Archive for the ‘Family Life’ Category
February 4th
Like most people, I’ve got a very sedentary job, so I like to get up early and do some sort of exercise before I park myself in front of a computer for 8+ hours at a time.
Back when I was in college, my dorm was right next to a park, so I’d get up each morning and jog. When it wasn’t raining or snowing, it felt great to be outdoors, and it also seemed like a very healthy form of self-sufficiency: I could stay in shape on my own, without the help of fitness classes or complicated machinery.
In grad school in Cambridge, England, the rain made running difficult. But then I discovered that I could bring reading material with me to the gym; I’ve been a devoted gym-goer ever since. (How else are you supposed to get through the entire Economist each week?)
Out here in Red Hook, though, the gym’s no longer convenient, and anyway it’s time for a change. So last week, I started jogging again—oh, soreness! I thought I was in decent shape, but no matter how fit you are, it seems, there’s nothing for running but running.
How do you stay in shape?
January 30th
I’ve never had the discipline to keep a daily diary; for one thing, it’s always seemed like such an enormous commitment of time, and I also suspect I’d soon grow bored with my own ramblings. I do carry around a couple of notebooks where I jot down random thoughts and observations (an idea for a short story, for example, or a funny conversation I overheard on the train). But it’s hardly a regular thing.
Nonetheless, I love learning about the methods people use to preserve their daily lives. In a comment to last week’s post about the new QV Memoriae journals, I found out about a service called LifeOnRecord, which enables would-be diarists to create an audio journal by calling in their thoughts on telephone. For some people, blogs serve as informal online diaries. So do scrapbooks.
And then there are the diary hybrids. A friend’s grandfather used his diary to painstakingly record each purchase he made that day. My own grandparents shared a diary in which they took turns narrating various milestones of their children’s lives: “Today Inga climbed up the stairs by herself for the first time”… “Today Harald’s first tooth broke through on the bottom right side of his jaw” (by the time they got to their fourth child, they’d pretty much abandoned the practice). A family friend encouraged people to write down a couple of thoughts in her notebook every time they visited; she lived alone, and that way she could read what they had written whenever she got lonely.
January 24th
As head of marketing for Quo Vadis in the U.S., much to my chagrin I was the only member of my immediate family to use an agenda. My spouse uses a blackberry. My son uses a cell phone. They weren’t budging.
Yesterday, I received an email from my son. It included this heart-warming quote: “I was hoping you might be able to get a planner for me. I find myself with more post-it notes than I can keep straight. I suppose the ideal planner would be bigger than a pocket one but smaller than a 11×7 book size.”
I gleefully went over to our stockroom and picked out an ABP1, Executive and Notor for him to choose from when we get together for dinner next week.
January 23rd
Memoriae is a new Quo Vadis product that should be available in the U.S. sometime within the next couple of months—it’s a set of 12 collectible diaries in which you can record your thoughts, dreams, and memories. Each diary, as I mentioned earlier this week, is designed to contain your reminisces about a particular topic (whether it’s your children, your travels, or your friends), and each is organized into a couple of different sections, like “stories and anecdotes,” “addresses,” and “lessons and advice.” It’s like a cross between a diary and a journal, only more organized.
You can also put your memories up online and share them with your friends on the Memoriae website, which recently launched in English. Just sign up for a free account and start writing; once you’ve completed each anecdote, you’ll be able to decide whether or not you’d like to make it public or keep it private. You can also upload and store photographs.
We’ll let you know just as soon as the Memoriae diaries are available for purchase. In the meantime, we’d love to hear how you currently record your memories… Do you keep a journal? Make scrapbooks? Let us know in the comments!
January 21st
Last week Karen and I had lunch out here in Red Hook (I promise, it’s well worth the trek!), and we and talked about some of the new Quo Vadis products on the horizon for 2008.
The Habana series, which was introduced last year in France and should be available in the U.S. within the next few months, is a collection of compact, leather-bound notebooks with matching elastic closures and smooth, high quality paper. You can use them to record your thoughts, your dreams, whatever—they’re designed with the tactile experience of writing in mind.
A different series of notebooks will also soon be available with my beloved Robert le HĂ©ros cover designs.
And a set of 12 collectible diaries known as Memoriae is coming soon to help you organize and record the events of your life. Each diary is designed to contain your reminisces about a particular topic, whether it’s your dreams, your travels, or your friends. There’s also an accompanying website where you can share your experiences with your friends.
