what Eve was like in her prime and try to reconstruct her legacy from the broken remnants that remained of her at the end.

James also turns the tables on our customary views of Noah's wife, Sarah, Hagar, Tamar, Hannah, Esther, Mary the mother of Jesus, and Mary Magdalene (reserving Ruth and Naomi for their own book).  It was the story of Tamar—the "bad girl" of the Bible, who played the part of a prostitute in order to seduce, and be impregnated by, her father-in-law—that took my breath away.  Read Lost Women of the Bible, and learn how a more careful analysis of the text and an understanding of her culture reveal Tamar as a righteous woman who rescued both the patriarch Judah and the human line of Christ.

Tamar shatters the traditional definition of what it means to be a woman by standing up to the most powerful man in her life. ... [S]he takes the symbols of authority away from the man who tells her whom to marry and where to live—a man who can sentence her to death without answering to anyone.  Before returning the articles ... she pointed Judah back to the God of the covenant, the only true authority over both of their lives. ... Judah gave Tamar the highest marks for her conduct and accepted her righteous rebuke. ... Her actions didn't emasculate or feminize him, as we are warned will happen if a woman takes the initiative.  She didn't rob Judah of his manhood.  To the contrary, he became a better man because of his encounter with her.  One wonders what would have become of Judah if Tamar had held her peace and remained passive.  The strength of a woman is a powerful weapon for rescue, healing, and peace when women like Tamar are "strong in the Lord."

The biblical Book of Ruth is often presented as a sweet romance, but the intense suffering and the questioning of God's goodness are more like the Book of Job than a love story.  And the heroic, other-centered, self-sacrificial actions of the three main characters—Naomi, Ruth, and Boaz—are an Old Testament prefiguring of the gospel in action.

Here are just a few more of the many quotes I could have pulled:

It's obvious to anyone who has experienced a significant loss that the sorrows of this world and the wounds they inflict in our souls cannot be compensated no matter how much good fortune and prosperity come our way.  Many holocaust survivors ended up wealthy, raised beautiful families, and enjoyed the good things in life.  But they never stopped hurting or felt their sufferings had evened out.  That's just not how life works.  To suggest that everything balanced out in the end for Naomi is to trivialize both her sufferings and also what God is trying to teach us through her story.

Naomi is completely unaware that the whole world is counting on the baby she cradles in her arms [grandfather of King David, and an ancestor of Christ] for the fulfillment of God's promises to redeem his people and put to right this fallen world.  Obed will not be the last boy born in Bethlehem to hold such a strategic place in the world's history.  Imagine the enormous responsibility of raising such a child.  You would want the wise men from the east to come.  Summon the teachers of the law, the priests, the rabbis.  God chose Naomi to be Obed's teacher.  And she is ready for the job, for Naomi has gained wisdom in the school of suffering.

A rescue effort is underway.  Lives are at risk.  There's a kingdom to build.  A planet to reclaim.  God doesn't intend to do any of this without us.  He burdens our hearts.  He opens our eyes to see faces, needs, and possibilities.  He is counting on his daughters to live and proclaim his gospel.  Whether we're tucking a child into bed; ministering to a friend; pursuing a heart that is hardened to the gospel; working in the corporate world, the church, and the community; or fighting for justice in some remote region of the earth—God is advancing his kingdom through our efforts and our gifts..  And you never know when some small everyday battle you are fighting may turn the tide for the kingdom in a big way.

I highly recommend both Lost Women of the Bible and The Gospel of Ruth.  Those who know me will understand more of how impressed I am with these books, because they know

1. As my previous reviews show, I'm decidedly unimpressed by both the content and the writing of much contemporary Christian literature.  (I use that final word loosely.)  Carolyn Custis James is a serious researcher, a clear thinker, and a good writer.
2. I've complained in previous reviews of authors who speculate about the conversations, thoughts, and emotions of the characters in biblical narratives.  A lot of that must happen in order to flesh out the Bible's spare descriptions of these women's lives, but here I don't mind it.  All I can say in my defense is that these speculations seem natural, believable, and fitting to the text, rather than awkwardly imposing modern thought on a distant culture.
3. One feature common to many contemporary Christian books is a "discussion questions" section at the end of each chapter.  I loathe this.  I always have, at least since its first appearance in my school textbooks.   Both of these books have that unpleasant feature (which I literally overlook), and yet I still love them.

