Archive for December, 2007
December 31st
Hogmanay - as New Year’s Eve is called in Scotland - draws its roots from the Vikings’ celebrations of Yule, as well as pagan rituals associated with the winter solstice.
A more important holiday than Christmas in Scotland (children traditionally go from house to house asking for presents), Hogmanay is an integral part of Scottish culture.
Hogmanay is celebrated in cities across Scotland, but perhaps nowhere near as elaborately as Edinburgh, where it has evolved into a four-day winter celebration that typically attracts 400,000 visitors to the Scottish capital.
December 28th
The Times Square Alliance is hosting a rather unconventional event this afternoon in preparation for New Year’s Eve: Good Riddance Day, “a chance to, literally, throw out your bad memories.” From noon to 1 pm, New Yorkers are invited to travel to Times Square and get rid of anything that they feel is too burdensome to keep—old love letters, fashion mistakes, incriminating documents…
If you can’t make it to the event, you can fill out an online form and let the world know what you’d like to part with in 2008 (messages will be displayed at the event).
What do you need to get rid of?
December 28th
Jeanne Verdoux uses Clairefontaine’s graph pads for her sketches. The grid of the sheet is often incorporated into the artwork.
Born in Paris, she lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Jeanne recently had a solo show at Galerie Magda Danysz in Paris. She will be part of a group show at AIM28, Bronx Museum in 2008.
Her artwork has been published in the New York Times newspaper, The New Yorker and New York magazines, and Le Monde, among others.Â
Jeanne has also used small graph notebooks to create animation books.
December 27th
Jackie Storm is an educator, counselor, public speaker and writer. She is a New York State licensed Nutritionist, and is nationally certified by the Certification Board for Nutrition Specialists.
Jackie has 30 years of counseling, teaching, writing and health education experience, plus 18 years of experience teaching at college level.
She has some wonderful tips and strategies for time management, stress reduction, weight loss and nutrition on her website.
In in the “Stress & Coping” section of the site, I found these helpful “Time Saving Strategies:”
Do less:
1. toss/eliminate
2. say “no” to the requests of others
3. delegate work to others
Do it faster:
1. Filter interruptions.
2. Set priorities.
3. Work selectively (schedule blocks of time)
4. Get organized (Use an agenda planning diary.)
December 24th
I love this picture!
Please visit Figments, a really neat website and store owned by Peggy Lo.
You can see her favorite agenda in Paper Goods.
December 19th
Last week’s New Yorker had a fascinating article about how a simple medical checklist is transforming the complex, high stakes arena of intensive care. One of the most common complications in intensive care are so-called line infections, or contaminations of the synthetic tubes that doctors insert into patients’ veins in order to administer fluid, medication, or nutrients. Line infections occur in eighty thousand people each year in the U.S. alone, writes the author, Atul Gawande, and they are fatal between 5% and 28% of the time.
In 2001, a Baltimore doctor named Peter Pronovost designed a five-step checklist to help prevent line infections. The list is shockingly straightforward; doctors are instructed to:
(1) wash their hands with soap, (2) clean the patient’s skin with chlorhexidine antiseptic, (3) put sterile drapes over the entire patient, (4) wear a sterile mask, hat, gown, and gloves, and (5) put a sterile dressing over the catheter site once the line is in.
The final step? Instructing hospital nurses to ask doctors whether or not any lines need to be removed each day. In the hospitals where Pronovost’s checklists have been implemented, they have made a remarkable difference. (In one hospital, the line infection rate dropped from 11% to 0 over the course of a single year.) The success, Pronovost speculates, is not just about mundane memory recall, but about making explicit “the minimum, expected steps in complex procedures.”
In the face of such intricacy, it’s amazing how simple life can be.
December 17th
The UnterGunther are a group of urban explorers who seek to carry out clandestine historical restoration projects in France. It is part of a roughly 150-person network known as UX, which also stages stealth cultural events in Paris’ underground tunnels and famous buildings.
During a trial last month members described how they pulled off their greatest coup: fixing the rusted 19th clock in Paris’ landmark Pantheon.
In 2005, four people set up a secret workshop in the Pantheon. With the help of professional clockmaker Jean-Baptiste Viot, four members of the group began work to restore the 1850 Wagner clock. Once the clock was fixed, the group informed the administrator of the Pantheon so he could wind the clock and connect it to the bells.
Nothing happened.
So UnterGunther members infiltrated the Pantheon again, and fixed the clock and bells to ring for Christmas and a few days after. They were caught and brough to the Paris Court of Justice. The charges were eventually dismissed for lack of evidence.
For some unknown reason the administrators of the Pantheon refuse to use the restored clock.
December 14th
A Berkeley based customer recently pointed out that her Trinote is compatible with the Getting Things Done system: “I maintain my to-do list elsewhere and use the calendar for scheduled events.”
The Getting Things Done, or GTD, system is David Allen’s celebrated productivity and time management system; according to Allen’s website, it “transforms personal overwhelm and overload into an integrated system of stress-free productivity” (sounds pretty good, right?). I’ve never read the book, but the simplicity of the system is definitely attractive. Here’s how Wikipedia explains it:
GTD rests on the principle that a person needs to move tasks out of the mind by recording them somewhere. That way, the mind is freed from the job of remembering everything that needs to be done, and can concentrate on actually performing those tasks. What distinguishes GTD from other time- or action-management systems is the idea of grouping tasks by the context (defined as a place or set of available resources) in which they are to be performed.
Do you use the GTD system with your Quo Vadis planner? Let us know in the comments!
December 13th
This year, I reclaimed the holiday spirit. The secret? I changed. I shifted from concentrating on everything that had to be done into enjoying whatever I decided to do. Holiday time is meant to make us happy and appreciative; not crushed, stressed and feeling inadequate.
For the past decade, growing worse every year, the holiday season becomes another burden of more things to do and less time to do them. By the end of the month I feel exhausted and resentful.
I decided the best way to enjoy the season was to do it week by week, leisurely and slowly. If people have discovered the benefits of slow food, then we can apply some of those same ideas to savoring the holidays.
Tired of the frenzied commercialism? Avoid the lines at the big box stores and try shopping in your neighborhood. You’ll get personal service from the shopkeeper, who will take the time to help you find what you need. It’s slower, but more satisfying.
December 12th
A couple of weeks ago, for Thanksgiving, I went back to Westport, MA to visit some family friends. When I was there on the 4th of July, I found out that the town had recently recovered an old, 19th century rescue boat that once patrolled the waters around nearby Cuttyhunk Island. At the time, I didn’t have any pictures of the boat, but I spoke with local architect Chip Gillespie this Thanksgiving, and he graciously agreed to email me some photos. The shot above shows the boat as it appeared in this year’s 4th of July parade.
The boat was originally stored in a small “rescue station” on Horseneck Point, near the Westport Harbor. To get her out to sea, the townspeople lifted her onto a horse-drawn wagon and drove her to the water’s edge. The area around the rescue station once bustled with restaurants, bars, and resorts; eventually it, too, was turned into a restaurant when the U.S. Coastguard assumed responsibility for protecting American waters. In 1938, a hurricane destroyed almost all of the surrounding buildings, but the old rescue station was left intact. Now Mr. Gillespie is leading a fundraising effort to restore the building to its former glory and create a small rescue museum.
I’ve put a couple more photographs of the boat—and what the rescue station might look like once it’s restored—after the jump… Read the rest of this entry »