Karen and I will both write more about these products in the upcoming weeks. In the meantime, happy planning!
January 15th
I got the BBC’s Planet Earth series for Christmas, a gorgeous set of documentaries shot in high definition and narrated by British naturalist David Attenborough. The production was expensive (each episode is rumored to have cost $3 million dollars to produce), but the series is far and away one of the greatest things I’ve seen on film—the only time I’ve ever wished I had an enormous flat screen television.
Our planet, as Attenborough says, “is still full of wonders,” and what I admire most about Planet Earth is the way it mixes stunning shots of natural beauty with a rather uncompromising view of what life is actually like: there is, on the one hand, the sheer animal joy of a polar bear emerging from her hibernation, zooming down the side of a mountain, and sloshing around in the snow. On the other hand is the quiet resignation of a caribou that’s been captured by a wolf, of a seal being eaten by a shark. Or my favorite scene thus far, of a group of African baboons wading uncomfortably through a freshly formed lake, holding their paws in the air and hoping that their heads don’t get wet (watch a clip from the American broadcast version, narrated by Sigourney Weaver, on Metacafe).
The holiday season is over, but I’d heartily recommend that you put it on your wish list for next year—or, if you can’t wait, order it from Amazon today.
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 10th
Unless, I’m really busy, I tend to procrastinate by cleaning, organizing, or just generally straightening up; that way, I can tell myself that I am, in fact, accomplishing something, even if it’s not my work. This is a disastrous habit to have in a newly-moved-into house, especially since I also like to take my time as I figure out where everything goes. Before, I lived in a one-room studio apartment, so there wasn’t really that much choice. Now I’ve got two whole floors and a basement to contend with!
Nonetheless, I’m having a great time setting everything up. I’ve also become a big fan of hardware and home improvement stores: we need to paint the walls, rake the yard, weatherproof the windows and doors… A house is an ecosystem, I’m discovering, and it takes a while to learn how everything fits together. Non-city dwellers will no doubt be amused, but I haven’t had to program a thermostat in years, much less deal with a water heater!
I just wish I were better at ignoring these distractions when it comes time to sit down and work…
December 6th
My father told me one of his favorite Christmas memories were the times when the two of us would track where Santa was in his journey to deliver presents. Tracking Santa took us almost the whole month of December.
I didn’t have the best grasp of geography in kindergarten and first grade, but I was sure since Santa had to cover the whole world before arriving in New Jersey (where we lived) on Christmas Eve he would need to get an early start.Â
“He’s in China” - “He’s in Greece” - “He’s in France” - “He’s in Greenland” (getting close!) - “He’s in Canada” (probably the 23rd) and finally, close my eyes Christmas Eve and know Santa was almost here.
Santa’s travel itinerary was in our imagination, but now you can follow him and the reindeer online here and here!
Around the same time another father, President John F. Kennedy, responded to a little girl in Michigan who wrote to him afraid the Russians would bomb the North Pole and harm Santa.
After writing that he shared her concerns about atmospheric testing, he concluded, “However, you must not worry about Santa Claus, I talked with him yesterday and he is fine. He will be making his rounds this Christmas.”
December 3rd
I moved into a new apartment over the weekend—a cozy, ramshackle townhouse near the waterfront in Red Hook, Brooklyn that’s larger than anywhere I’ve ever lived since I left my parents’ house to go to college. Moving is always stressful, but I’ve learned my lesson over the years, and this time I hired a professional moving company to help me cart over all of my stuff. I was very organized about it, too, diligently labeling my boxes according to their contents. After we’d loaded the truck, I sat back, congratulating myself for having figured everything out. But when we got to my new place, I quickly realized that the process wasn’t going to be as smooth on the other end: rather than simply labeling my boxes according to where they’d go in the house (kitchen, bathroom, basement), I’d scribbled out a list of their contents that wasn’t meaningful to anyone but me. “Modernist, medieval”—those were books, and they went downstairs. “Dictionaries and reference material” went upstairs, in my office; ditto for the “cables and cords.” I ended up having to inspect each box before the movers took it inside so I could tell them where to put it. (Not the end of the world, of course, but hardly what I’d foreseen when I spent so much time labeling them in the first place!)
There is evidently such a thing as too much organization.