Next up?  Steeling myself to reread When Life and Beliefs Collide (my mind knows I'll enjoy it; my gut still has issues), and requesting that our library add to its collection Carolyn Custis James' latest book, Half the Church, written to complement Half the Sky.

It's been more than a decade since a family tragedy forced me to look into how childbirth has changed in America since our chlidren were born.  It's still a major concern of mine, and so I read with heightened interest this profile of Suzanne Davis Arms in the May/June 2011 issue of the University of Rochester's Rochester Review.  (Yes, I realize that is two years ago.  Any regular reader of this blog knows I'm behind in practically everything.)

A few things made the article particularly interesting, beyond the basic subject.

• Arms is a University of Rochester (alma mater of three of the four people in our family, and of my brother as well).
• Betsy Naumburg, quoted in the article, was one of the doctors when Porter worked for the UR's Family Medicine Center.
• Arms wrote Immaculate Deception: A New Look at Women in Childbirth in 1975.  Although I hadn't read it, her book clearly influenced the attitudes and options that were prevalent when our children were born in the late 70's and early 80's.  Her revised edition, Immaculate Deception II: Myth, Magic, and Birth came out in 1995, not long before my forced re-entry into the world of childbirth.  Perhaps if I had read it then, I would have been forewarned of the return of over-medicalized childbirth.
  

The latest celebrity visitor to Fenwick, Connecticut.

I'm writing this post to remind myself how easy it is to order books from amazon.de—the German version of amazon.com—and for anyone else who might be considering such an order.

When you first go to amazon.de, the page can look intimidating, being mostly in German.  This is not a problem, for three reasons:

1. It's still Amazon.  You'll be able to guess most of the important words simply because they correspond in position on the page to what you're accustomed to from amazon.com.
2. If you're uncertain, Google Translate is a great help.
3. On the top left of the amazon.de page, you'll see "Hilfe".  This is "help" and will take you to a page where (on the left side) you can click on Information for English speaking customers.  This section is—surprise!—all in English.

The company clearly expects some very nervous English-speaking customers, because the Step-by-Step Guide to Ordering is excellent.

From the English guide you can also learn about the Amazon Currency Converter.  This is an option you can turn on or off in "Mein Konto" ("My Account"), from the main amazon.de page.  Prices at amazon.de are given in euros.  One payment option is to pay in euros with your credit card, letting the credit card company handle the exchange.  But if you enable the Amazon Currency Converter, which stays on or off until you change it, Amazon will make the exchange.  The primary advantage of this is that you know at the time of purchase exactly what charge will show up on your credit card bill.

If you're sending the order to Switzerland, you're in for two pleasant surprises:

1. Shipping is free, with no minimum order.
2. The price will be less than you expect, since the EU's VAT will have been subtracted.

More good news:

1. I don't know the legal technicalities of the connection between amazon.de and amazon.com, but it uses the same account information (passwords and such) and address books.
2. If you have an Amazon credit card, buying from amazon.de is just as 'way too easy as buying from amazon.com.

"Okay, so what's the down side?" I hear you ask.  There is one:  I've found books to be generally more expensive on amazon.de.  Even so, buying from them is cheaper, and a whole lot faster, than having amazon.com ship overseas.  And since the USPS got rid of its International Media Mail rate (Boo! Hiss!), buying from amazon.de is much cheaper (and again, faster) than buying from amazon.com and shipping the books yourself.

Why wrestle with how to express this story when thduggie has already done it so well?

Back in 2010, a German family was granted political asylum in Tennessee, because they had been homeschooling their children in a country that prosecutes, fines, and removes children from homeschooling parents. This immigration judge sent a strong message to the world: America is still a country where Liberty is writ large.  Today, the same family stands in danger of being deported back to Germany. Whether the appeal stems from a fear of offending an ally, or a fear of having immigration offices overrun (by legal immigrants), the message is the same: “We’re scared of our Liberty.”

The Romeike family's plight should be of concern to every American, because a threat to liberty, even—or maybe especially—on the part of an ally, is a threat to us all.  American homeschoolers, even though they currently enjoy educational freedom in every state, should be very concerned:  if our courts rule that educating one's own children is not one of the most basic human rights and responsibilities, that precedent could (and probably will) be used to attack our own hard-won liberty.

This is not, however, just a homeschooling issue.  If the forced removal of children from stable, loving families is not considered by the United States to be a heinous act, no one dare consider his family safe.

Even Al Jazeera has noticed the case.  Their article is actually the best summary I've seen of the situation.

I'm not, in general, a petition signer.  But today I registered with whitehouse.gov (a simple process) so that I could sign this petition to allow the Romeikes to remain in the United States, where they can educate their children without fear of unthinkable reprisals.

Here is the text of the petition:

We, the undersigned, respectfully request that the Obama Administration grant full and permanent legal status to Uwe and Hannelore Romeike and their children. The Romeikes, a homeschooling family represented by HSLDA, were granted asylum in 2010 because Germany persecutes homeschoolers with fines, criminal prosecution, and forcible removal of children from their families. Every state in the United States of America recognizes the right to homeschool, and the U.S. has the world’s largest and most vibrant homeschool community. Regrettably, this family faces deportation in spite of the persecution they will suffer in Germany. The Romeikes hope for the same freedom our forefathers sought. Please grant the privilege of liberty to the Romeike family.

If 100,000 people sign a petition within 30 days of its creation, the Obama Administration will officially respond.  As of today, almost 60,000 more signatures are needed by April 18 in order to reach that threshold.

Please consider signing the petition, writing President Obama and/or your representatives, or otherwise publicizing the Romeikes' dire situation and this opportunity to set a precedent for or against not only our basic educational freedom, but even more, our commitment to Liberty itself.

Update 5 April:  Here's a brief chronology (full article) for those who want more information but don't want to sift through the articles.  (Emphasis mine.)

German law mandates that children attend a public or state-approved school. The local mayor informed the family that they would face fines and could lose the custody of their children if they did not attend school. The parents also faced potential jail time.

The government fined the family heavily and at one point seized the children to force them to attend school.

After trying to secure an exemption from the law, the Romeikes fled the country and immigrated to Tennessee in 2008. They had been fined well over $10,000 by the time they fled and faced escalating fines if they continued to homeschool their children.

The family applied for asylum in the United States and an immigration judge granted it to them, citing a well-founded fear of persecution if they returned to Germany.

However, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), appealed the ruling to the Board of Immigration Appeals.

The board overturned the original judge’s ruling and ordered the Romeikes deported to Germany. The Romeikes appealed their case to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, where their case will be heard April 23.

[F]ailing to read in one's native language sends a negative message:  that the language and culture of native-language speakers are second-class, unworthy of widespread use. ... Learning to read and then to write in one's mother tongue sends the opposite message.  It reinforces the teaching that all people—and all languages—reflect the image of God. ... When people grow up learning to read first in a language they don't yet speak, they often miss the concept that reading is supposed to be a meaningful activity....  They can learn to decode, but they have no idea what they are learning.

These quotations are from a recent Christianity Today article on the advisability of teaching children to read in their native, "mother-tongue" language before introducing the complexities of a language that is foreign, even if it may be the country's official language.  In the Philippines,

Children in Lubuagan ... speak Lubuagan at home but learn a national language and an international language, in this case Filipino and English, at school.  (In case, like me, you were wondering what happened to Tagalog, which I always thought was the official language of the Philippines, according to the CIA World Factbook, the language is based on Tagalog but called Filipino.) ... In school, they learn to read in a language they don't really understand....  That makes it difficult for them to understand what they are learning.

The Philippines is one of many countries where emphasis is now being placed on first becoming literate in one's own language.  On the one hand, it's a much-needed change from a system in which children were punished for using their own language (much as Native Americans once were in school).

On the other hand, this approach misses the fact (as does the article) that learning in a foreign language is probably not the most important factor in low literacy rates.  Because the Swiss do it all the time, and Switzerland has a 99% literacy rate.

If you're a Swiss baby growing up in what is called German-speaking Switzerland, your native language is not High German—what we call simply "German"—but Swiss German (in one of many dialects).  But when you go to school, you learn in High German.  You learn to read in High German, because that's the official written language.

True, the Swiss have advantages that the Filipinos don't.  Swiss German and High German may have significant differences, but they're probably closer than many native and national languages.  Swiss children grow up surrounded by people who are literate and who read to them from books written in High German.  How they reconcile the differences between the language of speaking and the language of reading I don't know, but children are wonderfully adaptable.  Our grandson is equally fluent (at a two-year-old level) in English with Mommy and in Swiss German with Bappe.  For the moment he has found his own solution to the written vs. spoken problem:  When he "reads," following along with his finger, he moves his hand left-to-right when speaking English, and right-to-left when speaking Swiss German.

Nobody worries about the Swiss.

Even Wycliffe Bible Translators, dedicated for 70 years to the belief that "every man, woman and child should be able to read God’s Word in their own language" does not seem to care.  The Swiss missionaries I met had spent their lives translating the Bible into an African language—yet they laughed when I asked why Swiss German was left out of the vision.

Children are wonderful learners.  Whatever the problems are that lead to illiteracy amongst those whose native language differs from the national language, it's not from an innate difficulty in language-learning.  There are African and Indian communities in which it's common for people to speak at least three languages, often many more than that.  If, as the article states, children are "not learning to read until late in elementary school," decreasing their foreign language exposure can only be a stop-gap measure.

Children really do expand one's horizons.  Who would have thought that trying to keep up with them would lead us to New Zealand, Australia, Japan, France, Germany, Switzerland ... and to one of the 25 Least Visited Countries in the World?

Tied with Djibouti (sort of; the tourist counts are from different years), sandwiched between the Central African Republic and Sierra Leone, is beautiful Liechtenstein.  Here's the entire list:

1. Nauru (200 tourists)
2. Somalia
3. Tuvalu (1200 tourists
4. Kiribati
5. Marshall Islands
6. Equatorial Guinea
7. Turkmenistan
8. Sao Tome and Principe
9. Comoros (15,000 tourists)
10. Afghanistan
11. Solomon Islands
12. Micronesia
13. Mauritania
14. Guinea-Bissau
15. Libya
16. North Korea (35,000 tourists)
17. Bhutan
18. Timor-Leste
19. Tonga
20. Sierra Leone
21. Djibouti
22. Liechtenstein (53,000 tourists)
23. Central African Republic
24. Chad
25. Dominica (73,000 tourists)

There's a small chance we may get to Dominca on a Caribbean cruise, but the others are long shots, by a long shot.

Liechtenstein is a beautiful and pleasant country, and an easy day trip from many places in Switzerland.  I highly recommend a visit if you're in the neighborhood.

Perhaps we should have paid the 10 francs (each) to get our passports stamped while we were there!

Good Friday.

Remembering the day all the sorrows of the world (and then some) were in some incomprehensible way taken on by the only one who (as fully both divine and human) could effectively bear them—albeit with unimaginable suffering.

I trust it is in keeping with the holiness of the day, and not in any way disrespectful or unmindful of its significance, to consider that as we, in the West at least, pay less and less attention to the significance of Good Friday, we find ourselves taking all the sorrows of the world on ourselves—and being crushed by them.

Consider the lives of our ancestors throughout almost all of history:  Most of them were born, died, and lived their entire lives in the same small community.  Even when they migrated, were taken captive, were exiled, or went to war, for all but a handful, their circle of experience remained small and local.

Our ancestors suffered greatly.  The unbearable sorrow of losing a child was not uncommon.  There was no easy divorce to sever marriages and blend families—but death played the same role.  The lack of sanitation, antibiotics, immunizations, and even a simple aspirin tablet made for disease, pain, and death on a scale most of us can’t imagine.  Starvation was often only a bad harvest away.  Slavery and slave-like conditions were taken for granted for most of history.  I’m not here to minimize the sufferings of the past.

But there is a very important however to their story.  Their pain was on a scale that was local and human.  They suffered, their families suffered, and their neighbors suffered.  Travellers might bring back tales of tragedy far away, but that was a secondary, filtered experience.

And today?  The suffering in our close, personal circles may indeed be less.  But our vicarious suffering is off the charts.  Whether it’s a murder across town, a kidnapping across the country, or a natural disaster halfway around the world, we hear about it.  In graphic, gory detail.  Over and over we hear the wailing and see the shattered bodies.  Full color, high definition, surround sound.

If that were not enough, our television shows and movies flood us daily, repeatedly, with simulated violence and horror, deliberately fashioned to be more realistic than life, so that, for example, we become less the observers of a murder than the victim—or the murderer himself.  (Not to let books off the hook, especially the more graphic and horrific ones, but their effect is somewhat limited by the imagination of the reader.)

No one imagines that the death of a stranger half a world away, much less in a scene we know is fictional, is as traumatic as a death "close and personal."  But a few hundred years of such vicarious suffering is not enough to reprogram the primitive parts of our brains not to kick into high gear with horror, anguish, and above all, fear.  Our bodies are flooded with stress hormones, and our minds tricked into believing danger and disaster are much more common than they are.  We repeatedly make bad personal and national decisions based on events, such as school shootings and kidnappings by strangers, that are statistically so rare that the perpetrators cannot be profiled.  We hear a mother wailing for her lost child, and our soul imagines it is our own child who has died.  We watch film footage of an earthquake and shudder when a tractor-trailer rolls by.  Did anyone see Hitchcock’s Psycho and enter the shower the next morning without a second thought?

Worse still, for these sorrows and dangers we can’t even have the satisfaction of a physical response.  We can’t fight, we can’t fly, we can’t hug a grieving widow; no matter how loudly we shout, Janet Leigh doesn’t hear us when we warn her not to step into the shower.  Writing a check to a relief organization may be a good thing, but it doesn’t fool brain systems that have been around a whole lot longer than checks.  Or relief organizations.

I don’t have a solution to what seems to be an intractable problem, although a good deal less media exposure would be a great place to start.  

The human body, mind, and spirit are not capable of bearing all the griefs that now assault us.  We are not God.

Thanks to DSTB, who have a personal interest in Bath, Maine, I offer you a glimpse of the action at Bath Iron Works.  It serves to remind me that the U.S. does, indeed, still build things (though I do wish we still built our own toasters), and that in my current (and I believe important) quest of small and local (farming, business, education, health care), sometimes large and local is beautiful, too.

All my e-mails are sorted and ordered and I know what needs to be done in a timely manner and what can wait.  The former have been sorted into "Action" folders, and I know to give them top priority.  But all the e-mails that now reside in various Project and Someday folders no longer trouble me, as I know there is no hurry, and I can get to them whenever I feel I have the time and energy to tackle them.  What's more, they are organized, so that if I decide to work on accumulated reading, or educational materials, or computer enhancements, I can navigate immediately to the relevant material.

I wrote that a week ago.  It's still true.  (It's still amazing.)  What's more, I have reduced an e-mail backlog of more than 600 to 64, and not by declaring e-mail bankruptcy, but by dealing with each one.  I don't expect the number to get much lower:  the point of e-mail is to use it, after all.  But what remains is in useable form, filed and easy to access.  If I keep it under 100, I'll be thrilled.

However, there's a downside.  Frankly, taking care of e-mail has become an obsession.  I can't stand to have anything in my inbox, which is a good thing because if I can deal with it quickly I do, and if I can't, I file it appropriately.  In addition, I've obviously spent a lot of time slashing my backlog by 90%.  That, too, was a very good thing.  But as I said, I'm obsessing.  I'm spending too much time checking e-mail, just so I can deal with it.  If I'm working on something else and notice that mail has arrived, I immediately drop what I'm doing to take care of it.

That was okay for the first week, but it's time to move on.

The point of e-mail control is not to get rid of all e-mails as soon as they come in; it's to deal with them effectively and efficiently, in a timely manner, and not allowing the important to get lost because of a poor signal-to-noise ratio.  What I need now is to let go my Death Grip of Control a little.  To acknowledge that

• the last 10% of my e-mails will take a lot longer to dismiss than the first 90%
• their numbers will continue to ebb and flow somewhat

And that's fine, because as long as

• I review them regularly so that I know I'm not neglecting something that can't wait
• I keep on top of them so that the flow doesn't overwhelm the ebb

all will be well.

My e-mail system, after all, is much like a Tickler File/Next Action Lists/Project Folder GTD system.  There's no point in an empty Tickler, and no need to check it obsessively.  Each day you check it once, deal with what you find, and then forget about it until the next.

My plan it to try to force myself to "check my E-mail Tickler" once each day, and do what needs to be done.  That doesn't mean I'll only read e-mail once a day.  I'll never be a Tim Ferriss and check e-mail once a week or less, because I've chosen e-mail as my primary form of communication.  I might be able to manage his recommendation to check e-mail only twice a day, but I don't think so:  I wouldn't want to miss the e-mail that says our grandchildren are asking to Skype!  (Though of course that will happen anyway, unless I get a phone smart enough to nudge me when an e-mail arrives, and I'm in no hurry for that.)

What it does mean is that while I may clear my Inbox more frequently, unless the e-mail is  one that (1) I can take care of in less than two minutes, (2) I would particularly enjoy answering right away, or (3) urgent, I will file it in the appropriate folder and forget about it until "Check E-mail Tickler" comes up again the following day.  (Actually, I may not forget about it completely, because several of my e-mails are parts of ongoing discussions, or for other reasons will provoke long, thoughtful responses.  In such cases, Li'l Writer Guy will always be busy in the background.  But that's pleasure, not guilt.)

And in case you're wondering why I haven't answered the e-mail you sent, checking my e-mail tickler means making sure I know what can wait and what can't, and dealing with the latter.  And then, if I have time, some of the former.  If you think I've misclassified your e-mail, feel free to nudge me with another.

This is not going to be easy.  There's always the fear that—as has happened with so many other of my efforts—letting go of iron-fisted control will cause the system to implode.  But a system that requires so much maintenance is of no use at all.  So it's time to take a risk, pry my clenched fingers off the reins, and let the system do what it's designed for.

Back in September of last year, our toaster over gave up the ghost.  As in, it started smoking in all the wrong places.  Since we all know that smoking is a health hazard, we decided to replace it.

(We replaced it within the month; I'm just slow in getting around to writing about it.  Granted, this post is somewhat ironic coming after the previous post on too much stuff, but it's hard to make a decent piece of toast by roasting bread like marshmallows over a glowing stove burner.  At least we followed the one in, one out rule.)

After much deliberation, I chose the Cuisinart Custom Classic.  It was $80 minus 20% at Bed Bath and Beyond.  Of course all online reviews vary from "worst toaster I ever bought" to "best toaster I ever bought," but this one seemed to do reasonably well.  I considered the convection combination, but I had space constraints -- this one is at the upper edge of what fits into the designated space.

Much to my surprise, I really like it.  Here are some reasons:

1. It hasn't actually burst into flames yet.    I still have it on a switched outlet so I can turn off power when I feel insecure, especially on long trips, but I've mostly stopped doing that since it has behaved well for six months.
2. It has a dial for setting toast darkness and a pushbutton start (albeit electronic, like most pushbuttons these days).  I like this much better than the tick-tick-tick timer, and for the first time in years I can make toast without watching it like a hawk.
3. The quality is a little better than that of the $25 toaster we bought five years ago.  Not $75 worth better, but the best I could do for a reasonable price.  The less expensive toaster ovens seemed really junky, as if they might be lucky to last five weeks, rather than five years.  If this one gives us the same use/price ratio, it should last more than 12 years.  Not that I'm counting on it.
4. It has two elements on top and two on the bottom.  Again, unlike our previous toaster, the cheaper ones had only one top and one bottom element.
5. The crumb tray is easy to remove and clean.
6. I haven't checked the accuracy of the temperature dial for baking, but it seems to work well.
7. There's a "bagel" setting that toasts the top more than the bottom.  I haven't actually used this yet, but I like the idea.
8. As I said, the oven is bigger than our previous one, but the larger footprint is worth it because it really does hold four pieces of toast well.  I think that whoever decides for advertising purposes how many slices a toaster oven can handle must use smaller bread than I do.

It's nice to make a purchase and still be satisfied with it half a year later.  That's true of our refrigerator, dishwasher, and washing machine, too.  (The last two years have been tough on the appliance budget.)  I'll write about them in upcoming posts.

Upfront admission:  This is a First World problem, and I know there are millions in the Third World who would love to have it.  But we are First World people, and it is a problem.

Janet, our (almost) Swiss daughter, has a refrigerator about half the size of the one I had in my college dorm.  It is, understandably, uncomfortably full.  Heather, our New Hampshire daughter, and I each have what I'd call a normal-sized refrigerator.  Each is uncomfortably full.  My sister has a large refrigerator.  You guessed it:  her refrigerator is also uncomfortably full.  (Maybe that's only because I usually see it at Thanksgiving.  But I doubt it.)

Janet has a small cubicle in their apartment basement for storage, stuffed full.  Heather has a good-sized basement, and the only reason it's not yet stuffed full is that they just removed the large furnace and chimney that were taking up a good deal of the space.  My sister's basement is wonderfully large, but it has the same problem.  We don't have a basement, but I know what it would be like if we did.

Janet doesn't have a garage.  Heather has a one-car garage that is crammed with stuff.  We have a two-car garage, ditto.  My sister's three-car garage is in similar shape.

Janet's apartment is very small, with no closets and little cupboard space:  it's overcrowded.  Our four-bedroom house has decent cupboard and closet space:  it's overcrowded.  Heather just moved into a large Victorian monstrosity of a house, and their newly-renovated kitchen alone has awesome cupboard space.  But even after making allowances for temporary construction equipment and materials, it's clear that the house is well on its way to filling up.  Thanks to a taste for clean lines and an eye for beauty, my sister's very large house doesn't feel crowded (except at Thanksgiving), but her closets and cupboards are as full as the rest of ours.

I could go on:  Attics.  Bookcases.  Drawers.  Filing cabinets.  Even boxes.  I'm seeing a pattern here, and it's not good.

No matter how much or how little space we have, our possessions expand to fill it to the point of discomfort.  I wouldn't want to limit the food I have in our refrigerator to what would fit in Janet's.  But if she can manage, why can't I keep ours at the point where there's still wiggle room?  Why do our bookshelves hold books behind books, and books on top of books?  If we had fewer bookshelves we would have the same problem—but with a quantity of books that would fit comfortably on the shelves we do have.

I've come to believe that the problem is actually a mental miscalculation, similar to the one that results in my having almost-but-not-quite enough time to meet any deadline.  If I could have 30 more minutes before guests come for dinner, I would be relaxed and well-prepared.  If I could have one more day to prepare for our vacation, I would step onto the plane well-rested and confident.  If I had left home ten minutes earlier, I wouldn't be fretting about traffic and red lights.  What I want to do always fills up the time available—plus a little bit more.  Likewise, what I want to store always fills up the space available, plus a little bit more.

Solving this problem has become one of my Foundations 2013 goals.  Inspired by Janet's organizational and deluttering efforts, encouraged by some modest successes of my own, and cheered on by friends and family who are tackling similar projects, I hope to recalibrate my mental vision, or at least figure out how to compensate for its known errors.

When to Speak Up and When to Shut Up:  Principles for Conversations You Won't Regret by Michael D. Sedler (Chosen Books, 2003)

I jumped at the opportunity to review this book, because conversations are often difficult for me.  As an introvert, I generally find conversations mentally and emotionally taxing, and thus tend to avoid them in situations where others might seek them out, such as with strangers on an airplane, or in those awkward "get to know each other" social gatherings.  Over the years, I have attempted to improve my skills in this area, with the result that I'm now much more likely to initiate and contribute to conversations.  Perhaps too likely.  Once started, I can be hard to stop.  I talk too much, running roughshod over others.

Hence my enthusiasm for reading this book.  I was looking for help in achieving the proper balance, that is, when to speak up, and when to shut up.

Unfortunately, the book does not deliver what I was expecting.  It is not so much about conversation as about confrontation:  the times you should speak your mind, the times you should hold your tongue, and how to tell the difference between the two. (More)

Here's an interesting TED lecture on some of the possibilities for small, agile, flying robots.  The possibilities for exploring dangerous places, such as collapsed buildings or gangsters' hideouts, are great.  If only they didn't sound so much like a swarm of bees....